Sonata of the Dead Page 10

  11

  I didn’t want cold chicken and leaves. I didn’t want white wine. I wanted a greasy, hot burger with everything on it, and a frosty beer to help it down. I stretched and looked out upon Marylebone, wondering how long I’d been out. The day had a glow to it, suggesting dawn or dusk, and I guessed evening because I had a cocktail pang in me and, screwed though my body clock undoubtedly was, I never yearned for vodka first thing. Much. So that meant I’d been out for nine hours or thirty-three hours. And I guessed the long haul because of the rasp of my chin. And the fact that Mengele had been creating more satanic effigies in his litter tray.

  I showered and dressed and went out into the balmy evening. My mind was full of blue crosses. Edgware Road was its usual polyglot scrum of charcoal and shisha and crawling, honking traffic. A little rain and neon and it would pass for Blade Runner country. I sated my meaty needs at a bar and grill where I was tempted to plant my flag and stay until closing: it was beer-drinking weather and there were pleasant-looking women walking by that I could watch while I drank, but Sarah. But Sarah. She kept me moving.

  I studiously avoided looking up at Marble Arch Tower, but noticed that the roads around it had been closed off; the reason for the slow traffic. A sign warned against falling masonry. Another spoke of unstable structures. I could have worn that one.

  By the time I got to Green Park it was dark and I’d bypassed any number of bars and pubs but I was a good man, a considerate dad, and I did not waver. Of course, I had chosen not to bring the Saab with me because once my mission was accomplished I intended to turn myself into a human cocktail shaker.

  I reached Birdcage Walk around ten minutes later. I found the tree with the blue mark – I felt like a spy in a Cold War drama; I felt like Quiller, like fucking Smiley – and I leaned against it for a while, watching the traffic, looking out for Max von Sydow or Patrick Stewart. Then I pretended to tie my shoelace and had a grope around between the roots. A piece of paper was thumbtacked into the wood. Many holes told of many previous messages. I felt a strange resentment that this had been going on without me for so long. I imagined Sarah bending here to retrieve, or plant, some code of her own.

  Quaint. It had been typed:

  corkscrew. you’re in.

  51°28’59.58”N 0°10’11.63”W

  09.04. @ 0200

  I pocketed the scrap, realising it should have gone in an evidence bag straight to Ian Mawker, realising too late I should have picked it up with tweezers, or worn latex gloves, and I nipped over to the Westminster Arms. A pint down and I was feeling twitchy. Usually I’d be settling in for a long session; there was often a couple of Met officers with their beers and whisky chasers whose backs I could scratch, but now I just felt kettled. I wanted to be out in the nighttime again, prowling.

  Something else was bothering me too, but I couldn’t put my finger on what it was. It was perhaps just the combined triple whammy of adrenaline, hope and frustration. The Accelerants had… well, they had accelerated me. I felt the need to run, to fly. And yet. And yet.

  Another meeting? Tomorrow night? It didn’t sit well with their ethos. Yes, they forced experience but they wrote too; and they shared. There was a reason for a gap between meetings. A chance to let off steam. An opportunity to take stock, recover. And to read the submissions.

  Which reminded me of the papers that were still in my jacket. I spread them out on the table. Three single sheets of different quality paper. No identifying marks. All pages handwritten.

  Before I’d properly thought it through I was on the phone.

  ‘Romy? It’s Joel. Are you busy? I was just… would you like to be? Well, no. I meant busy in a fun way. Well, that’s great. I’m in town. Victoria way if that helps. Yes, yes I like beer. Yes, yes I like football. Okay. Okay. See you there.’

  * * *

  She was sitting in a corner booth of a sports bar in Haymarket and there was a fresh pitcher of lager in front of her. Two glasses. The place was crammed with men wearing pastel-coloured polo shirts and placing in-play bets on their smartphones.

  ‘I didn’t interrupt anything, did I?’ I asked, looking around.

  ‘I was about to leave,’ she said. ‘A friend stood me up at the last minute. And then your call came through so I bought this.’

  She poured and I drank. She held her glass with both hands, like a child, and closed her eyes when she took her first mouthful.

  ‘Oof,’ she said. ‘That’s good.’

  ‘That was the drink of a person who has just walked out of the desert,’ I said.

  ‘Feels like it. Had a tough couple of days.’

  ‘I know how that feels.’

  ‘So I watch football to unwind.’

  ‘Really?’ I said. ‘It doesn’t relax me. I end up swearing at the set.’

  She took another drink, leaned back in her seat. On the screen, ex-players in panic-inducingly expensive suits and fuck-me haircuts bantered around a pitch-side table.

  ‘That’s because you’re partisan. You’re invested.’

  ‘You’re not?’

  She shook her head. ‘Itinerant upbringing. Didn’t stay in one place for long enough to swear allegiance. I’m as neutral as it gets. I just like to watch. The patterns. The shapes. The flow.’

  ‘So what’s on tonight?’ Screens upon screens. Giant screens. Tiny corner screens. Personal screens on tables. So many screens you’d be hard pressed not to catch the match at all, even if you were a dwarf with cataracts. In a different bar.

  ‘Champions League semi-final, first leg.’

  ‘Who’s playing?’

  ‘No idea.’ She looked at my clothes. ‘Red versus blue. France versus England. Expansive versus cautious.’

  ‘You could be describing us.’

  ‘Experience versus youth.’

  ‘Very good,’ I said. ‘Very funny.’

  ‘So how come you’re out on a school night?’ she asked. ‘Adult education class in professor impersonation?’

  On the screens overpaid, oily-haired prongs stood in the tunnel. And that was just the match officials. Smoke from a flare turned the stands into a ghost-red battle zone. The bar management ramped up the volume and the Champions League theme shook our glasses.

  ‘No more professors,’ I said. I’d gone through my beer as if it were water. I realised I was nervous. She poured me another glass. ‘I’ve been looking into a death. Someone was murdered a couple of days ago. In Enfield. He knew my daughter.’

  ‘I don’t know what I can do to help.’

  ‘Possibly nothing. It doesn’t matter. But I was wondering if there was someone at the museum who could look at some documents for me.’

  ‘You mean me?’

  ‘Of course I do. I’m rubbish at being direct.’

  ‘What sort of documents?’

  I pulled the pages from my jacket and handed them over. She took another deep drink and studied them.

  ‘My uncle would have been all over this,’ she said.

  ‘Your uncle?’

  ‘He was involved in the Zodiac killings back in the sixties and seventies.’

  ‘No kidding.’

  ‘Yeah. He was one of the team who studied the notes Zodiac sent to the San Francisco Chronicle.’

  ‘And you got into palaeography because of him?’

  ‘Kind of. But I’m more involved with manuscript dating.’

  ‘You just haven’t met the right man yet.’

  ‘Very good,’ she said. ‘Very funny.’

  ‘So maybe you can’t help.’

  She licked the ball of her thumb and winked. ‘Let’s see what we can do for you,’ she said. ‘I happen to have a deep interest in the utterly pointless science of graphology.’

  I drank. I watched players roll around on the grass as if the pitch was littered with landmines. Spittle arced. Arms swarmed with tattoos containing more ink than a David Foster Wallace novel.

  ‘This is pretty rough handwriting,’ she said. ‘Probably written by
someone who doesn’t sleep enough. It’s jittery. Slants to the right, which suggests confidence, assertiveness, perhaps even a level of insensitivity. But pressure is light, and that is linked to people with low emotional energy. The ink colour – blue – is conservative; I imagine this is a person who is not at all showy, who probably dresses without flair. Someone who sees clothes and food as essentials, chores even. This person has no interest in putting forward any kind of image; this person does not eat for pleasure.’

  ‘You can tell all this from the loop on a “g”?’

  ‘Oh yes,’ she said. ‘And much more besides.’

  I was thinking of Treacle. He cared about his appearance: that strategically positioned tuft of hair that peeked from under his beanie was evidence of that.

  ‘Like what?’ I asked.

  ‘Sex.’

  ‘You can tell the gender from the handwriting?’

  ‘Well, yes – this is a guy, for example. Obvious because of the content too, of course, but I was referring to sex. Fucking.’

  I choked a little on my beer. On the screens the referee ran backwards away from a bearded, shaven-headed footballer clearly screaming that I never fucking touched him, ref, you shithouse.

  ‘This guy, he holds something back in bed. He won’t give himself completely. Unlike our footballers here, he doesn’t give a hundred and ten per cent.’

  I thought of Underdog and his perpetual pout. Maybe he was wanting in the generative organ stakes. Maybe he had a cock like a tube of damp macaroni.

  ‘He’s emotionally stunted. Prone to violence. Has a victim mentality.’

  ‘Hang on,’ I said. I reached across and took my letter to ‘Rosie’ from her; I’d forgotten to separate it from the other sheets. I folded it and placed it in my pocket. I gave her a painful little smile. She gave me a painful little smile.

  ‘Like you said,’ I said. ‘An utterly pointless science.’

  She nodded. Bit her lip. ‘Her name’s not Rosie, is it?’

  My head snapped up. ‘What makes you say that?’ If I was so transparent maybe the Accelerants could see through me too. It’s not as if you get a chance to rehearse this shit, to test it on an audience before the real thing.

  ‘Little clues. The tip of the pen did a tiny dance at the point where you started writing the name, as if you’d hesitated. The name didn’t flow with the same loose action that serviced the words surrounding it, which suggests it’s not as known to your fingers as the name of a daughter ought to be.’

  ‘Right,’ I said, and rubbed my face. Utterly pointless… I gestured at the other pages. ‘What can you tell me about those?’

  On the screens, a footballer wearing an Alice band pressed his fingers against one side of his nose and blew a gout of snot from the other. How long before someone pissed against a corner flag or took a shit in the penalty box? How long before somebody rubbed one out in the centre circle?

  ‘Her name’s Sarah,’ I said.

  * * *

  It was interesting, what she came up with, but it was an inexact science at best. Also, because the pages were anonymous I didn’t know who it was that had perhaps suffered a hand injury as a child, or who was likely to be unfaithful, or who was on medication, probably for a disease of the digestive system. Or whether any of that was of the slightest relevance or importance.

  We’d moved on from the sports bar after the match was finished. I’d been impressed by her reading of the game – she understood the tactical switches better than the commentator or his ex-pundit sidekick.

  ‘You’ll get yourself sacked,’ I said, as she let herself into the staff entrance of the British Museum.

  ‘Nonsense,’ she said. ‘I have clearance. I also have a very nice bottle of cognac in my office, a gift from a friend when I got this job.’

  ‘A friend,’ I said. ‘Would that be code for a man? A boyfriend? A husband?’

  ‘No code,’ she said, walking ahead of me up the stairs. I heard the shush of nylon. Her hair shook: ripples in molasses. ‘But what would it be to you if it was?’

  ‘Nothing,’ I said. And I meant it. She was beautiful and spirited and kind-hearted; all the things I was not. I was not in her league. If she was a Premiership footballer, I was a crocked sub in a Sunday pub team. If she had a thing for foul-mouthed fuck-ups, that was nice. But I couldn’t allow what happened before to happen again.

  She let us into the office she shared with a colleague and retrieved the bottle from a desk drawer, along with a couple of collapsible plastic wine glasses.

  ‘Tres posh,’ I said, sitting on her chair.

  ‘Bien sûr,’ she said, pouring us a couple of generous measures. ‘Only the best for our professors.’

  She was right; it was good. If you like that sort of thing. I craved ice and clarity. But it was smooth and warming. There was enough cold in me to keep me going.

  Her desk was disappointingly barren. Apart from a PC and an in/out tray, there was nothing of note. No framed photographs, no notebooks bearing her own no doubt inscrutable handwriting, no nick-nacks or gee-gaws. Maybe she just hadn’t been in the job long enough. Or maybe she was one of those psychopathic minimalists who are obsessed with clean surfaces and masters of storage fu.

  We spent an hour in her office sipping XO while she showed me – wearing latex gloves – a fragment from an eleventh-century manuscript written on palm leaves found in Nepal, and I tried hard to concentrate, but I noticed a button had worked itself loose on her blouse and I could see the firm sweep of her tummy within the gap, the eggshell-blue curve of her bra. I couldn’t tell her, obviously, and a little while later she noticed and fastened it and gave me an indulgent smile as if she realised I had been leching but that it was no big deal because it probably happened all the time and middle-aged men were no threat, especially when she could go home each evening to her ridiculously chiselled Adonis whose name was Garth or Grant or Alpha-fucking-Male Almighty.

  ‘Penny for your thoughts?’ she asked.

  ‘Oh, I just realised I’m out of Fishbitz. You know. Cat.’

  ‘You have a cat?’ she asked, excitedly. And so we spent the short walk to the Tube talking about my cat (‘What’s his name?’ ‘Men… um… Mencap… after the charity…’ Christ…) and how much Romy loved cats and how she was planning to get one as soon as she could find a place of her own because her dad was allergic.

  ‘What now?’ she asked.

  ‘I go back to the hunt.’

  ‘Does it frighten you? Digging in the dark? Is it difficult to do what you do? Difficult to find who’s responsible?’

  ‘Finding who’s responsible isn’t about psychological profiles, or clever detective work. It’s about talking to people. It’s about pulling the lid off the tightly closed ones and getting them to spill what’s inside. Sometimes it’s very messy. Ugly work. And it’s a process of unearthing truth. It’s about walking whatever dark path you can expose. All the way to the end. And I’ll go anywhere.’

  She kissed me on the cheek and I felt her hair brush against me and her breast press for a maddening instant against my arm. Then she was gone into the throat of Tottenham Court Road, on her way back to Professor Ferguson’s house in Hampstead.

  I walked back along Oxford Street and angled towards Marylebone once I hit Selfridges. On Marylebone High Street I saw a guy trying to kiss a girl who was laughing so much she could hardly stand up straight. What utter dicks we make of ourselves, I thought.

  I got back to find Mengele had eschewed his last bowl of Fishbitz for a pigeon he’d caught on the balcony. Feathers and blood everywhere. He placed the pigeon’s head on my pillow and had somehow managed to get it upright. It regarded me with its haughty expression as if to say, Well, what are you going to do about this?

  I cleaned up as best I could, having to risk Mengele’s claws when I teased the pigeon’s feet from his sphere of influence. It was a half-hearted swipe – he must have been stuffed fuller than the gimmick crust on a high street pizza – but a
claw caught my knuckle and sank in and blood rose from the skin like a ruby on an invisible engagement ring.

  ‘Shitweasel,’ I hissed at him. He yawned and narrowed his eyes at me.

  I washed my hand and turned out the lights. My heart was racing. I saw the gap in Romy’s blouse widen, the separating of silk and skin, and I fell through it into a nightmare sea lashed with combers of red foam, and sharks finning through a churn created from all the people I’d loved and lost, and the few I’d finished by my own hand. I was afraid to touch the bodies lying face down on the surface for fear of what they’d reveal when rolled over. I could feel the currents changing beneath my feet. Pressure rising; something nosing through crimson fathoms, hunting me. Something hungry and determined and massive and ancient.

  And nothing, including the sharks, including me, had any life in its eyes.

  12

  I woke to bright sunshine but I couldn’t loosen the feeling of grey from my bones. The dream had stuck in the base of my brain like a layer of grit in a standpipe. I couldn’t shake it.

  I washed in a basin of blistering hot water and breakfasted on a single shot of ice-cold Stoli. It didn’t make me feel better, but it didn’t make me feel any worse.

  The gods of misery had decreed I should be up at the same time as the parents of small children and the poor souls completing ten-till-six shifts. A better man than me would have jogged around Hyde Park for an hour, or read philosophy, or gone for a swim, but all I could do was stare at the clock and count down the hours until I saw the Accelerants again at two a.m.

  Two a.m. What did they do all day? Did they have jobs, or did they enjoy some sort of private income, rich kids who held sway over their parents, privileged, entitled. Spoilt twats. I thought about heading over to Odessa’s house and keeping watch, but I couldn’t decide what it would achieve. Either she worked – in which case I’d follow her to her job location – hairdresser, City worker, barista, rocket scientist – and be none the wiser about what made her tick, or she’d remain at home, writing presumably. Either result was a pointless waste of my time.