The Mammoth Book of Best British Crime 9 Part 12

Joe tried to keep the irritation out of his voice "I guess the Germans weren't thinking about that when they bombed the place to f.u.c.k" and failed.

Another group of young men entered the bar. Joe didn't consider himself an expert on the outward signifiers of particular social groupings, particularly in foreign countries, but he wondered if Mains had brought him to a gay bar. One of the newcomers glanced at Joe, then switched his attention to Mains, his eyes lingering on the tattoos on the Scot's forearms.

"Are you hungry?" said Mains.

"I haven't eaten all day."

"Let's go get something to eat."

As they got down from their stools, Joe felt his head spinning again. He really did need something to eat, and quick.

They ate in a Thai restaurant. Joe smiled at the waitress, but it was his dining partner she couldn't take her eyes off.

"You'd better write a decent script, that's all I can say," Joe said to Mains, argumentatively, as the waitress poured them each another Singha beer. "It better not be s.h.i.+t."

Mains laughed.

"I'm not f.u.c.king joking. When's it set, for example? Is it contemporary?"

"It's timeless, Joe. It's a timeless story, after all. I'm sure you agree. Grave-robbing it's never a good idea."

"Tell me you're not writing it as a f.u.c.king period piece."

"Like I say, it's timeless."

"f.u.c.k's sake."

As they left, Mains slipped the tip directly into the waitress's hand. Joe thought he saw her fingers momentarily close over his.

Out on the street, Joe wanted nothing more than to drink several gla.s.ses of water and get his head down, but Mains wasn't done yet, insisting that they go to a club he'd read about near Centraal Station.

"I'm f.u.c.ked," Joe said, pulling a face.

"Ah come on, man. It's new. I want to check it out and I can't go on my own."

Why not? Joe wanted to yell at him. Why the f.u.c.k not?

But instead he allowed his shoulders to slump in a gesture of acquiescence.

"Good man!" Mains clapped him on the back. "Good man! Let's go."

They walked together through the city streets, dodging bicycles. Joe knew he was making a mistake. He just didn't know how big.

They reached West-Kruiskade. The nightclub WATT was located between a public park and an Asian fast food restaurant. Dozens of bikes were parked outside. Bouncers looked over a steady stream of clubbers as they entered. Joe and Mains joined them.

They waited to be served at the bar.

"The gla.s.ses are made from recycled materials," Mains said.

"Right," said Joe.

A bartender cracked open two brown bottles and poured the contents into two plastic gla.s.ses.

"They have a rainwater-flush system for the loos," Mains went on.

"Brilliant," Joe said in a deliberately flat voice.

"The lighting is all LEDs. Renewable energy sources."

"This is why you wanted to come here?" A disgusted grimace had settled on Joe's face.

"The best part is over there." Mains turned and pointed towards the dance floor, accidentally brus.h.i.+ng the shoulder of the girl next to him, who turned and stared at the two men. "It's a brand new concept," he continued, ignoring the girl, who eventually looked away. "Sustainable Dance Club. Energy from people's feet powers the lights in the dance floor."

Joe concentrated on trying to remain upright. He drank some beer from his recycled plastic gla.s.s. Something Mains had said in the restaurant came back to him.

"You know you said grave-robbing is never a good idea?" Joe looked at Mains, whose face was unreadable. "Surely what we're doing is a form of grave-robbing? Adapting the work of a dead man without his approval." Joe finished his beer. "I'm not saying I wouldn't have done the adaptation, offered the chance, but still, eh?"

Mains stared back into Joe's eyes and for a moment Joe thought he had outwitted the scriptwriter.

"I prefer to think of it," Mains said eventually, "as recycling."

Joe held his beady gaze for a second or two, then, with an air about him of someone conceding defeat but slipping a card up his sleeve at the same time, said, "I have some ideas."

"Uh-huh?"

"Mike Nelson."

"The installation artist?"

"Works a lot with abandoned buildings, something Vos told me to keep an eye out for. Plus, he's a fan of Lovecraft. He ent.i.tled one of his works To the Memory of HP Lovecraft. Admittedly he's quoting a dedication from a short story by Borges, but why would he do that if he wasn't a fan?"

"So what about him?" Mains asked.

"Get him on board as production designer. I suggested it to Vos. Do you know what he said? 'Production design's not art, it's craft.'"

Mains appeared to alter the direction of the conversation. "Vos optioned your novel, didn't he?"

Joe nodded.

"You realize if the Lovecraft adaptation gets made it increases the chances of yours going into development?"

Joe nodded again.

"It would make a good movie," Mains added.

"You've read it?" Joe asked before he could stop himself.

"Vos gave me a copy."

Joe felt more conflicted than ever. If Vos had given Mains a copy of his book it could mean he wanted him to adapt it, and whereas Joe would rather write any script himself, the ultimate goal was seeing a film version on the big screen, whoever got the writer's credit.

Joe saw himself buying more beers, which was madness, given how seriously drunk he was by now. He turned around to pa.s.s one to Mains, but the writer was not there. The back of his jacket could be seen threading its way between the crowds towards the dance floor.

Joe looked at the beers in his hands.

The rest of the evening was a maelstrom of pounding music, throbbing temples, flas.h.i.+ng lights. Grabbed hands, shouted remarks, glimpsed figures. Time became elastic, sense fragmentary, perception unreliable. Joe was aware, while staggering back to the hotel, of feeling so utterly isolated from the rest of the world that he felt alternately tiny and huge in relation to his surroundings. But mainly he was unaware of anything that made any sense; there were pockets, or moments, of clarity like stills from a forgotten film. The giant white swan of the Erasmus Bridge glowing against the night sky. A heel caught between rails as the first tram of the day screeched around a bend in the track. His hotel room leaning back against the closed door, astonished to be there at all. Looking at his reflection in the bathroom mirror and not being convinced it was his, until he reminded himself this was how a man might look after drinking as much as he had. Cupping water in his hands from the tap, again and again and again. Finally, lying in bed staring at the door and hallucinating one of Antony Gormley's cast-iron figures standing inside the room with its back to the door.

Waking was a slow process of fear and denial, the inside of his head host to a slideshow of rescued images from the night before. Tattooed flesh, strobe lights, red flashes. Someone grabbing hold of his crotch, taking a handful. A mouth full of teeth. The pulsing LEDs in the kinetic dance floor. The Erasmus Bridge. The Gormley figure in his room. The open window admitted the sounds of traffic on river and road, the city coming to life. Knowing he would soon be spending a long period of penance in the bathroom, he looked over towards the door. The figure he had thought he had seen just before falling asleep was not there, but there was something not right about that corner of the room. He closed his eyes, but then opened them again to stop his head spinning. There was something on the wall, something that oughtn't to be there. Feeling his gorge begin to rise, he clambered out of bed, naked. To get to the bathroom he had to pa.s.s the end of the bed where there was a bit of s.p.a.ce between it and the wall opposite. The door was beyond to the left. There was something there on the floor, some kind of dummy or lifesize doll, or a picture of one painted dark rusty red by a child. There was a lot of red paint splashed on the floor and the walls and the end of the bed, but Joe had to get to the bathroom.

He threw up in the toilet, his brain processing the images from the floor of the room, against his will. All he wanted to do was be sick and cleanse his system. As he vomited again, a small knot of pain formed towards the front of his skull, increasing in severity in a matter of seconds. He knew he had to go out of the bathroom and have another look at the floor between the wall and the end of the bed, but he didn't want to do so. He was frightened and he didn't understand. What he had seen was just a picture; hopefully it wasn't even there, it was a hallucination, like the figure as he'd lain in bed. He turned and looked out of the bathroom door. The bedspread had a busy pattern, but even among the geometric shapes, the purples and the blues, lozenges and diamonds, he could see streaks and splashes of a dirty brown. He crawled to the doorway, his heart thumping, and peered around the corner.

He spent a few seconds looking at the thing that lay on the carpet before retreating into the bathroom and being sick again.

He remembered Mains telling him, at the start of the evening, that he hadn't booked a hotel room. Had they come back together? Or had Mains followed him back and had he Joe let him in? Or had he broken in? Had the glimpsed figure been the writer, not one of Gormley's cast-iron facsimiles? Or had Mains already been there pa.s.sed out on the floor while Joe was drifting into sleep in bed, and had the cast-iron man done this to him?

It was no more bizarre an idea than that Joe had done it. Had slashed at the writer's body until it was almost unrecognizable as that of a human being, never mind as that of Mains. There could be little blood left in the vasculature, most of it having soaked into the carpet and bedspread or adhered to the wall in patterns consistent with arterial spray.

Joe inspected his hands. They were clean. Perhaps too clean. His body was unmarked.

Very deliberately, Joe got dressed. Stepping carefully around the body, he left the room and took the lift down to the ground floor. He glanced at the desk staff as he left the hotel, but they didn't look up.

He walked towards the western end of Nieuwe Binnenweg until he found the mix of shops he needed and returned to the hotel with a rucksack containing a st.u.r.dy hacksaw, a serrated knife, some cleaning materials, skin-tight rubber gloves and a large roll of resealable freezer bags. As he stood facing the mirrored wall in the lift to go back up to the fourth floor, he pictured himself as the boys in the bar would have seen him, shouting at Mains. He recalled the waitress in the restaurant, who had been at their table precisely when Joe had been giving Mains a hard time, and then there was the girl by the bar in WATT. The latter part of the time they had spent in the club was a blank. Anything could have happened and anyone could come forward as a witness.

The lift arrived with a metallic ping and Joe got out and walked the short distance to his room. Once inside, he dumped the rucksack and stripped down to his underpants. He slipped his iPod inside the waistband and inserted the earphones into his ears. "Rotterdam" by Githead, on repeat. If it meant he would never again be able to listen to Githead, so be it. Just as he had never been able to listen to Astral Weeks since the traumatic break-up with Anne from Donegal, or to Cranes. He'd been to a Cranes gig in Clapham the night before his father had died and every time he tried to listen to any of their alb.u.ms, it put him right back where he was the morning he got the phone call from his mother.

He moved a towel and bath mat out of the way, then dragged the body into the bathroom and lifted it into the bath, not worrying too much about the smears of blood this left on the floor and the side of the bath. He stood over the bath with the hacksaw in his hand and suddenly perceived himself as Vos might film him, looking up from the corpse's-eye view. He hesitated, then reached for the towel, which he placed over the head and upper torso.

His first job was to cut away the remaining sc.r.a.ps of clothes, which he dumped in the sink, and then he began working at the left wrist, just below the tattoo. The hacksaw blade skittered when it first met substantial resistance. Blood welled from the cut in the flesh and trickled down towards the hand, causing Joe's hand to slip.

In his earphones, the girl vocalist sang, "It's a nice day," over and over.

It took at least five minutes to get through the radius and another minute or so of sawing to work through the ulna. There was a certain grim satisfaction in having removed one of the hands, but the exertion had brought Joe out in a sweat and his head was throbbing. In his dehydrated state, he could little afford to lose further moisture.

He knew that he had a long job ahead of him and that it would never seem any closer to being completed while he was still thinking forward to and dreading the hardest part. He sat down on the bathroom floor for a moment, letting his heart rate slow down. He knew what he was about to attempt. He had decided. It was necessary if he was to survive.

It's a nice day.

Taking a breath, Joe shuffled along the floor. He turned around and leaned over the edge, pulling the hem of the towel up to reveal the neck. He placed the serrated edge of the hacksaw blade against the soft skin just below the Adam's apple. A little bit of pressure and the teeth bit into the skin causing a string of tiny red beads to appear. He leaned into the saw and extended his arm. Back and forth, back and forth. His hand pressing down on the chest and slithering and sliding.

It took a few minutes. He wasn't timing himself. It felt longer. He bagged the head by touch alone, using a plastic carrier from one of the shops on Nieuwe Binnenweg. He recycled one of Mains's shoelaces to tie it shut, then placed it in the sink.

It would be easier now. It could be anyone.

It's a nice day.

At several points over the next two hours, Joe thought he would have to give up. What he was doing was inhuman. If he carried on, he would lose his humanity. Even if he evaded capture, he would never be at peace. But each time he merely restated to himself his determination to survive. Yes, what he was doing was a crime, but it was the only crime he knew for certain he had committed.

The clean-up operation took longer.

It was some time in the afternoon when Joe presented himself at the front desk to settle his bill. The rucksack was on his back, his own bag, bulkier than on arrival, slung over one shoulder. Outside in the street he stopped and looked back. He counted the floors up and along until he spotted his open window. On an impulse, he walked back towards the hotel. There was a poorly maintained raised flower bed between the pavement and the hotel wall. Joe rested his foot on the lip of the bed as if to tie his shoelace and peered into the gaps between the shrubs. At the back, among the rubbish close to the hotel wall was a broken brown bottle. Joe reached in and his fingers closed around the neck. He placed the bottle in his shoulder bag and walked away.

On a patch of waste ground at the end of one of the docks behind Keileweg, un.o.bserved, he started a small fire with bits of rubbish, locally sourced. When the fire was going well enough to burn a couple of pieces of wood salvaged from the dockside, Joe took Mains's torn and bloodstained clothing from his bag. He dropped the items into the flames, then added Mains's wallet, from which he had already extracted anything of use. The broken bottle, which could have originally been a beer bottle from WATT but equally might not have been, went over the side of the dock.

Satisfied that the fire had done its most important work, Joe left it burning and started walking back towards the city centre, the rucksack still heavy on his back.

At a bus stop across the street from where one of Antony Gormley's ubiquitous cast-iron moulds stood guard on the roof of another building, Joe caught a bus to Europort and boarded a ferry bound for Hull, using Mains's ticket. The writer would have approved, he thought. When the ticket control had turned out also to involve a simultaneous pa.s.sport check, a detail he had somehow not antic.i.p.ated, Joe's heart rate had shot up and a line of sweat had crept from his hair line, but the check had been cursory at best and Joe had been waved on to the boat. He sat out on the rear deck, glad to relieve his shoulders of the weight of the rucksack. With an hour to go before the ferry was due to sail, he watched the sky darken and the various colours of the port lights take on depth, intensity, richness. Huge wind turbines turning slowly in the light breeze, like fans cooling the desert-warmed air of some alien city of the future. Giant cranes squatting over docksides, mutant insects towering over tiny human figures pa.s.sing from one suspended cone of orange light to the next. Tall, slender flare-stacks, votive offerings to some unknown G.o.d. The lights of the edge of the city in the distance, apartment blocks, life going on.

Soon the ferry would slip her mooring and glide past fantastical wharves and gantries, enormous silos and floating jetties. She would navigate slowly away from this dream of the lowlands and enter the cold dark reality of the North Sea, where no one would hear the odd splash over the side in the lonely hours of the night.

SMALL PRINT.

Ian Ayris.

"DRINNGG, DRINNGG. DRINNGG, drinngg."

That's me phone. Always let it ring three times before I pick it up. It's like not steppin on the cracks in the pavement or walkin under ladders. Black cats and all that s.h.i.+t.

"Drinngg, drinngg."

There we go. And then I count to three. Don't say nothing. Gives me the upper hand, see, if it's a punter. Gets 'em right on edge from the start. If it's me mum, just p.i.s.ses her off and she gives me a right ear-bas.h.i.+n, but more often than not, it's a punter.

"Er ... Mr Splinters? Charlie Splinters?"

One. Two. Three. It's a geezer's voice. And he sounds just like when you're up in front of the school gettin caned by the headmaster or when you're doin a ton down the motorway. Or when you've just beat a man to death with your bare hands. Fear and panic all runnin round inside but all you wanna do is laugh your f.u.c.kin head off.

"Yes," I says.

Geezer breathes hard, like he's blowin all the fear back out.

"Mr Splinters. I need a favour."

Cos that's the business I'm in. "Favours". I do anyone a good turn, me. For the right price. And me rates is pretty reasonable. Ain't got much in the way of letters and education, but I got a head for business, you might say. Undercut every other f.u.c.ker on the manor, do the job clean and quick, take the money, and see you later. Everyone's a winner. Other than the poor sod in question, of course, but that's sort of the point of it, really.

"Come round to the office," I says.

"You've got an office?" he says, sort of surprised, which I've got a bit of the a.r.s.e about straight off to tell you the truth, him thinkin I wouldn't have a place of business, and all that.

"Yes, I've got an office," I says to him, a bit f.u.c.kin narked. I can tell by how his breathing's gone he knows he's done a wrong 'un. Won't be no more of that I can f.u.c.kin tell you.