To Kill For Page 8

  I tried King first at home. There was no answer. That didn’t surprise me. I tried his mobile.

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘It’s Joe.’

  I could hear background traffic and thought that King was probably on the road.

  ‘Come on, man. Can’t you leave me alone? I’m in enough shit because of you.’

  ‘Who was the third person?’

  ‘Huh?’

  ‘After you called Green and Siddons. Who did you call then?’

  ‘Bloke called Bowker. Jim Bowker.’

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  I trawled around the snooker clubs and pubs and bookies and couldn’t find Bowker. I went to his flat and banged on the door. There was no answer. I hadn’t expected there to be. He was smart enough to make himself scarce. After crossing me and grassing King up to whoever, he was probably halfway to China by now.

  I’d told Bowker that I knew what he’d done to Brenda. That was stupid. He must’ve feared I’d want revenge for that. I’d forced him to pick Paget’s side. When King called him, he would’ve known it was me who wanted the information. He would’ve called Paget and told him about King’s interest, and then Paget would’ve called King and Daley and warned them off.

  That was how I reckoned it must have been. But there were two things odd about it all. The first was that Paget knew Cole was after him, so why would he be bothered if King wanted him too? The second was that whoever had called King knew details about his kids, and knew it almost straight away. That didn’t sound like Paget.

  There were only two ways into Bowker’s flat that I could see: kick the door in or smash the window. Either was going to cause noise and get attention, but I took the chance that people around here, in this block, wouldn’t call the law. If they did, I’d hear the sirens and get out quick.

  The door looked easier. It started to give after the fourth try, the frame splitting and warping. I heard the next door neighbour’s door open. An old lady in curlers peered out at me.

  ‘What are you doing?’ she said.

  ‘You know the man here?’

  She made a sour face.

  ‘I know him.’

  ‘He owes money,’ I said. ‘I’m collecting.’

  She nodded and her thin lips got thinner. She seemed to think it fair that I should smash his door in.

  ‘He owes me twenty quid,’ she said.

  She faded away and I kicked the lock and sent the door inward in a shower of splinters.

  The flat smelled of stale cigarettes. The walls were yellowed with tar, the carpet worn.

  I pulled the place apart, starting in the small square living room. I emptied drawers, riffled through papers, tore apart the few books. I tried the kitchen and the bathroom and found nothing. I moved into the bedroom and went through clothes in the wardrobe, a chest of drawers, a box of oddments. Finally, I saw a cordless telephone on the floor, by the side of the bed. I snatched it up. It was a landline, not a mobile, and I supposed that was why he’d left it behind. Being a gambler, he’d made sure of having a phone on him all times and probably didn’t use the landline much. I looked around some more and found nothing and left.

  Outside, the old lady from next door was waiting. She had removed her curlers and put on a thick woollen coat. When I came out, she said, ‘Has he gone?’

  I shrugged.

  ‘Did you find it?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘My twenty quid.’

  I left the door open for her and walked off.

  Back in the car, I looked through Bowker’s cordless phone. There were dozens of stored numbers, all with what looked like coded contact details, abbreviations that meant nothing to me. I turned the thing off and drove out.

  I found a small pub and ordered some food. I got a pen and some paper from the girl behind the counter, found myself a quiet corner table and began scrolling through the numbers, noting down all the details I could get from the memory. After a while, I had two sheets of paper with numbers listed. There was no Paget in the list, no Glazer, no Mike or Michael, no Derek. Instead, the details were all combinations of letters; JG, ATC, and abbreviated words like Tag and Mac. It looked like a simple code, but it was probably just Bowker’s way of being discreet. They were only abbreviations of names. Tag was something like Taggart. Mac could be anything Scottish. There was no KP, though, and no MG.

  I already had one number for Paget stored in the memory of my mobile. I checked the numbers I’d taken from Bowker’s phone against the one I had. None of them matched.

  The food came over. My head was throbbing now and I felt a clammy sickness getting a hold of me. I must have looked ill because when the girl brought my food, she lingered and looked at me.

  Something was wrong. Something inside me was squirming and clenching my guts and wringing them, and an ice-cold hand gripped and squeezed my head. It wasn’t anything I’d known before, but I recognized it for what it was: fear, of a kind. Not a fear of Paget, though, or of Cole or Dunham or any of those cunts – that kind of shit I was used to dealing with. They were just men, and I could face them and take my chances. And it wasn’t like the fear I’d felt as a fighter, covering up because my face was mush and I knew that my brain was being thrown around more than it could cope with. And it wasn’t the fear of a boy ducking to avoid Argentinean machine guns and knowing that we were going to have to advance towards them. I’d known that kind of fear, but knowing what was coming, the fear isn’t so bad. This, though, was something else, a sickening hollowness. I didn’t know what was causing it, but my mind kept creeping back to Brenda and how she’d been in those last weeks I’d known her.

  I picked at the food for a while then pushed it aside.

  I started to call the numbers I had. I went alphabetically. The first one was listed as AL. After a few rings, a man’s voice said, ‘Hello.’

  ‘I’m trying to reach Kenny Paget or Mike Glazer.’

  ‘You’ve got the wrong number, mate.’

  ‘Jim Bowker gave me this number.’

  ‘Bowker? What the fuck did he do that for?’

  ‘He told me—’

  ‘I don’t give a shit what he told you. You’ve got the wrong number.’

  He hung up.

  It went on that way. Most of the numbers belonged to bookies, pubs, that sort of thing. Some were individuals and most of those didn’t seem to know what I was talking about. They’d never heard of Paget or Glazer. Some were more guarded in their answers, some were hostile, some didn’t bother talking to me at all. I made a note of those ones, for what it was worth. I hadn’t planned very well how I would try to get information from anyone, and I had to change my approach as I went along, pretending that Bowker had been taken ill and that I had an urgent message from him for Paget or Glazer. I don’t know if anyone believed that; I wouldn’t have believed it. Most of the numbers were mobiles, and they were untraceable save for fancy tracking gear which I didn’t know how to get hold of. So, I plodded on with my story.

  I’d gone through the numbers from A to F and I was tired of the whole fucking lot. It was lunchtime now, and the pub was starting to fill up. People sat at the tables and ate lunches and laughed and talked loudly. I tried another number. The hum of the place started to seep into my head, the pain piling up around it. I closed my eyes for a moment and when I opened them I saw Brenda. She sat opposite me, gin and tonic on the table in front of her. She looked at me with wide empty eyes.

  I blinked. She was gone. The pain wasn’t.

  I was into the H’s by now. I dialled another number.

  Something happened. The phone in my pocket vibrated. I pulled it out and looked at it. It took me a moment to realize the phone belonged to this Derek character, and I’d just dialled his number. I had him. Or, at least, I had an abbreviation of what I thought was his name: HAY. That was something, but not enough. Too many names started HAY. If it was his name. I remembered the phone call I’d answered from Derek’s wife or girlfriend. I still had her number. I w
ent to the public phone in the corner of the pub, fed in some coins and dialled the number. I recognized her voice when she answered. Some of the concern had gone from it now, but it was still wary. I said, ‘I’m trying to reach Derek Hay…’

  I paused, like I was fumbling with an address book or something.

  She said, ‘Hayward.’

  ‘Yeah, Derek Hayward. Is he there?’

  ‘No. May I ask who’s calling?’

  ‘Is this his wife?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Do you know where I can find him?’

  There were some seconds of silence. Then the line went dead.

  I had his name, though. Now I was looking for Derek Hayward, who must’ve been admitted to a hospital within the last few hours. Unless he was dead.

  I started calling the hospitals. There was nothing. No Derek Haywards. I tried the pub’s phone book and directory enquiries. I had a home number, so if any of the D. Haywards they’d given me had been the right one, I’d have known. I tried different spellings of Hayward, and different initials, in case Derek was a middle name or something. After a couple of hours I still had nothing. By now, the pub had cleared and my head was thick with pain. I couldn’t think straight. I quitted the pub and drove back to Browne’s.

  When Browne saw me, he said, ‘You’re still alive, then.’

  He didn’t bother to ask if my head hurt. He just handed me a couple of his knockout pills.

  The last time he’d seen me, Eddie and his men were taking me to see Dunham.

  ‘Trouble?’ he said.

  ‘Huh?’

  ‘From Eddie. Is it trouble?’

  ‘It’s something.’

  I downed the pills.

  ‘I thought he was a friend of yours. Well, as much as you can have a friend.’

  ‘He works for Dunham.’

  ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘It means he doesn’t have friends when Dunham wants something.’

  ‘And what does Dunham want?’

  ‘I don’t know. Something’s going on. They want Paget.’

  ‘They want you to get Paget?’

  ‘No. They don’t. They want him, but they want me out of the way.’

  ‘Why?’

  It was a good question. Why?

  I hit the sack and let the pills work on me.

  She came to me again, in the dreams.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  One day, she said to me, ‘Do you think there’s a god, Joe?’

  It was late summer and still hot. I’d taken her up the West End to see a film, and then we had a meal in Chinatown. She was wearing the dress I’d bought for her at the market. I could see now that it was too small for her, too short on her tall body, and too tight. It clung to her and she’d have to pull it down every now and then when it gathered. It would fit her to a T, the geezer in the market had said. Bastard. He must’ve seen me coming.

  Brenda didn’t complain.

  Her skin was like black velvet against the dress which clung to her tall slim body so that she seemed unreal to me, a flowing thing, like she and the cotton were part of the same thing and a breeze would float her away. She held my hand. I was almost scared of touching her, scared that I’d crush her.

  After we ate, we wandered along Regent Street and Bond Street, Brenda stopping every five feet to gasp at a dress or piece of jewellery in some posh shop window, dragging me by the arm and saying things like ‘Look, Joe, isn’t it beautiful’ and ‘Look how expensive it is’ and stuff like that.

  When she saw Liberty’s, she pulled me towards it.

  ‘I came here once, years ago. They have such lovely cloth. You should see it.’

  I saw it. It was cloth, alright. The place was still open so we went inside. It smelled sweet with all the soaps and scents. It made my nose itch. Brenda was wide-eyed with it all, stroking silks, sniffing candles, hefting cotton, and showing it all to me.

  ‘Isn’t it beautiful?’ she kept saying.

  She saw some handbags and went off to look at them. My back was bad by this time, so I found one of their small chairs and took a seat. After a while I couldn’t see Brenda and I knew I was in for the long haul. It didn’t matter. I sat and watched the people, tourists gaping at the colourful cloth and looking awkwardly about, city blokes buying silk ties, dusty old women trying on scarves, thin women dabbing perfume on their wrists, all of them like they were in some kind of wonderland. I suppose it was an escape for them, for Brenda too.

  Every now and then, one of the security guards would walk slowly past, looking at me directly. I got the message. After a while, I had an idea. I remembered all the cheap creams that Brenda had bought at the market that time.

  I got up and wandered over to the cosmetics section. The woman at the counter was polite, but I could see she wanted to be rid of me as quickly as possible. I couldn’t blame her for that. I must have been a bad advertisement for them. I asked her for a gift box of some kind, something a beautician might like. She brought out a few. I paid eighty quid for some purple thing with an Italian name. I got the woman to wrap it up for me.

  I went back to my seat and waited. A half hour later, the lift doors opened and Brenda came out. She stopped short when she saw me. She looked at the bag at my feet. She said, ‘What on earth have you got there?’

  ‘Beauty stuff.’

  She looked from the bag to my face and burst out laughing.

  ‘You’re gonna to need a bigger bag,’ she said.

  Then she burst out laughing again.

  I stood and gave her the bag and she said she’d open it when we got back. She reached up and kissed my cheek. I think she was happy then, at that exact moment. We went home.

  She was quiet on the tube back, gazing at nothing, thinking, I thought, about those dresses and necklaces and handbags, dreaming, like people do, about how one day she’d buy one of them for herself. Every now and then she’d look down at the bag or lift it up and weigh it.

  It was when we were walking down the Caledonian Road, back towards her flat, she tottering by my side in her high heels, one arm in mine, the other swinging the Liberty bag, that she asked me if I believed in a god. I said, ‘No.’

  She said, ‘I mean, don’t you think it’s even slightly possible?’

  She’d asked me all this before. I’d told her I thought it was all bollocks and she’d told me the same thing. Now she was asking me again and I wondered why. What did she want me to say?

  ‘You didn’t go to church when you were young?’ she said.

  ‘I went sometimes, while I was too small to do anything about it.’

  ‘Why did you go?’

  ‘My parents took me.’

  ‘But they didn’t give you religion.’

  ‘They gave it to me till I was black and blue.’

  ‘They beat you?’

  ‘My old man did. My mum didn’t do anything to stop him.’

  ‘Why’d he hit you?’

  ‘Drunk,’ I said, ‘or full of hatred for everything. Himself, mostly.’

  ‘But he was a Christian.’

  ‘He said he was. Lots of people do.’

  ‘And your brothers and sisters?’

  ‘They got it too, not so bad.’

  She was quiet for a while. She’d stopped swinging the bag. It was stupid of me, I knew, to talk of these things. I wanted her to stay happy. I should have lied, I suppose.

  ‘That doesn’t make any sense,’ she said, ‘Beating a child.’

  ‘You think it should make sense?’

  ‘Christianity’s about mercy and tolerance.’

  ‘Yeah, well, my old man tried to beat mercy and tolerance into me.’

  We were silent after that, walking along in the cool of the dusk, the low sun spreading light over everything and giving it all a glow. When we neared a pub called the Winston Churchill, Brenda pulled me in.

  ‘I need a drink,’ she said.

  We’d been in there before. Brenda seemed to like it. It was a s
ixties building, too new to have any character, too old to look new. The red carpet had worn away in places, the tables and chairs looked like they’d been bought second hand.

  It was mostly empty. A few people sat in groups of two or three. It was a long way from Bond Street jewellers and the rich mob we’d seen in Liberty’s. Nobody here had anything to prove, or maybe they’d given up trying. They had their own problems. I think that’s why Brenda wanted to go there. She wanted to try and push the rest of it out of her mind. She wanted to get back to the real world. She wanted to stab the dream to death before she could start believing it. Anyway, she hadn’t dragged me in there for the booze; she had plenty of that at her flat.

  I bought a couple of drinks and we took a seat at a corner table. Music was crackling out from battered speakers. The light was dim. There was laughter and chatter. There was a smell of crisps and beer and mildew and furniture polish.

  Brenda was quiet. We sat there, her stirring her gin and tonic with her finger, me looking at her, waiting, looking around at others. I wondered if she was going to tell me we were over. I suppose I always half expected that, anyway. I tried to tell myself it didn’t matter, but I felt a coldness grip my stomach when I thought of it.

  Finally, she pulled her finger from the gin and sucked on it a moment. Then she looked at me and saw that I was looking at her. She smiled, but she couldn’t make it look real. It was just too hard for her to do.

  ‘I’ve got to work tomorrow,’ she said.

  She tried to make it sound casual. I said, ‘Uh-huh.’

  It was something in the way she said it, the way she looked away from me, the way she went back to stirring her gin with her finger. There was something else about the job, something wrong. Or, rather, something worse than normal, something beyond lonely old men who only wanted a fumble because they couldn’t get it up, or drunk businessmen who wanted to display a bit of their power by buying a tart for an hour, or married men who wanted someone else, anyone else.