Sonata of the Dead Page 17

  I teased the lips of the envelope open and slipped the manuscript out. No covering letter. No address. A musty, dusty exhalation. I was reminded of old school libraries, mushrooms, wet, autumnal woodlands. There was dried blood on the paper, smears and flecks and droplets. It was creased and torn and aged. But it was not all here. The manuscript started at page 244. Presumably Simm had hived off the first half of it, including whatever prefatory material the writer had included, to take home to read.

  There was another envelope in the safe too. Smaller. Inside this were a series of short notes to Simm, ostensibly from the killer, detailing what he’d done, where, and to whom. These were details that only the police or the killer could know. Or me.

  I stood there, stomach churning, trying to process this, how Simm must have been allowing the deaths to happen knowing that each one might add a zero to any eventual confession.

  I borrowed one of Simm’s envelopes and slid into it half a dozen pages from the middle of the manuscript. Then I took a selfie with the manuscript in front of his safe and emailed it to him, along with the message: You think you’re going to get rich off the back of this wanker but you’re just as much in his sights as anybody. Maybe more so. I can help you. It’s either that or prison for you, you grievous fuckhead.

  I left then, before the residents of W1S could nail me. Maybe they’d kept quiet, afraid of this leather-jacketed Spider-Man. Or more likely ashamed of the rusted fire escape.

  19

  I’d made it to Crawford Street, determined to give Mawker Simm’s head on a platter, when a bronze Audi screeched to a halt in the middle of the road and Underdog leapt out of the passenger seat.

  ‘Get in,’ he said.

  ‘Get fucked,’ I said. ‘I’m busy.’

  He lifted the bottom of his hoodie and showed me the butt of a handgun sticking from his waistband – what looked like a Browning pistol; easy to get hold of, even for a tourist like this joker.

  ‘Oh, the experience of buying a gun. I bet you called it a “piece”, didn’t you? I bet you handed over a “ton” for it, in used twenties.’

  ‘Get in,’ he said again. His face was pale and greasy. His eyes, usually so scornful and languid, now could not be more agitated. The ‘little boy lost’ shimmered just beneath the skin. I got in the back of the car and Underdog slid in beside me. The Browning, like most guns bought in the city on the black market, was probably just for show. A frightener. You had to pay extra for bullets (or ‘food’ as it was known) and once fired, your gun was unlikely ever to be sold again.

  Odessa was behind the steering wheel. She looked similarly pale but it was countered by the inner steel she carried, a gutsiness that Underdog could only acquire by play-acting. But I still suspected him, nonetheless. I still looked at him askance. I imagined him puncturing and hacking. I could see him happily foisting pain and suffering in some twisted, retributive act.

  Underdog slammed the door and we took off. I felt myself being pressed back into the leather.

  ‘Nice car,’ I said. ‘What happened? Did you win first prize in a limerick competition?’

  ‘You know, if I ever had to use this gun on you, I’d shoot it through your cocky fucking mouth first. I mean, don’t you ever shut the fuck up?’

  ‘Shutting the fuck up, sir,’ I said.

  He sighed and there were all kinds of defeat in it. ‘You’re a pain in the arse, Corkscrew,’ he said. And then: ‘Sorrell.’

  ‘Ah,’ I said. ‘You’ve done some sleuthing. How did you find out?’

  ‘It wasn’t hard,’ Underdog said. Triumph laced his voice. ‘I thought there was copper in you so I went and asked the coppers down at Savile Row nick. “Anyone know this gobby scarface who’s always sticking his nose in where it’s not wanted?” Turns out you’re not a copper. At least not any more. Turns out you’re not as anonymous as you’d like to think. They were queuing up to tell me who you were and what a monumental pain in the arsehole you are. One of them even told me you lived on Homer Street. Ask a policeman, they say. Too right.’

  ‘Well done,’ I said, making a mental note to scour the cunts at West End Central, find their snitch and perform the Riverdance on his face. ‘So why don’t we stop playing silly buggers and come clean on everybody’s name. I’m fed up of all this Mission Impossible shit.’

  ‘Fuck you,’ Underdog said. ‘I know you. You don’t need to know m—’

  ‘He’s Sean. Sean Niker,’ said Odessa. ‘I’m Kim Pallant.’

  ‘Did you have to do that?’ Sean asked. He sounded like the kid at a party whose balloon has been popped.

  ‘It’s over, Sean,’ Kim said. ‘The Accelerants are finished.’

  ‘Why are we doing this then?’ I asked. ‘Presumably you stole this car? We could have just met in the pub and chatted over nibbles.’

  ‘It wasn’t my idea,’ Kim said. She was pasting it along the Euston Road, weaving in between the traffic, honking the horn as she approached pedestrian crossings, giving everyone at least a fighting chance to stay alive. At any other time I’d have been happy for her to ferry me around in a flashy machine like this, but fifty miles per hour in a thirty zone was giving me sphincter twitch. And the gun that Niker had pulled from his waistband didn’t help.

  ‘Where are we going?’ I asked.

  ‘We’re going to shut the fuck up,’ Niker said. ‘I’m still in this. For the long haul, even if everyone else has wimped out.’

  ‘For “wimped out” read “brutally murdered”,’ I reminded him. But he was in rant mode.

  ‘My pursuit of experience, my euphoria, has not ended.’

  A police car came howling out of Shepherdess Walk, skidding on to our tail so closely that I could see the light reflecting in the glasses of the driver.

  The shock of it almost caused Kim to oversteer but she righted the car at the last moment, although I heard the kerb scrape against the expensive paintwork. Sirens wailed.

  ‘How’s your euphoria now?’ I shouted.

  We carried on along Bethnal Green Road before turning south through Stepney.

  ‘You have to stop, Kim,’ I shouted. ‘You can’t win this one!’

  But she was deep in concentration, or she was choosing to ignore me. She turned sharp left on to Commercial Road. People backed off, or shot footage on their smartphones. Other cars were sounding their horns, maybe in support, more probably in condemnation. Sirens looped and twisted above the din: backup for the tenacious driver sticking with us as we belted east.

  Kim nicked a thin roadside tree with the front nearside wing and I saw it split in two. The shock from the collision snapped my head back and wrenched the car to the left. Kim floored the accelerator and took us up a narrow alleyway. People screamed and swore. If she hit anyone, add x number of years to the rapidly accelerating count already on the wheel of incarceration.

  Bags of rubbish erupted as she hit them and flung their slimy, rotting compost over the windscreen. The wipers succeeded only in smearing it more completely across the glass. She hit a hopper and it barrelled away in front of us, but something had happened to the car. A heavy, metallic clacking that sounded terminal. Our speed dropped off.

  ‘Shit,’ said Sean.

  ‘You’d better lose that gun,’ I said. ‘Or you’ll be looking at a ten stretch. At least.’

  He turned in his seat and pointed the muzzle at me instead.

  ‘Niker. Load that thing first. Then play “noisy penis compensation”.’

  ‘I think there’s one in the chamber. To tell you the truth, in all this excitement I kind of lost track.’

  ‘Christ,’ I said. ‘You really are a brain-dead twunt, aren’t you?’ I punched him in the eye and the gun went off about three inches north of my skull. The world went very quiet and I was momentarily blinded. Gunshot residue, I was guessing. It felt as though a thimbleful of hot sand had been thrown in my face. The only thing I could hear – though dully, as if coming to me through many layers of thick blanket (was I asleep? God y
es, please make this a bad dream) – was the rise and fall of sirens. More than one, now, unless my insulted brain was fashioning elaborate echoes.

  Somehow the car had stopped, the doors opened, and I was being led, blinking, eyes streaming, through dingy little veins of road and pathway, all of them furred with fly-tipped junk, all of them hazy with the feral mist of several species’ worth of male piss. We climbed over fences and pushed our way through body-high walls of nettles. A police helicopter was blatting towards us; we had to find safe ground before it reached us or there’d be no escape. We scrambled across a no-man’s land of back yards stippled with dog shit and puddles of electric-blue petrol. Big dogs on chains with jaws the size of firefighters’ hydraulic cutting tools. Up stone steps carpeted with dead beetles and pebbles of reinforced glass. Along corridors lit by stuttering fluorescent tubes. Down scaffolds, feet slapping on duckboards. The shiver of brick netting. Yells of pursuit falling away. And then we were on level ground, down by the river somewhere. I had no idea where I was. This area might well be pink space on a map of uncharted territory. A sketch of a serpent and a warning: Here be Dragons. Christ I needed a beer and a lie down and Romy telling me how shit I was because my ‘d’ was too small.

  I felt his punch before it landed; it seemed to push the air before it. It certainly pushed the air out of me. I fell to my knees and he punched me again, right on that painful little knot of nerves and glands at the top of the jaw. I couldn’t see him to stop him; Kim’s shouts at him to leave me alone were being ignored. A shadow fell across me; I pushed myself to one side and swept my leg around in a wide arc. I connected with leg. I hoped it wasn’t Kim’s. Niker’s grunt as he landed confirmed I’d made the right choice. He swore and scrabbled after me, but now I knew what direction he was in I could keep all my dangerous edges pointed his way. I thrust a boot out when I sensed he was close enough and enjoyed the satisfying crunch as his nose became so much red putty in the centre of his face. That ended it. He was choking on blood, and reaching again for the gun. Kim screamed at him and slapped his hand down. She took him off to one side and tended to his blitzed schnozz with a handkerchief. By degrees she calmed him, though he didn’t stop shooting me malicious looks every few seconds. It looked as if she had given him some instructions because he nodded twice and then sloped away, like a dog that has been reprimanded after shitting in the bath.

  A jet took off, arse-shrivellingly close. City Airport? And when it faded, I could hear my hot, hard breathing, and that of another.

  ‘Kim?’ I asked. My eyes were still stinging, grit-filled. I felt as if I’d shifted a gallon of fluid from my tear ducts alone.

  ‘You pair of testosterone pillocks,’ she said. She tugged at my sleeve and cajoled when I stopped to hack my lungs up into my mouth.

  ‘Am I shot?’ I asked. I kept touching my head, where the heat of the round had burned my skin, and my hand kept coming away wet, but I could feel no wound.

  ‘Don’t be stupid,’ she said. ‘Sean put a hole in the roof. You were lucky.’

  ‘So was he,’ I said. ‘Where is he?’

  ‘Nearby.’

  ‘Where are we going?’

  She stilled me. ‘Let’s have a look at your face,’ she said.

  I couldn’t keep my eyes open for longer than a second. Then blessed relief: she was splashing water on my face, irrigating my eyes, chasing away what felt like jags of hot glass.

  ‘Can I have a swig of that?’ I asked, and she put the bottle in my hand. ‘What’s going on?’

  ‘Niker’s convinced you have something to do with this. That you might actually be the killer.’

  My sight was improving. We had entered a blasted land of derelict buildings: mills and warehouses and factories. We went inside one of them. I could see concourses of fractured concrete, sun-ravaged safety notices on walls topped with copings of shattered glass. There was a stormguard door in faded metallic blue with a sign painted on it in stark white capitals: IN CONSTANT USE. Barrels, a plastic chair, hubcaps, chicken wire. Arcane machinery frozen by time and oxidisation; valves and springs and pistons. Every pane smashed; every door sagging on buckled, rusted hinges. All of it could be fifty years old for all I knew. It seemed as if nobody had visited this district for decades. Dust was thicker than palace carpets.

  Instead of gunsmoke and blood I could smell the river. And something Kim was wearing. Something subtle, something floral.

  ‘It’s strange knowing your real name,’ I said. ‘You look like an Odessa, weird as that might sound. You don’t fit Kim quite as well, somehow.’

  ‘This experience thing,’ she said. ‘Sometimes I think it’s getting out of hand. Sometimes I think it’s the best thing anybody could do. I’ve never felt so alive.’

  ‘I’m happy for you,’ I said. ‘I’m happy to be experiencing your experiential joy right now.’

  She ignored me. There was misery in her voice, despite the smile on her face. ‘You know how this started for me? I’ve been thinking about it. I guess I must have been about seven or eight. We were learning stuff at school, science stuff. Temperatures. Expansions and contraction. I remember drinking super-cold iced drinks followed by cups of tea I’d scald my lip against. All so I could crack my teeth. I’m having enormous problems with the dentist now, but that’s how I got the bug. Pushing myself to do crazy shit.’

  ‘Crazy shit,’ I said. ‘I saw some crazy shit once. Not long after a dog ate a box of crayons.’

  ‘What are you up to?’ she asked. ‘What is it you want from all of this?’ There were a hundred stories I could spin. Anything to gain more time, to win back some trust. I guessed she liked me; I guessed she wanted to believe me, to be on my side, even though Niker felt the polar opposite. But I was tired of lying. It didn’t matter any more. They knew me, I knew them. Nothing mattered except one thing.

  ‘Solo,’ I said. ‘I know who she is. Her name is Sarah. I’m her father. I’m trying to find her. She was involved with Martin Gower.’

  ‘I see,’ she said. ‘Well, you’ve got the lying skills for a career as a storyteller.’

  ‘Have you seen her?’

  ‘I told you, her attendance is erratic.’

  ‘Do you know where she lives?’

  ‘No. We all thought she lived with Martin. They seemed pretty close.’

  ‘Martin lived with his parents.’

  ‘So we gathered. You wouldn’t think it, to listen to him. Mister Independent. Strong-minded. Used to take over our meetings. And then went home and got his mum to wash his socks.’

  ‘What’s she like?’

  ‘I’ve never met Martin’s mum.’

  I gave her a look. ‘You know who I’m talking about. I haven’t seen her for five years. She was a kid when she ran away. She’s an adult now. I’m not going to get those years back.’

  Kim spread her hands. ‘What do you want me to say? She was funny. Had some lip on her. Like you.’

  ‘Is she a good person? I mean, would you say she was happy? Does she have… you know, people she can turn to if she needs them? Does she have a job?’

  ‘I liked her, Corkscrew,’ she said. ‘She seemed streetwise. In control. I didn’t see her too often. We didn’t really talk. I read some of her stuff.’

  ‘What did she write about?’

  ‘Why don’t you ask her that yourself, when you see her?’

  I couldn’t speak for a moment. I didn’t know how to answer her. ‘What will you do?’ I said.

  ‘Now? Lay low, I suppose. Write about it.’

  ‘It’s what the police would advise. It’s clear this killer has a beef with you lot for some reason.’

  ‘I don’t believe it’s an ex-member,’ she said. ‘The ones who left went abroad. Only President is still around, and he got out because he wants to write music.’

  I wondered if that was the case. I was going to ask her if she really thought Niker was to be trusted, when he turned up on a motorbike, a knackered Suzuki Bandit. He didn’t switch off th
e engine. He didn’t take off his helmet. Through the visor I could see his eyes, like two pork pies with slits in them. Kim went to him and got on the back.

  ‘It’s an offence to ride without a helmet,’ I said.

  ‘It’s an offence to steal a motorbike,’ said Niker. ‘So arrest us.’

  ‘What about me?’ I asked. ‘You drag me halfway across London and then just maroon me? What about the experience of three on a bike?’

  Kim waved. ‘Check the drop from time to time,’ she said. ‘We left a warning for Solo. You never know.’ Then they took off.

  BLONDE ON A STICK –

  30 APRIL 1988 –???

  The manuscript was odds on favourite for the Big Black Bin, but that was before Roper came in with the coffee. Caffeine was his panacea for the Monday morning depressions he fell into when he shambled into the office. It was something that could have been cured by a simple furniture change, re-decoration, maybe even a couple of prints to brighten the walls but he was damned if it would come out of his pocket. No. Cofee was an immediate solution and it sufficed.

  He was Don Philbert, editor of Dark Candy, a monthly magazine devoted to the macabre. It was a rag that had lasted ten years and he had been a co-founder along with Ralph McKean. Ralph had been claimed by throat cancer a year after the launch, lumbering Philbert with the unenvioable task of trying to make a success out of things. Which he did, partly through his own motivation, partly through a resurging interest in horror and fiction, and mostly due to a lucky break when James Herbert gave him a story back in 1982 which got Dark Candy noticed. That year also saw them rise from small press status into what Philbert called ‘The Big Kids’ Playground’. For him, the most important part of this promotion was the freedom to offer tempting payments for submissions. And he was inundated every day of the week – some of the manuscipts were top class – perhaps too good for Dark Candy (something Philbert would never admit to).

  This particular morning was quite possibly the worst Monday since creation. A nuclear winter he decided would be mild compared to this. He climbed the steps to his office, noticing the crisp packet that was still pushed deep into the pointing of the brickwork. It had been there for at least five years. He couldn’t care less.