The Alchemist was doing brisk business for a bar on a Monday lunchtime. The outdoor terrace, blinding white beneath the sun, was fully occupied, with groups sitting down to gourmet burgers off pieces of driftwood, ice-buckets filled with Corona, or complicated, hair-of-the-dog cocktails. Inside, it was darker, cooler, lit by hanging clusters of lightbulbs. They bestowed a kind of alchemy on the hammered-copper bar-top itself, and it seemed to glow golden beneath them.
The barman was putting the finishing touches to a theatrical cocktail involving dry ice, and a thick, smoke-like vapour was pouring out of the beaker. It looked like a science experiment. The menu was designed to resemble a dreamy, Victorian gentleman’s periodic table, illustrated with sketched intersecting geometric shapes, fossils and kraken tentacles. I was trying to interpret it when the barman eased into position opposite me.
‘What’s good?’ he said, in a cool monotone.
‘Afternoon, Earl.’
He took a step back. ‘What happened to you?’
‘Nothing a drink wouldn’t fix. Anything you can recommend?’
‘I’d usually say something tall and strong, but it looks like you’ve had enough of that for one day …’ I didn’t say anything. ‘You look serious.’
‘It just hurts when I smile.’
He shrugged. ‘What kind of thing do you like?’
‘When it’s a cocktail I want it to taste like static, y’know? Like white noise. I want to feel the brain cells dying.’
‘Sure.’ He hesitated, then turned and got to work, drawing on several bottles from the alcoves around him. Finally he handed me the drink. ‘Barrel-aged corpse reviver,’ he said. It was served in a long-stemmed glass and when I took a sip I tasted Sapphire gin and Cointreau.
‘What do I owe you?’
‘On the house.’
‘Really? In that case, you must owe me something. I thought you hated the police …’
‘You were good with Soph,’ he shrugged. ‘What brings you here, anyway?’
I smiled. It did actually hurt. ‘Some days it seems like I’m magnetically attracted to liars.’ He turned to go but I grabbed his arm. ‘You’re not walking away from this. She’s your friend, remember?’
He nodded and I removed my hand.
‘Is she OK?’ he said.
‘For now. But I want to talk about you. There are a lot of reasons people lie, Earl. Even some good ones.’
‘What’ve I lied about?’
‘Come on,’ I said, taking a drink. ‘Don’t double-down on what we both know. We’re talking about why you did it. Like I said, I’ve heard good reasons before.’
‘What do you think mine is?’
‘Well, that’s just it. My job’s to build cases. Theories. Gather evidence. But motive? You never know that unless someone comes out and says it.’ His expression still hadn’t altered so I said the hardest thing I could think of. ‘Worst-case scenario? You’re a manipulator, wasting police time, fucking around with a girl you pretend to care about and getting off on watching her twist …’ I thought I’d hit a nerve. ‘Either that or you’re the man I thought you were. Someone who doesn’t like to see a friend getting used.’
He made eye contact for a second.
‘If I believed that, I couldn’t care less about you lying to me. In your shoes, I might have done the same thing.’ Earl swallowed. ‘That note never fell out of Sophie’s jacket, did it?’
He shook his head.
‘You found it in her room?’
He nodded.
I softened my voice. ‘And you know what it means?’
He lowered his eyes to the bar and nodded again.
‘I need to hear you say it, Earl …’
‘That she went to meet him,’ he said with sudden intensity.
‘Who?’
‘The fucking prick. Cartwright. She went and fucked him.’
He looked desolate.
‘So she didn’t meet him on a night out?’ I asked. Earl didn’t move. ‘Had you really been to a protest outside his building? Or did you just want to be sure I knew who he was when you gave me that note?’ He nodded, covering it all. ‘This wasn’t really about a sex-tape when you called the police, was it? What kind of trouble’s she in?’ He didn’t answer. ‘Cartwright’s in jail, Earl.’ He looked at me. ‘They found a bag of coke in his possession when he got off a flight to Dubai. They’re not big on second chances out there …’
‘He’s not the problem, though.’
‘So tell me who is.’
‘That club,’ he said. ‘That place. Incognito.’
‘You told me you didn’t know where Sophie met Cartwright …’
He shook his head. ‘I went there. Went down there myself when I found the note. When I saw that club, his name, and realized how revolted she was about this guy she’d been with, this tape they’d made, it all clicked.’
‘What happened when you went down there?’
‘I didn’t even get inside,’ he said. ‘I asked the doorman to speak to the owner. Said I knew what was going on. He laughed at me. Pushed me down and said no Irish, no dogs, no blacks.’
‘What’s Sophie’s problem?’
‘Money, same as everyone else’s,’ he said. ‘You grow up in a shit town and if you wanna break out, you need a degree. To get a degree, you need money. They’ve got it locked up.’
‘I thought she came from a good family?’ He frowned. ‘She told me that’s why she didn’t want to make her complaint official. Her parents would kill her.’
‘That’s what I told her to say. All she’s got’s a deadbeat dad she doesn’t see.’
‘So why’d you tell her to say that?’
‘Because she freaked out. When I told her I’d called the police she fucking freaked out. You were waiting in the next room and she was having a full-blown panic attack. She said I’d landed her in the shit, she’d get a criminal record, go to jail, her life was over. But I couldn’t let that guy post pictures of her on the internet. So I said she should tell you she didn’t want to make it official because her family would kill her. I fucked it, didn’t I?’
‘I don’t know. You got Ollie Cartwright off her back at least, and stopped him from blackmailing her.’
‘But he’s not the problem. Is she gonna go back there? Does she even have a choice?’ He hesitated. ‘She won’t talk to me any more …’
‘She won’t talk to me, either.’ I got up. ‘Thanks for the drink, Earl.’
3
I crossed the road towards Incognito. The doorman I’d dealt with twice before saw me coming, and stepped in front of the entrance.
‘You look like—’
I headbutted him then stepped over his body, inside the club. When I got to the top of the stairs another doorman approached, one hand on his earpiece. I kicked his knee out from under him and crossed the dance floor towards Guy Russell’s usual seat. I wanted to force my fingers inside his eye sockets. I put my hand on the shoulder of the man sitting there, but when he turned it wasn’t him.
I walked through the dance floor.
People were giving me a lot of space.
‘Where’s Guy Russell?’ I said to the barmaid.
‘He hasn’t been in,’ she said, her eyes drifting up to the doorman’s blood on my forehead. I wiped it with the back of my hand.
‘It’s the truth, Detective.’ I turned to see Alicia, Russell’s daughter, watching me. She was smiling and the bottoms of her perfect white teeth looked like pearls against her tanned skin. ‘Perhaps I can buy you a drink …’
‘I’m afraid of what you might put in it.’
She stopped smiling. ‘Then perhaps I can convince you that those days are behind us?’
We went to an office in the back room. Its furnishings were dark and mirrored, or made from cheap, creaking leather, and the ceiling was so low it felt like it was pressing down on us. It was like sitting in the back of an old limo. Alicia had entirely abandoned the wild neon of our first meeting. Now she seemed more comfortable in a smart black dress and minimal make-up. Her dark clothes made the whites of her eyes look brilliant. It wasn’t just her clothes, though. She was different. She sat and watched me taking the tiny room in from the doorway.
‘This is my dad’s idea of cool …’