Dust and Desire Read Online Free PDF Page B

soon.
    The swingers were pairing off like it was a chromosome lookalike party. I slalomed through them and was hauled back by the beanpole just as I was about to make it on to the street.
    ‘You forgot something,’ he said, wagging his hoods over to my right. The woman with the Polaroid camera was tottering after me, a clutch of photographs in her hand. I pocketed them, thanked them both, and ran all the way back to the car.

4
    A lthough it was an easy drive home from Hampstead, I dumped the Saab at Belsize Park and caught a tube to Archway. Another of Phythian’s so-called haunts was in N19, a good old-fashioned public house where you drank till you made yourself ill. None of that fannying around that was going on at Stodge. I imagined the most fannying that went on at the Lion was up against the wall outside, at chucking-out time. The excitement of the last hour had made me a bit jittery and I wanted a drink. Scratch that, I wanted several drinks. And I was going to offer a black little toast to Kara Geenan before each one.
    Part of what she’d told me the previous evening – hell, earlier that morning – kept rolling around in my mind like a pebble in the drum of a washing machine. Not the lunacy about her brother going missing mere hours after she was with him, but more the detail that she fed me regarding who he was. She hadn’t sounded to me like someone listing the aspects of someone she cared for. There were no little embellishments when it came to describing his face, for example. He was just: brown hair, blue eyes. In my experience, it’s hard to get such a belt-and-braces sketch of a missing person. The client will twat on for twenty minutes about how glossy her hair was because she brushed it morning and night with a Charles Worthington vent brush, or his eyes were grey or green depending on what colour top he wore and the light in the sky just made his eyes come alive… So it concerned me that Kara’s facts should be so naked, so cold. It didn’t sit nicely with her rushing out at midnight, fit to shit with panic about her baby brother.
    But I wasn’t too concerned. I really couldn’t care less how weird their relationship was if it meant my bank balance was about to turn a pinker shade of red. I would either find him, or I wouldn’t. I’d get my cash and could forget about missing persons for a while. Or I could forget about other people’s missing persons, at least.
    I emerged at Archway into that astonishing horrorfest that is the collision of a number of main roads. It seems that all roads lead to Archway. And then they die there. Archway could be the place where old roads come after they have enjoyed their youth as edgy country highways or suburban dual carriageways. They come here and they just go ‘fuck it’ and coil up in weird spaghetti shapes and expire then make the cars grind to a halt. It had been a while since I was last in N19, and I was pretty certain the traffic was the same. All the drivers’ faces look like: ‘Bollocks, I had a choice, but I decided to drive through Archway.’ You can see them, almost physically wrestling with the compulsion to weep.
    I crossed Junction Road, averting my eyes as one does at the scene of an atrocity, and breezed into the Lion. According to Kara, her little brother had a flat a little further north, on St John’s Way. But I needed a pint before I tackled Roadkill Central.
    ‘Kronenbourg,’ I said, as I sat on one of the stools at the bar. The barman went to it without a whimper: just the kind of barman I like. I took a slow look around the pub, guessing which of the half-dozen beer-nursing thugs might be villains and which mightn’t. By the time the barman had delivered my pint and sorted out my change, it was six-nil to the cons. I asked him if he knew someone called Phythian.
    ‘That his surname?’ he asked. He had something rattish about his face: it was pointed and twitchily interested in what I was questioning him about.
    ‘Yeah,