“Are you a detective now?”
Larkin smiled. “Just call me one of your Stowell Street Irregulars, Mister Holmes.”
“Fuck off!” said Moir, almost smiling. He drew in a deep breath. “I’ll see what I can do, but I’m a bit busy at the moment.”
“Yeah. How’s it going?” asked Larkin.
“Don’t you read the papers?”
“Not when Carrie Brewer’s writing them.”
Moir harrumphed in agreement. “Not the best advert for your lot.”
“Or humanity, come to that,” added Larkin.
Moir nodded. “But no. Nothing. Brick wall after brick wall.” Moir shook his head and sighed; the escape of air from his body seemed to soften his attitude. “I’ve got a bad feeling about this one, son. Very bad.”
“Yeah,” said Larkin, “I think you’re right.”
There followed a lengthy, contemplative silence. Outside, the day had quietly slipped into a sodium- and neon-lit darkness and the city’s denizens were beginning to embark on their nightly quest for comfort and confirmation. Inside the room, the single, unshaded bulb cast long, lonely shadows onto the far wall.
Eventually Larkin stood up. “Well, thanks for the drink and the cosy chat, Henry. My place next time?”
“Nobody asked you to drink my whisky.”
“No, but it was very kind of you to offer.” Larkin looked at his watch; it was later than he had expected. Not that he had anywhere to go, but he knew how the evening would end if he didn’t knock it on the head now. He stood up, gave Moir a piece of paper with Noble’s details and the names and addresses of his referees. Moir took it, looked at it and put it in his pocket. “I’d best be off,” said Larkin.
The corners of Moir’s mouth almost lifted. “I’ll let you know if I come up with anything.”
“Me too. See you later.”
After Larkin left, Moir sat silently for a while, then reached for the bottle. Pouring himself a hefty measure, he settled back into his chair and cranked up his mental projector to let the old home movies run once more.
The whisky had given Larkin an appetite. An almost pathological hatred of supermarkets meant that he kept a virtually empty fridge so he decided to visit his local Indian takeaway on the way home,
settling for a chicken dhansak with pilau rice and a keema nan. A trip to the off-licence next door gave him a six-pack of Stella. It was the kind of sustenance his body rarely needed, but always enjoyed.
As he opened the door and peered into the gloom, he noticed that the red light on his answerphone was flashing furiously, like a malevolently twitching one-eyed guard dog. He walked over and hit Play, shrugging off his jacket as he did so, then entered the kitchen to turn out his dinner onto a plate and crack open a Stella. But after hearing the first message he knew he wouldn’t be eating for a while. He listened to another one, more frantic in its pitch, and picked up his recently discarded jacket.
As he slammed the front door behind him, he could still hear the voice on the machine, leaving a third message. Had he stayed a moment or two longer, he would have heard it being abruptly – and violently – silenced.
The man was powerful. In public and in private. He thrived on power, basked in its glow, mainlined it directly into his system like a class A drug. He needed power to survive.
The power had deserted him today, though. For once he felt unable to cope with what he was, what he had become. All he wanted to do was to sit alone and weep for what he had done.
He hadn’t intended to kill the boy. But the more wilful the child had become – the more determined to refuse – the more the man had hit him. Eventually, he had come to enjoy it. Watching the skin change colour with each blow had been like taking a privileged walk round an exclusive gallery – each work of art strikingly similar yet with a myriad of subtle nuances.
When the boy had died the man had felt his powers reach their peak. But after the euphoria had died down and the mundanities of disposal had been attended to, another mood descended: black and morose. Try as he might, he couldn’t shift it. It reduced him to a snivelling and helpless creature – just like his recent victim.
He had cried almost constantly; sometimes for the dead child, but mostly for the boy he himself had once been. Not the strong, confident cricket player and captain of the rugby team – the childhood he had invented for the powerful man he had become – but something quite different. He looked into his memories as if he were seeing them through an ice-frosted window in the depths of winter.
He came from a background that some would consider to be privileged. A moneyed family. Private education had furnished him with all the contacts he would ever need: a secure job with a golden future.
His mother was an alcoholic, his father cold and absent.
Following the birth of his elder brother and himself, his mother had withdrawn sexual favours from his father. Not that it had bothered him much; he had always sought his pleasure elsewhere and hadn’t troubled to conceal the fact.
The boy’s death had triggered these memories, dredging them up from the bottom of his mind like shit from a septic tank. He thought of his mother and the parties she would throw for a select group of her friends. He and his brother were always the entertainment. He remembered how she would dress them in her old underwear, paint their faces with rouge and lipstick, force them to kiss each other, touch each other. Her sexual thrill increased in proportion to the misery and humiliation her children suffered.
The one over-riding moment – the worst memory he could recall in a childhood chock-a-block with them – was when he had looked into his brother’s eyes and implored him to find the strength to protect him. He had stared long and hard and found nothing. The eyes that met his were dull, flat, death-like. His brother had gone beyond all feeling. And with that realisation came a shock of recognition: his brother’s eyes were a mirror of his own.
When his mother died, he and his brother, dutiful sons, had gone to the funeral and stared numbly and dumbly at the proceedings. The rest of the family, who knew nothing of the parties, assumed they were in shock. That night, they crept back to the graveyard intending to desecrate the grave, to spit and shout and scream their hatred at their tormentor, to dig up the cancerous husk of the body and rip it to shreds with their bare hands. As they reached the newly-turned oblong of earth they could only stand and gape helplessly. They looked at each other and knew. She was dead, it was done, but they didn’t forgive; they wouldn’t forget. Not ever.
Their father, who had long since faded out of their lives, died. The two boys were split up and farmed out to any relatives who would have them; then, in desperation, to a series of foster parents. His brother was eventually adopted: a new name, a new family. Safe. But he wasn’t to be so lucky.
And now, as he had so often done in those far-off days, he sat alone and in tears. Re-examining his past had been like pouring pure alcohol into a deep festering wound: the agony excruciating, cleansing.
But he couldn’t sit here all day. It was time to put on his mask of power and face the world again. No need to worry about the dead
child: his people were taking care of that. All that was required of him was that he resume his everyday guise and act with complete conviction. He would return to his past again before too long; it was important to remember what he once was, what he had become. But life had to go on.
He had transcended pain and suffering; he had come through. And soon, no doubt, he would meet another wayward boy; a boy with no future, a boy who would quickly learn the harsh but necessary lesson of his past.
From a distance the red glow in the sky looked like Gateshead’s entry into the space programme. Close up it was a different story.
The house was old and, like all the others in the street, built of sturdy Edwardian stone and redbrick. Although it had been cheaply converted into flats and bedsits it had always looked to Larkin like the kind of element-defying edifice that would endure forever. He was currently having to amend his opinion.
The voice on the answerphone had belonged to Houchen. In the first message he was excited; there was something he had discovered that couldn’t wait and Larkin would be very interested. In the next, his voice was tense; where was Larkin and why didn’t he have his fucking mobile turned on? Larkin had left the house before hearing the third message reach its involuntary end. But he had heard enough to fear the worst and the closer he got to Bensham, the more he knew his fears were justified.
Houchen’s house was ablaze. The whole street had been cordoned off and there were two fire engines blocking the road. The firemen were moving into place with well-drilled precision: hustling people back behind hastily-erected barriers, evacuating neighbouring houses, unpacking equipment, getting suited and tooled up to enter the burning building. There was an enormous crowd staring, as if it were a spectator sport and they had wangled free admission. Just down the street, the first TV crew had appeared on the scene, unloading cameras, scoping out the most dramatic angle.
As Larkin hastily parked his car, an ambulance sped past him, its klaxon clearing a path through the growing mass of onlookers. A fireman pulled aside a section of the temporary roadblock so it could pass through, and Larkin seized his chance to sneak in behind it,
staying on the opposite side of the ambulance so that the fireman wouldn’t see him.
As soon as he was inside the restricted area he stopped, dumbfounded. The fire was huge, a massive orange, red and yellow force of nature reaching about thirty feet into the air. The heat from it was so intense that Larkin felt sweat burst onto his skin spontaneously. The noise – big whooms of rushing air, explosive bursts as something combustible fed the fire’s appetite, crackles and crashes as the structure of the house began to char and disintegrate – was deafening. He could smell people’s belongings, their
lives
, both acrid and sweet, melting and being subsumed in the fire’s hunger. For all he knew he might have been smelling burning people as well. He stared at the fire, hypnotised with fear and wonder, knowing if he stood there long enough the flames would consume him too. Any closer and his leather jacket would start to bubble.
He was startled back to self-awareness by a figure running towards him: the fireman from the barricade.
“What the fuck are you doin’? Get behind the line, you daft bastard!”
The fireman grabbed Larkin and started to force him back. Larkin reluctantly did as he was told, allowing himself to be pushed behind the line. He still had a ringside view of the whole operation.
The firemen, lit by portable arc lamps, uncoiled hoses and pulled on breathing apparatus. One of the engines had been positioned with its ladder extended to an upstairs window; through billows of smoke, a gesticulating figure could just about be glimpsed. A fireman at the top of the ladder was beckoning to the figure, urging it to step out. Instead of doing so, the figure – a woman, Larkin assumed – handed out a small bundle. A baby. The fireman took the baby and hurried down the ladder, handing the fragile package to a waiting paramedic who walked briskly to the ambulance with it. From his calm expression Larkin guessed the baby wasn’t in any danger.
The fireman climbed back up the ladder and entered the building through the window; the crowd gasped and muttered. Simultaneously, firemen entered through the front door of the house, pulling hoses with them. All the while, another contingent of firemen kept up a steady bombardment of the house with high-pressure hoses.
The firemen at the upstairs window appeared with the woman in front of him. He gestured to her to step onto the ladder, which she
gingerly did. A fireman was waiting on the ladder to escort her down to the ambulance. She didn’t appear to have been burned, but from her blackened skin and dazed expression, it seemed as if smoke and shock had got to her.
Larkin looked at the ambulance. So far the woman and the baby had been the only people Larkin saw being brought out. There was no sign of Houchen.
Knowing that crafty bastard
, thought Larkin,
he’ll have his camera out looking for the best angle. Getting an exclusive. Or
… Larkin ducked under the barricade and ran towards the nearest fire engine, encountering the angry, crop-headed fireman who had forced him back before.
“Have I got to tell you again?” the fireman barked, his gloved hand pushing into Larkin’s chest.
“Just listen a minute,” Larkin said. Something in his tone made the fireman stop in his tracks.
“What?” It was a statement rather than a question.
“I’m looking for someone. Houchen. Ian Houchen? He lives in that house,” Larkin indicated the burning building, “in the top flat. He was probably the first out. Where is he?”
The fireman looked straight into Larkin’s eyes. “Top flat?”
They both looked up at the top of the house. The fire had virtually eaten away the roof slates and was now persuading the roofing beams to collapse.
“You know this for definite, do you?” asked the fireman.
“He phoned me earlier, asked me to come over quick as I could. When I got here, this was happening.”
“Aw, fuck…” said the fireman.
As they stood looking at the house, the team of firemen who had recently entered by the front door hurried out. One separated himself from the others and began to stagger towards them, ripping off his facemask as he came. The crop-headed fireman moved towards him; Larkin, not wanting to be left out, did the same.
The fireman was in his early twenties, tall with dark hair. He was breathless and sweating and his uniform appeared to have been barbecued. The crop-headed fireman confronted him.
“What’s the score?”
“Ground floor’s cleared. Nobody there. Mother and baby son cleared from the first floor. The top floor’s completely blocked.”
“How?”
“Stairs have gone. No way we can get up there.” He sighed and
looked over his shoulder at the house. “I know it’s a bit early to say, but it looks as if that’s where it started.”