Dreams of Leaving by Rupert Thomson Page A

the Yellow Pages and dialled a firm of industrial cleaners. After hanging up, he had noticed some shit on his shoes. He must have trodden in it on his way upstairs. At that moment, he said, he had wanted to kill.
    Later in the day he called a couple of friends of his, forensic experts. The only clues that had been left behind were the plastic bag and the paint-tub. The plastic bag had come from Safeway’s. The tub had once held Crown White Matt. No fingerprints on either of them. According to Elliot’s forensic friends, the shit in the plastic bag had been human, possibly belonging to the man who had done the job, and collected over a period of several days during which time he had eaten, among other things, a McDonald’s, two Indian take-aways and a Chinese. More than that, they couldn’t say. The chances of tracing the man, they told Elliot, were slim. Very slim indeed.
    â€˜You know, it’s funny,’ Moses said, ‘but the first time I came here I smelt shit. I thought I was imagining it.’
    â€˜You weren’t imagining it.’ Elliot smiled grimly. ‘This place was so full of shit I could’ve opened a sewage farm. I had to close for three weeks.’ He sighed, leaned back, massaged his neck. ‘Three weeks is a fuck of a lot of money.’
    Moses wanted to ask why it had happened; he chose not to.
    â€˜Yeah,’ Elliot went on, ‘that’s why I laid into you that afternoon. You know, when you were out there taking pictures.’
    â€˜What? You mean that was the same afternoon?’
    Elliot nodded.
    â€˜No wonder you were in such a foul mood,’ Moses grinned. ‘I suppose you could say it was shit that brought us together.’
    Elliot winced. ‘Hey Moses, I don’t want to think about it, OK?’
    Moses apologised, but his grin lingered.
    He stayed at The Bunker until four in the morning. Partly because he liked Elliot’s company, and partly because he didn’t want to risk running into the German actress who hadn’t noticed him smiling at her. Especially as she was with Eddie, who had.
    *
    Then it happened again.
    One evening at the end of February Moses turned up outside The Bunker to find Elliot prowling up and down the pavement as if held by an invisible cage. His face twitched with rage. His lips were forced back over his gums.
    â€˜What’s wrong, Elliot?’
    â€˜
Fuck
,’ Elliot snarled. ‘Fuck Jesus fucking
fuck.’
He pointed at the pavement just to the left of where Moses was standing. Somebody had painted a big white arrow on the ground. It was aimed at the entrance of the club.
    Elliot jerked his head, and disappeared through the double-doors. Moses followed him inside. A trail of similar arrows led across the foyer, up the stairs, along the corridor, leading, inevitably, to Elliot’s office. Elliot pushed the door open, then stepped aside to let Moses in first.
    It was a scene of such violence that Moses found the stillness unnerving. As he gazed into the room, he kept expecting something to spring out at him from a hiding-place in the debris. It was the kind of stillness that had recently been havoc and had only just returned to being stillness again. Moses took a deep breath, and let the air out slowly through his mouth. The entire office had been systematically and viciously destroyed. Torn paper, broken glass and long splinters of wood buried the carpet ankle-deep. The red drapes lay on top, cut into sinister neat pieces. The red lamps had been ripped loose and smashed. Wires trailed from the empty sockets like torn ligaments. The two black holes in the wall made the room look blinded somehow. The desk, the sofa and the executive chair, dismembered, hacked almost beyond recognition, reared up from the chaos as if trying to break free. Blood inched down the window-panes. The bitter smell of urine trickled into Moses’s nostrils. But worst of all – and Moses groaned when he