DR EDWARD HOUGHTON had watched a new brass plaque being fixed to the wall that afternoon, in a rare break between patients. He still referred to them as patients, though he knew other private dentists who described them as customers or even cash cows. His relationship with many of his patients had been eroded by their suspicion – unfounded, though perfectly understandable – that he was pulling them in for treatment they didn’t need, or providing fillings that contained a built-in obsolescence, to ensure they would return. Still, he was busy and doing well.
Now the small waiting room was empty and Lorraine, his assistant, had gone home. Houghton had spent the last hour disposing of sharps, cleaning his equipment and updating files on his work computer. He was looking forward to getting upstairs to a glass of Talisker malt, a lamb curry, and an hour or two of Grand Theft Auto before logging on to the discussion boards at the BDA website. The game was a guilty pleasure of his, a habit he had developed after stillborn experiences of trying to initiate some sort of relationship with members of the opposite sex. He accepted that he was not the most attractive man in the world, that his hangdog expression, his boxer’s nose, and his small piggy eyes had had their last chance of landing a mate. A balding head, expanding waistline, and wrinkles were only going to work against him. Good teeth were no aphrodisiac on their own.
He had been favoured with a few pitying stares whenever he brought up his interest in the game with Lorraine or the patients he liked enough to have a chat with before or after their check-ups. One man of around forty had barely been able to suppress a snort of derision before suggesting he read a book. And yet this very same man had met his fiancée on the Internet at a chat site. If there were levels of sadness with regard to computer activity, surely he merited a rosette, too.
Houghton didn’t care. He liked the game, liked how involved he could get. He could roam the streets freely, off mission, play little sub-plot games, drive around, go to the gym, buy a new wardrobe, beat someone to a pulp, be involved in thrilling police car chases, shoot the Christ out of things. It was enormous fun.
Frantic knocking at the door gave him pause as he was about to climb up to the living quarters above his surgery. He went to the window and looked out into the street. Lauderdale Road was busy with cars, as was the case every evening at around 6 p.m. London’s rush hour was more like a rush three hours. He couldn’t see quite enough of the entrance to reveal who was standing there, clouting the door again and again, but the security light cast at least three shadows across the gravel driveway.
He hurried to the door and placed his ear against it. Worry was unfolding itself like the slow spiny leaves of a carnivorous plant. He couldn’t understand his discomfort. He often received unheralded visitors after work, it was a source of pride to him that his was a house where friends felt they could drop in whenever they wanted, rather than have to make extensive arrangements, as most Londoners seemed to do. But something about the anger in these knocks – urgent without any vocal accompaniment – seemed utterly wrong to him.
Another barrage. He steeled himself and called through the letterbox: ‘What is it? Can’t you see the surgery is closed now?’
‘An emergency.’ A man’s voice, young, hurried but smooth. Someone putting it on. But even as he thought this, he saw a long, looping rope of bloody saliva drop down into sight.
‘Please help.’ Spoken as if recited from a script.
‘All right,’ he said, and unlocked the door, pulling it open as far as the security chain allowed. Three men, large men, dressed extravagantly, all with hair dyed fiery red, shorn almost to the skin, crowded his doorstep as if desperate to prove they could all fit within its frame. They wore sunglasses with coloured lenses. Silk handkerchiefs frothed from top pockets. He thought they were clowns at first, and then rock stars.
One of them, the tallest, seemed to be holding his face together with blood-drenched hands.
‘Bloody hell!’ Houghton barked. ‘Get this man to a hospital. My God. I’ll call an ambulance. What were you thinking, bringing him h–’
‘No,’ the injured man said, stepping forward. He raised a hand and slammed it against the door, which sprang open, the chain snapping as if made of spun sugar. The other two men moved swiftly inside and led Houghton to his surgery. The leader calmly closed the front door behind him and followed.
‘Anybody else in the building?’ he asked, the words coming awkwardly slimed with gore, heavily slurred. Houghton could now see that there were few, if any, teeth left in the man’s mouth. For someone who had been violently attacked, he seemed admirably calm about it.
‘Yes,’ he lied. ‘My wife will be down in a moment to help me clear up.’
‘Already clean,’ the man said quietly, with difficulty. ‘Nobody else.’ It wasn’t a question.
He sat in the dentist’s chair and put his head back on the rest. He put his hands down by his sides and a stream of blood drizzled off them, creating two crimson pools on the brilliant white-tiled floor.
‘How can I eat, if I don’t have any teeth?’ he said.
‘What happened?’ Houghton asked shakily, trying to understand his serenity. His pain must be insufferable, yet he didn’t show any signs of being on the drugs that might combat it.
The man lifted his sunglasses; blood made a series of strange punctuation marks on his face. It was leaking steadily from the corner of his mouth. ‘I walked into a lamp post,’ he lisped.
His companions chuckled.
‘Right, that’s it. I’m calling the police.’
Without looking at him, one of the other men, who was wearing a laminated photograph of Stanley Kubrick on a chain around his neck, stepped across his path and closed the door. He stood in front of it, almost obscuring it, and waited with his eyes politely diverted, his large soft hands folded primly into each other, like sleeping doves.
Houghton could only stand and wait for something to happen, too frightened to realise that the others were waiting for the same thing.
‘We brought you something to replace my teeth with,’ the man on the chair said. A paperback of The Human Factor peeked from his jacket pocket; his fingers strayed to it frequently, as if it were of some comfort to him. A series of red fingerprints were arranged across the top block of pages. The other man who, Houghton noticed with horror, was holding a piece of brick that was shiny with bloody pulp, held out his other hand and opened it.
‘You must be joking,’ Houghton said, looking at the three of them in turn, his eyes wide with shock, burning with the intense operating lights that removed every shred of shadow from the surgery.
Graham Greene indicated his nude, seeping jaws. ‘Does this look like a joke?’
‘This is beyond me,’ Houghton said. ‘What you’re asking. It’s beyond me.’
‘Breathing will be beyond you,’ Greene said, ‘if you don’t get to work. Now.’
Houghton took off his jacket. ‘It will take time,’ he said. ‘My first patients will be here at eight-thirty tomorrow morning. This is going to take …’
‘Begin,’ Greene said. ‘And I’ll have a touch of anaesthetic. I’m not much of a one for pain.’
Houghton moved in on that riot of wet reds as laughter crashed around him. For the first time in his career, he wished he’d followed his father into the waste management industry.