The showers were already on, hot jets filling the changing rooms with acrid steam that tickled the craw. A malty smell of naked, damp bodies mixed with the harsh odours of cheap soap and shampoo. Talk was turning away from the football, to what was going to happen later that night. The pubs they would meet in, the girls who would be up for it, the men they wanted slain.
“Billy?” Sean called. Three men said: “Yeah?”
“Billy Morgan?”
“He’s outside,” said one of the other Billys. “Taking down the nets.”
The sweat that had been driven onto Sean’s skin by the steam froze instantly when he returned to the freezing pitches. He saw Emma mooching under the trees, looking at the flowers and the mushrooms. She waved at him and then shrugged as if to ask:
What’s going on?
A more distant figure was struggling to unhook the nets from the goalposts. Sean pointed at him and motioned for her to stay where she was. Emma threw back her head theatrically but gave him a smile that made him forget all about the cold.
By the time Sean reached him, Billy had managed to divest the goalposts of their net and was bundling it up into a manageable shape to carry back to the sports centre.
“Want a hand?”
Billy froze as Sean approached, the net dangling from his grasp, giving him the bizarre appearance of a cheated fisherman. Billy scrutinised the stranger, the gauze over one eye, the black beanie, the way he favoured one leg over the other as he approached. “Who are you?”
Sean smiled. If Billy bolted before he was within arm’s length, he’d never catch him. “The name’s Sean. We’ve met before.”
“I don’t thi–” But now the eyes widened a little and the net fell from his arms. “Fuck off. I’m finished with him now. That Lord. That
bastard
. I don’t owe him nothing.”
Sean held his hands up, kept the smile in position. “I know, I know. I wanted to apologise to you.”
“You
what
?”
“Apologise, Billy. I was working for Vernon Lord, but I didn’t know what it was he was up to. I still don’t. I thought he was a debt collector. I swear. That’s all.”
“He was,” Billy said. His voice had calmed down, but he was still taking steps backwards, keeping the distance between himself and Sean. Sean stopped. Billy stopped.
“But you said, that day, that it wasn’t money...”
“It was never money,” Billy said.
“Then what?”
“Why should I tell you? You caught me that day. Gave me a hiding. Set me up for that bastard.”
“I’m sorry, Billy. I was... I’m a private investigator. I was trying to find out who killed a girl.”
“I don’t give a fuck what you are. You’ve spoilt me for life. I’m a wreck.”
“I don’t understand.”
“I hope you never have to.” Billy walked around Sean in a wide arc, as if fearful of a repeat attack.
“Billy–”
“Fuck off.”
Sean trudged after him as he returned to the changing rooms. The others had finished cleaning themselves and were standing around outside, hair nicely combed and glinting in the pale sunlight, sports holdalls slung over shoulders, car keys clinking in their fingers. Billy dumped the nets and went inside. Sean followed.
“I want to help you,” Sean said. “I want to get Vernon Lord. I think he had something to do with the death of this girl.”
Billy said nothing. He slowly peeled the kit from his filthy body. Sean turned away. “Who was the other guy who turned up after I left you that day, Billy? The man in the mask?”
He heard Billy snort behind him. The squeal of a tap was followed by the blast of water on tiles. Sean turned to see Billy eclipsed by a cloud of steam as he began to soap his body. “That was Dr. Chater.”
“Dr. Chater?”
Billy’s hair stood up in soapy tufts. His eyes closed as shampoo creamed across his face. He looked impossibly young. “Yeah,” Billy said, spitting out water. “Vernon has a deal sorted out. He finds prime cuts and Dr. Chater comes to harvest them.” The steam from the shower dissipated under a breath of air from outside.
There was still plenty of moisture in the changing rooms, sluicing along the floor, hanging in the air, but none of it could help the dryness that stripped Sean’s throat in the second that Billy’s body became visible.
Billy stood in the cubicle, rinsing his gelded body with a flannel. Wintry sunlight diffused by the frosted windows turned his flesh to powder; the spasming striplights arranged on the ceiling softened him to such an extent that it seemed the angles of his bones had been sanded down. Sean stared at the mangled nub of his pubis, beribboned with shining scars, as if a slug had made criss-cross journeys across him. And then he noticed Billy was watching him. As Sean made to say something (what comfort could he have offered?) Billy made a barely imperceptible shake of his head and, bringing his finger to his lips, locked the words Sean might have uttered deep inside him for ever.
“C
HRIST, WHY
?” E
MMA
asked him.
They were sitting in a café. From his seat, Sean could see through the misting windows to the muddy fields they had just departed. The sugar in his weak, hot tea was slowly making inroads to the core of his shock, thawing him, bringing him back. He shrugged.
“Billy said something about a deal. I’ve got a horrible feeling about this.”
“What?”
“I think... I think that Vernon is selling organs to someone over there.”
“In Tantamount?”
“I think so. I think he’s harvesting organs here and giving them to Tim Enever to sell over there.”
Sean told Emma about the package Tim had been carrying. It had been a smallish parcel, wrapped as the cuts from a butcher might have been wrapped. He told her of the blood that had seeped to the bottom of the parcel. “I thought it was something he had bought. For lunch. I’ve seen Tim eat the most God-awful lunches when we were working. Anaemic meat puddings, ribs from the Chinese takeaway that looked way out of date; it wouldn’t have surprised me, what he had in that parcel for his din-dins.”
“Why Billy? What’s so special about him?”
“I don’t know. Maybe it’s because there’s nothing obviously special about him. Maybe that’s it. On the surface it looks as if he’s being chased for dosh. Nobody looks twice. Happens all the time for those poor bastards.”
“What about the others you visited?”
“Jesus,” Sean said shakily, his hand trembling against his cup. The rattle of it against the plastic table drew attention from some of the other customers. “Those poor bastards.”
“Hark at him!” cawed a craven figure who seemed to have created himself from the sooty skin on the wallpaper by the café window. “Precious little wanker. Have some respect. Don’t think you’re any better than the rest of us.”
“God forbid,” spat Emma, screeching her chair legs back on the lino. “Come on, let’s go.”
Outside she held on to Sean while he tried to make his legs work properly. The cuts in his thigh were bleeding again, showing through the thinning denim. “God, I’m a mess,” he said wearily. His face was grey and scooped-out, like a pumpkin for Halloween.
“Over here you’re a mess. Over there, in Tantamount, you’re strong. You’re unbelievable.”
“Oh, go on,” Sean said, affecting a camp voice. Emma laughed.
“It’s true,” she said. “I watched you run after that Tim guy. You were incredible. People stopped to look. You were strong and fast.” Emma took his head in her hands and drew it towards her. She kissed him on the mouth, gently at first, but with mounting desperation, as if trying to feed off some of the steel she had referred to.
“I should check on those others,” he said. “Make sure.”
Emma nodded. “Okay. I’ll come with you.”
H
E WAS GLAD
of that, in the end. Although he was not attacked by the people he had had to disable when he first came with Vernon Lord to visit the old woman, Mrs Moulder, in the tiny flat near Runcorn’s Shopping City, the presence of danger was very real and constant. Emma helped just by being there. She lent him the mettle that she thought she had seen in him in the other place, over there.
Her door was closed but the latch was off. Inside, the smell of death was overwhelming. There were no signs of struggle, but there was an intense feeling of a presence in the flat which they both acknowledged.
Emma said, “It’s as if someone has just left the room, do you know what I mean?”
Sean nodded. “Or is hiding. Is still here.”
They found Mrs Moulder in the kitchen. Sean said, simply, “Cheke.”
If her method of dispatching victims was becoming more skilled, the manner of her disposal of the bodies was shockingly clumsy and tokenistic. Mrs Moulder had been forced into the oven, but when Cheke had found she would not fit, the old woman had been abandoned, half-sprawled on the floor, her head burned like a forgotten roast. An older wound in her chest told the story of Sean’s first visit here. A story, the ending of which he had not been privy to. The ribs had been snipped open and bent back to reveal the heart, which was no longer there.
Cheke had half-heartedly begun hacking off Mrs Moulder’s legs, but had given up, no doubt bored. The body was partially digested too: a naked portion of the abdomen bore sucker scars and the flesh had turned to porridge. Presumably Cheke had given up on this idea too when she realised how pointless it would be to assume the form of an elderly blind woman.
“I’ve seen enough,” Emma said.
“She’s closing in on us,” Sean observed. “When we give her the slip, she simply goes back to the trail and rubs it out bit by bit until she makes fresh contact.”
“When does it end?”
Sean squeezed her arm. “When we go down. Or her. Don’t lose that thought. She’ll have an Achilles heel.”
They were on their way out of the flat when Emma halted Sean, her voice a whispered, frantic appeal. In the cracked, foxed mirror hanging in the hallway, trapped between the silvered background and the solid reflections of Sean and Emma, Cheke lingered, in the act of departure. Emma reached out for Sean and held tight to his hand as they studied the wolfish profile and the volley of deep-red hair that tumbled across her shoulders. The eye regarded them, unseeing, yet giving the illusion of awareness. It hung there, beneath the lid, sly, gem-bright. Teeth glistened between slightly parted, ruddy lips. She had a bloom about her, even in the ghost of this reflection. She was formed. Ripe.
“She looks so real,” Sean said. “She looks...
beyond
real. Jesus.”
He delved for some kind of conversation as they drove back to town, but nothing could penetrate the vision they had witnessed. He guessed that her reflection, in its reluctance to leave the mirror, counted for something, might point to a weakness, but was baffled as to what that could be. He had been shocked by the perfection of the woman. She looked so hungry and ambitious, yet utterly fulfilled at the same time. She was an advert. She was aspirational. His lust stirred at the thought of her wide, thick mouth, the carnality that played in its shape. She had developed so much in the short time since her last attack it seemed impossible to believe it could be the same woman.
“How far can she go? Where can it take her?” Emma asked. He saw in her glazed countenance how Cheke had stayed with her too.
“I don’t know,” Sean said. “But she’d have us as a part of her in an instant.”
Saying the words, he hadn’t meant to invest them with enthusiasm, although that was how it had sounded. Would it really be a bad thing to have your make-up absorbed by her, to become a part of the perfection she was zeroing in on? Would it hurt so much? He thought of her body opening, sliding across his, the heat as she sucked him into her. To be indivisible from her.
He swallowed thickly and wound down the window, allowed the frigid January air into the car.
“She would kill us in a second,” Emma said. “No mercy.”
“I know.”
“Be strong,” she said. “Be careful.”
C
HAPTER
T
HIRTY-
F
IVE:
M
ASH
T
HIS
T
HERE WERE OTHERS.
Sometimes they appeared as subliminal slivers of colour and movement. Sometimes they loitered. Will slowly began to understand the migrations here, but he never got over the patterns of damage, the abundance of injury in all its manifold, grotesque variations.
Joanna said, “Look.”
A boy and a girl hurried along a path flanked by fluorescent yellow mushrooms. In contrast to her brother, the girl seemed to have only superficial injuries: a slight concave aspect to her skull, a ragged wound that flapped on her arm. Half of the boy’s head was hanging down his back, like some ghastly pony tail. They skipped and giggled, oblivious to their plight, excited instead by the lure of this strange wonderland.
“Look.”
A woman was trying to pick the crystallised cobwebs from hedgerows packed with thorns and fingers and teeth. She kept forgetting, it seemed, that she no longer had the hands to perform the task.
“Look.”
An elderly man with bulging eyes and empurpled skin tried to force his fingers into his gullet to remove a chicken bone that was lodged there. Somebody had performed a tracheotomy on him: a black hole in his throat wheezed and sputtered as he calmed down, realising that he could quite happily exist here with the foreign body trapped in his windpipe. Somewhere, a surgeon might be operating on him now, trying to remove the bone, trying to bring him back.
“Look. Look. Look.”
He did not become inured to the circus that passed him by as they sought the train station. When he asked a woman for directions, he completely missed what she said to him, partly because of his fascination at the sight: the mouth through which the instructions were coming had been widened by the blade of an axe that separated her face; partly as the words were rendered unintelligible because of it.
In the end, a man with a sanitised, almost beautifully neat incision across the centre of his forehead pointed them towards the station. Will led Joanna through a ticket barrier that was unmanned and over a small footbridge to a similarly unpopulated platform.