Стивен Бут - Blind to the Bones

‘All right, all right. Keep your hair on.’

Fry turned away to stare out of the driver’s side window, as if she might be able to forget that he was there if she couldn’t see him out of the corner of her eye. But she was still aware of him through the small noises of his movements, the sound of his breathing, his male smell, and the sulphurous whiff of the match he had struck. She knew there were drops of rain glistening on his scalp among the freckles and the tufts of ginger hair, and she was aware of the dark, wet patches on the shoulders of his coat. And with two of them sitting in a stationary car, the interior was getting too warm from their body heat and the glass was starting to steam up. She wound down the window a couple of inches.

They were parked in a street between the dark, blank walls of crumbling factories. But straight ahead, she could see traffic lights and a busier road that was well lit, with cars passing constantly, and a row of terraced houses with flickering TV screens visible through their curtains and shadows passing in front of lamps in upstairs windows. One of the factories must have a night shift. She could hear the rumble of machinery from somewhere nearby.

‘A name?’ she said impatiently.

‘She’s living with a bloke called Akerman. Johnny Akerman. Not many folks will mess with him. He’s well known around those parts.’

‘Which parts?’

‘Eh?’

‘I need an address.’

‘I can’t tell you that, love.’

‘Look, don’t waste my time.’

‘I can’t do it.’

‘Can’t, or won’t?’

She felt him turning towards her in his seat. His knee touched the gear stick. A fold of his coat fell over the handbrake towards her, and she instinctively flicked it away. He was holding out his hands in a gesture of appeal, and his face was a pale smear that she was much too aware of. He was willing her to meet his eyes, but she couldn’t.

‘It’s not worth it,’ he said. ‘It could get me a hell of a lot of bother. I mean, it’s not as if there’s anything in it for me , is there?’

‘Oh yes,’ said Fry. ‘You’re going to feel a whole lot better, after you tell me.’

‘I don’t think so, darling.’

Fry pressed the button to close the central locking and reached out to start the ignition.

‘Hey, what are you doing?’ he said.

‘I think we should go for a little ride.’

‘No way. I’m getting out.’

‘I suggest you put your seat belt on,’ said Fry. ‘It’s not safe without, you know.’

‘For God’s sake—’

She pulled out from the kerb and drove towards the lights at the end of the road.

‘This is the compromise,’ she said. ‘And it’s entirely for your benefit. You say you can’t give me the address for this Akerman. OK. I accept that. So what we do instead is, we go for a little drive.’

‘Where to?’

‘You decide,’ she said. ‘You give me directions.’

She could practically hear him working it out. He was wondering what the best way was to get out of this madwoman’s car.

‘Right, left or straight on at the lights?’ she said.

He was silent so long that she had almost reached the lights, and she was beginning to think that he wouldn’t go along with it. But he was, after all, a man who didn’t answer questions too quickly.

‘If I were you, I’d go left,’ he said. ‘It’s the scenic route.’

They drove for a few minutes. Fry’s passenger hardly spoke, but gave her directions by holding up a hand at junctions to indicate left or right. She guessed he was thinking that he would honestly be able to say that he had never told her anything.

‘Stop here,’ he said.

‘Is this it?’

‘I get out here.’

They were in a street of Victorian terraces, with little flights of steps to their front doors and drawn curtains. Fry pulled up in front of a row of shops, mostly boarded up, but for an Asian greengrocer’s where the lights were still on.

‘Is this it?’ she said again.

‘Yes,’ he snapped. ‘The red door. But if you’re going to try to get in there, you’re crazier than I thought.’

‘Thanks for the concern. It’s touching.’

He got out, slammed the door and in a moment had vanished into the darkness, walking quickly in the shadow of the deserted shop fronts.

Fry had no intention of going into the house. She was prepared to wait for as long as necessary.

In the end, it took two hours. When the woman finally appeared, Fry got out of the car and walked towards her along the pavement, pulling up the collar of her black coat and tucking her chin into her red scarf. She stared at the woman openly, trying to see the girl she was looking for in the way that the woman walked, the angle she held her head, or the look in her eyes.

Fry didn’t stop or speak to the woman. She walked on past her, and continued to the end of the block, where she came to a halt on the kerb and stared blankly at the corner of an empty florist’s shop. For a few seconds, she had been walking along an entirely different street in another city, in a different time. She had been a younger Diane Fry, the one who had looked into every face she passed, expecting to see someone else. But trying to see ghosts never worked. It hadn’t then, and it didn’t work now.

As Fry listened to the woman’s footsteps fade away behind her, a door opened and closed, a car sounded its horn on the corner and drove away with a screech of tyres, and she realized that she had forgotten where she was.

But, worst of all, she had forgotten why she had been trying to see someone who wasn’t there.

Somehow, Ben Cooper had found himself in a room whose walls were covered in white tiles, many of them crazed into patterns of tiny cracks that had absorbed dirt over the years. The only light came from two tiny windows over the doors on to the street, and even the windows were covered in steel mesh and spiders’ webs. In front of the doors stood a white Land Rover with its bonnet propped open. There was an overwhelming smell of old sump oil inside the stuffy space.

Cooper took a step down into the garage, then stopped. He knew he was in the wrong place. The day had been going badly already, and this was getting worse. He must have been too tired or distracted to be concentrating properly, otherwise he would never have ended up here.

And what a place to be. The tiles made the garage look the way public toilets had done once, before vandalism had made local councils adopt a more cost-effective approach. Bare breeze-block and polished aluminium were the style these days.

But it was the smell that made Cooper’s hands begin to itch. They immediately felt as though they were covered in grease, and his fingernails were scraped and ragged, and full of black dirt. The pathways in his brain had been stimulated by the oily smell, prompted into recalling the many times he had peered and poked inside the engine compartment of a similar Land Rover, or sometimes a David Brown tractor. He could feel the cold metal under his fingers, which were always numb, because it always seemed to be winter. And he could feel the old blue overalls that he had worn, with the sleeves rolled up over his wrists because they were a couple of sizes too big for him.

Most often, the young Ben had been completely ignorant of what he was supposed to be doing inside the engine. But he had been enjoying the feeling of a shared moment, whether it had been with his older brother Matt, or his uncle John. Or even, rarely, his father. Joe Cooper had not been quite so tolerant of inexperienced help, and would snatch a spanner from his son’s hand the second he looked likely to turn it the wrong way. There was a curious kind of bonding that took place over a set of dirty spark plugs or a blocked fuel jet. The words alone, as they came into his mind, made Cooper smile with something like nostalgia.