Part 18 (1/2)

'I told you I haven't done this before.'

He went back into the garage and pulled more things from the shelves. She saw him in the weak light pouring petrol from a plastic container into a power tool. The chainsaw. He brought it out and stood in front of the corpse.

'No,' she whispered. 'No. We can't.'

'We haven't got a choice. Not any more.'

She closed her eyes and took a long deep breath. Something was trying to thump its way out through her chest. She breathed hard, counting to twenty, until the static in her head eased and the thing in her chest stopped moving.

She opened her eyes and found Steve watching her expectantly.

'OK,' she murmured. 'OK. Where do we start?'

'His face,' he said tightly. 'Because that's the worst part. We start with his face.'

40.

The whisky wore off quickly. They kept themselves together by setting a timer to fifteen minutes. They'd force themselves to work for those minutes, but the moment the timer went off they'd rip off their gloves, drop them on the plastic next to the remains of David Goldrab, and go back into the garage, where they'd stand with their backs to the mess in the garden, drinking another whisky, was.h.i.+ng it down with water. They didn't speak, just drank in silence, holding each other's eyes as if they needed to look at a living human being. To see flesh that had blood and heat and life moving through it.

'We can't go on drinking,' Steve said. 'We've got to drive.'

Sally let her eyes stray outside to the plastic mat slick purple lumps s.h.i.+ning in the moonlight. Steve kept saying he had good reason to know what the police were like that without a body and a motive they'd have nowhere to start. He said that human remains were easier to hide than anyone believed that most criminals just lacked the time, resources and basic b.a.l.l.s to hide their victims properly. That it was easy as long as you had the stomach to make the remains unrecognizable as human. Then you could hide them under the noses of the law and they'd walk straight past them. Sally thought he was only talking as if he knew what he was doing to rea.s.sure her, but she said nothing. 'It's easier from now,' he said. 'The worst bit's over. We can stop the whisky. And we should try to eat something.'

She shook her head. 'I'm never going to eat again.'

'Me neither. I'm just saying we should.'

They went back outside and began dividing the pieces into eight piles. Steve had a pair of pliers, which he used to remove some teeth from David's broken bottom jaw. There was no vice in the garage so he had to hold the jaw between his knees to get a purchase on it. Sally took photos using his camera. She heard the noise of gristle tearing as the teeth came from their sockets, and knew she'd never forget it. To the electric drill he fitted an attachment with a helical blade, meant for mixing paint, then together they loaded joints of bone and flesh into a bucket. They used more plastic sheet taped down around the drill to stop the contents spraying out and Steve switched it on, ramming it into the bucket over and over again, pulverizing the pieces.

By one in the morning he was covered with sweat and ten Lidl carrier bags sat on the lawn, each bulging with an unrecognizable red paste. Sally said they should say a prayer or something. Or make some sort of gesture to mark the death.

'You think anyone's up there to hear a prayer like that?'

'I don't know.' She stood on the driveway, transfixed by the bags. 'Maybe it doesn't matter if we believe maybe it only matters if he he did. David.' did. David.'

Steve shook his head. 'Forgive me, Sally, but we just don't have time for a morality lesson. If there is a G.o.d up there, then don't waste His time praying for David Goldrab's soul. Just pray as hard as you can.'

'For what?'

'For us.'

41.

The clouds cleared and the moon sat, low and dazzling, over the Somerset countryside. Sally arranged her jam-making pans outside on the lawn, filled them with limescale remover and cleaned everything they'd used the drill, the chainsaw, the plastic sheet, the plastic bags. Then she cut all the plastic into small squares the size of postage stamps and placed them in a bin liner. Meanwhile Steve piled up the clothing they'd worn with the shoes, the towels heaped it in a flowerbed on the west side of the house, poured paraffin on it and set it alight. When the fire had died and they'd dug the ashes into the soil, they spread more plastic in the boot of the Audi and loaded in the carrier bags. An eleventh, containing hair and larger pieces of bone that hadn't been pulverized by the mixer, went into the well below the back pa.s.senger seats. The remains filled the car with a foul mixture of offal and faeces. Sally and Steve kept their coats on, the heater up high, the windows wide open.

Steve was from the countryside outside Taunton. He was a rambler someone who had every Ordnance Survey map of the British Isles ordered neatly according to their code number on his bookshelves. He knew the border lands of Somerset, Gloucesters.h.i.+re and Wilts.h.i.+re better than Sally did and he had a route already planned. It took in rivers and ca.n.a.ls, forests where badgers foraged at night. It took in the Severn estuary Steve waded out into the mud in the giant grey shadow of the decommissioned nuclear power plant at Berkeley. They stopped on the outskirts of villages and squeezed dollops through sewage grates in the road; they tramped across fields in the Mendips to press the contents of the last bag through the meshes that protected disused Roman mineshafts. Steve stood in the silent darkness, his ear close to the mesh, straining to hear the soft wet patter of the tissue hitting the sides of the shaft.

From time to time Sally turned and looked at his face as he drove, the glow of the dashboard lighting it. She watched his eyes on the road and a strange thought came to her that for the first time in her life she'd done something as a partners.h.i.+p. An ugly, perverse, unthinkable thing, but it had been done by equals. Crazy though it all was, she decided it was the closest she'd ever been to anyone in her life.

He turned and caught her looking at him. He held her eyes, just for a second, and in that moment something pa.s.sed between them. Something that made her stomach stir, as if an odd strength was gathering. Like the beginnings of excitement on a holiday, the desire to yell and dance. She opened the window and threw a handful of the shredded plastic into the slipstream, watched it in the wing-mirror, like confetti, lit red by the rear lights. It was so beautiful it could have belonged to a celebration. Funny, she thought, how everything in life was so deceptive.

Part Two

1.

'I've got something for you.'

'About time too.'

'These things don't just happen overnight. It's not the way it works.'

The guy at the other end of the phone a clerk at SOCA, the Serious Organized Crime Agency was getting a little weary of Zoe and the way she kept pressing him for an answer. It was Monday and in the last four days she'd called at least twice a day to find out if he had any results for the search she'd requested on a p.o.r.nographer from London, nicknamed London Tarn.

'Maybe not overnight, but within the next year isn't too much to expect, is it?'

'There's no need to be sarcastic.'

'Well, if you weren't so f.u.c.king slow I wouldn't have to be,' she wanted to say, but she pressed her lips together, tapped her finger on the desk and kept her control. London Tarn had been the manager of the Bristol club she'd worked in the only person from that time who'd known her real name. She'd never thought she'd hear of him again she thought he had disappeared abroad, but no. Apparently all these years she'd been living on borrowed time, because he'd been in the UK all the while, somewhere in this area, and if he ever had any cause to be called into the nick and heard the name Zoe Benedict attached to the t.i.tle 'Detective Inspector' she'd be screwed, so screwed. That was the thing about the past. You never really appreciated its power until it was too late.

She swung the chair back and forth impatiently. At least her energy was back. Finding him was helping her not to think about Ben. 'Fair enough,' she said. 'Fair dos. Thank you for what you've done. How's it going to come to me?'

'Email. It should be on your system now. Unless your web-master is being a jobsworth.'

She tapped in her pa.s.sword and scanned her inbox. It was there an email loaded with attachments. 'Yup I've got it.'

'There are some pieces missing. If they've got form you'll get a mug shot but some haven't been convicted and we're building intelligence packages on them, so on those the photos might be missing. Do you want me to take you through what's there?'

'Sure I mean ...' She put her tongue between her teeth and began scrolling down the list of attachments. SOCA gathered information from an array of agencies: the old Vice and Street Offences squads, Serious Crime groups across the country, Customs and Excise, Trading Standards, even the Department of Work and Pensions. Sometimes the files they sent looked like ancient computer MS DOS printouts. She found one that looked promising and clicked on it. A list of names reeled down the screen. 'It looks like a h.e.l.l of a lot. Are there really that many p.o.r.nographers in this country?'

'I've narrowed it down for you best I could. I couldn't find the name London Town anywhere.'

'No that was probably just a nickname he picked up out here.'

'But you wanted me to look at Londoners, right?'