Sonata of the Dead Read online

  I copied the names into my notebook and returned the paper to the Block. I resisted the strong temptation to stick around with Gatsby until Odessa returned, convinced we could thrash out the whole mystery if she could give me the addresses of the people on that list. But I knew that was unlikely. This was London and people don’t necessarily stay in one place for long. And just because she had a bunch of names didn’t automatically mean she had a bunch of addresses. Instead I gave the old soldier another chuck under the chin and wished him well. Then I was out and in the car and driving fast, the smell of garlic and paprika in my clothes.

  * * *

  I got home and slung a few back and went to bed with a buzz on and a rage on. Somehow I fell into a shallow sleep and Becs was there, as beautiful as the day I met her and the wind was in her hair and she wore that maddening half smile and a long, cement-coloured knitted dress that clung everywhere. She gently picked the strands of hair from her green-brown eyes and I reached out for her. As soon as my fingers touched her she exploded into the red jigsaw puzzle I’d discovered in my house that night. I tried touching her again, craving some dream logic that might reverse her disablement, but my fingers only made tracks through the blood filming what remained of her face.

  The sun was beating in the sky behind me, casting hot, pulsing shadows over the woman I loved. But that can’t have been right because I found her in raining dark. I cast a glance over my shoulder and the sun was in the room, fierce and red and small. And it beat like a heart, burning, hotter than the breath of the devil.

  I woke up in the airless stove of my bedroom and all I could smell was the bitter, spiced fug of cheap Nicaraguan cigars. I opened the windows and leaned out. Close your eyes and – early morning W1H – you could taste a sweetness in the London air… although at that moment I’d have tasted sweetness with my face inches above the quivering meringues of filth found in Delhi’s most virulent hovels.

  I swilled down a couple of painkillers and wrote my mother a postcard. She’d love it: I hadn’t sent her a handwritten note since I was a homesick school kid on a weekend trip to Shropshire. She’d hate it: I only had one postcard in the flat, an H.R. Giger of a creature with a drainpipe for a penis blowing mucus-covered deformities out of the end. I think that one must have been from Giger’s rose period.

  I flipped open the laptop and went hunting for new names. Ben George: nothing useful. Rory Melling. Used to live in Camden Town. Long gone. Yvonne Gibson. I found a dead one, zonked by an aortic dissection. Same person? Who knows? Scott Dennis. Thousands of the fuckers. North, east, south, west. Veronica Lake. Dead Hollywood actress. Barbara Parker. By then I’d lost the will to live. London. I remembered the first time I’d arrived here. I thought the city was laid out for me. I thought I was the city. You’ve not seen my like before. I’ll tame you. I’ll change you. Yeah, right. You’re a temporary skidmark. You’re an immediate ghost. At best. Everyone drifts through this place, this eternal processing zone, this grand old charnel house. Fast turnover. This place ate you up and spat you out. Moorgate. Isle of Dogs. Strand. Weialala leia, Wallala leialala.

  Madness descending. I had to talk to someone. I pulled my phone out and quick-dialled.

  His voice, thick with sleep. ‘Sorrell.’

  ‘I’ve got a favour to ask,’ I said.

  I heard the flapping of duvet as he failed to maintain any vestiges of calm. Feet thumping on floor. Magazine pages sliding off the bed. I shuddered to think what he’d been reading.

  ‘Favour my bollocks,’ he snarled. ‘Do me a favour. Get yourself down to the copshop so we can put some irons on you.’

  ‘I’ve done nothing wrong, Mawker. Come on. If you were that serious, you’d have put a foot through my door.’

  ‘You need to wind your neck in, Sorrell. Let us do our job. You’re muddying waters.’

  ‘What is your job?’ I asked. ‘I don’t remember “being a cunt” on the list the careers advisor brought to school. I’d love to know what you’ve been up to since Martin Gower was found.’

  ‘Ditto,’ Mawker said. Now I could hear his feet on the stairs, slapping on lino in his Ealing misery hole. The tinkle of cornflakes in a bowl. A radio snapping into life: Deacon Blue.

  ‘You know what depresses me?’ I said.

  ‘Loyalty?’ Mawker suggested. ‘Honest work? Human decency?’

  ‘When DJs refer to the music of my youth as Golden Oldies,’ I said. ‘I mean, I use the stairs whenever there’s a lift option. If I kick a football, it stays kicked, and I remain upright. I don’t have any problem pulling my socks on. I don’t have any grey pubes.’

  ‘Thanks for sharing,’ he said. I heard a kettle whistling. I heard something launch itself from a toaster. It all sounded like domestic bliss but I couldn’t shake the image of him sitting in his own filth in a rat-infested dump playing breakfast SFX through a tape recorder. We all have our favourite fantasies.

  ‘Do you know what you and Deacon Blue have in common?’ I said.

  ‘Well now,’ he said, equably. Track six: butter scraped across a pikelet. ‘I’m not Scottish. I don’t play any musical instruments. So I can only offer conjecture that you believe we share some level of cuntdom as yet unattainable by the common man.’

  ‘You seem unusually relaxed,’ I said. ‘What happened last night? Did you fuck something living for a change?’

  ‘What do you want, Sorrell? Some of us have got real lives to lead. People will start to talk. You can’t stay off the phone to me. People will think you’ve got a crush on me.’

  ‘I’d love to have a literal crush on you,’ I said. ‘Don’t forget to pilot your ship called Dignity into the nearest harbour of shit.’

  ‘I’m putting the phone down.’

  ‘I want to see Graeme Tann.’

  ‘Oh, fuck off. You are kidding me.’

  ‘I was offered the chance to see him once, remember? To spend some quality time with him, when you brought him in. And I couldn’t. I couldn’t do it.’

  ‘Well you won’t get any quality time with him now,’ Mawker said. ‘That horse has bolted.’

  ‘This is my daughter we’re talking about, Ian,’ I said.

  ‘No it’s not. And it never was. Do you understand? Your daughter is incidental to all of this. As is Graeme Tann. She knew Martin Gower, a guy who was murdered. That’s it. I told you because I wanted to help. To give you a lead. It was a favour. It was not a fucking invitation. Not to have you impersonate the police. Not to have you disappear and walk your muddy footprints all over my fucking case.’

  ‘If my daughter is involved in all this… If my daughter dies—’

  ‘We’ll end up picking up the pieces. We’ll be the ones who catch her killer. You’d better hope you don’t get in the way any more. You don’t want this on your hands. You don’t want to fuck up, here, Sorrell.’

  ‘I just want to talk to him.’

  ‘Walk away from it, Sorrell. Forget about him. He’s rotting in a cell.’

  ‘I need it.’

  ‘Why?’

  I started laughing. It was hard, spiky laughter, razoring through my throat as if I was pulling out yard after yard of barbed wire. I didn’t think I could stop. In the end I was able to put a cap on it. A headache was caroming around my head; I wasn’t even sure if Mawker was on the line any more.

  I said: ‘For the experience.’

  ‘B LUEBOTTLE JAM’

  1 OCT 1988 BY RONNIE

  MAIN CHARACTERS

  Alexander Fox: ‘Ali’

  Brian Grey: ‘Moon’

  Gordon Thomas: ‘Thommo’

  Stephen Spence: ‘Croc’

  SUB CHARACTERS

  Joanna Gifford

  Henry Shetton

  Robert Fox

  Melissa Fox

  Part One – Rumours

  Part Two – Reality

  CHAPTER 1

  I lie asleep in bed, but only sometimes. Mostly I’m awake, struggling with my fear of the dark, conscious of the sweat
on my forehead. Conscious of the cruel silence. After ten years the dreams still bother me. Ten years.

  Sometimes, when I’m awake, the sheets becoming oiled with perspiration, I hear a dog barking in the night. Sometimes I want to scream when I hear that. When I hear a dog barking, it takes me back. Like tonight for instance. The dog barked and that was it. Sleep stays away.

  So I’m sitting here. Looking out on to my street. It’s quite chilly, and all I have on is a pair of shorts, but I’m sweating.

  It is a cold February night. It has been raining; I can see puddles of water on the pavement and the road is shiny and wet. The streetlights are dripping and tears of rain runnel the windows.

  The moon is full, the colour of ice that has strong light glinting on it. Almost blue in its brightness.

  I can’t see the dog but I can hear it. I think it belongs to number 27 or 29. I’m not sure. It sounds like a big dog. Not necessarily mean. But big. An alsatian. Or a doberman. A rottweiler.

  I can feel the cold now. My arms have become covered with a layer of goosepimples. A car crawls past my house. I’ve got a notebook in front of me. One of the thick ones with the large spiralling metal rings that keep the paper together. I’m doodling.

  I read what was on the cover and managed a smile. I don’t smile much these days because there is nothing much to smile about.

  The notebook is an old one, intended to record the events that happened ten years ago. I haven’t written in it. Until now that is.

  The cover is full of messages from my old friends. They are old messages. Stuff like: ‘Bri85’ and ‘Skool stinx’ and ‘Johnno is a geek’.

  The one that made me smile was directed at me, written by a girl in my class in the last year of school. ‘To Ali, we were ships that passed in the night. Love, Joanna.’

  I can conjure up her face in my mind if I try hard enough. Sometimes I wonder what happened with her. Where she went, what she’s doing with her life now.

  Sometimes I wonder what became of all the school friends. It’s natural.

  Only, I know what happened to some of my friends, my close friends.

  And that’s part of the nightmare.

  I’ve started writing. I knew that I would have to get this down at some stage or another. That time has arrived.

  I sit here. A cold, February night. The wind has become strong and clouds – angry, charcoal-coloured ones, have shut out the moon’s light.

  The rain has started again. Spitting lightly on my windows like fingernails tapping softly.

  I hope the dog doesn’t bark again.

  I’m writing faster.

  And the memories are flowing.

  Shelton Farm. Autumn.

  My friends. Moon, Croc and Thommo.

  And Midnight at the start and end of it all.

  14

  I nipped to the cigar terrace at the hotel on Manchester Street and bought a box of Nicaraguan cigars, the best I could afford. The guy I bought them off said the Oliva Serie V Melanio Figurado had been the previous year’s winner of Cigar Aficionado magazine’s top smoke. He kept talking about nuanced leaves and notes of coffee and leather as he wrapped them in gift paper. It all went over my head. I’d just as much inject bleach into my eyeballs as suck on something that would turn my lungs to kippers.

  I got on the motorway fast. I came off the M1 at Aspley Guise and drove through the countryside along ever narrowing B roads until I reached a long approach road to the ten-metre electrified fences around HMP Cold Quay.

  Graeme Tann. I had not seen him since the trial. I had not read the papers or watched the televised bulletins; none of it was news to me, and I didn’t want to see photographs of my wife. I hardly knew anything about him, other than he was a janitor at the leisure centre near where we had once lived, and that he had hidden a camera in the female changing rooms. Out of the hundreds of women who passed through those doors he developed a fixation for Becs. Part of me wanted to know, Why her? But most of the time I was saying, How could he not? I remember a couple of bottles of guilt I drank off the back of feeling more disgusted that his taste in women was impeccable over the horror he had visited upon her.

  And what did I know about him now? Incidentals. Prison life detail. He slept on a mattress that was two inches thick. He now owned three pairs of prison clothes consisting of a dark green shirt displaying his surname and identification number. Someone clipped his finger and toenails once a week. Everything he owned – and none of that was from his life outside – could fit inside the five foot by fifteen inch locker that was kept under his bed. He was in C-wing, unofficially known as Red Row, where they kept the meat-heads, the serial killers, the psychopaths. I knew that his day began at six a.m. with breakfast. There were 200 men on Red Row – nobody ate until every man had arrived at the canteen. Once seated you had ten minutes to eat what had been dumped on your tray. After that came Punishment 60, an hour of ‘free time’ in the quadrangle – the outside communal area. You could exercise out there: they had a cinder running track, they had a stack of free weights, they had batting nets and football goals. There were no cameras here: security was afforded only by a handful of guards on each of the corner towers. If convicts were going to dole out any pain, this was where it happened. I understood that Tann had received a couple of beatings during his time at Cold Quay.

  At eight a.m. everyone returned to their cells for the count. Anyone not sitting nicely on their bunks was red flagged. Three red flags and further punitive action – usually a ban on free time or curtailing of other privileges, sometimes a period in solitary confinement – would follow. Then the wait for the doors to unlock for the next plate of slop, the next hour in the Quad – rain or shine – and lights out at nine p.m.

  I crossed the gravel forecourt to the gate. There were two guards with Armalite rifles slung loosely across their shoulders; one of them was stroking the barrel as he watched me progress. The car that had shadowed me through the Bedfordshire countryside since I slipped off the M1 at Aspley Guise had parked a little distance back; a pair of blank faces tracked me from the front seats. Nobody was taking any chances with this gig.

  Mawker had wanted to accompany me, but I told him I wanted to go it alone. Publicly I explained it was because I didn’t want Tann to have the satisfaction of seeing somebody holding my hand; it was a rite of passage, an exorcising demons process, something I had to do to try to propel me to some halfway normal life path, especially if Sarah was bent on never being reunited with me. Privately it was because I didn’t want him to suffer any fallout were I to launch myself at Tann and try to chew through his carotid artery.

  I was met by the governor’s assistant, a guy called Furniss who had chunky hands with squared-off fingers and doe eyes with long lashes. His body language was professional and warm, but his mouth couldn’t disguise his distaste of me or my reason for this visit. It was curled as if he’d just taken a lick of something rotten. Disdain dripped through his words like venom.

  ‘Welcome to Cold Quay,’ he said.

  Outside the visiting area I was halted in front of a desk, behind which was seated a thickset man with close-cropped silvering hair and damp blue eyes. He looked as if he had worked out a lot in his youth and then let everything slide. He wrote my name down in a ledger and gestured at the box.

  ‘What’s in there?’

  ‘Cigars,’ I said. ‘For Tann.’ I knew full well that he wouldn’t be allowed such luxuries and that they’d be confiscated before I got near him, to be returned to me on my way out. The desk jockey said as much.

  ‘I know,’ I said. ‘But let me tease the bastard, just for a while? It’s a cheap shot, but I don’t have anything else.’ The desk jockey smiled, his lips peeling back to reveal tiny pebble teeth set in broad gums. I was frisked before they opened the doors for me. If the officer who did it noticed how wet the back of my shirt was, he didn’t let on. A buzzer sounded, the door unlocked. I went in.

  All the tables and chairs were bolted to the floo
r. Each set of furniture was accompanied by a steel pivot loop. I sat down and waited. The air was heavy with the smell of Doublemint and Juicy Fruit. The fluorescent tubes arranged across the ceiling bleached the skin and chased away all shadow. One of them was on the fritz and it buzzed and popped erratically, scattering chancy light like a strobe.

  I’d thought about this moment a lot in the years since Tann’s arrest, but I’d never rehearsed it, despite my conviction that I’d meet him some day, face to face. I just never imagined it would be while he was still incarcerated. It was always in some dark alley, or in the kitchen of whatever squalid backwater he found himself in were he to be granted parole. I remember when the life sentence was passed, thinking, Good. I hope he rots in jail. I hope he contracts Hep B. I hope he overdoses on bad gear. I hope someone tears his eyes out and wears them for earrings. But pretty soon after I was fantasising about a day he was allowed to go free so that I could find him and do something to him that would secure a long custodial sentence of my own.

  Buzzers sounding in muffled distance. Bars sliding open and ramming home. I tried to relax. My fingernails were jammed into the tops of my thighs. A shadow falling through reinforced glass and lengthening across the floor towards me. I wondered if my nails were long enough, sharp enough. I wondered if I was quick enough. Would I have time to tear his throat open before the guards fell on me?

  I kept my eyes on the cigar box, even as the shadow stilled, and he sat down before me. I heard the slither of chains as they were fed through the pivot loop. I concentrated on the words:

  Oliva Serie V Melanio… Gran Reserva Limitada

  ‘Hello Joel…’