Ник Харкуэй - Angelmaker

Or is it unrelated? Billy has plenty of irons in the fire. Perhaps he slept with a Russian mobster’s daughter or a boxer’s wife. Perhaps he sold to the wrong person (for the second time this year) a painting “possibly by van Gogh” which quite definitely is not.

Two of Billy’s suits are laid out over the back of the leather sofa. There’s a bottle of milk, half empty (and where does he get bottles any more?) resting on the bar. But still no cheerful bald erotomane, no glad halloo of greeting.

The floor is done up in more of the thick carpet so that Billy can have sex on it without grazing his knees or back. Joe’s shoes make no noise as he walks. He is acutely conscious that a housebreaker, discovered in his profession and armed, might likewise make no sound as he prepared to strike. On the other hand… Joe Spork is a big man. His profile does not invite casual assault. It suggests rather that discretion is the better part of valour. He scoops up the poker from the fireplace.

Billy’s penthouse is in three parts. The outer ring—you might almost think of it as the moat—is where he does his entertaining. It is furnished with glitzy scatter cushions and fertility idols from non-existent indigenous peoples, and a collection of somewhat risqué paintings by an eighties artist whose name no one now remembers.

The middle ring is made up of Billy’s bedroom, in which resides his pride and joy, a great bed with four stone columns looted from a defunct museum in Croatia. The canopy is a driftwood panel carved by a girl in the Maldives whom Billy espoused as the greatest natural talent he had ever met. He brought this thing back as proof of concept and secured her a deal with a gallery in Holborn, only to find, on his return, that she had died in a road accident.

He wasn’t even sleeping with her. He just saw beauty and loved it. On the frequent occasions when Joe asks himself why he remains in touch with Billy, this sad little story is one of the things which persuades him that Billy is more than he appears to be.

Joe stares at the bed. Clean sheets. Billy had time to change them after his most recent lover departed. But unravelled and hauled about the place. So. Billy packed, and then he was burgled.

Something crunches underfoot. Joe looks down. Corn? Wheat? Something like, anyway. Not a sexual fetish he can identify. Packing material? He’s seen, recently, objects packed in popcorn as an environmentally friendly alternative to those pernicious foam nuggets which cling to everything and, if they once escape their box, take refuge all over his workspace. But popcorn is soft and fluffy, and this stuff is notably unpuffed. Gravel, probably, from whichever grand home Billy is presently selling to.

He peers into the bathroom. The same unkind hand has tossed all the shampoo bottles and colognes into the tub. The shower curtain is pulled halfway across, and Joe experiences another frisson of unease. He reaches out with the poker.

The most horrible thing behind the curtain is a bar of soap in the shape of a naked female torso. It’s a fair likeness, but it’s green, and smells of artificial apple.

On, then, to the innermost ring: Billy’s study. It’s a small, cosy little room at the back, with a view of the rooftops. There’s just room beside the desk for a single bed and a bookshelf. After saying goodbye to Joyce, Billy took to sleeping in here so that the size of the double bed wouldn’t remind him she was gone. Joe has a sad, never-uttered conviction that Billy, when alone, sleeps in here a great deal, that this room and this room alone is the truth about his life. Like Soho, the truth about Billy Friend is seen in the quiet times as much as in the loud. In this study, the lonely, almost scholastic little man takes stock, and looks into his mirror, and wonders who is looking back. He reads first editions (the only thing Billy will not chop and recondition, steal, or counterfeit is books) and eats cheese sandwiches made with granary bread from a local baker. He drinks tea. He wears jeans and a jumper and very occasionally calls his distant, disapproving family in Wiltshire to check on the progress of his nephew and two nieces through the horrors of school. University, by now—for the older ones, at least.

Joe pushes open the door. His breath catches a bit. There’s a picture of Joyce in a frame on the desk; she’s smiling a broad, hearty smile, the one she reserved for Billy and shared with him whenever she could. Billy, you’re an idiot. You loved her. You still do. Call her up, get her back. She’ll come. Tidy is a habit, to make or break. Love is more than tidy.

Perhaps he has. Perhaps, in extremis , he’s fled to Joyce. Maybe that’s what this is all about; not Mr. Titwhistle and Mr. Cummerbund and their facile deceptions, but Billy having a minor nervous collapse and junking his old life for a new one with Joyce, puppies, and a messy place in the country. That would be strange, but very nice. Joe could go and visit. He could bring a girlfriend, a serious one, and not worry that Billy would offend her by making a pass (or not offend her by making a pass).

Maybe this isn’t burglary, but commitment. Make a mess. Let go the little streak of mean precision. Let it all hang out.

There’s something on the picture frame. Jam, apparently. That almost settles it. Billy has been sitting here, eating jam (on granary, with too much butter) and realised the futility of his urban party lifestyle. He has tossed back the last mouthful of Mrs. Harrington’s Finest Strawberry Preserve, snuffled up the crusts, and thrown his life into disarray in the name of love. Bravo!

The jam is odourless. Joe sniffs at it again. No. Very strange. It smells of nothing at all. Underfoot, another crunch. More gravel? Yes, but also… something white and bulgy. Popcorn. He prods it with his foot. Not popcorn. Hard. A plastic rawlplug, a picture hook, a binder. He leans down.

A tooth.

He picks it up. Wet. Cold. A tooth. He holds it in his hand. Nicotine-stained, just a little. Polished. Billy takes good care of his dentition. Joe stares at it. How does a perfectly healthy man lose a tooth all of a sudden?

The smell hits him all at once, as if it’s been lurking around the edges of the room and now sweeps down and rushes into his nose and mouth. Flat, metallic, raw and vile, it makes him gag. The tooth . Oh, shit. Shit, oh, shit. The room is going round and up and down, and now there’s an enormous amount of noise in his ears, a rushing static like a radio between channels. He leans on the desk, goes to sit on the bed, and realises just before he does so that it is the source of everything, the ghastly, misshapen lump beneath the sheet which he has been ignoring, somehow, since he came in: a huge, dead, butchered hog’s carcass, except that it is not a hog at all, but a lonely, bald lecher with a monkish heart, and someone has done bad things to him, bloody things which have dripped and stained the carpet, and sprayed the walls in the dark, private corner above the bed.

Beneath the sheet, Billy Friend has been murdered, most awfully, most deliberately, most pointedly, and that is the world now, newborn and hard.

He must have died looking at Joyce’s picture, and Joe cannot decide if that was mercy or a most appalling cruelty.

He shudders.

Billy Friend is dead.

The trouble with shooting people, Edie Banister now remembers, is that it’s so hard to do just one. Having shot her would-be assassin, and now being, as it were, on the lam, she has to return to her former quite abstemious attitude and not just shoot anyone who impedes her passage. She has already had to speak to herself quite firmly about nearly shooting two irritating pedestrians and a slow driver. She is positively proud not to have ventilated Mr. Hanley, the street-sweeper, who popped up behind her as she was leaving and wished her good morning, and she is really astonished at her own good behaviour in not shooting Mrs. Crabbe, who was merely walking by on the other side of the street, but whom she has never liked.