Read Make Death Love Me for Free Online Page A

a bookcase used as a food store. Nobody had cleaned the place for several years.
    The house was semi-detached, end of a terrace. An Irish girl had one of the rooms next to Marty’s, the one that overlooked the side entrance, and the other had for years been occupied by a deaf old man named Green. There was a lavatory between the Irish girl’s room and the head of the stairs. Half a dozen steps led down to a bathroom which the top-floor tenants shared, and then the main flight went on down to the first floor where a red-haired girl and the man she called her ‘fella’ had a flat, and the ground floor that was inhabited by an out-all-day couple that no one ever saw. Outside the bathroom door was a pay phone.
    On Saturday Marty went down to this phone and got on to a car-hire place in South London called Relyacar Rentals, the idea of stealing a vehicle having been abandoned. Could they let him have a small van, say a mini-van, at nine on Monday morning? They could. They must have his name, please, and would he bring his driving licence with him? Marty gave the name on the licence he was holding in his hand. It had been issued to one Graham Francis Coleman of Wallington in Surrey, was valid until the year 2020, and Marty had helped himself to it out of the pocket of a jacket its owner had left on the rear seat of an Allegro in a cinema car park. Marty had known it would come in useful one day. Next he phoned the Kensington commune and asked Nigel about money. Nigel had only about six pounds of his mother’s loan left and his Social Security Giro wasn’t due till Wednesday, but he’d do his best.
    Nigel had learnt the sense of always telling everyone the same lie, so he announced to his indifferent listeners that he was going off to Newcastle for a couple of weeks. No one said, Have a good time or Send us a card or anything like that. That wasn’t their way. One of the girls said, In that case he wouldn’t mind if her Samantha had his room, would he? Nigel saw his opportunity and said she’d pay the rent then, wouldn’t she? A listless argument ensued, the upshot of which was that no one was violently opposed to his taking ten pounds out of the tin where they kept the rent and light and heat money so long as he put it back by the end of the month.
    With sixteen pounds in his pocket, Nigel packed most of his possessions into a rucksack he borrowed from Samantha’s mother and a suitcase he had long ago borrowed from his own, and set off by bus for Cricklewood. The house where Marty lived was in a street between Chichele Road and Cricklewood Broadway, and it had an air of slightly down-at-heel respectability. In the summer the big spreading trees, limes and planes and chestnuts, made the place damp and shady and even rather mysterious, but now they were just naked trees that looked as if they had never been in leaf and never would be. There was a church opposite that Nigel had never seen anyone attend, and on the street corner a launderette, a paper shop and a grocery and delicatessen store. He rang Marty’s bell, which was the top one, and Marty came down to let him in.
    Marty smelt of the cheap wine he had been drinking, the dregs of which with their inky sediment were in a cup on the kitchen table. Wine, or whisky when he could afford it, was his habitual daily beverage. He drank it to quench his thirst as other people drink tea or water. One of the reasons he wanted money was for the unlimited indulgence of this craving of his. Marty hated having to drink sparingly, knowing there wasn’t another bottle in the kitchen waiting for him to open as soon as this one was finished.
    He swallowed what remained in the cup and then brought out from under a pile of clothes on the mattress an object which he put into Nigel’s hands. It was a small, though heavy, pistol, the barrel about six inches long. Nigel put his finger to the trigger and tried to squeeze it. The trigger moved but