Positively his last thought is of bodies floating face down in the cold Irish Sea, their buttocks like white stepping-stones straggling away to the rim of the liquid world. When he tries to walk on them they sink sluggishly, soundlessly, under his foot and he has to keep moving, leaping from one to the next – sinking, leaping on, sinking again, leaping on – while the bodies he has disturbed bob gently up and down, submerged except for their white buttocks, their eyes wide open and staring with vacuous curiosity into the cold grey depths …
After switching off the current Fat Boy unscrewed the needle, taking extreme care not to touch the tip. There was blood on it. He really ought to wear gloves (the skin-tight flesh-coloured kind surgeons wore) because nowadays you couldn’t be sure of anybody. He wrapped the soiled needle in cotton wool and dropped it into a plastic bucket with a broken handle under the workbench.
The dark-bearded man in the chair was slumped forward, the leather straps round his naked waist and bare arms preventing him from falling. His back was a fiery red bubble, seething with puncture holes. There was no design, no pattern – just an aimless, mindless scribble. Not that Fat Boy couldn’t have done something tasteful (he prided himself on his artistry) but of course that would have given the game away. As good as leaving a trade mark.
He had the talent right enough. Had the fancy taken him he could have done something decorative in purple and green: a hawk about to land with feathered wings, or a skull with diamonds for eyes. Or maybe a dagger like the one on his own freckled hairless forearm, three pearls of crimson blood dripping from its point.
His gross shadow undulated across the frosted glass partition separating his workroom from the waiting area in the front of the shop as he made everything shipshape. He was expecting Victor in a little while, to help him dispose of the body.
But there was one last job to do first.
He removed the ground-glass stopper from the small bottle and poured clear fluid into a saucer – just sufficient to cover it, but not enough to spill – he wasn’t that daft. With great care he brought the saucer to the chair and raised the limp left wrist and dabbled the finger ends in the solution. He leaned away as he did this, squinting his eyes, but still caught a pungent whiff that stung his nostrils. He then did the same with the right hand.
Finally, the saucer washed in the sink, his instruments tidied away, Fat Boy unwrapped a chocolate bar and broke off a chunk between his small brown teeth and chewed slowly and luxuriously, squelching the sweet milk chocolate against the roof of his mouth. He leaned against the workbench, staring at nothing.
The bare room with its dusty light bulb and scarred wooden benches and cracked linoleum wasn’t up to much. But he had his art gallery-pictures torn from Sunday colour supplements and fashion magazines – taped to the yellow gloss walls. They brightened up the place, and sometimes gave him inspiration: an upright classic sports car with huge cowled mudguards, chromium headlights and exposed plumbing; a fashion model under a black dinner-plate hat, all angled shoulders and thrusting hip-bones; the futuristic globes and gleaming organ pipes of a nuclear power plant at night; a sepia child starving in the ochre dust clutching a clean bowl, with eyes bigger than the world.
The street outside was deathly quiet, except for the rain. It pattered against the shop window, the refraction of the trickling drops smearing the starving child’s face and making its scabbed lips twitch in a sneer or a smile. It was a ghost town all right. The fishing had gone years ago. Nothing had replaced it – no industry, no tourists, nothing. People only came here, ended up here, when there was nowhere else to go: washed up on the beach of black sand, swirling with the rest of the flotsam round the timber pilings of the crumbling Victorian jetties, stuck in the carpet of green sludge that lapped the walls of the old harbour. All that was left were the rusted hulks leaking oil and the skeletons of the fishing boats with their exposed wooden ribs.
Eventually, as darkness was falling, Victor arrived by the back door. Fat Boy crumpled the wrapper and tossed it in the bucket, sucking the chocolate from the gaps between his teeth. Victor came in from the passage, wrinkling his broad, flat, Slavic nose. The air was stale and dry and reeked of ozone. ‘Bloody awful stink,’ he complained in his polyglot accent of north of England and Polish. ‘He give you any trouble?’
‘Naw …’ Fat Boy whinnied. ‘Good as fucking gold. I gave him enough to stun a fucking carthorse before he knew what had fucking hit him.’
‘What ’ – Victor stared with narrow slanting eyes – ‘to his back, for God Almighty’s sake.’
‘Doodling.’
‘Huh? What?’
‘Scribbling. Messing about. To pass the time.’ Fat Boy rounded his eyes, grinning broadly. ‘Old Pete here didn’t seem to mind.’
‘Oh I don’t know, I don’t know …’ Victor shook his balding head mournfully. ‘What’s the man going to say?’
‘What the man doesn’t fucking know won’t fucking hurt him, will it?’
Victor lifted the head back by the hair and ripped off the adhesive plaster covering the mouth. It came away impregnated with the dead man’s beard. He screwed it up, and after two attempts, when it stuck to his fingers, threw it into the plastic bucket.
‘Let’s move him now. I got the van.’
‘Wait your sweat,’ Fat Boy said. ‘Give it ten minutes till it’s dark. There’s no rush.’
He unwrapped another chocolate bar with fruit and nuts, broke it in half, and crammed it into his mouth.