Rupert Thomson - Soft

He watched a girl in tight blue leggings walk over to the chocolate machine. When the coins had dropped, she reached into the slot at the bottom. Then turned away, looking for a train. He’d never gone for skinny women, but there was something about this one, something that forced him to look. She wore a leather coat with a fake-fur collar and calf-length boots with high square heels. Oddly enough, she was carrying a furled umbrella. Surely it had only rained a couple of times all summer? He had caught a glimpse of her outside the station, he realised, standing up against the railings. She had been talking to a black man, her face only inches from his, as if the two of them were planning a conspiracy. The man was probably a pimp, he thought. It was King’s Cross, after all. Where would she be going now? A cheap hotel room in West London? Some basement flat with net curtains on the windows and a coloured lightbulb hanging from the ceiling?

The train pulled in. He waited until she chose a carriage, then he followed her. She sat down, crossed her legs. He watched her from where he was standing, by the glass barrier next to the doors. She adjusted her fringe in the makeshift mirror of the window opposite, then reached into her black suede bag and took out a chapstick, which she applied to her lips, running it backwards and forwards at least a dozen times, her head perfectly still, her face composed, expressionless. Her eyes were a pale grey-blue, the kind of colour that, on paint-sample charts, would probably be called ‘Cool Slate’ or ‘Dawn Surprise’. He wasn’t sure why he was noticing her in such great detail. Maybe it was because he had to identify a girl that afternoon. Maybe it was because he was carrying a physical description of that girl in his jacket pocket. How do you do it, Barker? What’s the secret? He let out a short laugh, scornful, scarcely audible.

He left the tube at Latimer Road, half-hoping the girl in the blue leggings would get out too, but she stayed in her seat, touching her fringe again with nervous fingers. If it had been her photo in the envelope, would he have felt the same? Could he have followed her to some dark place? Could he have done what he’d been hired to do?

Latimer Road. It wasn’t an area he had ever visited. The street outside the tube station looked bleak despite the sunshine, the shop windows caged in security grilles, litter scattered across the pavement. An old man shuffled towards him wearing brown flared trousers and a shirt that was open to the waist. A six-inch scar showed on his belly, the skin raised and livid. To the north Barker recognised the concrete pillars of the Westway. He moved in that direction. The roar of cars coming from above his head sounded angry but contained, like wasps trapped in a jar. He opened his A-Z and checked the route. Then he began to walk.

Before too long he found himself in an area of two-storey red-brick houses. Pink and blue hydrangeas sprouted from the small front gardens. There was nobody about. A police car hesitated at a junction, and then moved on. Once, when Barker was in his early thirties, he had been stopped and searched on Union Street. They pulled a pair of scissors out of the back pocket of his jeans — his father’s scissors, as it happened — and held them up in front of him. ‘I’m a hairdresser,’ he said. ‘And I’m Julio Iglesias,’ said the policeman. The name meant nothing to Barker. ‘Julio Iglesias,’ the policeman said while his colleague sniggered in the background. ‘He’s a famous singer. Spanish. Had sex with three thousand women.’ Which meant they didn’t believe him, of course. Barker was charged with possession of an offensive weapon, and forced to pay a fine. That Dodds bad luck again. Looking up, he saw a middle-aged woman standing on the pavement. She wore a floral dress, and she was holding a shopping basket made of straw. Her legs were very white. When he passed her, she looked in the opposite direction. The red-brick houses, the small-mindedness — the quiet. He felt as if he’d strayed into the suburbs. He could almost have been back in Plymouth.

At last he stood outside Glade Spencer’s house. Red-brick, just like the rest. He’d been expecting something better. He didn’t know why that should be, why he should care. Somehow, though, the house seemed tawdry, less than she deserved. He knew that she lived on the first floor and that she shared the flat with a girl called Sally James. The bay window on the first floor was open, he noticed, though the curtains were closed. He wasn’t sure how to interpret this. Did it mean that somebody was in? He stared up at the window until his neck ached. In all that time no sound came from inside the room. He wiped the sweat from his forehead; the heat only seemed to add to the silence. Opening the gate, he walked up to the front door. He couldn’t see through the panes of frosted glass. Instead, he bent down and looked through the letter-box. It was cool in the house, several degrees cooler than outside. He could see into a narrow hallway — the walls off-white, the carpet a shabby turquoise. On the right there was a door, which was closed. The ground-floor flat. Directly in front of him he could see another door, half-open, and, beyond it, a flight of stairs. They must lead to the flat where Glade Spencer lived — and if the door was open, then presumably, yes, someone was home …

He heard a cough. Glancing over his shoulder, he saw a dog cock its leg against a tree. The man holding the dog’s lead was staring at him furtively. Suspiciously. He stared back. After all, there were any number of perfectly valid reasons why he might be peering into a house. Even so, he realised that, to most people passing by, he would look like somebody who was about to commit a crime. Yet there was nowhere to hide, no cover … Then he remembered the man who’d appeared outside his flat a few months back — Will Campbell’s father. Suppose he pretended to be trying to trace a friend. It was plausible; it happened all the time. He felt in his pocket, found a biro and an old tube ticket. On the back of the ticket he wrote his brother’s name, Gary, and, underneath it, the address of the house directly opposite. He crossed the road. The same privet hedge, the same black plastic dustbins. The same frosted-glass panels in the front door. He rang the bell and waited. Through the glass he watched a figure walk towards him from inside the house. The door opened on a security chain. An old woman squinted at him through the gap.

‘Yes?’

‘Gary in?’

‘Gary?’

‘Yeah.’

‘No one called Gary here.’

Barker looked at the ticket in his hand, then stepped backwards and studied the number on the door. ‘He told me his address over the phone. I wrote it down.’ He showed the woman his ticket.

She took it from him, peered down at it. Her hand trembled slightly. Behind her the house seemed to sigh, its breath sour and damp. She shook her head and handed the ticket back. ‘You must’ve heard it wrong.’

Barker stared out into the silent, sunlit road. Like Will Campbell’s father, he seemed disinclined to move.

‘You better try some other numbers,’ the woman said.

Strange: she was feeding him lines, a strategy.

He nodded. ‘Sorry to bother you.’

She closed the door.

He watched the shape of the woman shrink and wrinkle in the frosted glass. He could relax now. If the police questioned him, he knew what to say. He would show the officer his tube ticket, claim he was looking for a friend. He could even call on the old woman to vouch for him, if he needed to.

After working as a bouncer for so many years, you’d think he would have been used to standing around. But you didn’t need patience when you worked for a club — at least, not that kind of patience; your time was filled. You had to read faces, make predictions. You had to be a clairvoyant of violence, seeing it before it actually began. And when it began you had to put an end to it. Outside a club, there was always something happening, or about to happen. Outside Glade Spencer’s house, the reverse was true. He stood on that street for three and a half hours, and they were probably the slowest three and a half hours of his life. Once, a movement in the bay window startled him, a glimpse of something white, but it was only a cat. He knew its name. Giacometti. If there was a cat in the house, he reasoned, then it seemed unlikely Glade Spencer could have gone away. Or, if she had, she wouldn’t be away for long. On the strength of the cat’s presence he waited for another hour.