Sonata of the Dead Page 16

  ‘Who’s Patrick Simm?’

  ‘He’s an agent. One of his writers submitted to the anthology.’

  ‘Where’s he based?’ I said.

  ‘Albemarle Street,’ she said, super-fast, all too happy to get me off her back. ‘Patrick reckons we can all come out of this like cats in the cream.’

  ‘There’ll be stuff in that folder that the police can use. Evidence that could put somebody very dangerous away. Every minute you keep hold of that, with your thoughts full of cash, is another minute this lunatic is free. And another minute closer to another body. Let me come and take it off your hands.’

  ‘I don’t know who the bloody hell you are. You’re not police. You could be him for all I know. This killer. This lunatic.’

  I lost my temper then and started yelling at her. When I calmed down I could hear that she’d killed the line.

  I wanted bed and Radio 3 and mano-a-cato wrestling bouts laced with vodka and bowls of wasabi nuts. But my free time had fucked off again, like a thief with a swag bag.

  18

  Patrick Simm was based on Albemarle Street, a pleasant road off Piccadilly filled with art galleries. He worked on his own and had garnered something of an aggressive reputation, working late when everyone else had bunked off, refusing to take no for an answer where his clients were concerned. He was known as the Honey Badger. I’d assumed he wouldn’t be enamoured of this title, or at least be indifferent about it, but there, on a table after he’d buzzed me up to his first-floor office, was a stuffed honey badger in a glass case. The floor of this diorama was littered with bones, spectacles, bow ties and swatches of tweed. A shredded piece of paper with the word CONTRACT written at the top.

  ‘Come in, young chap,’ he said. ‘My PA, Polly, is off shedding babies or some such. So I’m making my own tea and answering my own calls. Right. So, how can I divest you of your shirt?’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘Apologies… force of habit. It’s my ice-breaker at meetings. What can I do for you? You mentioned on the phone something about cranks?’

  ‘It’s a little more serious than cranks,’ I said. He gestured to a Windsor chair with a comb back. I sat down and refused his offer of tea. I wanted to get out of here. I didn’t like his honey badger; it gave off a whiff of something chemical – formaldehyde, perhaps… naphthalene, I don’t know – that hung heavily in the stuffy room and turned my stomach. I didn’t like Simm either. I didn’t like his pinstripe shirt and white collar, nor the way he didn’t seem to blink at all, like a lizard.

  ‘How do you mean?’ he asked.

  I didn’t like his questions either. There was something… compliant about them, as if he was indulging me. As if he knew exactly what was going on.

  ‘Two people are dead. We are assuming they were killed by the same person. The people who were killed were members of a writers’ group.’

  ‘A writers’ group.’ He couldn’t keep the disdain from his voice.

  ‘That’s right,’ I said. ‘Based in London. A committed bunch of writers. What, that doesn’t please you? There could be a future literary star in their midst. Someone you could play sycophantic parasite to.’

  The shutters lowered on those unblinking eyes. ‘It’s not all about money, my job, you know. I offer a certain level of pastoral care to my clients, all of whom, it should be said, are very happy with the services I provide.’

  ‘My apologies,’ I said. ‘I went for the theatrical perception of a ten-percenter, and I was wrong to do so.’

  ‘You were,’ he said. ‘I charge twenty per cent.’ The smile returned. It was like black poison spreading across his face.

  ‘I think the person who did this has got some kind of grudge. But it’s become this twisted, personal thing. Obviously the killer is a psychopath. If you’d seen the bodies…’

  ‘Spare me, please, Mr Sorrell,’ Simm said, holding up his hands. ‘I read a lot of unsavoury material during office hours. I don’t need to hear about the real-life unpleasantness.’

  ‘Something was found in the vicinity of both victims. A book. We don’t yet know if it was something in their possession, or whether it was planted by the killer.’

  ‘A calling card.’

  ‘Maybe,’ I said.

  ‘The same book at both locations?’

  I nodded.

  ‘Seems unlikely to be a coincidence, wouldn’t you say?’

  ‘Unlikely, yes,’ I said. ‘But possible. People read.’

  ‘Yes, but… what was this book?’

  I told him.

  ‘Hmm,’ he said, and steepled his fingers, rested his bottom lip against them. His fingers were thin and long. ‘You’ve spoken to Tula Barnes I take it?’

  ‘Yes, she told me to speak to you.’

  He smiled. It was the smile of a shark before it bites your leg off. ‘Delightful woman. Pissed as a nappy half the time, mind.’

  ‘Anyway,’ I said. ‘This book.’

  ‘Commercially speaking, short stories aren’t the thing these days,’ he said. ‘Novels are where it’s at. Most people don’t read short stories, more’s the pity.’

  ‘So you’re saying it’s probably a plant. Because of current tastes.’

  ‘Well, a big name can sometimes carry what otherwise might be seen as a niche product.’

  ‘I think the killer might be one of the writers.’

  ‘Why?’ he asked. He was smiling. Again I got the feeling he knew more than he was letting on. I wanted to jab a finger at his face and get him to blink. I had the fear he might only do so when alone, and then with some kind of third eyelid.

  ‘I have no idea. But two of these writers in this group evidently did something to piss off this maniac. Maybe he was a member once upon a time. Maybe, when he asked for feedback, they gave it to him. And he didn’t like it.’

  ‘You think he killed people because his ego was bruised?’

  ‘Happens all the time.’

  ‘And he left a copy of the book with them to show that he had the last laugh? Difficult to enjoy that kind of victory when the reader is no longer capable of reading.’

  ‘It’s my understanding that he spent some quality time with them before he ended their lives.’

  ‘Ah,’ Simm said. ‘How pleasant.’

  ‘So I just wanted to talk with some industry professionals and see if they might have heard of any… strange goings on. I’m guessing you all have fingers in each other’s pies… You go to the same book fairs, you know the same people, the same names in the same publishing houses bid for your writers… Have you heard anything on the grapevine?’

  ‘No,’ he said. All too quickly. And with that little smile on his face. His stare dared me to contradict him.

  I sighed and sat back. His desk was one of those beautiful old things with a leather top. Way too big for anybody, apart from maybe generals and majors pushing plastic tanks around a map. There was a penis substitute fountain pen, and an ostentatious bottle of violet ink. A letter opener. A tiny red laptop that was probably just blushing at the ridiculous proportional contrast. A handwritten note that was half concealed by a book on top. It was signed Pol. My eye lingered on what text I could read:

  tand, Pat, I’m not

  ed to come in under

  ances. I fully accept

  ind another PA. I need

  hink things over. I had

  shock, you must see that.

  y mother’s until next week.

  mber (only in emergencies) is

  And then he must have noticed my scrutiny because he casually slid the book further over so that the entire letter was obscured. I’d seen the number, though. A Brighton number. I feverishly repeated it in my mind until I had it fixed there. I had no idea what I intended to do, but I knew Simm wasn’t sharing his sweets with me and I needed some leverage from somewhere. This so-called baby machine Polly – who had clearly been scared out of town by something – might provide it.

  ‘You’re always on the lookout for
a fresh angle, I’d have thought. Is that right, Mr Simm?’

  ‘I’m always on the lookout for impactful writing. A strong voice.’

  ‘But the zeitgeist exists, and you must have an eye on its coat-tails, if you’re a successful agent.’

  ‘Is there a point to this? Christ, you’re not a writer are you? If you are I hope you can spin a story better than you vocalise one.’

  ‘My point is that this hack… if he is a disgruntled writer, you might be able to make some dirty coin off the back of his arrest. If, say, there was a manuscript that he’d written. If, say, he’d submitted it to an agency with a view to securing representation.’

  Simm blinked at last. It was a slow blink, the kind one affords an imbecile just before one explains what it is about them that is so imbecilic.

  ‘We get a lot of manuscripts every week,’ he said. He indicated a pile four feet high in one corner of the room. ‘Those are submissions I received just this month. I’d say maybe one manuscript in every fifty is worth reading to the end. All those hundreds of manuscripts… I might take on two or three new clients a year. How many of those tomes are written by whackos? All of ’em. Some of my best clients are utter fruit bats. Writers, Mr Sorrell. All of them self-obsessed, paranoid pricks. They magpie feelings, emotions, episodes witnessed in other people’s lives, rehash it all and serve it up as original fiction, framed in a nice little plotty world. It’s all lies. Badly written lies at that. I polish turds for a living. That’s ninety per cent of what I do.’

  ‘So nothing out of the ordinary?’

  ‘Define “ordinary”.’

  ‘Never mind,’ I said. ‘I can find my own way out.’

  I resisted the urge to kick his stupid glorified weasel display across the room. I said, ‘Any more bloodshed it’s on your hands. And I will come for you. I’ll staple your eyelids to your fucking forehead and then you won’t be able to blink even if you want to.’

  * * *

  I called the number as soon as I was at street level. I walked towards Bond Street and shot a glance at his office window. He was there, behind the net curtains, like an etiolated revenant in a black-and-white horror film who did his own stunts and didn’t need make-up.

  She picked up and she sounded raw, on edge.

  ‘Is this Polly?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Who are you?’

  ‘He’s killed twice, you know. Martin Gower in Enfield and Malachi Dawe in Shepherd’s Bush. That one was just today. He’ll kill again. How do we stop him, do you think?’

  ‘Are you police? Did you speak to Patrick?’

  ‘He told me you were having a baby.’

  ‘He what?’ There was a knocking, and a muffled thump; I thought she’d either dropped the phone or hurled it across the room. ‘The bloody bastard,’ she said, eventually. ‘The bloody fool bastard.’

  ‘What happened, Polly… may I call you Polly? What happened to get you riled up? Why did you leave work and go to your mother’s?’

  She sounded guarded and scared. But also, it seemed, on the brink of gushing, as if she’d been desperate for the opportunity to divest herself of some onerous burden, or shackles that had been locked around her wrists by a Mellivora capensis with an overactive thyroid.

  ‘I open his post. All the letters and bills, and all the manuscripts too. I have to separate the material sent by clients from the hopefuls, you know…’

  ‘The slush pile. The chaff. Yes, I saw it. I asked Patrick if there’d been anything delivered that was out of the ordinary.’

  I heard another noise now, another muffled thump, though this resolved itself into a sob. When she came back on her voice was strangled with emotion. ‘He took it off me as soon as he heard me… as soon as I opened it. He heard me. I suppose I must have sworn, or made some sort of noise. A cry of disgust.’

  I rubbed my face. Polly sounded like the kind of highly strung individual who would make a noise of horror if someone opened a curtain too quickly, or overcooked a boiled egg.

  ‘What was it?’

  ‘There was blood,’ she said. ‘A manuscript. Horrible thing. Dirty. Fingerprints. Typed on the back of pre-used pages. Circulars. It was stained with coffee. Wine. Other stuff…’

  ‘This can’t be the first time you received anything… dodgy through the post,’ I said. ‘Don’t you have some sort of company policy?’

  ‘Usually we’d bin it straight away. And report it to the police. But Simm swept it all up and took it into his office.’

  ‘Anything with an address on it?’

  ‘I read some of it. The first page. I don’t usually; it’s not my job of course, but I needed to know… I needed to know what kind of mind could produce something like that.’

  ‘An address, Polly.’

  ‘It was terrible. Ugly. Inhuman. It wasn’t fiction. It was fact dressed up as fiction. But Simm was adamant. He said we needed to keep it just in case it turned out to have something to do with the murders. He said we’d all be rolling in clover if he could represent a mad man.’

  ‘Polly, who sent it?’

  ‘I don’t know – it talked about dismemberment. How difficult it is to take a body to pieces.’

  ‘Where is it now? Can you get it?’ I didn’t want to shout in case she dropped the phone again and the link was lost; I doubted she’d pick up again. Despite that I wanted to reach through the wires and grab her around the throat and throttle an answer out of her. I wasn’t sure she could even hear me any more.

  But then: ‘It will be in his safe. In the office. Unless he took it home with him.’

  Every possibility, every chance to get nearer to this killer seemed to fork into multiple options. Not for the first time I wished for access to the police’s resources.

  ‘Do you have the combination to his safe?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes. But I don’t want to have to touch it again. I washed and washed my hands…’

  ‘Polly, I just need to see it. Maybe just take one page. We need something to work with. Patrick might be in danger.’

  ‘And me too,’ she said, in a voice leaden with awful epiphany.

  ‘We’re all at risk,’ I said. ‘Anyone caught up in this.’

  She gave me Simm’s home address and the office safe’s access code and told me again, firmly, that she would help me no further. Her tone was relaxing though, softening. I was gearing up to try to work on her to go to the office for me when she gently put the phone down.

  I nipped into a bar and ordered a beer. I stared at it and wondered what to do. I could march back to the Honey Badger’s lair and force him to hand over the manuscript or I could go to his house and wait for him there; either choice, though attractive because it meant I’d get to manhandle the oily wanker, would only mean settling myself even deeper in to the trough of shit outside Mawker’s door. Simm might be seriously hindering progress on this case but I would be involved in an assault charge if I wasn’t careful.

  And there was always the possibility that this grubby stack of pages might just have nothing to do with the deaths, a writer who hadn’t observed the basic list of dos and don’ts involved when submitting work for consideration. But I couldn’t entertain that possibility. I knew in my tripes that this was a bona fide lead. Simm knew it too, and wanted to get rich off the back of it. I swallowed half the pint, then the rest, trying to get the vile flavours of his intentions out of my mouth. Fuck the assault charge: I was going to pan the cunt.

  I got back to his office and leaned on the buzzer. No response. I stepped back into the road and scanned his windows but there were no umbrella-eyed ghosts capering at the curtains. He’d gone out possibly to butter up some unscrupulous publisher with pound signs branded on his heart.

  I buzzed the other offices but nobody was home, or they’d decided against letting in the shady character they could see on their entry cameras.

  I went around the back. There was a fire escape but it looked rustier than Ian Mawker’s pick-up lines. I’d have to chance it
. There was a wall topped with razor wire so I tossed my jacket over and climbed up; I left the jacket where it was in case I needed to make a quick escape, then headed up the fire escape. As soon as I planted one boot upon it I knew it was fifty-fifty as to whether it would stay attached to the wall, or me to the stairs. It was corroded right through in places. It was like trying to climb a series of wafers.

  Central London. Late. Me climbing the wall of a prominent building in an affluent area. Me, not looking affluent. Me, looking effluent. I was bound to be spotted. I reckoned I had ten minutes. Which probably meant five.

  I took baby steps all the way. The fire escape groaned and swayed, and dry red rain landed in my hair and on my shoulders. I could see the screws and bolts dancing in their sockets. I reached an opaque window with a crack running diagonally through it. A toilet on Simm’s floor. I placed my boot against the glass and tested it. The putty was old and crumbly. The crack spawned others. I pressed harder, trying to resist the temptation to kick the thing in as hard as possible. I didn’t want to attract any unwarranted attention, nor sever my femoral artery. A large wedge of glass came free. I was able to waggle the rest loose after that.

  I slipped into a narrow WC made narrower by cairns of toilet paper rolls ranged along one wall. There was a smell of apple Glade, bleach, and something older and more acrid. Simm’s piss, most likely. Out into a gloomy corridor. There were the stairs I’d taken earlier. I went into Simm’s office, fully expecting him to be sitting behind his desk perfecting his gecko look. But the room was empty. I checked his drawers in case he’d positioned the manuscript close to hand but he kept only the usual desk accoutrements here: business cards, comp slips, notebooks and pens.

  I found his safe inside an attractive oak cupboard. Once I’d dialled in the combination, I opened it and looked inside. A tin of petty cash, some signed contracts. And a buff-coloured A4 envelope inside a clear plastic bag. I took it out, holding it gingerly by the edges. There were no stamps on it, no evidence of it having been fed through a franking machine. The address itself was restricted to SIMM. ALBEMARLE. No return details.