Ash & Bone

54

Repton saw the police vehicle approaching from the opposite direction and checked his speed, lifting his foot from the accelerator and easing it down on the brake. Being stopped for driving under the influence was just what he didn't need. Not that he'd drunk a lot, not by some standards.

Checking the mirror to make sure the police car had continued on its way, he grinned. Not by some fucking standards! Christ! Times he and George had laid one on! Practically paralytic at five in the morning and still they'd turned in at their desk three hours later, ready for a day's graft, a day's hard sodding work. Not like today's bunch of puerile wankers! Binge drinking! They didn't know what a fucking binge was, didn't know how to fucking drink!

Shit! He'd only gone too far, hadn't he?

Too far down the fucking road.

Catching sight of his reflection as he readied to make a U-turn, he laughed out loud. Metaphors, Maurice? Fucking metaphors. Who the fuck d'you think you are? Too far down the fucking road, all right, and no mistake.

He nudged into a space between a clapped-out Escort and a white van, front wheel striking the kerb and maybe shaving the van's paint with the rear end, but good enough all the same.

Twenty past fucking two.

There was a half-bottle of Scotch in the glove compartment and he unscrewed the top and took a quick belt.

His breath came back at him off the inside of the windscreen like something out of a dog's arse.

Poetic, Maurice, he thought as he got out of the car. Fucking poetic.

'Green Lanes Sauna and Massage' was picked out in electric light above the curtained glass. Except close to half the letters were missing, bulbs gone or bust, and you had to be a regular or one of those sad shits who did the Times fucking crossword in five fucking minutes to know what it said.

Reaching for the handle and not finding it, he wondered for the umpteenth time why, when the place had had a new front door fitted a year or so back, they'd hung it the wrong way round, the handle on the wrong fucking side.

Fuck!

When finally he'd pushed it open, it sprang back too fast and he almost collided with the facing wall. Hallway the size of a kazi for fucking dwarves.

Immediately to his right, a curtain of coloured beads hung down from the ceiling almost to the floor, and he parted this with both hands and stepped into the room. Rosie, as usual, was seated at a stool behind her desk, peroxide hair black at the roots, make-up half an inch or more thick sandblasted into place. Hundred and thirty years old, God bless her, and as ugly as the day she was born. Nothing else to do, twelve hours a day, other than fill in her puzzle books, watch her pocket-sized black-and-white TV, drink cup after cup of instant coffee and smoke endless cigarettes.

'Maurice, how's tricks?'

The times he'd told the stupid cow not to use his name.

There were three girls occupying the chairs opposite the desk, two he vaguely recognised, one that was new, not one of his favourites in sight. Busy, maybe. Each of the girls in button-through white overalls and bare legs, two of them flicking lazily through magazines. Now or Hello! or some such bollocks, scarcely bothering to glance up when he came in.

The third girl, the one he didn't recognise, was leaning back, legs pulled up, bottom two buttons of her overall undone, one high-heeled shoe on the floor, the other dangling from her toes. Nails painted alternately red and blue.

'This all there is, Rosie?' His voice sounded slightly blurred to him, but who was going to give a shit? No one there.

'Veronica's upstairs.'

'That fat cow!'

'That's Edie over there. She's new.'

Edie, Repton thought, what kind of a name was that? Not that they used their real names anyway, most of them. He'd always reckoned Rosie picked them out of a hat.

'Knows what she's about, does she?'

Repton stared at the girl as he spoke and she looked back at him, holding his gaze, mouth opening in a smile. New, right enough, he thought, out to make an impression.

'Edie's from Slovenia,' Rosie said.

Heaven fucking help us, Repton thought.

He followed her up the stairs, a nice enough arse on her, the last door along the corridor standing ajar and in they went.

Repton removed his jacket as Edie closed the door behind them, reaching out to take it from him and laying it folded across the foot of the bed. Repton waving his hands and saying, 'Not like that. Not like that. Put it on a fucking hanger, for fuck's sake, you soft Slovenian cow. No offence.'

The girl taking a thin metal hanger from inside the rickety MDF wardrobe and fitting Repton's suit jacket on it, even smoothing down the shoulders – he liked to see that – before hanging it from the double hook behind the door.

It was going to be okay, Repton thought, as he took a handkerchief from his pocket and spread it over the pillow – well, you never knew – and lay down with Edie standing alongside him and bending to unbuckle his belt, slip it through the loops, and then attend to the buttons on his fly. Buttons, that was what he'd always insisted on, none of your fucking zips. Disaster waiting to fucking happen.

He felt himself hardening and closed his eyes.

Concentrated on the slip slip slap of massage oil on Edie's hands.

First time he'd done this, he remembered, had this done, he'd been a young DC, green round the gills, the other lads putting him up to it, pulling a freebie on his behalf, some scrubber from Swansea with more than a touch of the tarbrush about her and dirt under her fingernails. The minute she'd touched him, he'd shot his load. Caught himself in the fucking eye.

Laughing at the memory, he glanced at Edie, solemn-faced, concentrating, he thought, chuckling, at the job in hand.

'Come here,' he said. 'Here, closer, here.'

Reaching up, propping himself on one elbow, he unfastened the remaining buttons of her overall. Bit of lace round the top of the bra, nipples standing firm. White knickers not much larger than your average postage stamp. No pierced navel for a change. Well, thank God for that.

Feeling himself close, he lay back and closed his eyes once more.

First thing tomorrow he'd find Framlingham and tell him to go fuck himself up the arse.

Breath accelerating, he arched his back as the girl's hand moved faster. Firmer. Faster.

He failed to hear the door open, then close.

'Maurice.' The voice was soft, almost a caress.

Repton's eyes opened in time to see Mallory's face; the ugly bulge of the silencer at the end of the gun.

'Come again, Maurice,' Mallory said and fired.

The girl screamed and, without moving his feet, Mallory slapped her with his free hand, slamming her, mouth bleeding, heavily against the wall.

Raising the gun, Mallory fired again.

Bone and tissue littered Maurice Repton's Irish linen handkerchief and the cheap pink polyester pillowcase beneath it, stained unremovably by a hundred heads and now darkening pink to red.