In silence, they trooped through to the kitchen. It was spartan, but well equipped. In the sink there was a dirty soup bowl and a mug half full of cold tea. A small shelf of cookery books testified to the occupants' obsession with healthy eating.
"Fart city," Tony observed wryly, opening a cupboard filled with jars of pulses. He opened the drawers, noting the kitchen knives. There was a small vegetable knife with a blade worn thin from sharpening, a bread knife whose blade was pitted with age, and a cheap carving knife, the handle bleached from the dishwasher. These are not your tools, Andy," Tony said to himself.
"You like knives that do their work properly."
Without consulting Brandon, he walked out of the kitchen and up the stairs. Brandon watched him stick his head round the first bedroom door and reject it. As he passed, he saw that it was obviously the couple's room. He followed Tony through the door across the landing.
In McConnell's bedroom. Tony seemed to drift away altogether into a world of his own. The room was simply furnished with modern pine bed, chest of drawers and wardrobe. An array of weightlifting trophies sat on the deep windowsill. A tall bookcase was crammed with pulp science fiction and a handful of gay novels. On a small table, there was a games computer and a television monitor.
On a shelf above was a collection of games. Tony browsed through Mortal Kombat, Streetfighter II, Terminator z. Doom and a dozen other games whose keynote was violent action.
"This is more like it," he murmured. He stood by the chest of drawers, hand poised to open one.
"Maybe it's you after all," he thought.
"Maybe you leave the living room to the other two. What if this is your only domain? What would I expect to find here? I'd want your souvenirs, Andy. You need to keep something by you, otherwise the memory disintegrates too fast. We all need something tangible.
The discarded perfume spray that holds her fragrance and summons her before my eyes like a hologram; the theatre programme from the night we first made love and it was all right. Keep the good memories, throw away the bad. What have you got for me? "
The first three drawers were disappointingly innocuous: underwear, T-shirts, socks, jogging suits and shorts. When Tony opened the bottom drawer, he sighed in satisfaction. The drawer contained McConnell's S&M gear handcuffs, leather restraint straps, cock rings, whips, and a clutch of items that looked to Brandon as if they ought to be in some kind of laboratory or mental institution. As Tony calmly took them out and examined them, Brandon shuddered.
Tony sat down on the bed and looked around. Slowly, cautiously, he tried to construct a picture of the man who lived in this room.
"You like to exercise power through violence," he thought.
"You enjoy the flow of pain in your sexual experience. But there's no subtlety here.
No sign that you're a man who plans things with care and detail.
You worship your body. It's a temple to you. You've achieved things, and you're proud of that. You're not socially inadequate. You manage to share a house with two other men, and you're not obsessive about your privacy, since there's no lock on the door. You don't have a problem with your sexuality, and you're comfortable with the idea of picking up a man in a club, provided you have the chance to get to know him a bit first. "
His picture-building was interrupted by Brandon.
"Look at this.
Tony! " he said excitedly. The ACC had been painstakingly going through a shoebox full of papers, mostly receipts, electrical guarantees, bank and credit-card statements. The box was almost empty, but now, he held out a flimsy slip of paper.
Tony took it. It was some kind of official police form. He frowned.
"What's this?"
"It's the form you get when an officer stops you in a car and you haven't got your documents with you. You have to take them to a police station within a fixed period, so they can check everything's in order. Look at the name of the officer," Brandon urged.
Tony looked again. The name that had at first seemed a scrawled jumble suddenly resolved itself into
"Connolly'.
"I recognized his number," Brandon said.
"You can hardly make out the name."
"Shit," Tony breathed.
"Damien Connolly must have stopped him for some minor traffic offence, or just on a spot check, and asked him to produce his documents," Brandon said.