Estela woke, still wrapped around Theresa, hugging her inside a lemon duvet. She had to twist Theresa’s head to free her arm and look at her wristwatch. She did not like what she saw: a quarter to eleven. She was getting to be a heavy sleeper, although she could only have had three or four hours in total. She felt dull and flat, she wanted her hormone tablets and she wanted them now. Damn that slut Yen. The poor boy. Estela disentangled herself from Theresa and looked around for her handbag. She knew that she had emergency items of make-up. What she needed was her complete vanity kit, but she could never return to the apartment. She would have to make do with whatever she could find.
Theresa was deep in sleep. Estela decided that a complete interrogation could wait. First she would look around the girl’s bathroom and see what kind of skin care products she kept. Alter a glance around Theresa’s miskept home, Estela was not prepared to bet on a lavishly stocked bathroom. Theresa hardly needed full-scale cosmetic enhancement, anyway. Asleep, she was such a slight thing. Estela liked her face. The down-turned mouth made her appear both serious and shrewd. She was certainly pretty. Estela might have paid good money for those eyelashes.
The steep, narrow and dark stairs ended opposite a bathroom that was nearer to being clean than filthy. The tiny window above the lavatory was chock full of cleansers and toners, most of them wrapped in decorative wicker baskets, as though Christmas had just passed and every one of Theresa’s aunts had decided to go with soaps-and-smells. Theresa was a Catholic name. She must have a thousand aunties. Estela looked over all the little plastic bottles. They would be fine if she was making a jello salad but she was not going to put any of them on her skin: passion fruit shampoo, banana moisturiser, aubergine (or egg-plant) cleansing milk, thyme and seaweed eye balm. Estela could not guess what kind of criminally insane hippie would have supplied this poisonous goo.
A range of Clinique toners and moisturisers stood by the sink. Estela found them eventually. Within a half-hour, she had all but completed a makeshift facial and could begin to get dressed again. She decided to put a tight and wide elastic hairband across the top of her forehead, holding back her thick black hair and pulling the flesh of her face up in the surprised fox/Joan Collins style. She finished by dabbing perfume in the shadowy crescents underneath her breasts. She thanked God and Our-Lady-of-lactation that they were still beautiful. She had not even begun to lose her figure. A seventeen year old would risk damnation for breasts like hers.
Her glamour restored, she returned downstairs, detouring through the kitchen before she woke Theresa. While she fed the toaster, Estela timed the radio/cassette on the worktop to Piccadilly Radio. She guessed that she’d missed the local news. But perhaps a little music would get some signs of life out of the Theresa-shaped duvet. After spluttering through an ad for exhaust pipes, the radio surfaced with the first bars of Blondie’s ‘Heart of Glass’. Estela had to stop and wait for Debbie Harry’s vocals to begin. How could anyone invent a voice like that? The sullen sublime. It wasn’t until the song ended, and the DJ gave the dates, that Estela remembered the song was thirteen years old. It was a summer hit; it must have been playing somewhere the night she left Manchester. She had once had a Debbie Harry wig. It was lost on the night she was arrested. The desk sergeant had taken it and logged it in his big black book, along with her purse, stiletto shoes and her season ticket for Manchester City. She never got any of them back.
Estela put her mind back on breakfast. After a while, she went to wake Theresa, honeying the tones and velvetting the Latin cadences as she whispered ‘darling? darling?’ She would have made an excellent extra aunty.
Theresa’s eyelashes swung open on clear blue eyes. As the girl focused, Estela thought she saw semi-circular lines swivel beneath the Celtic glaze, reminding her of the telescopic sightfinder on cameras and rifles.
‘I put on the kettle, darling,’ said Estela. She stroked Theresa’s hair out of her eyes, revealing a bony porcelain forehead with a single crack running across it. Theresa had woken unhappily.
The toast was ready. Estela had found a tub of crumb-filled margarine in the fridge, but no butter. The margarine congealed in pools on the slabs of white toast that Theresa couldn’t eat. Estela wondered if she should try and persuade the girl to eat something, but didn’t bother. As they sat together, Theresa began to worry that the fire had been on too long. Estela told her not to be silly and took a ten pound note out of her purse.
‘I’ll pay. I don’ want either of us to freeze.’
Theresa took the money. She asked Estela how she had come to know Junk.
‘I once lived in Manchester,’ Estela told her. Estela had intended keeping the truth to a minimum, but did not know how carefully Theresa had listened to her conversation with Junk. If Junk chose, he could tell Theresa everything anyway. ‘I was born here.’
‘It doesn’t sound like it, that’s all I can say.’ Theresa had the urban nasal slur of a Manchester girl. Estela thought: north Manchester; Blackley, certainly no further from town than Crumpsall.
Estela said: ‘Was Yen your boyfriend?’
Theresa’s mouth took another down turn, but she held on to her tears: ‘No, he was a friend.’
The duvet had begun to slip off Theresa’s pale shoulders. Estela tucked it around the girl as though she had been born to play her mother. ‘Tell me, what did Yen say about me exactly?’
Theresa’s voice had a sour edge. ‘About finding a gun at your place? He said you had photographs of John Burgess and a gun. He joked that you were planning to knock him off, but there’s no other explanation. It was a real gun.’
‘A nine millimetre Beretta, it was a very good piece. Now the police have it, and I am helpless.’ Estela hoped that her lip had quivered.
‘Not as helpless as Yen.’
‘No? We can pray for him. I don’ have a prayer unless I find another gun,’ said Estela. ‘I was not intending to kill Burgess but if he finds me, then I prefer to get to him first.’
Only Theresa’s head was visible above the duvet, her little face and large Irish eyes. Could Estela really kill Burgess?
Estela said, ‘You have to understand, Burgess is mad. Not just loopy, he is mad at me because I once caused him a certain amount of emotional pain.’
Estela paused. She last saw Burgess the night she had broken out of prison. Burgess had looked in pain, certainly. He was lying on the floor, his hands over his face. As she stepped over him and walked to the door, he seemed to be crying.
‘I know Burgess and I know the way his mind works. He’s the kind who thinks too intensely. He barely sleeps, which gives him too much time to brood. He wants revenge. If I don’ kill him, I face a problem. I’d like to clear up our past misunderstandings, but John Burgess is beyond reasoning.’ Estela paused, before saying, ‘But I’m sure you know all about Burgess. You must see him at the club, and I know that Yen worked at his travel agency.’
Theresa only nodded.
The travel agents was new, something Burgess had never dabbled with in the past. Now she was past her jetlag, Estela realised that this slight shift in his business empire must be significant. Burgess took everything he did seriously so she would have to look into it. She began by saying that it was difficult to imagine Yen working for a living. ‘He can’t have earned very much, the way he would steal from everybody.’
Theresa said it was just his mild klepto streak. It was one way of putting it, like Burger King’s passing interest in beef or Héctor Barranco Garza’s flirtation with pharmaceuticals. Theresa insisted that Yen was sorted at the travel agents. Mostly because he could get cheap flights to Ibiza and Amsterdam, which is all he ever wanted out of life.
‘Last night, I heard you tell Junk that Yen was dealing, but it’s not true. Yen would have got the sack if he’d ever been busted. He said that Burgess was paranoid about drugs – because he was once such a criminal and he’s now trying to live it down.’
Estela said, ‘I only just met Yen, but I don’ believe he could be so diligent, keeping his job by keeping his boss sweet.’
Theresa put her half empty cup of tea on the floor. Estela had forgotten to stir it, or bring teaspoons. A thick granular syrup oozed about the bottom of the cup. It was God’s truth, Yen never dealt drugs: ‘Nearly, everyone deals a little. Or what the cops call dealing, buying more than they need and selling the extra on to a friend as a favour – but Yen didn’t even do that. He was always at the bottom of the food chain. Which only made him all the more keen to rush off to Amsterdam every possible weekend. If you don’t believe me, ask his friends. Half of them work for Burgess, too. They’ll tell you the same thing.’
‘I’ve met some of his friends.’
‘There are two called Cozy and Tom, another boy called Jules.’
Estela nodded, Cozy and Tom she knew. She believed Jules was the one who claimed to be the reincarnation of a Dutch sailor. Could Burgess really only employ idiots, drug-hobbyists, the emotionally disturbed?
Estela said, ‘Every travel agents I’ve ever seen, they employ young girls and dress them in air hostess drag. But I suppose Burgess still prefers boys.’
‘Burgess isn’t gay, is he?’
‘The worst kind,’ said Estela. ‘Like an American novelist, the kind that has to maintain one hundred per cent hetero integrity.’
‘What do you mean?’
Estela admitted that she did not know: ‘I never could work out what went on under the skin of John Burgess. I thought it was better that I did not try to find out. And I’ve known him for nearly twenty years.’
‘Since the time when he was Manchester’s biggest gangster?’
Estela nodded.
‘And what were you, his Moll?’
‘No.’
Estela must have let a half-beat slip because Theresa said. ‘But he was soft on you?’
Estela let that hang; she remembered that St Paul had cursed softness ahead of theft and extortion. Instead, she picked up the cups and saucers and took them through to the kitchen where the radio was playing a wayward version of ‘Right On Time’. The news came on just as she finished stacking the plates in the sink. It led with Yen’s death, and the news that the Gravity would not reopen until further notice.
Theresa was sat upright, listening, but that was the end of the item. The newscaster moved on to a piece about an attack on an Indian restaurant in Rusholme. The police believed that automatic weapons were involved and were appealing for witnesses.
Theresa said, ‘Is that it?’
‘What did you expect, a minute’s silence?’
Estela regretted her tone immediately she saw Theresa’s eyes. Soft tears were collecting against her lashes. Estela knew that she was growing too hard. She needed her pills back. She had to ask – ‘Yen stole some tablets from my handbag. Do you know what happened to them?’
Theresa reached under a settee cushion and pulled out a bottle.
‘Yen had these with him in the club. I went back for them after he died. I thought it was better the cops didn’t find them.’
Theresa took the bottle of Chicadol gratefully, her eyes cast heavenwards in thanks. Opening the child-proof cap, she could not believe how few were left.
‘He has taken all these?’
‘I guess so. I mean, there was no way I was going to have any. Whatever’s gone, he must have taken. Are they dangerous?’
‘Not to Yen. Not in his state. But the police surgeon might have a surprise.’
Estela wondered how she could replace the bottle. If she could not persuade anyone to write a fresh prescription, she could hold up a pharmacist. She would have to find a new gun, first.