London Noir - [Anthology] Read online

  Rick pushed the buzzer and waited. After half a minute a voice said, ‘Yes.’

  Rick looked at me. ‘Is that Daddy?’ He asked. His voice was softer than the one he used to me, and he put on a slight lisp.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘My name’s Steve. Ronnie sent me. He said I could stay.’

  There was silence. Then the voice said. ‘Come on up Steve,’ and the entryphone’s buzzer sounded and the door clicked open half an inch.

  Rick grabbed the roll of notes I was still holding and said. ‘See you back at the motor.’ And he turned and vanished into the thickening rain. I pushed open the door and was faced by a flight of stairs leading upwards, faintly lit from a bare bulb screwed into a fixture in the ceiling.

  I walked slowly up the flight until it dog-legged and I could see an open door with a figure standing in the doorway.

  The figure was huge. Bigger than huge. Humungous in fact. A great fat man in a white shirt and a pair of strides that would have made enough suits to dress a quartet. I stopped about four steps below him and looked up. I didn’t like being at a disadvantage, but I didn’t want to get close enough for him to aim a kick at my head with the big, black shoes he was wearing.

  ‘Daddy?’ I said.

  He looked down at me in puzzlement. ‘It wasn’t you that buzzed though.’

  ‘No.’ I said. ‘It was someone I met who told me that Jimmy Himes had been here.’

  I saw the fat man’s face pale and he licked his lips.

  ‘Who told you that?’ He asked.

  ‘It doesn’t matter. Is Jimmy here?’

  ‘Who are you?’

  ‘Nick Sharman. I’m a detective. Private. I was hired by Jimmy’s mum and dad to find him.’

  ‘I don’t know any Jimmy . . . What did you say his name was? Himes?’

  ‘That’s right. And I’ve been told different.’

  ‘Then you’ve been told wrong.’

  ‘Would you mind if I came in and had a look round?’

  ‘I certainly would. You could be anyone. A man alone in my condition . . .’

  I wasn’t interested in a diagnosis. I took one of my cards from inside my jacket and climbed the last few stairs until I was on a level with him, and put it in his tiny, fat paw.

  He glanced at it and said. ‘This means nothing.’

  I pulled out the photo I’d been showing around all day. ‘This is Jimmy. Are you sure you don’t know him?’

  Daddy’s eyes flicked to the photo, then away. ‘Never seen him before in my life.’

  I shrugged. ‘Fair enough,’ I said. ‘How would it be if I came back with the police?’

  His manner changed, and he gave me a smarmy grin, but I saw sweat break out on his forehead like tiny blisters of clear varnish.

  ‘I don’t think that will be necessary,’ he said.

  ‘Can I come in then?’

  He moved his massive bulk backwards into the flat and admitted me. I pushed the door closed behind me. It was warm, and the hall was freshly decorated, with a thick blue carpet on the floor and a tiny table just inside, underneath the flat’s entryphone, with a glass vase of fresh flowers on it. Home sweet home. But the smell of the flowers didn’t disguise the sour smell coming from Daddy, and another smell from somewhere inside. Sweet but rank. Faint enough not to be noticeable unless you knew what it was.

  I knew. And I was glad I’d bought my gun.

  There were five doors leading off the hall. The flat was bigger than it looked from in the street. All the doors were closed.

  Daddy threw open the first one on the left, reached in and switched on the light. It was the kitchen. It was spartanly neat and the appliances and utensils reflected like mirrors. It was empty.

  Next door: Bathroom and toilet. Once again everything shone. Once again, it was empty.

  End door: A bedroom, simply furnished with a single divan and a bedside table. The sweet smell was stronger there. The room was in darkness except for the light that entered from outside, between the undrawn curtains at the window that looked onto a bare brick wall opposite. Daddy stepped in and fumbled with the light switch. A dim bulb came on and I saw the door to a cupboard in the far wall. I pushed Daddy towards the divan and went over and yanked the cupboard door open. As I did so, the smell hit me like a muffled hammer. Human decay in its early to middling stages. Inside the cupboard, dressed in a puffa jacket and jeans was the body of Jimmy Himes. His face was bloodless, and his lips were drawn back over yellow teeth, but he was instantly recognizable from the photo I had shown Daddy. There was no visible sign of injury. Jimmy’s body was propped up against the back of the cupboard, whether by rigor, or because the collar of his jacket had been caught on a hook, I didn’t know, and didn’t stop to find out.

  I looked at the fat man and he grimaced. ‘You fucker,’ I said.

  ‘There’s no need to get personal,’ he replied. ‘I’m sure we can come to some arrangement.’

  ‘No arrangement,’ I said, and drew the Colt from my pocket and pointed it at him.

  ‘And you won’t need that either.’

  ‘We’ll see. Where’s your phone?’

  ‘In the living room,’ he said. ‘The door opposite the kitchen.’

  I backed out of the room, gestured with the revolver, and he followed me. ‘Why have you kept him here?’ I asked as we went.

  ‘I like him. He doesn’t talk back.’

  I could have shot the bastard there and then for saying that. I should have. It was all going too easily. I walked backwards into the hallway, Daddy following me all the while, and when he reached the doorway, he looked over my shoulder along the length of the hall and said. ‘Sonny. Deal with him.’

  ‘Not that old one,’ I said. ‘You’ve been watching too much TV.’ And then I felt a slight displacement of air by my ear, before the doorway and Daddy exploded in a galaxy of white lights, and I tumbled down into a deep well of blackness where there was no light at all.

  * * * *

  I came to for a moment as I was picked up by a pair of strong arms and carried back into the bedroom. I opened my eyes and saw that I was being held by a massive lump of meat in a pale blue, hooded sweatshirt. It had to be Sonny. ‘Yesterday my life was full of rain.’ I was so out of it, that I started to hum the tune, and he crashed my head against the door frame as we went, and the black hole opened again and I dropped into its embrace for a second time.

  I came to once more lying on the divan bed with my arms and legs tied tightly and some kind of tape over my mouth. I was on my side, my hands were behind my back, and both they and my feet were numb and cramped, they were bound so tightly. The light had been switched off and the room was dark except for the reflected glow coming through my window, and someone was bending over me. For a second I didn’t know where the hell I was, until I was pulled roughly onto my back and I looked up into Rick’s face.

  Then I remembered.

  ‘And you were going to make sure everything was all right,’ he whispered. ‘You’re fucking useless.’ He ripped the tape from my mouth, taking a few square centimetres of skin with it.

  ‘How did you get here?’ I said through dry lips, in a voice that I didn’t recognize as my own.

  ‘Up the fire escape and through the window. I thought you’d run out on me.’

  I shook my head and nearly passed out again.

  ‘Did you find Jimmy?’ he asked.

  I almost nodded, then thought better of it. ‘Yes, I did’.

  ‘Where is he?’

  ‘He’s dead. Murdered. In the cupboard over there.’

  ‘What?’ Rick looked at the cupboard door. ‘Christ. I wondered what that stink was.’

  ‘Can you unite me?’ I said. ‘We can talk about it later.’

  ‘Better than that,’ said Rick, and he reached into his jacket pocket and produced a flick-knife. He touched the button on the handle and a six-inch blade popped out, reflecting the dim light in the room.

  As he slashed at the cords th
at bound my wrists we both heard movement in the hall outside the room.

  ‘Quick. It’s one of them,’ I said, urgently trying to rub some life back into my hands. ‘And they’ve got my gun.’

  Rick stood up and went towards the door. ‘My legs,’ I said desperately, but before he could cut those ropes too, we both heard the movement get louder as someone approached the room. Rick ran across the carpet, opened the cupboard where Jimmy’s body was hidden, slid in, and pulled the door closed behind him. I lay on the bed, put my arms behind me as if they were still tied and squinted at the door through half closed eyes. It began to open and a shaft of light from the hall crept across the carpet before it was obscured by Daddy’s huge bulk. He stood in the doorway, the light behind him, my gun in his hand. I hoped he’d come close enough so’s I could grab him because my feet were useless, my hands weren’t much better, and I knew I’d only get one chance.

  He entered the room slowly and I wondered what was on his mind, when there was a noise from the cupboard and I knew the game was up. Daddy switched on the light, looked at me, then turned in the direction of the cupboard door and raised the gun he was holding. The look on his face was half puzzlement, half fear. Slowly the cupboard door began to swing open and Daddy’s eyes widened in astonishment. I knew that with my legs tied the way they were I couldn’t reach him before he could shoot me, and I knew that Rick and I were done for.

  The door opened further. Daddy was frozen to the spot and Jimmy’s body appeared in the opening.

  Daddy screamed and fired twice at Jimmy. Rick who was holding the corpse as a shield let it drop and ran across the carpet, open flick knife in his hand, and his arm outstretched. Daddy stepped back and Rick plunged the blade upwards into his throat, and blood spouted like a fountain over his gun hand. Daddy fired once more, point blank into Rick’s stomach and the heavy bullet smeared a chunk of his back across the floor.

  The fat man fell to his knees like a tower block being demolished, and with much the same racket, one hand clawing at the knife that protruded from his quadruple chins. I threw myself off the bed and crashed to the floor, cursing my useless legs, pulled myself up, using his fat as handholds, tore at the gun he was still clutching, and hitting at his face and neck with the side of my clenched left fist, hammered the knife further into his flesh. The Colt was sticky with both Rick’s and his blood, but I managed to tear it out of his grasp as the door at the far end of the hall opened and Sonny appeared, and ran towards us. I fell flat on the floor and fired upwards, emptying the gun into Sonny’s torso as he came. The pale blue of his shirt blossomed red, and he stumbled and fell, and his body slid along the carpet until his head rested in the doorway just a few feet from where I was lying. He opened his mouth and breathed his last with a rattle, and a gout of hot blood.

  I looked at the carnage. At Sonny’s corpse, at Daddy bubbling his last around the amateur tracheotomy that Rick had performed on his throat, and at Rick himself, doubled up on the floor, still breathing but with a sound that was anything but healthy.

  Fuck me, I thought. How am I going to explain all this?

  * * * *

  I managed. Just about.

  Rick was still alive, but bleeding badly from the .38 special exit wound in his back, and not so badly from the entrance from his belly. I dropped the Colt, ripped the ropes from around my ankles, took off my jacket, then my shirt, and ripped it in two. I wadded up one half and stuffed it in the hole in his back and covered the hole in his front with the other half. Then I stepped over Daddy’s and Sonny’s bodies and went to find the phone.

  I needn’t have bothered. Some concerned citizen had heard the shots and called the police. As I picked up the receiver I heard the scream of a siren in the street outside, followed by the slamming of doors and a buzz from the entryphone. I went into the hall and buzzed back and met the coppers at the flat door with the gun dangling from my left forefinger by its trigger guard. The first copper took the empty Colt gingerly from me, and I told them to call an ambulance. They did.

  The first copper went on into the flat whilst the second put me against the wall and searched me.

  The ambulance arrived within minutes, which was a minor miracle, closely followed by a couple of detectives who took me down to West End Central to get my story.

  I told it pretty well as it had happened. I just left out one part, and told only one lie.

  I left out the part about going to King’s Cross that morning, and started my story with my tour of the Dilly where I met Rick. And I said that the gun belonged to Daddy and was at the flat when I arrived, and he’d pulled it on me. Like I said, I’d stripped and cleaned it that morning and I always wear a pair of cotton gloves when I do, so’s I leave no prints on the mechanism inside or on the cartridges. My fingerprints were on the outside, but so what? You’d expect them to be if I’d used the gun to shoot Daddy and Sonny, and there was so much blood on the weapon by the time we’d finished wrestling for it, that I doubt if forensics could get decent impressions anyway.

  I reckoned the squatters at the house at the Cross wouldn’t be big on reading newspapers or watching TV news and only Wayne and Duane had seen me with it earlier. And if they did tell, it was just my word against theirs.

  The police called up Douglas Himes at the hotel and he confirmed hiring me, and Rick lasted long enough in ICU to tell his part of the story, before he died the next day.

  The police seemed to be quite happy about getting two chicken hawks off the streets. And as for Jimmy and Rick. There’s plenty more like them arriving every day at London’s mainline stations, for the cops to worry about them overmuch.

  Well, I assume I explained everything. It’s over three months now since Christmas and everyone seems to have forgotten about the incident.

  Almost everyone.

  Mona Himes called me up a couple of weeks back to thank me for my help. She was crying before she’d said a dozen words.

  Whilst I listened to her sobbing, someone put the phone back on the hook.

  I don’t think it was her.

  <>

  * * * *

  LIZA CODY

  RECONSTRUCTION

  J

  osie Farraday wore a brown leather jacket with a green silky lining. They gave me one just like it. It wasn’t hers. I didn’t want to wear hers. I don’t like other girls’ clothes. I like mine to be brand new. Other girls’ clothes smell like other girls. I don’t want to smell like Josie Farraday. Not tonight. Not ever.

  So I was glad when they told me I didn’t have to wear Josie’s clothes. I had to wear clothes just like hers but they didn’t have to be hers.

  Caro is jealous of me. She says she isn’t, but she is. She said, ‘You’ll be on telly. Everyone will see your face. You’ll have to do your hair like Josie. Ugh.’

  I was worried at first. Caro said, ‘You’ll be wearing dead girl’s clothes, Miss Show-off. The clothes she died in. Bet you hope they washed the blood off.’

  Then Caro said, ‘Blood never comes off. You can scrub and scrub but it never comes off. Not completely. You’ll be wearing it next to your skin and some of it will rub off onto you and then it’ll be on you forever. You’ll be tainted with a dead girl’s blood for ever and ever.’

  So, when the lady policeman came to see me, I said, ‘Will I have to wear Josie Farraday’s clothes? Her actual clothes?’

  And she said, ‘No no, not her actual clothes. Her actual clothes are still at the forensic lab. Besides they were badly damaged.’

  And my mum said, ‘Please, officer, do you mind?’

  And the lady policeman said sorry.

  I wonder if they’ll let me keep the leather jacket. It’s quite nice. It looked horrible on Josie, but that was because Josie wore it with a blue skirt and black porkpie shoes. Josie was a terrible dresser. I wouldn’t be caught dead in a brown jacket and a blue skirt. Except that’s what I’m wearing now.

  Caro couldn’t come. Her dad wouldn’t let her. She’s furious
.

  She said, ‘You have all the luck.’

  I said, ‘Being like Josie Farraday? I wouldn’t call that lucky. She was boring. A nothing.’

  Caro giggled. She said, ‘Well, she’s certainly a nothing now.’

  But when we ran into those reporters by the school gate, Caro said, ‘We’re all ever so sad. Josie Farraday never did anyone any harm. We’ll all miss her.’ And the reporters wrote it down. Every word. They didn’t ask me anything.

  But I’m here and she isn’t. I’m going to be on TV and she isn’t. That’s why she’s jealous.