Dead Silent (9 page)

It was an easier ride now. His Vespa purred up the hills, and so he was able to take in the views as he got higher and the air became fresher.

Frankie had seen the car before he reached the house, the red Triumph parked on a small patch of pink gravel at the front of a grey cottage, its stones large and worn, the old slates on the roof jagged and uneven. He had pulled into a small track by a farm gate and then switched off the scooter’s engine and clambered over the gate, binoculars in his hand. He had walked along the wall until he could get a good view of the house, to see who else was there before he spoke to the reporter.

He knelt down so that the lenses just peeked over the wall. He saw the reporter, a glass of wine in his hand, but then Frankie was jolted when he saw who else was there.

He ducked down quickly. She was a police officer—he could tell that from the stiff trousers and the white shirt—and that scared him. He didn’t want the police at his house.

But she had looked pretty, and so he got to his knees and looked again towards the house.

He liked the way she smiled as she leant over the reporter and then gave a giggle. She was just back from work and it had been a warm day. She would be taking a shower soon. He scanned the house with his binoculars, looking for the bathroom, and then he found it. There was frosted glass in the window, but the top pane was partly open and he could see the clear glass of a shower cubicle.

His hand scrambled around in his bag as he nudged the notepads and yesterday’s newspapers aside, until he found his camera. It felt hot in his hand. He closed his eyes for a moment and apologised. To his mother. To the policewoman
at the cottage. And to himself. He knew he shouldn’t, that it was wrong to look at naked women, his mother had told him that. But he wanted to see her. As long as she didn’t know he was there, where was the harm in that?

He watched as she went inside and then, as the light went on in the bathroom, he trained his camera on the window, waiting.

Mike Dobson drove slowly around the Mill Bank area of Blackley, an eye on his mirror for the police. The streets ran through mainly open spaces now, from which rows of terraces had long since been cleared, ready for the urban regeneration that had never happened. The grass grew long and wild, nature reclaiming the land, fluttering through those piles of bricks and grit that hadn’t been taken away by the diggers, security fences stretching along their edges, protecting the tyre-fitters and builders’ merchants with jagged silver spikes.

There were still some rows of houses, but the windows were mostly blocked by steel shutters, awaiting the attention of the bulldozers. Water trickled onto the street from one, the pipes ripped away by scrappers, and the walls hosted the garish scrawls of graffiti artists.

The streets were busy with women though, the balmy weather making it easier to work, but the roads were quiet, traffic still too light. Mike’s car bounced into the potholes as he crawled along and the women peered into his car, smiling, their teeth browned by drug use and decay.

But he didn’t want them. He was looking for someone else.

He did a couple of circuits before he saw her, standing on a corner, well away from the other girls. He felt a small tremor of anticipation. It had been a couple of months now,
but whenever he went looking she was the one he sought out. She was different from the rest—nicely spoken, almost polite, a couple of wrong turns in her life bringing her to this point—but it was her looks that drew him. Her hair was long and dark and she had an easy smile, but it wasn’t just that. She looked like Nancy and, whenever Mike saw her, it was like Nancy was back, from the way she tossed her hair as she walked, to the provocative rise of her eyebrows when she smiled.

He slowed down as he reached her. She bent down to peer into his car and he leant across the passenger seat, puffing slightly as his stomach strained against the seatbelt.

‘Looking for business?’ she drawled, as she pulled her hair back over her ears. Nancy used to do that.

‘Don’t you remember me?’ he said.

She shook her head.

‘That’s okay,’ he said, and then opened the car door. ‘Get in.’

She climbed in and put her bag on her knees. It was gaping open and Mike could see the packet of cigarettes squeezed in next to the baby wipes, her tools for the evening.

As he set off towards his usual place, the site of an old factory, now reduced to a concrete patch and dark shadows by the redbrick viaduct that overshadowed the town, he said, ‘I just thought you might remember me, that’s all.’

‘Why would I?’

‘Because I treated you nicely,’ he said.

She paused for a few seconds, and then she asked, ‘How many times?’

‘With you?’ He blushed. ‘Not many.’

She didn’t respond to that, and he guessed that she wasn’t interested in idle talk. As the car crunched slowly to a halt, just the dark walls ahead of him, she asked, ‘What do you want?’

‘Something more than this,’ he said quietly.

‘What do you mean?’

He shook his head. ‘Nothing, it doesn’t matter.’ And then, ‘Who are your regulars?’

‘Taxi drivers mainly,’ she said. ‘And men like you, who don’t like their wives any more.’

He looked down at that, suddenly ashamed, and picked at his fingers. ‘Take off your top,’ he said quietly.

‘An extra fiver for that.’

He nodded. ‘I know.’

‘Full sex?’

He nodded again, his cheeks red.

‘Thirty quid,’ she said.

‘It was forty last time.’

‘Call it a loyalty discount,’ she drawled.

He got out of the car to sit in the back. She clambered in there with him, climbing between the gap in the front seats, and slipped off her T-shirt. She looked thin and pale, her skin mottled, her bones too visible in her shoulders. Her fingers were grubby and her nails bitten short.

The leather car seat was cold on his backside as he pulled down his trousers. He felt ridiculous, exposed, his eyes darting around, watching out for the police. The car was filled with the noise of the condom wrapper being torn open, and then he gasped and closed his eyes as her hands worked it onto him.

She climbed on top of him and tears squeezed out between his eyelids, part shame, part relief. Then she started to move up and down quickly, functional, passionless, getting him from start to finish, her hair brushing against his face, the seat creaking beneath him.

He ran his hands along her back, felt her naked skin under his fingers, the ridge of her spine, the fine hairs in the small
of her back, and then he leant forward to kiss her. She moved her mouth out of the way and shook her head, going faster, and then it came at him in a rush…just a release, nothing more.

She climbed off him too quickly and stepped out of the car to put her knickers and T-shirt back on. He pulled at his trousers and then tossed the condom and wrapper out of the car window. As he clambered out of the back seat, puffing and wheezing from the exertion, he went towards her, to touch her hair, but she pulled away and smoothed her skirt instead.

‘I need to go back,’ she said. ‘I’ll walk if you don’t want to take me.’

‘No, I’ll take you,’ he said. ‘I’d like to spend more time with you.’

She looked wary. ‘What do you mean?’

‘It isn’t just about this,’ he said, and he gestured around him, at the car, at his lap. ‘I want something more.’

She looked away and thought for a few seconds. ‘I’m not going to your house.’

‘No, it’s not that,’ he said, and then he sighed. ‘This will sound stupid, but it’s about feeling someone in my arms, someone who will hold me. I can make it better for you, more than this.’

She folded her arms and looked at him. ‘That would be expensive.’

He took a deep breath. ‘I know, I know. I’ll come and find you when I can arrange it.’

She didn’t say anything for a few moments, and then she said, ‘I’ll walk back, it’s okay.’

And then he was alone again. His breathing returned to normal, and he climbed back into the driver’s seat and started the engine, the noise loud in the shadows around him.

The early morning train to London was busy, filled with pensioners on cheap advance bookings. The journey was shorter than it used to be, just a couple of hours from Lancashire to the bright lights, and the aisles were busy as people tottered to the buffet car to relieve the monotony. A group of Scottish students swapped boyfriend-talk on the opposite table and the air was filled with the smell of sandwiches. I looked up as I saw Susie making her way towards me, two coffees in her hands, a magazine tucked under her arm.

‘I thought we might have gone first class,’ she said as she lowered herself into her seat. ‘We’re going to make some big money from this.’

‘You wouldn’t like first class,’ I said. ‘You get free coffee, but you’ll also get businessmen trying to impress the rest of the carriage.’

Susie smiled and slid one of the coffees over to me.

‘When do I get to meet Claude?’ I asked.

Susie didn’t answer at first, as she fiddled with the lid on her coffee. ‘Whenever he calls,’ she replied eventually.

‘But you know where he lives. Why can’t we just go there?’

‘Like I told you, he needs to know that you’re on your own, that he can trust you,’ Susie said.

‘You can vouch for that.’

‘How do I know someone hasn’t been following us since we met this morning?’ When I didn’t answer, she said, ‘We just go to where I’ve been told to go and we hang around. Claude will find us, don’t worry.’

I thought about the prospect of meeting Claude Gilbert, and it was hard not to smile. I took a drink of coffee, and then said, ‘Claude comes second though. I need to see someone first.’

‘How do I know you’re not speaking to the police?’ she said, shocked.

‘You don’t,’ I replied. ‘But these stories don’t sell themselves. I’m trusting you, and so you’ve got to trust me.’

Susie considered this before saying, ‘But will they let you write it up how Claude wants it?’

I looked out of the window as I thought about that. The truthful answer was that they would go with what they think will sell papers and they wouldn’t give a damn about Claude, but maybe it was too early for a lesson in the cold world of journalism. Fugitives don’t get copy approval.

‘If it is Claude, then yes,’ I lied, ‘but the story might change if he goes to prison.’

‘But he won’t,’ Susie said. ‘He didn’t kill Nancy.’

I turned away again and looked at the reflection of my cup in mid-air, a ghost against the backyards of some Midlands town that we were racing through, the landscape getting brighter. I could see Susie in the reflection too, but as London got closer, the cold reality of having to sell her story to a ruthless press started to sink in, and so I began to wonder whether her story really made sense, that Claude Gilbert could have been undiscovered all these years—but I was willing to gamble my reputation on the chance that I was about to write the best story of my career.

Mike Dobson lay alone in bed while Mary cleaned the kitchen downstairs. He thought he could still smell the night before on him, the latex on his fingers, her cigarette smoke in his hair. And it seemed like Mary knew. He didn’t know how, but she always seemed different after he went for a drive. Maybe it was the way that he no longer pawed her or tried to tease out a response, hoping that their sex life would reignite just once and become something more than it had been for most of their marriage. Or perhaps the flush to his cheeks gave him away.

Mary always cleaned the house afterwards. At least that’s how it seemed.

He turned over and looked towards the window. He could see the tops of the sycamore trees in the park nearby, giving the roofs a frame, and birds swirled overhead. It felt like freedom out there. In here, it was stifling.

He closed his eyes. It had once been good with Mary, but they had been younger then. She had been the quiet girl who worked on the tills when he had his first job in a supermarket. He had loved her the first moment he saw her, from the nervous way she toyed with her hair to the way she blushed when he tried to make a joke. But their sex life had always been the same, all shy and coy, as if, for Mary, it had only ever been about the closeness afterwards.

They should have had children, and maybe that would have changed things, but they had found it difficult. For a while it became all about producing children, so the fertile days turned into an obligation, and as they failed, as all Mary’s friends got families, Mary became colder.

It was just the way it was, he knew that, but Mary hadn’t seen it that way.

He hadn’t meant to look outside of the marriage, but it had come along when he wasn’t expecting it.

He put the pillow around his ears and tried to stop himself thinking of it. It had gone on too long now. He prayed for the day when he could get through a summer and not see her face, red, bloody, or hear her shouts. But the memories hit him like a punch each time.

He heard a car pull up outside, and he wondered again whether it was a police car, that gnawing dread of discovery back again, but then he heard the loud chatter of his neighbour.

He threw back the sheets and sat on the edge of the bed. As he looked around the room he saw a shadow just disappear from view, like someone skipping through the doorway. He ran his hand across his forehead. He had the sweats again. He always got them at this time of year, when the scents brought everything back. He needed to get out of the house. He had to sell things, it was what he did, but the fake smiles were wearing grooves into his cheeks. To make money he had to overprice, but the internet and lack of credit made people shop around.

Maybe it wouldn’t matter, he told himself. So what if he lost all of this? He could go abroad, sell cold beers and hot pies to expat Brits in a Spanish seafront bar; for a moment, as he thought of it, his life seemed to have a point. But then his mood darkened again. He knew that he couldn’t. He felt tied to Blackley, as if events beyond his control would occur if he went elsewhere and the life he wanted to leave behind would just drag him straight back.