2.45am. Thursday, 9th November
The two halves of the cannibal car were held together by an even seam of rust, scarred soldering and spit. Parked up on breeze blocks in the cement front garden, the Ford Mondeo had a silver front end and a battered blue rear end. It was the work of a lock-up optimist, because only an optimist would have thought the welded scrap could make it past 10 miles per hour without the two parts breaking apart in sparking, shrieking shame.
He stepped around it, and over the bags of powdery cement which made him think of bodies buried under concrete, and between the discarded spin drier and pitted fridge that stood in for garden ornaments. The fridge door swung wide as he edged past it, letting out a smell of putrification and a cloud of mould. He tried not to breathe.
From the outside, the house was everywhere you wouldn’t want to live, and North suspected it was worse on the inside. But good or bad in there, he couldn’t see which, because the curtains were drawn and cardboard fixed to the inside of the windows with brown packaging tape. He knocked, and when no one answered, knocked louder – this time with his boot and the full weight of his body behind it.
With the splintering sound of rotten wood, the door gave.
The stench of cat urine hit him first, and hanging on to its tail a stagnant, faecal sweetness. The garden was bad, but the stink of the house worse. Breathing through his mouth, North stepped into the rancid darkness. Floral wallpaper peeled from the damp walls of a narrow corridor lined with boxes. North hit the light switch which flickered, sparked blue, and died. He shoved one of the larger boxes against the front door to keep it open as much for air as light, and ran the car key along the join to lift its flaps. He started back as the deflated latex face of the sex doll stared up at him, her red mouth open in angelic delight. He closed the box back up again. Hadn’t internet porn killed off latex dollies? He’d once known a sergeant who hid a sex doll called Gloria up a chimney, only to light a fire and set the house ablaze. His wife of 10 days blacked his eye and left him that night. Rumour had it that the sergeant was more upset at the loss of Gloria than his wife.
But that was years ago.
There was a clatter from the rear. Cautiously, he moved through the gloom of the hallway towards the kitchen. Underfoot was soft and hazy, like walking over damp rags on top of rotting wood on top of a graveyard. There was no door.
By the sink in front of the kitchen window, a scraggy tabby licked herself, as if she wanted the fur to come off in fleshy strips, rubbish and moulding food piled on every surface – pizza boxes mixing with Saturn-ringed saucepans of shrivelled beans, corrugated silver containers of half-eaten curry on top of engorged bin bags which, on smell alone, were full of dead goats.
If the cat hadn’t moved as North reached out to stroke her, he wouldn’t have seen the reflection of the arm bearing the hypodermic scything towards his neck.
Jimmy the Sniff had been an addict for as long as he could remember. He wasn’t big and he wasn’t strong, but he was scared and a man scared for his life is a formidable opponent as North well knew. He grabbed the arm as the needle touched North’s skin, hurling Jimmy away and into the sink – filthy pots and pans cascading to the ground, and with an unholy screech the cat leapt for safety. Only it wasn’t safety, it was on to Jimmy the Sniff’s face who in turn shrieked like a banshee. North stood back from the fray as man and cat fought – man for freedom, cat for purchase, scattering piled up pots, and leaning towers of plates.
As Jimmy threw the cat against the wall, he scrabbled for a knife on the zinc counter – the hypodermic crushed underfoot on the shard-strewn, greasy floor.
“I’ll cut you up,” he snarled.
North hit him.
It didn’t take long for the dealer to come round – 12 minutes. It would have taken longer but North helped by holding his head down the toilet and flushing it repeatedly. The cat watched. She looked like she approved. Jimmy spluttered and retched as he came round, then retched some more as he saw what he was looking into.
“Divn’t kill me,” he fought to free himself from North’s grasp, his hands everywhere and nowhere, as North tried and failed to flush the toilet again. “Please, mate. I wouldn’t have cut you.” The dealer slumped to one side, wiping his face with a grubby sleeve, his shoulders heaving, his ribs as skinny as a picked-over chicken carcass. “I canna stand the sight of blood. It makes me come over reet queasy.”
North leaned against the wall. The rankness of the house was on him. Poverty smells different in its particulars but childhood memories of neglect and squalor were beginning to churn in his gut. He suffocated them.
“What do you know, Jimmy?”
The dealer began to shake, rocking himself back and forth, his grubby fingers to his mouth. North’s hand slapped itself against the pigeon chest, took hold of the dealer’s hoodie and hauled him to his feet, then upwards.
“You’re a hard bastard you. If it got that bloke at the uni killed, it’s ganna get me killed – and it’s ganna get you killed too,” North couldn’t fault the dealer’s logic. “I can’t be dead – I’ve tickets to the match this week.”
North shook him anyway – Jimmy’s head snapping back and forth like a puppet’s. “I canna remember anything – it’s the stuff y’kna. It drills holes in your head.” The addict dangled in North’s grasp, his birdlike claws over North’s hands, the touch dry and insubstantial, his feet fighting for purchase on the slimy floor. “Ah’m telling you the God’s honest truth, man.”
Jimmy, he reckoned, wouldn’t recognise God’s honest truth if the Angel of the Lord came down from heaven and announced it in his front room to a trumpet fanfare.
What did Hardman say?
That Jimmy swore he’d seen a woman snatched up from the street. He attempted to tune in to the addict. What had he seen?
It was dark and Jimmy was hunkered by the side of a car, a lock-pick in his hand together with a halved tennis ball. He had a leather bag by him on the ground. He was breaking into cars. A quiet residential street.
North half-dragged, half-carried Jimmy the Sniff out into the corridor. The dealer clawed at the boxes, but North kept him moving out of the house and over the threshold, into the wasteland of a garden, alongside the gaping fridge and the wreckage that passed for a car. Jimmy covered his eyes as if the streetlight was a sharp and hurtful thing and North kept one hand on him as he opened the door to the 4x4 Stella had lent him. He shovelled him in.
“There,” the bony finger trembled as Jimmy pointed at the house on the corner. He needed a bump – North felt the dealer’s urgent need in the pump of his own blood, in the quickened rise and fall of his breath. Any profits Jimmy made as a dealer weren’t going into a pension plan, but were reinvested straight back into the business. North thought about the purple pills he’d taken for the pain in his head, and the Harley Street doctor who wrote prescriptions for a patient he believed to be all but dead, a doctor who smelled of cologne and money. Not all dealers were as honest as Jimmy the Sniff.
The Edwardian villas overlooked the Town Moor, grass land stretching out to the Great North Road beyond, a tinny buzz and a snaking trail of traffic. In the early hours, the suburban street was quiet, a deep mulch of brown and blackening leaves on the ground. A nice street with a nice aspect. Quiet. Number 21 at the end of the terrace was shabbier than its neighbours – the home of a single professional preoccupied with her academic work rather than the state of the front garden. Honor said Peggy had a refugee family living with her, but the house was shuttered and silent.
“I don’t know who they were.” Jimmy’s voice had a wheedling tone to it as he pushed a plaited silk friendship bracelet round and round his wrist. The sort of thing a child would make. Did Jimmy have a child somewhere? A little girl who called him Daddy? He’d adopted a cravenly apologetic mien for not being able to give North everything he wanted. Having decided North wasn’t going to kill him, he’d become anxious to please instead. North almost preferred him with a syringe in his hand.
“I was out for a walk…” For which read I was out breaking into cars…
“What time?”
“About now.” Jimmy the Sniff was rubbing his dry hands together hard enough to spark up tinder. At three in the morning, clubbers and students were tucked into each other’s beds, bodies awash with cheap drink, hard drugs and easy sex. At three, the night shift was not yet awake and up and at ’em. Three – when souls depart the old and the tired of life to slide out of hospital windows left open by the wise and superstitious medic alike. A time to choose if there was harm to be done. A time North himself used in a different life.
“I felt really bad for her y’kna, but I was out of it.”
When Jimmy the Sniff started talking, he didn’t stop. North could almost taste the other man’s curiosity, his fear. His heart almost stopping as the car’s headlights shone on him, then swept around. Pausing, reversing, wheels turning as the driver swung into the space. A late return. Parking up. Jimmy relaxed then. Stick to the darkness and the night would be his again soon enough. Waiting, as the driver pressed the button. A blip. Locking the car. A woman. Tall. Big boobs. Probably the boobs were the reason he didn’t see the men. At least four of them. The van with blacked-out windows. The ambulance that drew up parallel to the car – no siren, no blue lights. The woman drooping. Hooded. Half-carried into the ambulance. No light in the interior. Low voices. Smooth motors. No extraneous noise. Over and done with. The ambulance gone. Van. Woman. Car. All as if they had never been. Jimmy spooked at the coming and going, heart pounding, not wanting to know, not wanting to be there or to be seen, moving on to a different street.
Still, if he could help now, he would. And he wouldn’t normally ask, but times were hard for the small businessman. North ignored him.
Had Peggy been taken ill in the night as she worked late at her desk? Had she called from the car as she drove for an ambulance to meet her at home? Unlikely. North turned it over. Paramedics needed light to work by and this was an operation carried out in darkness and silence. Their patient hooded. But no one questions the comings and goings of an ambulance in the middle of the night.
Shame she didn’t make it into her house.
Or perhaps it was a lucky escape for the family she had opened her home to. He gestured Jimmy out of the car and into the street.
“Ever broken into a house, Jimmy?” He could do it himself better but he had no intention of letting Jimmy the Sniff out of his sight till he was sure there was nothing else to know. “I always enjoy seeing a professional at work.”