That closed the case as far as Dispatch was concerned.
‘How’d it go?’ said Sutty, stirring. ‘Think you can finger a suspect?’ I opened a window so I could breathe, started up and pulled out into the road. ‘Let me guess. She had a face like a boiled arse but says some bloke risked his liberty to kiss it.’
I just drove.
Sutty had no family and no friends that I knew of. The rumour was that he’d once been a promising detective, before he became addicted to human tragedy and was slowly seduced by the night shift. That had been a decade ago. Now it was all that he lived for. Ours was essentially a patrol duty, prowling around looking for trouble. This gave the shift the illusory promise of real detective work. The chance to see something through to the end. This promise was generally broken by our handing cases over to the day shift. Often we inherited them back the following night impossibly transformed, or with basic follow-ups not done. We were plain-clothes detectives, officially reporting to CID, but they rarely acknowledged it. Uniform treated us with the minimum amount of respect that they could get away with. I was here because I had to be.
But Sutty was in love with it.
He was at once attracted to, and repulsed by, the people. The boys were all snowflakes and fuckwits, the girls were easy or, worse, feminists, but he’d happily sit in cells, listening to them all night, he’d even drive them home when they were lost or drunk or both. To the untrained eye, these instances could look like sympathy, but in truth he enjoyed seeing people cast low.
In truth, he encouraged it.
He’d routinely let the names of informants slip to violent criminals, he’d drop young girls working as escorts in the worst parts of town. He told me he’d once attended an AA meeting, poured a bottle of vodka into the free coffee and waited, watching, as people got drunk. ‘Took this blue-haired slag home afterwards,’ he’d said. ‘Screwed her until the hair dye was running down her face.’
Our partnership was a war of attrition.
He openly despised me, but any obvious reciprocation seemed to feed something inside him. So I tried to keep the condemnation out of my voice. He’d say and do outrageous things and I’d smile back, swallow them, refuse to give him the satisfaction.
Although he was a large man, and although we often disagreed, I’d never been physically afraid of Sutty. He enjoyed our status quo too much to change it. Mentally, though, it was a different matter. Once, we’d been parked in the lay-by of a car accident hot spot, our lights out as we watched the road for speeders. It was three or four in the morning and he’d been talking, idly, about old cases. Finally, he got around to his first go at the night shift. He’d responded to a disturbance at a dog shelter.
‘So there’s this witch at the entrance, yeah? Long black coat, fingerless gloves, the whole bit. Except she’s twitching like someone put a thousand volts through her, listening to the ghosts in her hair or whatever. And the voices are especially vicious tonight. Three-part harmony from Hitler, Ho Chi Minh and Fred fucking West.
‘So I go up the path, Mr Nice, and get up alongside her. She starts giving me all this Jesus stuff, asking if I’m saved. Says he’s coming back, he’s on his way, etcetera, etcetera. I said I think he’s outta town tonight, sweetheart.
‘Anyway, turns out she’s broken in, given the dogs their first holy communion or something. Wait here, I say. I get halfway down the hall and the smell’s killing me, just unbelievable. Every cage I look in, the dogs are sodden, I mean soaking wet.’ He laughed. ‘She’d only gone and baptized ’em in petrol. Then I see her at the door and she’s got her back to me, shuddering. I realize she’s striking matches. Mad bitch has put us on God’s guest list.’
Sutty lost his eyebrows and most of the hair on his head before he got outside. He collapsed on to the lawn, coughing his lungs up, listening to the dogs howling, barking, burning alive in their cages. At first light he’d traced the woman’s footprints. They went one hundred feet into the trees and stopped suddenly. As far as he knew, that was the last anyone saw or heard of her. The story wasn’t remarkable in the context of the night shift, which is filled with haunted people and impossible dead ends.
It was Sutty’s reaction to it that disturbed me.
‘That’s when I saw it,’ he’d said. ‘All the famine and war and children in need. We’ve been born right into the end of it, Aid, straight into the death throes. The whole race is suicidal, it’s hardwired into us and something’s flicked the switch. We’re the last generation there’ll ever be.’ As he talked, I realized that he was being sincere. Worse, that he was in love with the idea.
The night shift meant different things to different people. To our superiors it was a demotion out of sight, almost out of reality. To me it was an act of cowardice. Somewhere I could hide out from my own life and let it pass me by. But to my partner it was life itself. It was his front-row seat to the end of the world and he was on his feet, applauding, in standing ovation.
5
‘What did I tell you?’ said Sutty, dowsing himself, face, neck and chest, in sanitizer. ‘The window-lickers are out in force tonight.’
Incognito ran out of a loft bar off Piccadilly, and we watched the line of men, oozing outside the door and round the corner. They were standing in packs, smoking and swearing, driven half-mad by the neon and the heat. By the girls in their summer clothes who didn’t even notice they were alive. Most of the men wore sharp buzzcuts and shapeless going-out shirts, and they seemed to share one low, booming voice that happened to possess them at different times. ‘Yeurgh,’ said Sutty, opening the glove compartment. He found his wet wipes and leaned over me to clean the steering wheel I’d just taken my hands off. ‘Someone really let one go in this gene pool.’
Although he was including me in his dim assessment of the men, looking out at the line it was hard not to agree. It was like watching one personality, stretched paper-thin across twenty people.
‘Fancy a walk?’ I said.
He balled up his wet wipe and threw it out the window.
‘I could stretch my legs, yeah. Ever met the guy who runs this place?’ We climbed out of the car and I shook my head. ‘Bloke should’ve been a handjob. A real beauty. Looks like the singer off a cruise ship that hasn’t docked in a decade.’
Two girls walked, arm in arm, to the front of the queue. The men nearby stopped braying for a second and drank them in. The doorman winced like he’d just done a shot, then stood to one side so they could pass, watching as they went up the stairs. His hair was shaved so closely that I could see the veins, gripping his skull. Any shorter and I could have seen what he was thinking.
He looked at Sutty. ‘Back of the line, darling.’
‘Try Detective Inspector. And get it right first time.’
All emotion drained out of the doorman’s face. ‘Apologies, Detective Inspector. How can I help?’
‘We want to talk to the owner …’
He didn’t move. ‘There’s a few heads with a stake in Incognito. Let me know which you’re after an’ I’ll make an appointment.’