Murder Club - Mark Pearson [14]
Not that Bible Steve had friends, as such. Just people like him. Living rough. Inner-city flotsam and jetsam. Human beings washed up on the tide of indifference, to seek shelter where they could and oftentimes finding none. Their bodies like the frozen statues in Narnia, only no shaggy lion’s breath was going to bring them back, thought Bible Steve. Then he blinked and the notion had gone from his mind. He shook his head again angrily and grunted, looking behind him suspiciously as if some thief of thoughts had stolen his memories.
‘Wassat?’ he said, but there was no reply. Steve looked forward again, but no one was there, and the person who had been speaking to him in his thoughts was from a time long before. A lifetime ago.
He shivered his shoulders a little to generate some warmth and took another hit from his bottle.
The whisky helped. The whisky always helped Bible. Some said it made him violent, but if it did, he could never remember anyway. Maybe it was the wild Celtic ancestry in him as much as the rough liquor? Sometimes he did feel himself getting angry for no reason, rageful. The buzzing in his head turning from a melody into a storm of locusts, their wings chittering and chattering. It would come out of the blue, the anger building in him like steam in an engine, so that he would explode if he didn’t do something. Maybe that was why he drank? Maybe that was why he turned to the stuff in the first place? Did it dull the rage or fuel it? He couldn’t remember. What he did know was that the alcohol made him oblivious, untouchable, eventually blissfully unconscious. He held the cold bottle to his lips once more and felt the harsh liquid burn down his throat like a cleansing fire. He coughed and shivered, the shiver turning into a trembling that he couldn’t stop. He dragged the rough fibre of his coat sleeve across his mouth and sat down on the pavement, his back propped against the cold brick of an empty building.
‘Vengeance is mine, sayeth the Lord,’ he said and took another sip of whisky, but it did nothing to stop the tremors of his battered body, and even less to stem the darkness that was building now in his mind.
‘Vengeance,’ he said again. Then he looked up at the moon and shook his fist at it. ‘Vengeance!’ He shouted it a third time and then stumbled to his feet once more. ‘An eye for an eye, a life for a life!’
9.
White City Police Station, west London. Ten-fifteen, Friday night
DR LAURA CHILVERS was a striking-looking woman.
She was just under five foot nine inches tall in her flat-heeled shoes. She had her hair cut in a platinum bob, with a muscular, fit, but womanly figure; she wore little make-up, but didn’t need to. She had a luminescence to her skin and a natural beauty that shone. Her eyes were Nordic blue and her smile dazzled. When she walked into or out of a room all eyes turned on her. If she was aware of it she made no sign. Few men dared to ask her out and, if they did, they were wholly unsuccessful. Laura Chilvers was gay. One hundred per cent all-the-way sister. The waste of it was often the subject of frustrated speculation by most of the male policemen at the station (never the bastion of political correctness), over their breaktime cups of tea and bacon sandwiches. And by quite a few of the women too, but not all.
As it was, Dave Matthews, a happily married man, just smiled warmly at Laura when she handed some paperwork over to him as he stood behind the custody desk. ‘Busy night again,’ he said.
‘Friday as well,’ agreed the police