then, squashed in the corner of Page Seven, a small heading:
‘Body Found at Luxury Hotel’.
The report was short and scant. Maids had found a body in a room at the Blenheim-Strand, and police were currently questioning a man in connection with their enquiries. No mention of Vernon.
His name would be all over the papers tomorrow. The press had their contacts inside every major hotel in London. If that didn’t produce results, they had plenty of loose-lipped, underpaid coppers on speed dial.
Of course it was a shock to me. But wasn’t it always a shock to anyone who found out a close friend or good neighbour or amiable work colleague was really a serial killer or rapist or some other kind of monster? All we know of other people is what we see reflected of ourselves. Beyond that they’re strangers.
When I’d known Vernon, I’d never seen him lose his temper. He’d never been violent, never thrown a punch or a kick. He never even raised his voice. His anger was glacial and controlled, all contemptuous stares and loaded silences. Sure, people changed, but not
that
much.
Yet what did I know? I hadn’t seen or spoken to him in almost twenty years.
Pressure was starting to build up behind my eyes, the thoughts swarming too thickly to isolate and break down. There was Vernon and our history. There was me defending him. There was the looming office battle with Bella. And, on top of that, the case itself. Four separate serrating headaches, one head.
I got off at Clapham Junction station and headed for Janet’s house, via St John’s Road. It looked like every other main street in London. A McDonald’s and a Starbucks, then several mobile phone shops, two supermarkets, a bank and an electronics store – all links in those long predictable chains that dragged the guts and soul out of every British town and city.
I passed several pubs, all busy. I walked faster. Pubs reminded me of hell.
Janet lived on Briar Close, off Northcote Road. It was a different kind of environment there, almost genteel, thanks to gentrification and the money that follows it. She was waiting outside her house with her motorbike driver. That was how she got around London, to and from meetings, on the back of a Suzuki GSX-R600. KRP had a firm of riders on call, mostly for deliveries and collections, but Janet used them as a chauffeur service.
‘Here you go,’ I said, handing her the pen.
‘You didn’t touch it, did you?’ she said as she put the pencase in her rucksack. She had her raincoat on and flat shoes.
‘How do you think I got it here?’ I joked.
She chuckled as she put her helmet on. She was a good foot shorter than me, with medium-length brown hair and sharp pale-blue eyes. She was older than I was by a decade and change.
‘Any more info on the case?’ I asked as the rider kick-started the bike and she clambered aboard.
‘The victim’s a woman,’ she said. ‘A blonde.’
3
The place I called home was half an hour’s walk and a whole different world away from Janet’s house.
We lived in a three-bedroom flat in a place called the Garstang Estate, near Battersea High Street – the ‘we’ being yours truly, my wife Karen, and our two children, Ray and Amy, who were then eight and five respectively.
The estate was a human battery farm – a regimented sprawl of identical brick blocks the colour of toxic factory clouds and bad-tempered skies, consisting of sixty-two apartments and maisonettes, spread over five storeys with communal walkways. Laundry flapped from every other balcony like the sails of a wrecked galleon; satellite dishes clustered at the corners of the walls in an upward creep, reminiscent of an advance of mutant toadstools; and, in the car parks between blocks, a quartet of CCTV cameras were perched atop twenty-foot-high metal shafts, as ineffective against urban evils as church gargoyles.
Dozens of different nationalities lived here, side by side; a regular melting pot, the metropolis in
‘Body Found at Luxury Hotel’.
The report was short and scant. Maids had found a body in a room at the Blenheim-Strand, and police were currently questioning a man in connection with their enquiries. No mention of Vernon.
His name would be all over the papers tomorrow. The press had their contacts inside every major hotel in London. If that didn’t produce results, they had plenty of loose-lipped, underpaid coppers on speed dial.
Of course it was a shock to me. But wasn’t it always a shock to anyone who found out a close friend or good neighbour or amiable work colleague was really a serial killer or rapist or some other kind of monster? All we know of other people is what we see reflected of ourselves. Beyond that they’re strangers.
When I’d known Vernon, I’d never seen him lose his temper. He’d never been violent, never thrown a punch or a kick. He never even raised his voice. His anger was glacial and controlled, all contemptuous stares and loaded silences. Sure, people changed, but not
that
much.
Yet what did I know? I hadn’t seen or spoken to him in almost twenty years.
Pressure was starting to build up behind my eyes, the thoughts swarming too thickly to isolate and break down. There was Vernon and our history. There was me defending him. There was the looming office battle with Bella. And, on top of that, the case itself. Four separate serrating headaches, one head.
I got off at Clapham Junction station and headed for Janet’s house, via St John’s Road. It looked like every other main street in London. A McDonald’s and a Starbucks, then several mobile phone shops, two supermarkets, a bank and an electronics store – all links in those long predictable chains that dragged the guts and soul out of every British town and city.
I passed several pubs, all busy. I walked faster. Pubs reminded me of hell.
Janet lived on Briar Close, off Northcote Road. It was a different kind of environment there, almost genteel, thanks to gentrification and the money that follows it. She was waiting outside her house with her motorbike driver. That was how she got around London, to and from meetings, on the back of a Suzuki GSX-R600. KRP had a firm of riders on call, mostly for deliveries and collections, but Janet used them as a chauffeur service.
‘Here you go,’ I said, handing her the pen.
‘You didn’t touch it, did you?’ she said as she put the pencase in her rucksack. She had her raincoat on and flat shoes.
‘How do you think I got it here?’ I joked.
She chuckled as she put her helmet on. She was a good foot shorter than me, with medium-length brown hair and sharp pale-blue eyes. She was older than I was by a decade and change.
‘Any more info on the case?’ I asked as the rider kick-started the bike and she clambered aboard.
‘The victim’s a woman,’ she said. ‘A blonde.’
3
The place I called home was half an hour’s walk and a whole different world away from Janet’s house.
We lived in a three-bedroom flat in a place called the Garstang Estate, near Battersea High Street – the ‘we’ being yours truly, my wife Karen, and our two children, Ray and Amy, who were then eight and five respectively.
The estate was a human battery farm – a regimented sprawl of identical brick blocks the colour of toxic factory clouds and bad-tempered skies, consisting of sixty-two apartments and maisonettes, spread over five storeys with communal walkways. Laundry flapped from every other balcony like the sails of a wrecked galleon; satellite dishes clustered at the corners of the walls in an upward creep, reminiscent of an advance of mutant toadstools; and, in the car parks between blocks, a quartet of CCTV cameras were perched atop twenty-foot-high metal shafts, as ineffective against urban evils as church gargoyles.
Dozens of different nationalities lived here, side by side; a regular melting pot, the metropolis in
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