Free Soft by Rupert Thomson

was, do you think I would’ve –’ and so on.
    After a while Barker just cut him off. ‘Got any ideas, Ray, for how to kill a girl?’
    Barker listened to Ray breathing, the TV in the background and, beyond that, the eerie hollow space inside a phone line.
    â€˜No,’ he said. ‘I didn’t think so.’ He lit a cigarette and bounced the smoke off the wall above the phone. ‘Tomorrow, Ray,’ he said, ‘tomorrow you should go down the Job Centre and ask them to take you on. They should stick you behind those fucking windows. Because you’ve got a real talent for finding people work, you know that? A real fucking talent. And something everybody knows, Ray, everybody knows, talent should not be fucking wasted. All right?’
    Barker slammed the phone down. From the quality of the silence that descended all around him he guessed he must have been shouting. Towards the end of the call, at least.
    He walked back into the lounge. On the table he saw the photograph of Glade Spencer. He picked it up and tore it into pieces. Dropped the pieces in the bin.

Mountains in Paddington
    On the tube Glade fell asleep, as usual. She had worked six shifts that week, including a double shift the day before, so perhaps it was no wonder she was tired. When she first left art school she had waited tables at a café in Portobello Road, but then, six months later, she had got a job at a small but fashionable restaurant in Soho, and she had been there ever since. She liked the place as soon as she walked in; though it looked formal – the starched white tablecloths, the low lighting, the slightly malicious gleam of cutlery – it didn’t feel tense. The hours were longer, of course, and she had to travel further, but she earned good money, never less than two hundred pounds a week including tips – and anyway, what else would she have done?
    She woke as the tube was slowing down. Her head felt numb and foggy. Turning round, she peered out of the window. The line had climbed into the daylight, though the towering embankment walls and cantilevered walkways of the station made a gloom of it, an underworld of gravel, weeds and shadows. Paddington. Four stops to go. As the tube clattered on, she glimpsed a stretch of barren land to the north, beneath the blunt, pale pillars of the Westway. This was a place she often thought about – a kind of sacred ground.
    Four years before, on her nineteenth birthday, she had invited some people to her room on Shirland Road, which was where she lived at the time. They drank Lambrusco outof plastic glasses and then, at midnight, she opened the door to her wardrobe and reached inside. The rocket she drew from the darkness behind her clothes was almost as tall as she was, the blond stick slotting into a heavy blue cylinder that had a pointed scarlet top to it. It had cost eight pounds, and she had kept it hidden in the wardrobe since November.
    That night they walked down Shirland Road, talking and laughing and smoking cigarettes, three or four girls from art school, and Charlie Moore, who was Glade’s closest friend. The girls were wary of Charlie, she remembered, one of them whispering about his hair, how it looked like stuffing from a sofa, another wondering why he hardly ever spoke. Shirland Road opened into Warwick Avenue, Glade leading the way. Warwick Avenue – so wide and spacious suddenly, with that church at one end, like a ship, somehow; she always imagined sea in front of it instead of road. Sometimes she sat outside the pub and drank a half of cider or Guinness, and she watched the church sail right past her, white spray breaking over the high porch, soaking the dull brick walls. On that night, though, the moon was almost full and in the aluminium light the church looked as if it had been moored, it looked anchored, and they walked on, past the grand houses, shadows draped over the cream façades like black lace shawls. Something