34

MARK SPADE HAD sworn off heroin the day his girlfriend Frannie had been found murdered, so it was no surprise to find him serenely high when Calvin and King arrived with a search warrant.

They didn’t even need to show him the warrant; he was totally cool with anything they wanted to do. He let them into the dingy, cluttered bedsit and then stood with his back to the door while Calvin and King stared around at the clothing and garbage, scattered knee-deep in places, and hoped they could avoid an actual search with a simple question.

‘We’re looking for Frannie’s nose ring, Mark,’ said DCI King. ‘Have you come across it?’

Mark Spade didn’t answer, and when Calvin looked more closely he realized why.

‘He’s asleep,’ he said.

‘You’re kidding,’ said King. ‘He’s standing up!’

‘Oi, Mark,’ said Calvin. He tapped the man’s shoulder and Spade opened his eyes and said, ‘Ask my probation officer if you don’t believe me.’

King and Calvin both laughed and Spade’s eyes cleared a tiny bit and he said, ‘What?’

‘We’re looking for Frannie’s nose ring, Mark,’ King tried again. ‘Remember? The ring she always had in her nose?’

‘Oh yeah,’ he nodded. ‘Her nose ring.’

‘That’s the one,’ said King. ‘Do you know where it is?’

‘In her nose.’

‘No it’s not, Mark. Remember? It wasn’t in her nose when we found her.’

‘She never takes it out.’

‘Well, she took it out this time, Mark. Or someone else did. Or maybe she took it out here, so that’s what we want to make sure of. If it’s not here then it might be a good clue for us, see? To try and find the man who killed her.’

‘Oh yeah.’

‘So can we look around then?’

‘Her nose?’

‘The flat. Can we look round the flat?’

‘This flat?’

‘Yes, this one.’

‘OK.’

‘Thanks,’ said King. ‘Can you remember what it looks like, Mark?’

‘The flat?’

‘The nose ring.’

‘It’s a ring. In her nose.’

‘OK, good. What colour?’

‘Colour?’

‘Was it silver or gold?’

‘Yes.’

‘Which one?’

Mark Spade frowned and closed his eyes in an effort to recall the nose ring.

After a minute, Calvin nudged him again and he woke up and said, ‘Silver.’

‘Do you use needles, Mark?’

‘No needles,’ he said. ‘Spoons.’

‘So we’re not going to get stuck, are we? Because if DC Bridge or I get stuck, we’re going to be very pissed off.’

‘No no no,’ he insisted, shoving up his sleeves to show off his arms. ‘Only spoons.’

Calvin opened a drawer in the ramshackle area that looked most like a kitchen, and held up a bent and buckled spoon, scraps of foil and a selection of Bic lighters.

‘He’s a smoker, not a poker.’

‘Right then,’ sighed King, snapping on a latex glove. ‘I suppose we’ll get started.’

They spent all day in the bedsit. Mark Spade slept on the sofa throughout, and so they decided to simply pile everything they’d searched on one side of the room, and then move it all back again and do the same to the other half.

It was disgusting, even with the gloves.

Among the clothing and debris on the floor they uncovered a selection of paper plates covered in what looked like bean juice, dozens of unopened packets of supernoodles and the various scattered components of what looked like a hamster cage, including a broken plastic wheel and wood shavings. Everything in the room was sprinkled with small pellets of shit, as if someone had spilled a big carton of chocolate Tic-Tacs.

Around lunchtime, Mark Spade woke up and demanded spaghetti hoops on toast. There was no bread or spaghetti, or even a pan that Calvin could see, so he went out and got three portions of fish and chips. But by the time he got back, Mark was asleep again.

King and Calvin ate standing up. Mark was on the sofa, and the only other chair was piled high with egg cartons and three Jack Daniels bottles filled with urine.

After lunch, they put on new gloves and worked their way methodically through the mountains of stinking trash and unwashed clothing and droppings, and there was no nose ring, although nose plugs would not have gone amiss.

‘It’s all glamour,’ sighed King.

They searched the bathroom and toilet during an hour of overtime Calvin knew they wouldn’t get paid for, and they finally felt reasonably confident that there was no square inch of the filthy bedsit that hadn’t been checked.

Except the sofa, where Mark Spade was now snoring loudly.

‘We should look down the back of the sofa,’ said King. ‘In fact, when I think about it, we should really have looked there first.’

Calvin shuddered. ‘Can’t we just wake him up and tell him to do it?’

‘C’mon! Where’s your sense of adventure?’

‘My sense of adventure?’

‘Yes,’ said King. ‘Obviously I’m going to pull rank on you.’

‘Can’t we toss for it?’

‘No,’ said King. Then added more encouragingly, ‘Go on. Anything you find, you can keep.’

Calvin sighed and went over to the sofa and shook Mark Spade until it was clear he wasn’t going to wake up. Then he and King dragged the sleeping man carefully on to the poo-strewn carpet, and Calvin dug his hand down the side of the cushions. The sofa was corduroy, he noticed, and now he knew why Shirley wouldn’t have sex on hers. It was a smorgasbord of suspicious stains, flaky lumps and congealed spaghetti hoops.

He dug his hand down the first side and moved it carefully around, removing anything solid. He found three ballpoint pens, a Bourbon biscuit, eighty-eight pence in small change, countless salt sachets, and a ticket to a Killers concert.

He dived in again.

‘Ha!’ He held up a five-pound note, folded into a small, thick triangle. ‘Mine!’

‘You can’t keep anything valuable,’ King qualified.

Calvin muttered darkly and went back in.

He was almost done when he said, ‘What the shit?’ and withdrew his hand with a look of disgust on his face.

King came over and peered at the dark, sticky chunk of something impaled on the tips of Calvin’s fingers. At one end of it was a ragged piece of fuzzy string.

Calvin sniffed it and almost choked. ‘What. The fuck. Is that?’

‘Tampon!’

They both jumped and turned to look at Mark Spade, who was suddenly awake, alert and cheerful as hell.

‘A tampon?’ said King, aghast.

‘Not a tampon! Just Tampon. Frannie’s mouse. He went AWOL ages ago.’

Calvin’s fingers were in a dead mouse.

He cried out and flicked his hand in horror and the corpse arced across the room and stuck to the wall above the television.

‘Shit!’ he shouted. ‘ShitshitshitshitSHIT!’ He bounded off the sofa and rushed to the kitchen area, where he peeled off his glove and tossed it in the sink on top of the pile of mouldy dishes, then turned on the tap.

‘There’s no soap!’ he yelled while DCI King giggled like a schoolgirl.

‘Yeah, there is,’ said Mark Spade calmly, and got up and came over to the nearly weeping Calvin. He bent and opened the oven and took out a large cardboard box, still sealed with packing tape. He slit it open with one long, dirty fingernail, and Calvin could see that the box was filled with what must have been fifty bars of designer soap, each individually presented in its own upmarket paper wrapper with – he couldn’t help but notice – hand-torn edges.

Spade took a deep sniff before handing it to a desperate Calvin.

‘Cinnamon and myrrh,’ he breathed.

‘Think you’ve got enough?’ said King, peering into the box.

Mark Spade looked at her seriously and said, ‘You can never have too much soap.’

They left the bedsit without the nose ring, but each clutching a gift of soap that had been pressed into their hands by Mark Spade, despite their protestations.

‘For Frannie,’ he kept saying. ‘For Frannie.’

Cinnamon and myrrh filled the Volvo as Kirsty King drove back to Bideford. Even so, Calvin couldn’t wait to get home, strip off, and scrub himself in a hot shower until the soap was a mere nub of scented heaven.

In a rare show of sympathy, DCI King had let him keep the fiver, but it was nowhere near enough.

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