44

Shiv Bannerjee liked his women to wear silk underwear. He liked a slight convexity of navel. He enjoyed that expanse of skin leading from nub of bellybutton to pubic shrub. He’d spent some of his happiest hours with his head pressed to this plain of flesh. He enjoyed being equidistant from breasts and cunt. He liked sex in cheap hotels. He liked his women to talk to him during the act. He preferred Caucasian blondes such as Charlotte Leckie, who was presently inclined, legs parted, against the end of the bed in the Waterloo Hotel, situated above a Chinese restaurant in Sauchiehall Street.

Bannerjee penetrated her from behind, controlling her movements with hands on her hips. Her bottle-green silk underwear had puckered around her ankles. She’d ripped them in the act of stretching her legs to receive him. She was twenty-two, read the Herald, played three-card Brag for pennies with her mother every Sunday, and liked to watch football on TV. She shopped a lot. She had a charge card for the House of Fraser in Buchanan Street, and a Bank of Scotland Gold Mastercard with a credit limit of £5,000. She owned a comfortable three-room flat in Havelock Street in an area between Partickhill and Hillhead, although she preferred to say she lived in the latter because it had a more genteel reputation. She didn’t smoke and she rarely drank, except for the occasional glass of Babycham. She’d never used drugs. She sang in a choir that rehearsed once a week at the University. Sometimes she did volunteer work at the Royal Hospital for Sick Children. She wept whenever she read of little children with serious illnesses. She prayed for these kids. She thought the world was a cruel place, and God had some serious questions to answer.

These regular Thursday nights with Shiv were enjoyable, even if this hotel he favoured was far less pleasing than the places where she met her other men. But it made Shiv happy, and that was what counted. He was a gentleman, always kind to her, always thoughtful. He had his peccadilloes, but what person didn’t?

She felt him grow harder. She gave her pelvic rotation more urgency and raised her voice from a whisper. ‘Oh Shiv, Shiv love, oh Shiv, do me, do me, your big brown cock is making me come, Shiv, harder, deeper, oh I love it, love it, love it, take me to the moon, sweetheart, ride me ride me ride me, Shiiiiv, yes yes yes.’

Bannerjee’s eruption was volcanic and prolonged. He spoke in Hindi. At least Charlotte Leckie thought that’s what it was. She gasped as he came. She was never quite sure where the line lay between genuine responses and acting. She’d been playing this role for a couple of years now, the pliant mistress, the surrogate wife. Men like Shiv were generous to her. They didn’t treat her as some common whore. They held her in esteem. They confessed things to her they couldn’t tell their wives. This was a huge responsibility, she thought. The stuff she learned. The secrets she kept. She considered herself a courtesan of the old school.

She felt Shiv soften, then he slid out of her, and she turned around to face him. She held him in her arms as if he were a helpless boy, and she smoothed a hand through his thick white hair and called him baby, because she knew he liked this. In the distance kids were singing Christmas songs. Charlotte was touched by the sound. The Christmas period always made her feel vulnerable and weepy; all that tinsel and those silvery ribbons reminded her of something she’d lost, although she wasn’t sure what.

Bannerjee said, ‘I need to lie down.’

‘Poor Shiv. I wear you out, do I?’

‘You use up my energy, my dear. A man of my age.’

‘You’re not old. Don’t say that.’

They lay together. Shiv Bannerjee caressed her breasts, kissed her nipples. He buried his face deep. He loved the weight of her tits. She sang to him softly. ‘If that mockingbird don’t sing, momma’s gonna buy you a diamond ring.’ She had rather a sweet voice and Bannerjee was enchanted by it. Of all the women he’d bedded in the past few years, he’d allowed only Charlotte Leckie to get close to him. He was very fond of her.

The light in the room came from a street-lamp or traffic passing in the street. He liked this sense of being in the heart of city and all its clamour, and yet tucked away in a secret place. He smelled Charlotte’s skin as he hid between her soft breasts. Here, the world didn’t intrude. No peevish policemen, sharp journalists, Revenue agents. No criminal alliances, no slush-funds and secret accounts, no envelopes and messengers. And no immediate trips to some rank Third World sewer masquerading as a city where corrupt local dignitaries regarded you as a panacea. You could cure drought, famine, housing problems. They thought you could fly without wings.

Lying here in a cheap room above Sauchiehall Street, ah, now this was the simple life.

Charlotte Leckie looked at his face. ‘You have very sad eyes, Shiv. Dark brown and inconsolable.’

‘It’s genetic,’ Bannerjee said.

‘You sometimes look like you have the weight of the world on your shoulders.’

Bannerjee smiled. ‘Like Atlas.’

‘Do you want me to massage you?’

‘I’d like to rest. Nap a wee while.’

‘I’ll stay. If you like.’

‘Of course,’ he said. ‘I don’t mean to snooze for ever. I’ll wake up filled with lust. And if you’re not here, then I’ll be truly inconsolable.’

She kissed his forehead. He shut his eyes. He listened to the carol singing in the distance, kiddie voices buried at times by the rumble of delivery-vans and lorries bringing Christmas goodies to the shops.

‘Close your eyes,’ he said.

She did so. ‘You like it when we just hold one another, don’t you?’

‘I like it enormously.’

‘If I sleep, and you wake before me, nudge me.’

‘I’ll kiss you awake,’ he said. Lovemaking produced a sweet drowsiness in him. He was inside a dark velvet space. Charlotte, face down on the pillow, draped an arm across his chest.

The drift was lovely and smooth, down the brae all the way.

Marak entered the narrow hallway adjacent to the Jade Song and saw before him a flight of stairs covered with a tartan carpet, black and green, shabby and badly stained. He detected a scent of hot cooking oil. He climbed slowly, reached a landing where a reception desk was situated. Newspapers lay in disarray on a coffee table, and a cracked brown leather couch leaked tufts of padding. There was nobody behind the desk. A life-sized cardboard figure of a man dressed in a kilt moved one hand up and down in greeting. Marak could hear the whirr of the little motor that drove the motion. A cardboard balloon attached to the figure’s cheerfully florid face read: Welcome to Bonnie Scotland.

He skipped past this effigy to the next flight of stairs. He moved softly. He was barely breathing. Up and up. He was hot. The place was overheated. Outside, pavements were frozen and lorries spread grit on the streets, and yet the heat in this building was almost tropical. He paused on the next landing and gazed upwards. At the top was a black skylight, a dome of glass smudged by recent rain. He wondered if this was the right place, this shabby hotel, if the address written on the back of the photograph had been wrong. And why had a date and time been added to the address?

Neither of the previous pictures had come with that information. Perhaps this time was the only time.

He climbed again. He had a strong impulse to turn and go back down into the street and climb aboard the first bus that came his way and ride it to its destination, wherever that might be. But he kept ascending. He was beyond retreat. On the next landing a corridor went off at a sloping angle. The ceiling was crooked. A door to his right opened and a middle-aged couple emerged, the woman swaddled in an enormous fur coat and the man dressed in a pearl-grey overcoat that reached to his ankles. Marak turned away as they passed, coughing, covering his mouth with his hand.

The man said to the woman, ‘Bloody Christmas rush. You know I hate that Princes Square. I’m knackered.’

The woman said, ‘You’re knackered? What about me? I’ve been carrying heavy bags all day.’

‘What have we got in common, eh?’ the man asked.

‘I often wonder, Erchie. I really do.’

‘Let’s have a bloody good argument,’ the man said.

‘I’d prefer a bloody good drink personally. Mibbe we can do both.’

Marak heard them go down the stairs, squabbling. He stood with his back to the wall. A phone rang unanswered some floors below. He touched the knife in the inside pocket of his coat. He heard his nerve-ends zing. Turn and leave, he thought. Listen to that earlier impulse. But he kept going. He owed the dead. When you had debts to the dead you didn’t walk away from them.

He owed the living too.

He rose another floor, and now he was at the top of the building, standing directly beneath the dome. The rain on the dome was starting to freeze. It resembled an extra skein of glass forming over the first.

He was looking for room 408.

He stepped into a corridor where a sign read, Rooms 400-416.

He paused, fingered the sheathed knife. He knew how to use a knife, he knew the angle at which to drive a blade into the human body for best effect, which artery to sever and the slickest way to puncture the heart. He’d learned the art of the knife during his two years of National Service. He’d learned guns and grenades. He’d bayoneted straw-filled dummy figures and he’d fired machine guns on target ranges. He’d learned hand-to-hand combat skills. He knew how to strangle a man efficiently.

He knew too much about killing.

He slipped the knife from the sheath, keeping the blade concealed under his coat. 408. He’d reach the door, try the handle, and if the door was locked – would he knock and wait for an answer? For somebody to appear in the doorway?

He heard a woman singing from one of the rooms down the corridor. Quietly, liltingly. He couldn’t tell what she was singing, but the sound captivated him. It released him. He was reminded of water running over stones, or the clarity of a monastery bell ringing slowly on a hill of ripe olive trees.

And then the singing stopped abruptly.