The next morning I passed on the gym, stayed in bed longer than usual and wondered if the activities of the night before had been a dream. McCallen’s anarchic reappearance had awoken long-dead emotions and knocked me off balance. Made me consider what the German had that I didn’t. I let out a sigh and pressed my head deeper into the pillows in a futile effort to evade the simple truth. Lars Pallenberg had not spent fifteen years of his sorry existence knocking people off.
She had nerve, I was forced to give her that. And she knew how to get to me, the ‘personal threat’ argument a blinder.
I finally dislodged myself from my cosy pity, got up, showered and shaved and stared at my reflection. You’re looking good. More rested, McCallen had remarked. My normally cropped dark hair could do with a cut. The rest of me appeared much the same: blue eyes, wide nose, high Slavic cheekbones, but I got what she meant. I’d lost the hunted look.
I dressed in a pair of jeans, open-neck shirt and sweater, black loafers. Standing in the kitchen, eating a solitary piece of toast, I looked around me. I hadn’t really got the hang of homemaking. I had all the right kit, furniture in the rooms, plantation shutters on the windows, yet the deliberate absence of personal touches, anything that could betray my true identity, gave it a slightly sterile air. Occasionally I’d buy flowers – freesias, my mother’s favourite – but that was about as far as my interior design went.
I gazed out of the window at a grey, wet January day that was already dark before it got going. Miserable summed it up and it reflected my mood. I might have committed to a home and car and gainful employment, but I had nobody with whom to share my life because I could never reveal my past. McCallen was the only woman who knew me well, understood the way I ticked, and McCallen was off-limits and unattainable. I was the equivalent of a city after a bomb has been dropped on it – ruined and empty.
With no particular place to be that morning, I pulled on a leather jacket and let myself out onto a street of terraced houses. Collar up, I walked with a brisk step past the watchmaker’s, nodding good morning to the guy inside, and round the corner to a short row of shops, my destination the newsagents. Perhaps McCallen had a point, I reasoned, as I picked up copies of the local newspaper and a couple of broadsheets with my standard pint of milk. I couldn’t keep running away from the world now that I’d made a conscious decision to reclaim it. With a particular eye for any development opportunities, I did a quick browse of the window of an estate agent. Nothing grabbing me, I went back home and soon had a mug of fresh coffee and newspapers spread out at the breakfast bar like recently received gifts.
Confronted by the usual suspects: war, economic woes, the Eurozone crisis and failures in various institutions, little seemed to have changed since I’d tuned in last. Marginally bored and about to flick to the business section, a face suddenly stared out that made me skid to attention.
Smoothing out the page, I looked into the dark, heartless eyes of the man I’d known as The Surgeon, the soubriquet earned because Chester Phipps was as physically strong as an orthopaedic surgeon and as skilled at exploring human anatomy in spite of his skinny physique. It was a good picture, one of which he’d have been proud had he been alive to see it. Taken a couple of years ago, it showed him wearing an elegant navy pin-striped suit, shirt loosely open at the neck. He was seated, cigarette rakishly held between his thin fingers, legs louchely crossed, his grizzled, moustachioed features gathered tightly beneath a mane of long grey hair. Staring directly at the camera, thin and intense, he could have been an art connoisseur rather than a crime lord whose interests included, to quote the man himself, ‘cocaine, crack and cunts’. A headline accompanied the photograph: ‘New Killing as Turf War Escalates’.
Phipps had exited the way most bosses meet their maker, his death part of the unseemly scrabble for power in the wake of the vacuum left by Billy Squeeze, a man who once retained a formidable hold on the drugs trade, a man whose ambitions had extended to genocide, a man who had done his best to stitch me up. While alive, Billy’s vicious reputation ensured that nobody dared to piss on his patch or cross him, making the ensuing jockeying for power and subsequent all-out war inevitable. I’d witnessed the destructive power of fear at close quarters. Uncertainty spawns violence. Loose associations, once tolerated, shatter into a maelstrom of killing until a new natural order is established. But The Surgeon’s death had me troubled for two reasons: I’d killed Billy, and Phipps had pointed me in the right direction to enable me to carry it out.
The phone saved me from further brooding. I looked at the number and groaned.
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘Is that Joe?’
I scratched my head. ‘Yes, Dan, it’s Joe.’
‘We’ve got a problem. The toilet’s blocked.’
‘Again?’
‘The toilet’s blocked.’
‘No, you dope, I meant not again.’
‘Erm … yeah. We’ve tried to sort it, but –’
‘Don’t touch anything. I’ll be round in ten.’
I took my shit-busting kit from the garden shed and walked out of the rear gate to where I parked my Z4. Having never owned a vehicle before – cars were a perk that usually wound up crushed or destroyed – it represented one of the pleasurable upsides of going straight. Opening the boot, I threw in a beast of a plunger, a drain snake, thick rubber gloves and a pair of waterproof trousers and Wellingtons. I couldn’t help but grimly observe that clearing up other people’s shit, of one kind or another, was a constant refrain in my life.
My student let was in St Paul’s, close to the university. As this was my third visit in as many months, I was beginning to realise that renting out property to three young men was a ridiculous idea. They had no sense of hygiene, cleanliness or financial responsibility. Without a parent in tow, they reverted to the behaviour of toddlers. Both species were messy and had a habit of staying up half the night, Dan, the eldest of the trio, being a typical specimen. Likeable, smart and easy-going, he was also an accomplished liar. The rent money was never quite available or where it should be – in my bank account – and yet he always had an entirely plausible reason for delay. I’d once facetiously suggested to him that he would make a good addition to the security services.
As soon as Dan opened the door, I was assailed by the heavy aroma of curry and body odour. Upstairs had its own peculiarly vile tang.
‘It’s a bit of a mess,’ Dan said, as I squeezed into the narrow hall and manoeuvred my paraphernalia past a bike with a puncture in the rear wheel, a skateboard and a full-size supermarket shopping trolley. The open door to the lounge revealed upended furniture. I gingerly peeked inside and saw that one curtain was seemingly held in place by fresh air, the other lying in an exhausted heap on the floor. Carpet and every available surface lay coated in empty cans of lager, cheap cider and overflowing ashtrays. I grunted disapproval and made the mistake of walking into the kitchen.
‘Jesus, when did you last wash up?’
Dan peered through a curtain of dark hair and stroked a fledgling attempt at a beard. ‘I was about to start on it.’
‘And the rubbish?’ I stared out of the window onto a vista of bulging and split bin liners. ‘We have fortnightly bin collections,’ I added, piercing Dan with a look that used to reduce grown men to tears.
Dan beamed and idly scratched his rear in the region where the top of his boxers conspired with his jeans. ‘No stress, Joe. Take a chill pill. Jack and Gonzo are loading all the shit up and taking it to Kingsditch later.’ Kingsditch was the recycling centre.
‘How? On the bus?’
‘Gonzo’s mum is driving down for a few days. She’ll do it.’
I didn’t bother to ask whether or not Gonzo’s mother had been warned of the treat that lay in store on her arrival. I had a feeling that this was another product of Dan’s ripe imagination. Last time they’d