Looking Good Dead

cologne – he had recently learned by heart the smell of all the colognes in a Gatwick Airport duty free shop, as a way of killing time before a flight.
    ‘She doesn’t like it up the ass, John. What do you think about that?’ Carl Venner asked; his five-foot-five-inch, twenty-six-stone frame looked in a dishevelled state, and he had a fresh scratch on his cheek. His normally immaculately coiffed wavy silver hair was awry and his pigtail had been partially pulled free of its band. He wore an emerald shirt wide open, with half the buttons torn off, revealing the massiverolls of loose flesh of his midriff and a hairless white belly overhanging his shiny belt.
    His face was a blotchy red with exertion or anger and dry patches of psoriasis, which the Weatherman had noticed before, showed on his forehead; the man was wheezing so hard he wondered if he was about to have a heart attack.
    ‘She doesn’t like being fucked up the ass,’ Venner said, rephrasing slightly. ‘Can you believe that?’
    The Weatherman didn’t really have an opinion on the subject. Feeling himself propelled forward by the short, dense mass of Carl Venner, he simply said, ‘Ummmm.’
    They stopped for a moment and Venner turned his head back to Mr Brown. ‘Do what you want with her, then get rid of the little bitch.’
    Putting up with this, and being party to it, was not part of his deal, but then the Weatherman had never understood the true nature of his contractor until he had started looking into Venner’s background by hacking into his private files.
    He had first encountered Venner on an internet chatline for techies, where information was exchanged and technical conundrums posited and worked out. Venner had set him a challenge which the Weatherman had thought at the time was hypothetical. The challenge was whether it was possible to put up a website on the internet that would be completely and permanently untraceable. The Weatherman had already designed the system. He had thought of offering it to the British intelligence services, but then he had been pissed off about the Iraq war. And anyway he distrusted all government bodies, everywhere. In fact he distrusted just about everything.
    Venner propelled him through into his cavernous office, which comprised most of the upstairs floor of the warehouse. It was a vast, windowless and soulless place, carpeted in the same cheap material as the front office and almost equally sparsely furnished, apart from one area at the far end taken up with several racks of computer hardware – which the Weatherman knew inside out, as he had installed it all himself.
    Venner’s desk, on which sat four open laptops and nothing else other than a glass ashtray with two crushed cigar butts and a glass bowl full of chocolate bars, was a clone of the one outside. There was an oldexecutive black leather armchair behind it, and a long brown leather sofa, in poor condition, near the desk. On the carpet just in front of it the Weatherman noticed a crumpled pair of skimpy lace knickers. Above him, raindrops were pattering down on the metal warehouse roof.
    As ever, Venner’s two silent Russian colleagues, in their black suits, materialized from nowhere and flanked the fat man, silent and unsmiling, giving the Weatherman just faint nods of acknowledgement.
    ‘You know, she really did fucking bite me. Look!’ Venner exhaled a blast of cigar-laced halitosis and held up a fat, stubby index finger, nail gnawed to the quick.
    The Weatherman could see deep puncture marks just above the first knuckle. Peering at them he said, ‘You’ll need a tetanus jab.’
    ‘Tetanus?’
    The Weatherman fixated on the knickers on the carpet, rocking backwards and forwards in silence, deep in thought.
    ‘Tetanus?’ the American repeated, worried.
    Still staring at the knickers Frost said, ‘The bacterial inoculum of human bite wounds is worse than any other animal. Do you have any idea how many organisms thrive in human oral flora?’
    ‘I don’t.’
    Still rocking, the Weatherman said, ‘Up to one million per millilitre – with over one hundred and ninety different bacterial species.’
    ‘Terrific.’ Venner stared dubiously at his wound. ‘So . . .’ He strutted agitatedly around the floor in a small circle, then closed his hands together, his expression indicating a complete change of mood and subject. ‘You have the information?’
    ‘Ummm.’ The Weatherman continued to stare at the knickers, still rocking.