‘What’s going on?’ I said.
‘This shit about your sister. It did annoy me a bit, but I trust Sian. I believed what she said. That’s nothing to do with this.’ I opened the envelope and looked inside.
Photographs.
I poured them out on to the table. They were all of me. Taken from various distances, as some kind of surveillance, while I moved through the city. At first I thought it was a nameless, shapeless threat. Related to the hit that had been hanging over my head, apparently for months.
But I saw that they told a story.
The first picture showed me leaving my flat with a black plastic bag under my arm. The next few showed my car driving across town to the Chorlton Street station. Then there were several of the crippled man who’d been raking the phone machines, pretending to look for change, while I watched. Next, a series of pictures showing me leaving cash in one of the slots and collecting something afterwards. I knew what the rest would show and I went through them reluctantly.
Their inevitable chain of events.
Driving out to the Quays. Waiting outside Cartwright’s building. Going inside with the bag. Leaving with nothing. The final picture showed me staring, directly at the camera. The car I’d seen pull away as I got outside. Somehow this one, with my face perfectly visible, looked most damning of all, like an admission of guilt. The times and dates were stamped in the corner of each picture.
I looked at Ricky. ‘What’s going on here?’
‘Shouldn’t I be asking you that?’ I waited for an answer and he went on. ‘I went to The Temple earlier, to see Sian. Found that envelope on a table. I was about to hand it in when I looked inside. Lucky for you I did …’
I thought he was telling the truth.
‘When was this?’
‘Today, when I called.’
‘Who left them there?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Did you see anyone it might have been? Anyone acting weird?’
He shook his head. ‘You’re buying drugs, though, aren’t you?’
I tried to think of a response but finally ignored the question. Swept the pictures back into the envelope. ‘Have you shown these to anyone else?’
‘Nah,’ he said.
‘Sian?’ He shook his head and I looked inside the envelope again. ‘Was there anything else in there?’
‘There were some negatives,’ he said, looking away.
‘I want them,’ I said, jamming the envelope into my jacket pocket.
‘They’re not here. Look …’ He risked a glance up from the table. ‘Sian hasn’t seen them. I hope she doesn’t …’
I tried to stay calm. ‘Don’t fuck around with this. Whoever left them there could be dangerous.’
‘Dangerous to who? Not dangerous to me.’
I stared at him but his eyes remained fixed on the table. ‘What do you want, Ricky?’
‘I don’t want anything, you’ve got that wrong.’ I watched him, waited. ‘It just looks like something really bad. And whoever took them, whoever left them obviously has it in for you. They obviously want to hurt you. I love Sian. We’ve got something really special going.’ I could see him edging towards it. The real reason he was here. ‘I don’t want anything bad around her …’
‘Right,’ I said. ‘You don’t think she should have some say in who her friends are?’
‘I suppose we could show her the pictures and ask?’
I looked at my untouched drink. ‘I want those fucking negatives, I mean it.’
‘Or what?’ he said. ‘You’ll beat me up as well?’
I heard a sound, like something snapping in my ears. ‘What did you just say?’
‘I told you, Sian tells me everything.’
I couldn’t speak. I shook my head, got up and walked out on to the street. Mainly to avoid introducing his skull to the wall. To avoid what he’d just said. I found myself looking over my shoulder as I went, turning my head at sudden movements. The sun blazed, indifferently, overhead, catching the angles of every object I passed. I felt like there were cameras, flashing, all about me.
6
I got back to the flat hot, distracted and stiff from another long day. My conversation with Ricky had been unnerving, and I could feel the weight of the envelope in my pocket, thick with pictures that could send me to jail. Or worse. I almost didn’t want to think about who’d left them there.
The list was getting too long.
The top half was made up of people who’d now faded into the background of my life, criminals and acquaintances I’d wronged. The same people who’d put a price on my head. The rest of the list was made up of more recent additions. Oliver Cartwright, or at least his alt-right friends, felt likely until I stopped to think about it. Surely if they knew that I’d set him up, and if they could prove it, they’d use that information to begin legal proceedings against me. To free him. Then there was the smiling man. An aura of dread and uncertainty hung over the case, and discovering his name, hotel room, the blood patch, had only increased it. What had Parrs said? That I was on my own if the investigation took us to unexpected places. Perhaps he already knew it would. Then, of course, there was Ricky. I thought I believed his account, however much I might dislike him, but it was clear he wanted me out of Sian’s life at all costs, and I’d been wrong about people before. As I got the key into the lock I heard a scuffed footstep behind me.
There was someone at the end of the street, watching.
He was unmistakably the same man who’d been into The Temple the day before, asking about my drinking habits, my friends. He was built solid, with the purposeful, unshowy muscle and simple prison tattoos that Sian had described. He wore blue jeans and a black T-shirt, pulled tight across a large, well-developed chest. I could see half-crescents of sweat under his arms and moisture glistening off the sides of his neck. His hair on one side was neat, buzzed short. On the other side it looked like it had been burned away, with odd, untended tufts protruding at crazy angles. His skin on this side ranged from light purple to dark, except for the area surrounding his dead eye. There, the skin was caved in, cratered and scabbed over with near-black scar tissue. It was this side of his face that he had turned to me and, as with Sian, I got the impression he was inflicting it, aware of its power. His head moved slightly, and I felt his left eye, the good one, searching my features.
And just like that, I knew him.
He spat a cigarette on to the kerb, crushed it beneath his boot and then walked, easily, towards me. I tried to get my key in the door but my hands were sweating, my fingers wouldn’t work. The man stopped a few feet away, and I smelt the second-hand smoke. It had been more than twenty years but I remembered it so well. It was blended with a new aroma. Urine, I thought, sweat.
‘Can I help you with something?’
We both heard the shake in my voice and he smiled.
His mouth looked like a wound, ripped right across his face.
‘Aidan Waits,’ he said. His speech was impeded by the damage to his skin, coating his words in a wet clicking sound. ‘Lives here …’
I looked at him.
Felt the heat beating off his skin.
‘I don’t know him,’ I said.
He turned his face, as though using his dead eye to look down the street. He was allowing me to take in the unscarred side of his head. The living eye that I’d always tried to avoid. I turned back to the door, opened it and went through, slamming it behind me, feeling sick. I went up the stairs, feeling sunspots wash in front of my eyes, the blood doing laps of my veins. When I got inside and went to make myself a drink I saw that the bottle I’d recently opened, that I’d had one drink from, was empty. I went to the window and looked out. The man was gone.
* * *