Mark Pearson - Murder Club

‘Best you don’t find out then!’

The sergeant nodded thoughtfully as Kate headed to her office. Then took a sip of his tea and looked over at Dr Chilvers’ closed door. He’d seen the look in her eyes as she took the call. And it wasn’t a kind one. There was trouble coming for someone tonight, he reckoned.

And he was right.

BIBLE STEVE TOOK a look at his bottle of whisky, half-empty now.

He held it to his lips and poured himself another small glug, felt his body shiver uncontrollably once more as the rough alcohol burned his throat. He looked to his side at the young woman who was sitting next to him. She was five foot six inches tall, with long, blonde hair, a stick-thin body. Innocence in blue jeans. Her skin was stretched tight over the bones of her face with fine, translucent veins showing through. She could have been an anorexic or a supermodel.

She was neither.

She had been abused by her father, an unemployed sheet metal worker, since she was twelve years old. Her mother, an undiagnosed manic depressive self-medicating on meth amphetamine, had added physical to the sexual abuse and she did what tens of thousands of children a year did. She ran away from home.

The young woman sitting next to Bible Steve would have rather walked in front of an Intercity express train than return home. She had come to London when she was fifteen, lived rough on the streets for two days before falling into prostitution, shoplifting and petty crime. Recruited into it by a girl a year younger than her and already six months into the life. She had had two abortions from back-street clinicians and had recently been released from Holloway prison, serving a year of a two-year sentence for fencing stolen goods, amongst other charges. She had been out two months. Two weeks out and she had left the supervised accommodation she had been provided with and was back on the streets. She was an alcoholic and drug-dependent. She was in her early twenties. An old hand. She had the mind of a child. Her name was Margaret O’Brien but anyone only ever knew her as Meg.

Bible Steve looked at her for a moment more, squinting his bloodshot eyes again. ‘Whoever was the father of disease, an ill diet was the mother!’ he roared and handed her the bottle. The girl muttered some thanks, her words slurred, her eyes unfocused. She took a sip and would have let the bottle slide from her grasp as she slumped backwards, but Bible Steve took it from her and held it towards a couple sitting on the other side of him. All four of them huddled together and against the wall for the warmth coming from the heated building.

‘Give, and it will be given to you. A good measure, pressed down, shaken together and running over, will be poured into your lap. For with the measure you use, it will be measured to you. Luke 6,37–38,’ said Bible Steve, grinning and revealing teeth rotten with neglect.

The older woman took the bottle gratefully, drank some, coughed and handed the bottle over to her husband. They were in their fifties and had been homeless for over a year. Unemployment, debt, gambling, loan-sharks. Theirs was not an unfamiliar story. Rare, however, that they had stayed as a couple and moreover had stayed together on the streets. The winter was going hard on them. You could see it in the cracked skin of their ravaged faces, and the hopelessness that dulled their eyes. The man took a drink of the whisky and handed the bottle back.

‘You’re a good man, Bible,’ he said.

Steve took the bottle, scowled as he looked at its diminishing contents — barely one-third left now — and had another small slug. He dragged the back of his coat sleeve across his mouth. ‘That, sir, I am not,’ he said. ‘The Lord has looked upon my blackened soul and He has seen that it is not good.’

‘I don’t know about the Lord, but there’s not many as would share whisky,’ said the older woman.

The younger girl snuggled into Bible Steve and he put his arm around her and roared again. ‘But if at the church they would give us some ale. And a pleasant fire our souls to regale. We’d sing and we’d pray all the livelong day, nor ever once wish from the church to stray!’

‘Too fucking right!’ said the young girl and Bible Steve pulled her in tighter to him. ‘Cuddle up, my lovely, old Bible’ll keep you warm. Warm as toast,’ he said. ‘Warm as buttered crumpet.’

The woman nodded, her eyes half-closing again.

‘I’ll make Christians of the whole heathen, ruddy lot of you,’ he said. He stood up, the girl’s face falling into his crotch. He held it there for a moment or two. ‘Business first though,’ he said. ‘Nature calls.’

The hairy man put a hand to the side of the rough brickwork to steady himself, he had to blink for a moment or two to remember where he was. All memory of the last two hours had vanished from his mind again as soon as he stood.

This happened to him often. Whole hours of blankness, days sometimes. He remembered early evening. A drunken Japanese tourist had handed him a twenty-pound note some hours ago when he had asked for any change. A mistake by the tourist, presumably, being unfamiliar with the currency, or else to impress the loud and overly made-up women who accompanied him and his business colleague.

Hired women no doubt, Bible Steve thought at the time. But if you were to ask him now what he thought he wouldn’t have been able to remember where the money he had spent had come from. Strong lagers and a bottle of whisky. He had passed a slug or two of the whisky around, but not much and the bottle was severely depleted. He looked at it, confused, and down at the people he had been talking with.

‘Have you been at my whisky?’ he snarled.

But the other three were huddled into each other and didn’t reply.

Bible Steve patted the young woman on the head. ‘I’ll be back in a minute, darling. Don’t worry, Bible’ll see you all right. He’ll see you snug,’ he said with a wink.

He took his hand off the wall and staggered a little further down the alleyway. Bright light spilled from a lone restaurant further ahead.

The Lucky Dragon restaurant. Cantonese. Bible Steve staggered towards it and put his hand on the glass, peering in as he fought to keep steady. The nearly finished bottle of whisky swayed in his left hand as if to counterbalance.

He didn’t recognise the figure staring back at him, reflected palely in the glass of the restaurant window. It had the face of a wild-haired and heavily bearded man. A French rugby player came to his mind. But he couldn’t remember his name. This man’s hair, though, was lank, greasy and matted. The beard covering most of his face was like a tribal shaman’s mask. He had on a battered and soiled army greatcoat with layers of equally filthy clothing beneath. His eyes were like coals. Sore, cracked and flickering with residual heat, but near to winking out as his eyelids closed. He shook his head and growled. He peered in the window, scowling at the diners within, who regarded him with an equal mixture of horror and disgust. An elderly Chinese woman shook her hands, gesturing at him as if to shoo away a large rodent.

Bible Steve blinked again and then snarled and banged on the window.

‘A corruption! A plague!’ he shouted. His native tongue broader now than earlier that day. His voice raspy with the rawness of the whisky and his outrage. ‘And the Lord says that he who eats with the pigs shall be as swine. Consumption and damnation is your bill. And ye shall pay it in punishment and in death!’

He banged on the window again. The Chinese woman leaned out from the doorway and shouted at him.

‘I call police! I call police! You go now.’

Bible Steve looked across at her and belched. ‘Madam, I shall gladly go now, as per your instructions.’ He belched again.