‘I’ve got a feeling I won’t tell the difference …’
‘The bad news is that your data requests on a Mr Anthony Blick started to drop into the office after you left. Luckily, while you were in the pub I was able to pick them up. That led me to speak to Aneesa Khan, which was very illuminating. Turns out there’s an entire line of enquiry you’ve been keeping from me. You’ve been interviewing the owners. Playing them against each other. Even making allegations. And now I know all about it. So, that’s the bad news.’
I didn’t say anything.
‘The good news is that due to my tireless work on this case, I’ve managed to close the book on our smiling man.’
I looked up at him. ‘You what?’
‘Yeah, well it’s obvious, isn’t it? Him and this Blick guy had some crooked deal at work. Drugs most likely, although since Smiley Face burned the evidence in those dustbins you failed to investigate, we’ll never know. But Blick’s financial records show he’s up to his arse in debt – apparently, that’s why him and his brother fell out – so it’s easy to see how he might go over to the dark side. I think they betrayed each other. Blick poisons the smiling man. Smiling man cuts up Blick in the bath. Afterwards he realizes he’s been spiked. Staggers to the Palace, knowing it’ll lead us back to Blick.’
‘That doesn’t even start to make sense,’ I said.
‘Well, this helps. The cash found inside the dustbin was fake.’
‘Fake?’
‘Quality stuff but fake nonetheless. And the card that old Smiley Face put down at the front desk of the Midland was a clone. Also under the name R. Sole. He was some con artist, Aid.’
I was shaking my head. It hurt. ‘So his dying act is to implicate someone he’d just cut up and flushed down a toilet?’
‘Human nature’s always been beneath you.’
‘And if they took each other out before we even started investigating, who killed Cherry?’
‘Random sex case. Who cares? One less chick with a dick on the streets, I’d throw him a fucking party.’
‘And who had a nail gun to Amy Burroughs’ head?’
Sutty was tutting now. ‘It’s a shame you can’t cash all these reality checks, Aid. You’d be a fucking a millionaire. Amy Burroughs doesn’t want to take things any further.’
‘What?’
‘Declined protection and all. She wants to move on. Parrs is impressed. Thinks I’ve tied it up like a kid in the basement. Bound and gagged the fucker.’
‘You didn’t take it to Parrs …’
‘I felt, given the circumstances, I had no choice. I was updating him on your current lodgings and it just slipped out. Forensics were able to match DNA found in Anthony Blick’s office to the blood found in the Midland Hotel, by the way. So there’s no doubt he died there. That was smart thinking, Aid. You should’ve been there to receive the results, though.’ He banged on the door and the bolt opened again. He stepped out into the hallway and looked back at me. ‘That bloke you battered? He got up and walked away. I hope he doesn’t know where you live. They’ll turn you loose tomorrow morning if you make it through the night, but expect to face charges from the bar owner.’ He smiled again, his eyes aglow. ‘And if you decide to take the coward’s way out when you get home, then do medical science a favour, yeah? Stab yourself through the heart so they can study your fucking head. Sleep tight.’
The door crashed like a gong behind him.
10
I passed a bad night trying to stay awake through my self-diagnosed concussion. I didn’t know what time it was but I could see the moon in a grubby window, slicing through the sky like a scythe. I listened to conversations, screams and echoes passing through the walls and tried to imagine the lives they were attached to. I’d have swapped places with any one of them. I must have slept, because when I removed my forearms from my face, the sky outside had tinted like an old photograph, catching the scuffed, dull colours of my cell.
It was morning.
Everything hurt.
They banged on the door an hour later and I called a taxi to take me home. I paid extra for a slow drive. Climbing painfully out of the car, I stopped on the street. Sian was standing by my front door, looking pale and tired. She opened the fingers of one hand in a small wave. When I got to the door she reached out and lightly touched my face, her eyes taking it all in. Then she looked directly at me, stood on her tiptoes and gently hugged me.
We lay on the bed, listening to music, drifting in and out of sleep. Sian had gone, wordlessly, to the record player. Removed Blackberry Belle by the Twilight Singers and replaced it with Max Richter’s The Blue Notebooks. She hesitated for a moment before lying down next to me, shifting herself closer. She ran a hand through my hair, exploring the new bumps and seams in my skull. I put a cautious arm around her shoulder, watching the pulse move in her neck, trying to memorize the freckles on her radiant white skin.
It felt like the end of something.
‘Those were the dreams you were having,’ she said.
‘He was always like that,’ I said. ‘Not his face but the rest of him. He hasn’t changed.’
Sian thought for a moment. ‘It’s like he’s a part of the heatwave.’
‘What was she like, anyway, your sister?’
‘A thinker,’ I said. ‘Stubborn, lovely.’
‘I walked out when Ricky told me about the pictures.’
‘I think he was just trying to look out for you.’
Sian’s fist closed around my hair.
‘You used to talk in your sleep,’ I said.
‘Not like you did …’
‘What kinds of things did I say?’
She laughed. ‘We haven’t got that long.’
‘You were buying drugs, weren’t you, in those pictures?’
I was silent for a moment. ‘Yeah,’ I said, finally.
‘What’s it about?’ She was leafing through the copy of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám that had been beside my bed.
‘Living life, apparently.’
She put it down and shifted against me. ‘Only you’d need a guidebook.’
‘Was there anything else that you lied to me about?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I don’t remember.’
She was thoughtful for a moment. ‘You could be so many things, you know …’
I looked at my scarred hands and closed my eyes.
‘We’ll see each other less and less,’ she said.
‘I know.’
‘We’ll drift apart again.’
‘I know.’
Sian was sitting on the edge of the bed, her back to me.
She turned slightly. ‘And what are you gonna do?’
VIII
A Pair of Brown Eyes
1
Sian and Ricky’s engagement party was held at the home of his parents. Their back garden was crammed with people. Resplendent with hanging lanterns, bunting and colourful bouquets of flowers. There was a large tent set up in the centre of the lawn, from which a band was playing ‘Brown-Eyed Girl’, and small children were doing laps of it, scuffing up their Sunday best with grass stains. Guests held perspiring glasses of Pimm’s or Prosecco, or paper plates of barbecued food, and there was laughter, skin, sunlight, everywhere you looked.
Sian wore a shimmering silver dress with her hair pulled up and her porcelain shoulders on show. The sun had started to catch her skin, and a light constellation of freckles was visible about her cheeks. Greeting old friends, pausing for photographs and talking to large circles of people, she was impossible not to look at, impossible not to love. She moved through the party like an aura, and even the places she’d been and gone from held something of her radiance, her afterglow. Occasionally her eyes went to mine from across the field and I nodded at her, I smiled. I’d never seen her looking so happy. A lot of heads had turned at my arrival. I was talking to a friend of Sian’s, explaining away the bruises on my face, the scars on my hands, as a hit-and-run.
She put a hand on my arm. ‘You must feel so powerless …’
‘I don’t know. When I look back at all the times I’ve deserved a kicking and not got one, I can’t be too angry.’ She laughed. ‘I think I’m still basically ahead.’
‘So you did have it coming?’