CHAPTER SIX
Wren
Mrs. Alaimo meets me on the pavement in a coat over pyjamas — a woman about sixty, her son's landlord, her hands doing that thing where they can't decide what to hold.
"You're on your own."
"My partner's out of town tonight."
"Should you be on your own?"
"No," I say, because there is no point lying to a woman standing outside her own house at midnight, "but I'd rather it was me than nobody, and if I leave it till Sunday it goes into the joists."
She looks at me for a moment.
"He played the guitar," she says.
"Okay."
"That's — I don't know why I said that."
"You said it because it's true." I get my bag out of the van. "Mrs. Alaimo, I'm going to go in and look, and then I'm going to give you a number, and then you're going to go upstairs and let me work. Is there anything in there you want, before? Photographs, anything that can't be replaced?"
She thinks about it for so long that I know the answer's going to hurt.
"His guitar," she says.
I get the guitar out first. That's the job. Nobody tells you that's the job.
It's a cheap Yamaha with a cracked scratchplate and a capo still clamped on the second fret, and I carry it up the outside steps in two gloved hands like it's a child, and I hand it to a woman on a pavement, and she holds it against her chest and doesn't cry, which is worse.
Then I suit up in the van — Tyvek, double gloves, respirator, boot covers, the whole spaceman — and I go back down the outside steps with my torch.
The door's off its top hinge.
I stop with my hand on it, because that's wrong. The police don't take a door off its hinge; they take the lock. And the hinge is pulled, the screws dragged out through the wood in four long splits, which is a thing that happens when something very strong opens a door that was already open.
I photograph it, because that's what I do with rooms I don't understand.
Then I go in, and the smell hits me even through the filter.
◆ ◆ ◆
The room is a slaughterhouse.
Whatever the police said about an animal, they said it because the alternative is worse. There's arterial spray on three walls at a height that means the man was standing when it happened, and standing when it kept happening, and the pattern on the ceiling is wrong for anything with four legs.
I've seen bad rooms.
I've never seen a room that felt watched.
I do the walk-through anyway, because the walk-through is the whole discipline: you go round once with your hands behind your back and you look, and you do not touch anything, and you put the room into your head before you start taking it apart.
Kitchenette. A bed, a chest of drawers, an ashtray, a guitar stand with nothing on it now.
A pile of laundry that will have to be destroyed.
Forty-one paperbacks in a stack against the wall, alphabetised, which nearly finishes me.
There's a thing that happens on jobs like this, and I have never found anybody outside the trade who understands it: at some point in the walk-through the room stops being a crime scene and becomes a person.
A man who alphabetised his paperbacks and kept a capo on the second fret and did not, judging by the fridge, eat properly.
"Right," I say, out loud, into the respirator. "Let's get you sorted."
I start on the floor, because the floor's the part that gets into the joists.
I'm two minutes into the second pass when I hear, above me, the very distinct creak of the top stair.
Then the second stair.
"Mrs. Alaimo?" My voice comes out muffled and stupid inside the mask. "You really shouldn't—"
"She's asleep," someone says.
◆ ◆ ◆
It's a young man.
That's the thing that undoes me, later, when I think about it — he's a young man, maybe twenty-four, in a hoodie and jeans and white trainers, standing at the bottom of my stairs with his hands in his pockets, looking around the room with mild professional interest.
"I overdid it here," he says, apologetic. "First week's hard."
"I'm going to ask you to leave."
"You smell incredible." He says it the way you'd say you've done something new with your hair. "I thought I was imagining it from the street. I've been standing in the road for like twenty minutes going, no, that's not — but it is. It's you." He takes his hands out of his pockets. "What are you?"
"I'm a licensed remediation technician and I have a taser—"
"I don't think you do."
He's right. It's in the van. It's always in the van, and I'm going to die in a Tyvek suit because I keep the taser in the van.
"You've got the wrong idea about me," he says, and he sounds so tired.
"I don't want to do this. I've been trying not to do this since Tuesday.
There's a thing in my head that's like a radio you can't turn off and it's been getting louder every day and tonight it's screaming, and I walked eleven miles tonight, and every single street I turned down it got worse, and then I got here and you were in the road getting a guitar out of a van and it stopped. "
The torch is on the floor and it throws his shadow up the wall enormous.
"It stopped," he says again, wondering. "That's the first quiet I've had since I woke up."
"What's your name?"
He opens his mouth.
And nothing comes out. He stands at the bottom of my stairs with his mouth open and his eyes going wider and wider, and something in his face comes apart, and he says, in a completely different voice:
"I don't know."
Then he's on me.
I throw the enzymatic cleaner in his face.
It's a five-litre jug and it goes everywhere and it does absolutely nothing except make him laugh and then he's got me by the front of the suit, lifting, the Tyvek tearing at the shoulder seam, and the respirator gets knocked sideways so the smell of the room comes in all at once, and his face comes down to the side of my neck and I feel him inhale —
"Oh," he says, wrecked, like a boy at a window.
The top of the stairs turns into a hole.
That's the only way I can describe it. Something goes through the doorway that the doorway was too small for, and the young man is no longer holding me. He's against the far wall with a hand around his throat, feet off the floor, kicking, and the hand belongs to the man from the parking structure.
He doesn't say anything to him. That's what I remember. No speech, no threat, nothing — he just holds him there and looks at him for a second with something that might be pity, and then he does something with his other hand at the base of the boy's skull that I hear more than see.
The body comes apart like a wet knot.
I don't scream then either. I make a small noise, like hm, and sit down hard in a dead man's blood.
He turns around.
Black coat. No colour in him. His hands are red to the wrist and his eyes have gone to something with no white in it at all, and he takes one step toward me and stops like he's hit glass.
"Don't," he says. His voice is barely a voice. "Don't move. Don't — your shoulder. You're bleeding."
I look at my shoulder. The seam tore and so did I, a long shallow scrape where the boy's nail caught.
"That's not that bad," I say, faintly. "That's a Tuesday."
He makes a sound like a man going under ice.
"He didn't know his own name," I say.
"No."
"He was twenty-four—"
"He was three weeks old," the man says, "and somebody left him in a city with a scent in his head and no way to stop, and I have been looking for the person who did that since Monday, and I'm going to find them."
Then he crosses the room, and everything goes black at the edges, and the last thing I've got is being lifted the way you'd lift something that mattered, and a voice above me, and I'm almost certain — even now, even knowing everything I know — that what it said was:
"I'm sorry. I'm going to have to be quick."