Sonata of the Dead Read online

  In a zip-up pocket of the suitcase there was an envelope of photographs. Sarah with Mum. I felt the breath punched from me. I hadn’t seen these pictures in years. Clowning for the camera. Dancing. Funny faces – you’ll stick like that if the wind changes – and exaggerated hugs. There were no pictures of me, which pierced me a little, but it didn’t matter. It was okay. I was the one holding the camera ninety-nine per cent of the time anyway. It was either that or lopped heads, inaccurate focus, fingers in front of the lens; Rebecca never tried to hide the fact she was a dreadful photographer. That was my reasoning, anyway. I clung to it.

  I sat down on the sleeping bag and closed my eyes. The fan of photographs in one hand. Swatches of the bag in the other. As if I was trying to commune with the dead by holding physical links to her. Stop that. Stop that.

  I hunted for warmth in the sleeping bag but I was so psyched up by my discovery that I couldn’t tell if the heat beneath my fingers was evidence of recent occupancy or the mischief of my tommy gun heart.

  Be here soon. Be anywhere other than that monster’s lair in Waltham Cross.

  I pulled out my phone, but before I could hit some numbers it leapt in my hand. It was Mawker. His call almost triggered an anatomical first for the human race: a man shitting out his own skeleton.

  ‘Ian,’ I said. My voice was flat and cold against the lonely stone. ‘Tell me you’ve got him.’

  ‘We’ve got him,’ he said. But his voice was all wrong. There was none of the tart triumph I recognised in him whenever he had some high-level intelligence he wanted to use to lord it over me. All the moisture fled from my mouth. I had to work to unstick the strip of jerky tongue from the roof.

  ‘Sarah,’ I managed, little more than a puff of air.

  ‘No. Joel. No, it’s okay. I’m sorry. Sarah… she’s not here.’

  ‘Then what’s up with you? You sound as if you’ve stumbled upon the grim truth behind your species’ relatives.’

  ‘This guy we’ve got. I know him.’

  ‘You know him? What? He’s someone on a wanted list? Ex-con?’

  ‘No. He’s ex-service. Name’s Nyx. Scott Nyx. When I say I know him, I mean he was one of us. But he was only in the force six months. He left just last year. Post-traumatic stress disorder.’

  ‘Because?’ I was getting narked. Mawker was withholding something, worming around the truth. He wouldn’t talk to me. And I was cheesed off that he was the one feeling this bastard’s collar when it was me that had found him.

  ‘That Archway fracas. You know. The one Sarah was involved in. According to the PSU roster he was on duty that night.’

  He said it as if she was responsible for the whole thing. And for this guy Nyx’s PTSD too.

  ‘What, he couldn’t cope with a bunch of shouty kids?’

  ‘It was more than that. Bricks and bottles. Nyx was hit. But I don’t… I don’t get it.’

  ‘What don’t you get?’

  There was some commotion going on in the background and I heard Mawker cover the phone while he yelled instructions. I felt an old twinge of excitement. The police raid. The battering ram. Entries and exits. Chasing down those chancers who make a break for it out of a rear window. I craved that for a moment. I itched to be back in the saddle with the others.

  ‘Christ, Mawker, what don’t you get?’

  Behind me there was the merest scrape of metal on concrete, so faint you could be forgiven for thinking it was little more than the peculiar song of a tired old building, or the wind testing its areas of weakness, or some weird collision of neurons in the brain; the inexplicable mischief of a tired body, wound-up too tightly like a spring. I turned but there was just the big, empty space of a room filled with dust and fusty air and ghosts.

  I was straining for another instance of it, to confirm or deny, to trigger some form of action as yet undecided, but then Mawker was back and he was saying something but his hand must have still partially been covering the phone because I didn’t hear him properly. Or if I did, then it made no sense, and maybe that was right, maybe this was what Mawker didn’t get.

  ‘Say again, Ian,’ I said. ‘It sounded as if you said—’

  ‘Yeah, you heard right. He’s a quadriplegic. We found him sitting in his wheelchair.’

  ‘So… he’s not our guy? We got the address wrong?’

  ‘No. We’re in the right place. Sound-proofed cellar. We’re waiting for forensics to check that out but it’s looking very red from up here. We’ve found a bunch of manuscripts. Same mish-mash of papers. Same typewriter. Old stuff going back to the eighties. Short stories and partially written novels with shocker titles. Maggot-Hearted You, for fuck’s sake. Blonde on a Stick. Cancer Planet. Christ. I’m no reader but some of this shit you wouldn’t believe. Purpler than something you’d find hanging out the back of a baboon.’

  ‘Thanks for that, F.R. Leavis,’ I said. ‘Maggot-Hearted You was one of the tattoos Phil Clarke found on Martin Gower. Maybe this guy, this Nyx, he’s a victim? Next on the list? We got to him before The Hack could settle in for another night’s arts and crafts?’

  ‘I don’t think so, Joel. There’s no neck puncture. And he’s clean. No evidence of injury. He looks as if… well, he’s been well looked after.’

  ‘What does he say?’

  ‘He’s not said anything yet – I’m not even sure he can – but I’m getting creeped out. This guy’s eyes are following me around the room like a fucking oil painting. He’s got some fucking scar on him. His head looks like a bucket that’s been given a real kicking.’

  ‘You wouldn’t get that from someone chucking half a brick.’

  ‘Looks like a gunshot wound.’

  ‘Anything on Sarah?’

  ‘Nothing we’ve found. I’ll let you know. We’ve got to decide what we’re going to do. Stake this place out. Take this guy in. I don’t know yet. I think the person we’re looking for is Nyx’s partner.’

  ‘Male? Female? Anything on record? He married? The courier said it was a woman gave him the package.’

  ‘We’re looking. There’s nothing here but pages and Wheelchair Guy.’

  ‘You’re sure he’s immobile? You’re sure he’s not kidding?’

  ‘His legs are like pipe cleaners.’

  ‘Pinch him,’ I said. ‘Stab him in the thigh.’

  ‘I’m not about to do anything like that. He’s a raspberry. Believe me, you can tell. He isn’t faking.’

  Another pause. Another muffled order. An expletive. A shuffle of papers.

  ‘Hang on,’ he said.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘We’ve got something here. It’s a page with a bunch of postcodes on it. Typewritten. Crossed through. Well, most of them.’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘Um… W12, crossed through. That’s Ellerslie Road. Malachi Dawe.’

  ‘What about the others?’

  ‘NW5, crossed through. W10, untouched—’

  ‘NW5 is Kim Pallant. W10 I don’t know. Maybe Niker. He’s gone. Left London. He had a feeling Pallant was dead. What about Taft?’

  ‘Yep, W1 is crossed through. Gower’s – N21 – that as well.’

  ‘Is mine on there?’

  ‘W1H? No. The only other one listed is SE1. Untouched.’

  ‘Southwark. That’s where I am now.’

  ‘You what?’

  ‘I had a breakthrough – Gower was using shorthand. A makeshift studio where he took those shots of Sarah. It’s on Silex Street.’

  ‘I’m sending a squad car over now. We can’t take any chances.’ I heard the phone moving in his hand, heard a barked question, presumably aimed at Nyx, and the line was cold before he’d finished it.

  Another scrape of metal. I felt my scalp tighten. This wasn’t a breeze pressing its shoulders against the door. I made to call Sarah’s name, but I couldn’t do it. It felt suddenly too foreign in my mouth. But that wasn’t it. That’s not it, is it, Joel?

  It wasn’t her.

  It wasn’t
the sound of a person coming back to a habitat they know well. It was an exploratory testing of barriers. It was too cautious. And then my confusion increased, because now I heard footsteps, light and quick. Above me.

  I felt a weird tingling of the flesh, as if everything was trying to draw in, conceal itself. The hedgehog frightened into a ball. But there was also an expansion as if part of me wanted to explode into action. Run for my fucking life. Fight for my fucking life. My leg started to shake and I was adding my own sound – a violent tattoo against worm-bitten floorboards – to those sounds snaking around on the levels above and below me.

  I stood up to try to control the trembling. It served only to shift it to my hands. Memories of pain, of near-death incidents in my recent past. Here was more of it. I couldn’t deal with it any more. Fuck forced experience. Fuck the thrill of the chase. I wanted to be away. Why had I even come here? Sarah was grown up. I should just accept that. She had managed to fend for herself as a kid and now she was fending for herself as an adult. The fantasy – that she would run crying into the arms of Daddy, the brave knight come to protect her once more – was dead. All I was doing was putting myself in a corner and inviting the shadows to smother me. I didn’t need to do this any more. She’d released me years ago. The problem was that I hadn’t released me yet.

  Sounds were rising and falling like amplified breath, as if the building was coming to life. I couldn’t pinpoint their origins. One moment I thought I was backing away from noise when it suddenly transpired I was shifting towards it. I heard the footsteps halt on the wood and then make a shushing sound as direction was altered, then they began again. Slow but light. They were descending.

  I placed the photographs back in the envelope and returned to the corridor, moving as quietly as I could. Air trapped in old pipes scarred with flaking paint made a borborygmic din that drowned out the footsteps. I felt the area around my pelvis and bowels turn to iced liquid.

  I stood in the corridor and waited for a while. Part of the ceiling had rotted through revealing batons of wood like misshapen ribs. A rat lay stiff and mummified in a corner, its insides having been hollowed out by insects long ago. There was a wooden chair with a vinyl seat that had perished to reveal nicotine-coloured foam beneath. A copy of a discarded newspaper had been bleached nude. I saw it but I took none of it in. It was just bland background. It was wallpaper. The space became granular with night. It grew difficult to discern detail. There had been no torch by the sleeping bag; it was fanciful in the extreme to think that any electricity still coursed through the bones of this place.

  I could no longer hear anything on the ground floor and there was nothing but the swarm of darkness; nothing substantial within it. I could still hear the subtle tap of feet on the stone steps coming down to this level. Up ahead, the stairs rose into a blade of deep shadow. I kept my eye on its cut-off point, ready for some forced experience the moment a foot should drop into view.

  I thought I heard a siren outside, far off, maybe coming closer, and I felt a warmth towards Mawker that I’d never experienced before, and then shook it away. Any warm feelings I was likely to have would be down to pissing my pants with fear. But I was glad he was sending backup.

  I wondered if Sarah was here, if it had been her making those kid steps on the floor above before coming down to see who was in her den. I remembered she used to do ballet, and she used to perform yoga moves with Rebecca on a Sunday night.

  I wondered if The Hack might have arrived for some fun too.

  That got me moving.

  I was at the steps, about to ascend, ready to call Sarah’s name and beggar the quiet and the consequences, implore her to run, just as I felt a presence rise in the space behind me. I smelled the wake of air it pressed before it, and I was reminded of my mother’s home. I was trying to understand why (perfume?) when I felt it – explosive, invasive – and immediately understood what was happening. Somehow, within the mushroom cloud of pain that fired up through the base of my head, I forced myself to act, to collapse as I would have been expected to do.

  It was dark, I said to myself. His aim was not true. He missed and he suspects that might be the case. He will lean over you to make sure. He will get it right this time. I managed to think this through the smothering mists of pain. I heard the sirens and they helped but I thought, They won’t get here in time. I could feel blood, a lot of it, drizzling across my shoulders and taking a slide down my spine to pool in the small of my back. An artery might have been nicked. So death was in the vicinity, or had at least hailed a cab to get here tout de suite.

  Pain and panic was filling all the gaps and crevices in my mind. I wanted to writhe around and try to scream. I wanted to beg for help. But I had to lie still and take the one chance I would be afforded. I might be on my way out, but I had to take the fucker with me, otherwise Sarah was dead too.

  ‘Once upon a time,’ she said, in a sing-song voice. ‘In a dark, dark wood. The big, bad wolf. Who’s been sleeping in my bed? One feather is of no use to me, I must have the whole bird. Mirror, mirror, on the wall. What great teeth you have. Trip-trap, trip-trap. Nibble, nibble, gnaw.’ Her voice was cracked. I thought of the wicked witch of the west. This woman cries a lot. This woman screams a lot. She does not sleep. She. Is. Insane.

  I grasped on to that as she dipped in towards me out of the dark, like a pale owl zeroing in on its prey. I didn’t know this darkness, but neither did she. We were both strangers here.

  I saw the flash of a blade.

  ‘Off with his head,’ she said, and I felt her hand in my hair, gathering it into her fist. I felt her breath on my cheek and I smelled bad coffee and raw alcohol and the sour stench of desperation.

  I knew it would hurt beyond all knowledge, enough to make me black out even, so I had to get it right. I wrenched myself to the side and felt about a square foot of my hair tear free of my scalp under her nails. That hurt a lot, but it was a manageable hurt, and I relished it, almost, because it shone through the fog of that other pain, which meant that the initial insult was not as serious as I had thought.

  I kicked out and connected with something soft. She let out a grunt and I heard her weapon clatter across the floor. I pushed myself to my feet and the wound opened in the back of my neck. It felt as if someone was pouring molten metal into it.

  ‘I’m not a part of your vendetta,’ I said, but the words came out as a garbled shriek of air.

  She came at me again and I lifted the chair and hurled it at her. She dodged it and a window shattered. Now the light flooded in and I saw her. Her hair was short; I saw the clean angles of her jaw. Her eyes were hidden within deep shelves of shadow. She bared her teeth.

  ‘I know what happened to Scott,’ I said, and my voice sounded better this time. ‘Your husband? Your son? We can find out who did it. They can be made to pay.’

  But there was no getting through to her. They were already being made to pay. Her justice. I kept myself between her and the stairs, the way out. I listened to the sirens, and waited for the slew of braking tyres and the floodlights.

  The mistake I made was thinking that because her machete was on the floor, far out of reach, she didn’t have another. She came at me with her hands frozen into claws and as I raised my arms to bat her away, she magicked a knife from somewhere in her jacket. I was off-balance, and so was she. She fell into me and I tried to knock her arm down, away from my chest. I felt the knife slide deep into the junction between thigh and abdomen.

  Her mistake was that she did not let go.

  We went down together. I managed to twist and land on her. I felt her teeth sink into my forearm. I screamed and the sound cut through the anaesthesia of all those endorphins flooding my bloodstream. The body’s way of allaying the panic, the pointless struggle, swaddling you as death took over.

  There was enough fight left in me to grab a scimitar of window glass and drive it into her eye until it ground against bone, until she stiffened into an arch, flinging me free of her. I hear
d her feet shiver and kick in the throes, but I was too busy with my own end to care much about hers. Blood was jetting from my thigh; I knew she had severed the femoral artery. I only hoped it was a clean cut. I stared at my fingers wondering if I could find somewhere to wash them, and choked on bitter laughter. Get in there, dickhead, I hissed to myself.

  Lying in the dark, trying to locate a tube the diameter of a drinking straw in a cleaved piece of warm meat is not the easiest task I’ve ever been presented with. It also hurts like fury. I tried to not think of those chunks of striated muscle as my own, and that instead I was cleaning a slab of steak, hunting for the integument and the veins and the gristle… all the stuff that gets caught in your teeth.

  Blood flashed across the back of my knuckles. I found the end of the artery and tried to plug it with my little finger, but I lost it instantly because of the blaze of agony and the fact it was so slippery. It would have been easier to hold a thrashing fish in hands drenched with baby oil. I almost fainted from the pain, but I had to keep it together or it was death for sure. Just five minutes and the place would be crawling with boys in blue.

  I felt the hot squirt of the opened vessel and sank my finger into the aperture. Again the surge of pain, but I bit down against it. I made a fist with my other hand and pressed it hard as if I was trying to pin my belly against my spin. Hopefully that might compress the main artery to all points south. I held on. I held on.

  I was going to die here. With this crazed bitch lying next to me. I’d been so close to finding her. I’d had her blankets in my hands. Sweet dreams.

  I didn’t want Mawker to find me with any fear or pain on my face. So I thought of Sarah, and I felt myself relax though I knew I had maybe thirty seconds before I lost consciousness. I thought of her before the death of my wife, when we would play chess together, or sit on the sofa watching Disney films. She had bottle green eyes and freckles. She had caramel hair and a ready smile. She used to have a ready smile.