Free Decay Inevitable by Conrad Williams

West Croydon, regarded him from the windowsill with the same mix of disdain and suspicion. Elisabeth was sitting with her slim legs winding around each other, elbow resting on her knee, cigarette burning between well-manicured fingers. Her hair had been cut short; her high cheekbones formed the inverted base of a triangle completed by the thick, ruby bow of her mouth.
    “You look fantastic,” he said.
    “You look like a stunt, Will,” she said. “You look like shit in a jacket.”
    “I aim to please.”
    “That’d be a first.”
    Will held his hands up. “Look, Elisabeth. I’m not here to fight you.”
    “What the fuck are you here for? Money? You still living in that shit pit with vinegar tits? My fucking patient, she was. I should have pulled the fucking plug on her before you got wind of her.” Elisabeth took a huge, violent drag on her cigarette and stubbed it out in an ashtray that might as well have been Will’s face.
    “Elisabeth, I–” And then he couldn’t go on. The grief that had been rattling around inside like a loose coin in a machine spat out of him with such force that Elisabeth moved back in her seat, her hand covering her mouth, her eyes large in their sockets. As she blurred before him, Will slid onto the floor and let it happen. By the end, his chin and chest were a thin gravy of snot and tears and saliva. His chest hurt from all the sobbing. He was exhausted.
    Elisabeth said, “I’m sorry.”
    “It’s not you,” he said. “Cat. She’s been kidnapped. I think she might be dead.”
    Elisabeth closed her eyes and for a while the two of them were silent. Then, very slowly, Elisabeth moved over to him, sat by him, and slipped an arm around his shoulders.
    She said, “You’ve lost weight.”
    “There was a baby. Our baby... I mean, one that me and Cat were going to have. We lost it.”
    Elisabeth tensed but did not remove her arm. Her voice was cold when she spoke again. “I don’t know what you think I can do for you, Will. I mean, it’s not as if we parted in a way that would ever be described in the maturity textbook, is it? I’m very sorry about what’s happened to you, but why have you come here?”
    “You’re all I know,” he said. His voice had dwindled to breath and little else. “Men came to our house. They were going to kill me.”
    “Will? What are you talking about?”
    The urgency in her voice couldn’t rouse him from the exhausted sleep that he suddenly fell into. Elisabeth was able to grab a cushion from the sofa before his head hit the floor. One of his hands retreated to his eyes, covering them as though to prevent him from seeing something awful. It was hours before she could get him up, in any sense of the word.
     
     
    E LISABETH SAID, “T HERE’S nobody called Slowheath on the net.”
    “Fuck it,” Will spat. He was sitting at her shoulder, watching as her fingers flew over the keyboard of her laptop. The computer’s hard drive softly chirruped and chuckled as it processed Elisabeth’s request and vomited the results up on screen. The window in the basement study showed a mass of foliage, topped by a portion of pavement. Occasional legs would stride by, casting stop-start patterns of shadow across the room.
    Will said, “Are you sure?”
    “You can see for yourself. Hang on. What about Sloe Heath?”
    “Who he?”
    “It’s not a he. It’s an it. It’s a hospital in the Northwest. Just outside Warrington.” She jotted an address on a piece of paper.
    “I’m not sure.”
    “Well.” Elisabeth swivelled to face him. The whiteness of the screen behind her made it difficult to see the cast of her features. She pressed the scrap into his hand. “There’s nothing else. You’ll have to try. Tell the police. They’ll look into it for you.”
    “I can’t get the police involved. I’m already on their shit list.”
    “What do you mean?”
    “Receiving stolen goods. And there was an affray in the town centre.”
    “An affray? What’s