Conrad Williams - Decay Inevitable

Sean held his hands up, kept the smile in position. “I know, I know. I wanted to apologise to you.”

“You what ?”

“Apologise, Billy. I was working for Vernon Lord, but I didn’t know what it was he was up to. I still don’t. I thought he was a debt collector. I swear. That’s all.”

“He was,” Billy said. His voice had calmed down, but he was still taking steps backwards, keeping the distance between himself and Sean. Sean stopped. Billy stopped.

“But you said, that day, that it wasn’t money...”

“It was never money,” Billy said.

“Then what?”

“Why should I tell you? You caught me that day. Gave me a hiding. Set me up for that bastard.”

“I’m sorry, Billy. I was... I’m a private investigator. I was trying to find out who killed a girl.”

“I don’t give a fuck what you are. You’ve spoilt me for life. I’m a wreck.”

“I don’t understand.”

“I hope you never have to.” Billy walked around Sean in a wide arc, as if fearful of a repeat attack.

“Billy–”

“Fuck off.”

Sean trudged after him as he returned to the changing rooms. The others had finished cleaning themselves and were standing around outside, hair nicely combed and glinting in the pale sunlight, sports holdalls slung over shoulders, car keys clinking in their fingers. Billy dumped the nets and went inside. Sean followed.

“I want to help you,” Sean said. “I want to get Vernon Lord. I think he had something to do with the death of this girl.”

Billy said nothing. He slowly peeled the kit from his filthy body. Sean turned away. “Who was the other guy who turned up after I left you that day, Billy? The man in the mask?”

He heard Billy snort behind him. The squeal of a tap was followed by the blast of water on tiles. Sean turned to see Billy eclipsed by a cloud of steam as he began to soap his body. “That was Dr. Chater.”

“Dr. Chater?”

Billy’s hair stood up in soapy tufts. His eyes closed as shampoo creamed across his face. He looked impossibly young. “Yeah,” Billy said, spitting out water. “Vernon has a deal sorted out. He finds prime cuts and Dr. Chater comes to harvest them.” The steam from the shower dissipated under a breath of air from outside.

There was still plenty of moisture in the changing rooms, sluicing along the floor, hanging in the air, but none of it could help the dryness that stripped Sean’s throat in the second that Billy’s body became visible.

Billy stood in the cubicle, rinsing his gelded body with a flannel. Wintry sunlight diffused by the frosted windows turned his flesh to powder; the spasming striplights arranged on the ceiling softened him to such an extent that it seemed the angles of his bones had been sanded down. Sean stared at the mangled nub of his pubis, beribboned with shining scars, as if a slug had made criss-cross journeys across him. And then he noticed Billy was watching him. As Sean made to say something (what comfort could he have offered?) Billy made a barely imperceptible shake of his head and, bringing his finger to his lips, locked the words Sean might have uttered deep inside him for ever.

“CHRIST, WHY?” EMMA asked him.

They were sitting in a café. From his seat, Sean could see through the misting windows to the muddy fields they had just departed. The sugar in his weak, hot tea was slowly making inroads to the core of his shock, thawing him, bringing him back. He shrugged.

“Billy said something about a deal. I’ve got a horrible feeling about this.”

“What?”

“I think... I think that Vernon is selling organs to someone over there.”

“In Tantamount?”

“I think so. I think he’s harvesting organs here and giving them to Tim Enever to sell over there.”

Sean told Emma about the package Tim had been carrying. It had been a smallish parcel, wrapped as the cuts from a butcher might have been wrapped. He told her of the blood that had seeped to the bottom of the parcel. “I thought it was something he had bought. For lunch. I’ve seen Tim eat the most God-awful lunches when we were working. Anaemic meat puddings, ribs from the Chinese takeaway that looked way out of date; it wouldn’t have surprised me, what he had in that parcel for his din-dins.”

“Why Billy? What’s so special about him?”

“I don’t know. Maybe it’s because there’s nothing obviously special about him. Maybe that’s it. On the surface it looks as if he’s being chased for dosh. Nobody looks twice. Happens all the time for those poor bastards.”

“What about the others you visited?”

“Jesus,” Sean said shakily, his hand trembling against his cup. The rattle of it against the plastic table drew attention from some of the other customers. “Those poor bastards.”

“Hark at him!” cawed a craven figure who seemed to have created himself from the sooty skin on the wallpaper by the café window. “Precious little wanker. Have some respect. Don’t think you’re any better than the rest of us.”

“God forbid,” spat Emma, screeching her chair legs back on the lino. “Come on, let’s go.”

Outside she held on to Sean while he tried to make his legs work properly. The cuts in his thigh were bleeding again, showing through the thinning denim. “God, I’m a mess,” he said wearily. His face was grey and scooped-out, like a pumpkin for Halloween.

“Over here you’re a mess. Over there, in Tantamount, you’re strong. You’re unbelievable.”

“Oh, go on,” Sean said, affecting a camp voice. Emma laughed.

“It’s true,” she said. “I watched you run after that Tim guy. You were incredible. People stopped to look. You were strong and fast.” Emma took his head in her hands and drew it towards her. She kissed him on the mouth, gently at first, but with mounting desperation, as if trying to feed off some of the steel she had referred to.

“I should check on those others,” he said. “Make sure.”

Emma nodded. “Okay. I’ll come with you.”

HE WAS GLAD of that, in the end. Although he was not attacked by the people he had had to disable when he first came with Vernon Lord to visit the old woman, Mrs Moulder, in the tiny flat near Runcorn’s Shopping City, the presence of danger was very real and constant. Emma helped just by being there. She lent him the mettle that she thought she had seen in him in the other place, over there.

Her door was closed but the latch was off. Inside, the smell of death was overwhelming. There were no signs of struggle, but there was an intense feeling of a presence in the flat which they both acknowledged.

Emma said, “It’s as if someone has just left the room, do you know what I mean?”

Sean nodded. “Or is hiding. Is still here.”

They found Mrs Moulder in the kitchen. Sean said, simply, “Cheke.”

If her method of dispatching victims was becoming more skilled, the manner of her disposal of the bodies was shockingly clumsy and tokenistic. Mrs Moulder had been forced into the oven, but when Cheke had found she would not fit, the old woman had been abandoned, half-sprawled on the floor, her head burned like a forgotten roast. An older wound in her chest told the story of Sean’s first visit here. A story, the ending of which he had not been privy to. The ribs had been snipped open and bent back to reveal the heart, which was no longer there.

Cheke had half-heartedly begun hacking off Mrs Moulder’s legs, but had given up, no doubt bored. The body was partially digested too: a naked portion of the abdomen bore sucker scars and the flesh had turned to porridge. Presumably Cheke had given up on this idea too when she realised how pointless it would be to assume the form of an elderly blind woman.

“I’ve seen enough,” Emma said.