Get Poor Slow Read online

  ‘In the middle of the night?’

  ‘She was big on the career stuff. Why don’t you ask her boss what books she was working on?’

  ‘She ever mention any boyfriends?’

  ‘No. We never got to that. Remember, we only ever had one conversation.’

  ‘One that you remember.’

  ‘My head’s fucked, Ted. Don’t rub it in.’

  ‘So what did you talk about, that time you do remember?’

  ‘Her job, mainly. Hyping books. Working with writers. She was – she talked about this book she was working on. This new thing by Liam Vagg. She was publicising it. That’s the sort of thing she talked about.’

  This was beyond bold and close to reckless. If Lewin had checked the newspaper he would know about my review, and the stink it gave off in all directions. But apparently he didn’t read my stuff, like everyone else. Nor, more alarmingly, did Vagg’s name seem to interest him in any broader sense, or any narrower sense, or any sense at all. Whatever he was fishing for, Vagg wasn’t it.

  ‘I notice you still haven’t slapped the cuffs on me,’ I said, as long as I was sailing close to the wind.

  ‘Do you want me to?’

  ‘Not at all. But I’m wondering why you haven’t. I would have, by now. My story stinks. It’s true, but it stinks. And yet for some reason you’re not laughing in my face. In fact, I have this odd feeling that you believe me.’

  He slipped the glasses from his nose and studied the wall behind my shoulder. His tongue went into his cheek, the way it does when he’s troubled.

  ‘What is it, Ted? What do you know here that I don’t?’

  He tapped the glasses against his chest. He was contemplating an indiscretion. Here it came:

  ‘There was other DNA on her,’ he said. ‘Some other bloke was with her too.’

  He looked hard at my face as he said it. I watched his fingers pinch and twist his dangling glasses. Each restless knuckle bore its own hedge of silver hair. His thick driftwood nails were foxed at the edges like old books. What did he expect my face to do? Howl? Look happy? Not care? Finally I said, ‘Was she raped?’

  ‘Now why would you say that?’

  ‘Was she or wasn’t she?’

  Lewin just looked at me in a stern and sickened way, as if the answer was none of my business. How wrong he was about that. But it didn’t matter. I could read his silences now. I could see that the answer was no. She’d permitted it. She’d wanted it. It was the answer any sane or decent man would have preferred, but jealousy can do nasty things to the mind. Or maybe I’m just a nasty guy. Either way, I appeared to be in love with a dead girl. That was pretty clear now. If I hadn’t known it before, I knew it then.

  ‘So you know I didn’t do it,’ I said. ‘Everything I’ve told you fits. I left, and this other bastard turned up and killed her.’

  ‘All we know,’ Lewin said grimly, ‘is that there were two of you. Who was with her last we don’t know. Maybe it was you.’

  ‘Come on, Ted. It fits.’

  ‘You’d better hope so. Maybe when we find this other bloke he’ll have a better story than yours.’

  He meant that mine could hardly be worse. He meant the other guy’s anonymous load was the last thing keeping me at large. And he didn’t seem to think it would stay anonymous for long.

  ‘This is why you asked me about her boyfriends?’

  ‘Why? You suddenly got someone in mind?’

  ‘No. I told you. The only men she mentioned were writers, people she worked with. Including some pretty rough types, like Vagg. Other than that, no.’

  By now I’d sold Vagg’s name as hard as I could without attaching a chunk of myself to it. But Lewin’s mismatched eyes just looked at me and wanted more. Always they wanted more. What was his problem? Was he a fan of Vagg’s work? It wasn’t impossible. Around now I got my head started on the task of remembering Vagg’s address. Maybe the time for my harbourside house call had finally come.

  ‘Here’s something,’ I said. ‘Somebody bit her. I saw the marks on her.’

  ‘Where?’ I had his interest.

  ‘On the back of her thigh. You must have seen them too.’

  ‘How many did you see?’

  ‘Two. Why? How many were on her when she died? More?’ Again this was far more my business than his. And again he wasn’t going to tell me. ‘Why do I get the feeling the answer’s yes?’ I said.

  ‘She didn’t say who did it?’ Lewin said.

  ‘No. Feel free to take a mould of my teeth, by the way.’

  ‘We may do that at some stage.’

  ‘Do it. Call a dentist now. I want you to find this fucker, Ted. Trust me, his story’s going to stink even worse than mine. It’s going to make mine smell good.’

  He gave me a weary sort of smile. I am the man who says too much when he is not saying too little. Lewin liked the other guy more already. He didn’t know who he was. He just liked him because he wasn’t me. Our relationship is like a love affair in decay. He doesn’t care how much I throw him. All he wants is the little corner of me that I refuse to give away. I looked at my dwindling future on his face and thought: Fuck it. I’m going to Vagg’s.

  4

  When your head aches, the city is a shimmering hell of things for light to bounce off – traffic and water, glass and steel. By the time I hit the bridge the sun was sinking already, spraying its low angry fire off anything that shone. Even architecture hated me these days. Even landscape. Vagg’s house was a dogleg right up the shore, but I didn’t go that way yet. I drove inland first, till I saw a big barn of a hardware store looming off the main road. It took me ten minutes and two wrong turns to get there. Inside I went to the aisle that sold knives. I selected a thin evil blade that curved like a sliver of the moon. I got a scabbard too. I was already handing these things to the checkout girl when it struck me that it was insane to be seen buying them. A knife? I’d forgotten who I was. But I was sinisterly in luck: the girl didn’t know me either. Another shunner of newspapers. Another non-restless non-seeker of knowledge. If this was a good omen, who was it good for? Me or Vagg? Maybe it meant I should stop now, while the going was still good. Or maybe it meant this was going to be my night.

  Back in the car, jamming the knife into the scabbard and the scabbard into my sock, I wondered what else I was failing to see. Clearly I was not at my best. It was late. I was a long way from home. I was low on supplies, and dangerously adrift from my stockpiles. Was the Vagg visit a bad idea all round? I decided the answer was no. The subtle approach hadn’t worked for me, recently or ever. I was living in the wrong world for it. It was time I ditched my commitment to nuance and gave crass literalism a try. Look at how far it had got Vagg.

  En route to his mansion I kept trying to think about violence instead of sex. It kept not working. I wanted to picture me and Vagg and the knife. Instead I kept seeing Vagg’s DNA – in her, on her, drenching her in foul arcs, his teeth in her flesh, her wanting that. Consensual sex with Vagg. Outside of a prison cell, had that ever really happened – anywhere, with anyone, let alone with her? But I had to hope it had. I had to hope that Vagg had sprayed that other load in her and then killed her. If the answer was not as simple as that, I was out of ideas. I was almost ready to let it be me, if it hadn’t been him.

  I swung the car towards the water. The streets got cooler and narrower. Big old English trees smothered them in shadow. White men had planted them two hundred years ago so they could pretend they were not a long way from home. And now Vagg wrote shit in their shade while pretending the same thing. The royalties had bought him a lot of nice bobbing boats to look at, but he still had to look at them through philistine eyes. That probably gave him a lot in common with his neighbours, who probably bought all his books, and possibly even read them. I’d rather be me and have nothing to look at but a dirt drive and a couple of fat old gu
ms.

  I ditched my car at the mouth of his street and went looking for his place on foot. It wasn’t hard to find. It had a wide wooden gate set into a high stone wall. The wall was about two feet taller than I was. A row of wrought-iron spikes was set into its summit. The spikes were a typical Vagg touch. They were sort of impressive, as long as you didn’t think about them too hard. If you did, you saw that they made getting over the wall easier, not harder. They gave you something to hang on to on your way up. I hadn’t come all this way to turn such an invitation down. Clambering to the top without much incident, I threw myself in over the spikes. They weren’t sharp. I’d already hit his lawn before I remembered the pit bull on the jacket of his book. I looked around and didn’t see it, and tried to believe that meant it wasn’t at home. Was I in the mood to stab a pit bull? Not really, but I didn’t feel like climbing back over the wall either.

  Vagg’s lawn was as wide as a fairway and as tightly clipped. It sloped up for a while before dropping off hard to the water, through a jumble of rocks and wet nodding ferns. On the crest of the slope stood the kind of house that military units stay at during wars. It was a hoodlum’s Brideshead, a spiv’s Manderley. I wouldn’t have wanted to live in it, but looking at it made me think about the many ways in which my life had gone wrong. There I went again: thinking. It was time I rethought that useless habit too. I walked up the slope fast, to get the thinking over with and bring the other part on instead. I went to the only door I could see that wasn’t a French window and knocked.

  I half-expected a coloured maid to answer it. Instead I got the man himself: Liam Vagg, in a satiny white sweatsuit. He looked me up and down and said, ‘Saint, you cunt. I’ve been wondering when you’d show up.’

  He showed me into his study. He had one, naturally. It was on the ground floor. There was a French window in it that gave onto a garden full of pink roses. There was a glass bookcase full of leather-bound books that no person among the living, and certainly not Vagg, had ever opened. There was a polished wooden desk that was big enough to sign a peace treaty on. A vintage typewriter sat on its far side, with a spotless sheet of paper furled around its platen. Behind the typewriter was a brown leather chair with arms as plump as boxing gloves. So this was where the tripe happened. The scene looked clinical and staged, as void of life as Vagg’s prose. There was not an open book in the room, not a scrap of torn paper, not one chewed pen.

  He poured me a finger of Blue Label without asking. He poured himself one too, then settled into his squeaking brown throne. I sat across from him, on the supplicant’s side. I looked at my glass and wanted a refill already. For a dirtbag, he doled out his booze in laughably genteel jolts. But he was still trying hard not to be an animal at this point. We both were.

  We looked at each other for a while. He was dressed down, by his latter-day standards, although the space-age sweatsuit didn’t look like the sort of sweatsuit you were meant to sweat in. Inside its satiny shell his lean greyhound’s body looked menacingly fit. His skin was so sun-damaged it looked cured, like salami. A blurred and ancient tattoo was just visible in the folds of his throat. His irises were disturbingly pale, like a goat’s. He used no deodorant: his PR people hadn’t tackled that issue yet. His study was a large room, but the rat’s-piss reek of his body made it feel like a small one. His hair was thin and silver and long at the back. He wore it in a ponytail – like a roadie, like a sex offender. Tight threads of it ran back across the top of his skull, soused with the sort of oil or pomade that was already going out of style when Dick Hickock used it. He looked as if he’d surfaced from a dirty pond and forgotten to remove the weed from his scalp. His chin had a limp delta of nicotine-stained whiskers stuck to it. I could feel him sizing up my scars, as if he were a connoisseur of broken faces.

  ‘How’s the other guy look?’ he said at last.

  ‘The other guy was a concrete slab.’

  ‘I heard that. Is that why you’re so fucked up?’

  ‘It’s part of it.’

  He kept flicking his tongue out and in over his lower lip, nastily, as if to stress that the lizard part of his brain was still fully functional. I hardly needed confirmation of that. He swirled his posh grog in its posh tumbler and said, ‘I’m sorry you didn’t think more of my book, Saint.’

  ‘You read my review, then?’

  ‘I got the gist of it, yeah.’

  ‘Hoped it’d be a bit more positive, did you?’

  ‘I hope that about all reviews.’

  ‘Even the ones you don’t pay for?’ I said.

  ‘Ah,’ Vagg said. ‘We’re going to be honest with each other.’

  He did that loutish thing with his tongue again. His stench needled the air between us. Even my ruined nose recoiled from it. Beyond his shoulder there was a long shelf of books. All of them were by him. Each one was brick-thick with a one-word title. To the right of the shelf a large leather map of the world hung on the wall, fashioned from the hide of some huge-flanked animal, or from the skin of the last critic who told the truth about him.

  ‘How much honesty do you want, Vagg?’

  ‘Let’s go full throttle.’ Full frottle.

  ‘All right,’ I said. ‘I know you killed her. Let’s start with that.’

  ‘You think so?’ He appraised me with his billy-goat eyes. That thuggish flick of the tongue again. ‘Everyone else seems to think it was you.’

  ‘And I’m ahead of them, because I know it wasn’t. I know you paid her fifteen grand to fix my review. I know she was expecting you that night, with the cash. I know the next morning she was dead, and the money wasn’t there.’

  Vagg was smiling a mirthless smile, for reasons I did not yet understand.

  ‘That honest enough for you?’ I said.

  ‘I don’t know where to start.’

  ‘Pick a place.’

  ‘I didn’t kill her. How’s that for a start?’

  ‘Unconvincing.’

  ‘Stabbing women isn’t my style.’

  ‘What is? Putting a sawn-off in their mouths and demanding money?’

  ‘If I’d wanted to kill someone about it,’ Vagg said, ‘I’d have killed you.’

  ‘I wish you’d tried.’

  ‘Believe me,’ he said, ‘you don’t.’

  His goat-grey eyes looked at me without expression. His facial skin was mottled, a weird quilt of different pigments. Four deep creases ran square across his forehead, like fence-wires on a horizon. I kept trying not to think about the knife in my sock. I had a weird feeling he would read my mind if I did. Do felons have a sixth sense for the concealed blade?

  ‘And what did the coppers say, when you put this theory of yours to them?’ Feory.

  ‘I haven’t. Yet.’

  ‘I didn’t think so,’ he said. ‘I’ve been watching your progress, Saint. I’ve been watching you sink into the shit. And I’ve been wondering why you haven’t pulled me in there too. Not that it’d do you any good, but I’ve been wondering why you haven’t tried. Is it because you’d rather drown in it than tell the world you take backhanders to write good reviews?’

  ‘There was no good review,’ I reminded him.

  ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘What happened there? She told me you were on the hook. And you must’ve been, mustn’t you? At one stage, you must’ve been. You must’ve done something you’re not proud of, or you’d have shopped me to the coppers on day one. Yeah. She had you on the hook, all right. If you’re clean, if you’ve got nothing to hide, what are you doing here?’

  ‘Do we have to put a label on it? Can’t two men of letters just get together and shoot the breeze across a vast desk? Surrounded by an incredible amount of leather? We’re a dying breed, Vagg.’

  ‘Man of letters. That’s what you call yourself, is it?’

  ‘Somebody has to.’

  ‘Man of letters who takes bribes to write good r
eviews. And then reneges. Having fucked the girl who tried to bribe him, who then turns up dead. Yeah, I reckon I can see why you want to keep a few things under your hat. That little story gets out, it’d really fuck up what’s left of your image, wouldn’t it?’

  ‘I’d say it’d fuck up both our images.’

  ‘I doubt that, Saint.’ He gave me a wider version of his smirk. His teeth were startlingly perfect and cashed up, and grotesquely out of place in a shrunken skull like his. ‘That sort of thing is my image. Bribing a book reviewer – Christ, I’ve got away with worse than that. But by all means roll the dice on that, if that’s what you want to do. Tell the cops. See how much good it does you. I might have to tell them a few things you don’t seem to know.’

  ‘Such as?’

  He was in no rush to enlighten me. He pulled a cigarette from a flat silver case. These days he had too much class to keep his smokes in the boxes he bought them in. He was above using matches too. Near his right hand there was a nifty old clock with a lighter built into the top of it. In no more time than it would have taken him to light ten matches he got a spark from it.

  ‘This is going to hurt a bit, Saint.’ His grey head issued grey smoke. He sat back. Leather accepted him with a rich creak. ‘You seem to think the deal was for fifteen grand. It wasn’t. The number we agreed on – the number I agreed on, after a fair bit of persuasion from her – was twenty-five.’

  I said nothing. I looked back into his billy-goat eyes.

  ‘If she said it was only fifteen,’ he said, ‘she was telling you a little fib.’

  Out in the dying afternoon, somebody was rhythmically raking leaves. A lawnmower was running in someone else’s yard, or in a distant part of Vagg’s. His eerie mouth was on the edge of smiling again.

  ‘I’m touched you think I’ll take your word for that,’ I said.

  ‘Take it or leave it, mate. I don’t particularly give a fuck.’

  ‘Who,’ I said, ‘would pay twenty-five grand for a good review?’