Chapter 12

SETTLING IN

Home. At least for the next few months. A one-bedroom hovel on the tenth floor of Swanson House. The letting agent had promised great views of London and accessibility to all local amenities. Bollocks. You could see the city sprawling east towards Barking and Dagenham—lovely—and you had Costcutter with its metal grilles and CCTV, the culinary delights of the kebab shop, Ray’s café, and a pub with boarded up windows. But you’d have to run the gauntlet of the three wise men—and probably a few of their mates—before you got your shopping done, picked up your supper, or had a quiet pint.

Yes, thought Faultless, studying the flat, it’s going to be perfect.

A shit-pit. Damp darkened the walls. The paint peeling. The floorboards rotted. A musty smell hung in the air. There was a red couch, sunken and sad-looking. By a window that provided smashing vistas of far-distant estates sat a table with two chairs tucked under it.

Faultless placed his MacBook on the table. This flat would be his base while he wrote the book. He’d spend his days researching and the evenings writing. After all, there wasn’t much to do around here. Lucky he had a hobby.

He unpacked the rest of his overnight gear—a change of clothes for the following day and bathroom stuff. He’d left his suitcase at his agent’s office in Holborn. He wasn’t going to walk into Barrowmore with it at night, telegraph the fact he’d moved in—that’d make his flat a target for yobs. Best to sneak in as quietly as possible and get his agent to send the case over tomorrow.

He ate a ready-meal spaghetti bolognese, heated in the dusty microwave. The floor of the kitchen was covered in mouse droppings. He studied them as he ate standing up, wondering if he should get a cat.

With everything done—unpacking, eating, washing—he sat at the table in front of his computer and thought things through.

The noise of the estate drifted up ten floors. It was muffled, but he could still hear it. Wheels screeching. Girls screaming. Boys laughing. Hip-hop throbbing. Babies wailing. Footsteps pounding. Dads leaving. Mothers crying. A cacophony compressed into a tiny ball of noise that was being constantly tossed at his window and his front door.

Good to be home, he thought. Good to know nothing’s changed.

He took his notebook out, laid it on the table, and opened it to the first page. Her photo stared out at him, and he saw red. He always did. The fiery rage erupting. In the past, he would’ve burned someone with it—doled out a hiding, a stare enough to provoke him. Now, most of the time, he could master the fury.

He looked into her eyes and breathed, clenching his jaw, bunching his fists, letting the anger seep out of him.

It was a color photo, taken when she was sitting at the kitchen table. He remembered taking it. The camera had been nicked. Some tourists had lost their way and decided to photograph the tower blocks, only for a seventeen-year-old Charlie Faultless to swagger over and say, “Take a shot of me, mate,” the tourist mumbling, “Heh?” and furrowing his brow—and seeing the camera snatched from his grasp. Faultless swaggered off, the tourist and his wife shouting at him. When he got home, she’d been sitting at the kitchen table, smoking.

“Over here,” he’d said, and she’d turned and flashed a smile saying, “No, Charlie, I look a right mess, darlin’.”

“You look gorgeous, Mum,” he’d said.

She did—long, dark red hair, mahogany eyes, and a face that had once appeared on the front of a teen-mag. That had been when she was a kid—just fifteen. A photographer spotted her at Oxford Circus with her mates. He’d handed her a card, told her to come to his studio. “Get your mum’s permission.” She said she would but never did. Her mum was a drunk who nicked the money her daughter made working weekends at Ray’s greasy spoon.

So she’d gone to this photographer’s studio with a mate.

“This is my mum.”

“Looks young, your mum.”

“Yeah, I was a kid,” her mate said, grinning. “You know—modern Britain and all that.”

The photos were taken. She got paid. Well, her “mum” got the check. A month later her picture was on the cover of the magazine, and the photographer said: “You’re going to be a star.” Three months later, she was pregnant. The star waned. Her skies darkened. Her future faded. Her boyfriend vanished. The child died.

But another came along. A little miracle. A 7 lb 10 oz bundle she named Charlie.

His murdered mother smiled at him from the photograph. It was how she would always be to him, and how he wanted to remember her. Smiling and beautiful. But the picture had been corrupted by another image—the police photos of her mutilated body.

As Charlie stared at the photo, both images mingled—the swishing hair, the glance over the shoulder, the cigarette, the half-smile, the open throat, the cleaved abdomen, the cavernous belly, the pile of intestines . . .

Faultless cried out, venting his wrath.

Anger’s no good, now, he thought. This is not about vengeance.

At least that’s what he told himself, in his suit and his tie, with his middle-class manners and the cut of his dinner-party jib. That’s what he told his agent. “Closure, Mike, not revenge.”

Closure . . .

He turned the page of his notebook. Another photo, Sello-taped there, looked up at him.

Rachel. Beautiful Rachel.

His heart felt as if it had shattered.

Fuck closure . . .