Maureen had been right.
The next night Billy had slunk into the pub at around eight, his face pasty and dishevelled, his arms dangling, out of order. He asked for his usual, but without his usual enthusiasm.
Moses walked up to him and leaned on the bar. ‘Sorry about last night,’ he said. ‘I was rat-arsed.’
Billy looked at him, then looked back at his drink. ‘Yeah,’ he said.
‘How did it go?’ Moses was trying to be friendly.
‘I’m going to get bloody killed,’ Billy said.
He’d got lost, he said, and turned up at the wrong house, and his mate’d waited two hours, and in the rain as well, and now his mate was down with pneumonia or something, and he’d rung his mate up to see how he was, and his mate’d said, as soon as he was on his feet again, he was going to tear Billy’s head off.
‘How long does pneumonia last?’ Billy had asked Moses.
‘Pneumonia?’ Moses had sucked in air. ‘You can die of pneumonia, Billy.’
Billy had grinned. ‘Fingers crossed, eh Moses?’
Barbara crushed her cigarette out. She nodded in Billy’s direction. ‘Looks like he got away with it.’ He still had his head on was what she meant.
‘So far,’ Moses said.
He went to buy her another drink. When he returned, Barbara’s face was jutting brutally over the table.
‘Where’s Eddie?’ she asked him. She looked ugly for the second time. Uglier than the first time, actually. Violence in the offing.
Moses glanced round. ‘I don’t know. Maybe he’s in the toilet or something.’
‘The toilet’s right behind you, I would’ve seen him go in,’ Barbara snapped as if he was not only lying, but lying badly.
Moses crossed the pub to where he had last seen Eddie. Billy was playing now, slamming balls into pockets, dominating the table with a precision and authority he couldn’t seem to bring to anything else he did.
Even as he asked the question, Moses knew what was coming.
‘Seen Eddie?’
Billy jerked his head in the direction of the side-door without taking his eyes off the table. ‘He left.’
Moses felt a lot like Billy’s mate as he walked back to where Barbara was waiting. He was beginning to understand why there were so many headless statues in the world.
She had already guessed the truth, judging by the look on her face: it was stiff and pinched, and suspicion had killed the light in her eyes. She probably thought of him as an accomplice, some kind of decoy, what with all his ridiculous stories. He told her what Billy had said.
She scratched at a crack in the table-top with a blunt fingernail. ‘Did Eddie say anything about me? You know, earlier on?’
Yes, he did, Moses thought, remembering a brief exchange with Eddie at the bar. He said, How the fuck’m I going to get rid of Barbara?
‘No,’ Moses said. ‘Not that I can remember.’
Perhaps she believed the lie. She still hadn’t looked up from the table. The silence stretching between them finally came to an end when she snapped her handbag shut. ‘Where can I get a taxi?’
‘I’ll show you.’
They left the pub and crossed the main road. He flagged down a cab for her. As she climbed in, he said something about seeing her at the party maybe. She didn’t reply. She pulled the door shut, leaned back against the seat, closed her eyes. Her eyelids collected light from the neon fish and chip shop sign across the road, glowed a supernatural white. She looked blind.
The taxi did a U-turn and headed north.
Goodbye 1,000, he thought. Or whatever number you are.
*
First to see the fourth floor of The Bunker was Jackson.
‘I’ll bring something to drink,’ Jackson said. ‘We’ll christen the place.’
He was full of gestures like that, tense and generous.
Moses opened all the windows that evening. Lingering indoor smells of bleach and disinfectant blended with exhaust — and curry-fumes and the unlikely scent of blossom from outside. It was May now. Air you could almost wear. A breeze so light that, had it suddenly been made visible, it would, he imagined, have looked like lengths of pale floating muslin. A warm red hem to the buildings. A thin veil of pink beyond, on the horizon.
Moses sat on the window-ledge and waited for Jackson. He was thinking of nothing, content simply to gaze out over the city as it accelerated towards the hours of darkness. When the bell rang, he didn’t move at first. Then he seemed to unwind, to gather himself. His eyes clicked over into focus like the fruit in a fruit machine. Peering down, he saw Jackson’s tangle of hair four floors below. He kicked off his left shoe, and peeled off his sock. He dropped his door-keys into the sock, rolled it into a tight ball, and threw it out of the window. It bounced off the pavement and into the gutter, missing Jackson by about six feet. Jackson, being Jackson, flinched.
‘The keys,’ Moses shouted.
Jackson cowered below, his face a pale area of nervousness.
‘The sock,’ Moses shouted. ‘The keys are in the sock.’
He sat down again. He had just finished rolling the first christening joint when Jackson appeared at the top of the stairs. Jackson was wearing a beige raincoat with a wide sash belt and floppy lapels. It was an awful raincoat. Not for nothing had Jackson once been known as Columbo.
‘You ought to be careful with those keys,’ Jackson said. ‘You could kill somebody with those keys.’
‘I need more practice,’ Moses said. ‘You’ll have to come round again.’
Jackson looked at Moses’s bare left foot, then at the grey sock in his own right hand. He nodded to himself. There was a methodical deductive streak in Jackson. He thought first, asked questions afterwards. Two years back — it must have been during Jackson’s Columbo era — Moses had tried to persuade his friend to become a private detective.
‘Well, the rain seems to be holding off,’ Jackson observed, in silhouette against the perfect sunset. He cast around for somewhere to put his tightly furled umbrella.
‘Rain? You forecast rain this evening?’
Jackson nodded, winced. ‘A severe depression moving south-east across the country. Scattered showers followed by outbreaks of heavier rain during the night.’
Moses suppressed a grin.
Jackson handed Moses a plastic bag containing a bottle of Jack Daniel’s. When Moses looked at him, not only with gratitude, but with a degree of curiosity, he explained, ‘I thought it was going to be cold, you see.’
Moses couldn’t help smiling now. He was glad that Jackson hadn’t taken his advice about becoming a private detective. He now knew that Jackson, after a great deal of intense and detailed investigation, would always come up with the wrong murderer.
He also suspected that Jackson’s constant reference to the weather was some kind of front. As if Jackson had inside him a device that took what he wanted to say and scrambled it. Moses doubted he would ever crack the code.
‘Well,’ and Jackson clapped his hands together in an attempt to convey the enthusiasm he quite genuinely felt, ‘what about a tour?’
There was nothing much to see beyond the rooms themselves, but the rooms, bare and uncluttered, still seemed miraculous to Moses.
‘You have to remember,’ he said, ‘that the whole place was three inches deep in pigeon shit.’
Rapid pecking movements of Jackson’s head as he darted from one room to the next. He said little, but missed nothing. He noticed the skylight in the kitchen and the view of the Houses of Parliament. And when he saw the bath, he emitted a curious whooshing noise that sounded like red-hot metal being dipped in water. Moses took this for approval.
‘So,’ Moses said, when they reached the living-room again, ‘what do you think?’