Die Twice

could have kicked the shit out of me if he’d wanted to, the contest was that one-sided.
Across the street I could see a middle-aged woman staring out of her window in my direction. She looked like she felt sorry for me. When I caught her eye, though, she turned away and was gone.
As I gingerly got to my feet, I found myself experiencing an impotent rage. He’d made me look a fool. I wished I’d had the gun I’d been using the previous night on me. I could have blown that fuck apart. I wouldn’t even have needed to tire myself out. I could have just strolled down the steps, taken aim at the middle of his back, and fired at leisure. He might have been a solid boy, but I’d yet to come across anyone whose skin deflected lead.
Malik came back into view, walking without urgency, and the rage passed. We’d get him. It was just a matter of being patient. Maybe, just maybe, once he’d been released again, I’d track him down one evening and put him to sleep. The thought made me feel better.
Malik looked pissed off. ‘I lost him,’ he said, stopping in front of me. ‘He was too fast.’
‘I know I shouldn’t say this, but I’m sort of glad you didn’t corner him.’
‘I can handle myself, Sergeant. Anyway, you’re the one who took the pasting. Are you all right?’
I rubbed my cheek and blinked a few times. My vision was still a little blurred but it seemed to be moving back towards normal. ‘Yeah, I think so. That bastard had a good punch on him, though.’
‘I saw. So who do you think he was?’
I told him, and he nodded in agreement. ‘Yeah, I’d have thought so too. So what do we do about him?’
‘It won’t take long to find out his name. There’ll be plenty of uniforms on the streets tonight, talking to the other Toms. They’ll find out who he is. Then we’ll just reel him in.’
It dawned on me that he might also be the pimp for the blonde girl in the photo with Miriam, and I suddenly felt protective towards her. She was too young to be selling herself on the street and too vulnerable to be under the thumb of someone like him. The sooner we picked him up the better.
We went back to searching the flat but, though we spent close to another half an hour in there, we didn’t find anything else of note. I checked in with Welland and he told us to speak to the other occupants of the block, which turned out to be something of a fruitless exercise. Number 1, the one playing the techno music, steadfastly refused to answer the door, which was probably because he couldn’t hear us. A few more hours of that and he wouldn’t be able to hear anything. Number 2 wasn’t in. Number 3, a colourfully dressed Somalian lady with a young baby in her arms, couldn’t speak English. She recognized Miriam’s picture but I think she thought we were looking for her because she kept pointing upstairs. Without a Somali translator, there wasn’t a lot more we could do, so we thanked her and left.
Number 4 eventually answered the door after we’d knocked at least three times. He was a tall, gangly bloke with John Lennon glasses and a badly trimmed goatee. He took one look at us and immediately clicked that we were police. In our trenchcoats and inexpensive suits, we were never going to be anything else. He didn’t look too pleased to see us, which was no great surprise since the unmistakable aroma of freshly exhaled dope smoke was easing out of the gap in the door.
I did the introductions and asked if we could come in. He started to say that it wasn’t a good time right now, which is what they all say when they’ve got something to hide, but I wasn’t going to let this one go, not after drawing blanks everywhere else in the place. I told him that it was a murder inquiry, and that we weren’t interested if he’d been smoking blow in the privacy of his own home. Malik, who came more from the zero-tolerance school of policing (where it suited him, of course) gave me the standard disapproving look I was beginning to get used to from my subordinates, but I ignored him.
The guy really didn’t have much choice so he let us in and turned the music down. He sat down on a large beanbag and, waving in the general direction of the other beanbags assembled around the cluttered room, let us know that we too could sit down.
I told him we’d remain standing. He looked a mixture of nervous and confused, which was fine by me. I wanted to make him take this discussion seriously, to get him to rack his brains for information that could be of help.
As it happens, I didn’t get a lot. His name was Drayer. He added that his first name was Zeke, but I told him I didn’t believe anyone would have called their kid Zeke, not at the time he was born, which had to have been at least forty years earlier. He insisted that it was. I asked him if that was the name on his birth certificate. He admitted it wasn’t. ‘And have you changed it by deed poll?’ He reluctantly conceded that he hadn’t.
Eventually, I got it out of him that his real first name was Norman. ‘Norman’s an all right name,’ I told him. ‘It’s no worse than Dennis, which is mine.’
‘I know it’s no worse,’ he said, and left it at that. Cheeky bastard.
It turned out that Norman was a poet by trade. He performed his poetry in some of the local pubs and clubs and had also had a few bits and pieces published in various anthologies. ‘It doesn’t pay much,’ he confided, ‘but it’s a clean life.’ Looking round his worn-out