The Unblemished, page 10
And then he was sick, copiously, and the dead flies in his vomit reminded him of his mother’s rock-cake mixture before it was put in the oven.
‘What’s happening to me?’ he whispered. ‘I don’t know who I am.’
He looked back up to the frosted window and saw a face in the moment of its retreat. His eyes shifted to the next window. That too was frosted, although it might have been the reflection of the morning sunlight, or net curtains in need of a wash. He kicked the bike into action and moved away, thinking of honeycombs, of networks, of death worming through the terraces of north London.
‘Okay, and now just one of the councillor and Pete. Pete, if you could lift the cheque a little higher. Level with your head. And bring it in a bit so that your cheek is touching it. Councillor, if you could get close enough so your cheek is touching the other side. I know, I know, but space is limited and we might only be able to fit that shot in. Nice. That’s good. And that’ll about do it, I think. Thank you for your time.’
* * *
He sat at a table on his own in the Albert, the little old pub on Victoria Street that seemed out of place among all the glass office blocks muscling in around it. He drank a lot of strong lager. He ran his finger over the camera, tripping it against the wind-on lever as if it were the rosary. He tried Keiko on his mobile but she wasn’t answering. That meant she was probably at the British Library where mobile-phone use was prohibited, boning up on entomology, or sending rude emails to her friends. He desperately wanted to be with her. He wanted to hold her so tightly that she left an imprint on him.
He finished his pint and walked across the road to the antique jewellers on Artillery Row. There he found a silver brooch in the shape of a bee. He bought it and wrapped it in gift paper, placed it in a bubblewrap envelope, and wrote a short note:
You’ve always been strong for me. But I don’t know if that’s enough any more. I don’t want you to end up as my crutch. Have you noticed things changing? Can you see what I see? Am I going mad? Does it mean I’m going mad if I have to ask the question? Do you see a difference in me?
He thought about it, then crumpled the note in his fist. He posted her the bee on its own.
There was a man standing on the corner of Albemarle Street and Stafford Street eating a baby’s arm.
He didn’t understand how he got back home without causing an accident. He had drunk too much, driven far too fast, leaning into corners like a superbike racer, his leathered knee sometimes kissing the tarmac. His head was full of clicking noises: teeth, shutter release, his propeller pencil as he fed fresh lead for names for his notebook.
Councillor Tom Leyland. That’s L-E-Y-L …
He parked and locked the bike, covered it with green tarp, went inside and took a shower. On the way home, as fast as he had travelled, what fucking things had he seen?
He had seen a couple of tramps sitting on the road as he throttled down through the lights at Notting Hill Gate. They had been kissing, hoods up, holding on to each other too violently for passion yet too controlled for drugs or booze. That’s what caught his attention. He saw his mouth so deep inside her face it was as if he were trying to hide.
Figures as white as candles swaying in windows.
A small child, so gaunt as to suggest translucency, gnawing at her own fingers, staring up accusingly at him, flattening lips dripping with blood.
He poured a long measure from a bottle of vodka he kept in the freezer. Tiredness had settled against his skin like cold bathwater. He sat on his bed and went for another sip to find he had already drained the glass without tasting it. He picked up the phone and tried Keiko at home. No answer. He left a message that he despised for its wheedling tone. Come over. I need you. I don’t want to be on my own.
I. I. I. Me. Me. Me.
He reached for his biker jacket and fished out Detective Inspector Laurier’s number. He’d barely dialled the number before it was picked up.
‘Joseph Laurier.’
‘It’s Mulvey,’ Bo said.
‘Mulvey. I don’t know any Mulvey. Expound or remove yourself from my phone line.’
‘I’m a friend of Sammy Dyer’s. I’m a freelance photographer. I was at Leonard Wright’s grave the other –’
‘Richard Dreyfuss. Yes, I remember. What do you want? You want to show me some big shark you caught?’
‘I just wanted to ask if you’d had any luck finding the grave-robber.’
‘Graverobber. Jesus. What are you? Can’t you talk in any terms of reality? Do you live in some film world, some fantasy world? This is London, Dreyfuss. Two thousand and eight.’
‘Well, what do you call him?’
He heard the line grow muffled. He thought he heard Laurier say something like, I’ll be with you in a minute, just got to get rid of some wanker. ‘I call him the perpetrator. We haven’t got a name for him yet. We haven’t been introduced. Maybe you know him. Do you know him?’
Oh Jesus God, friend, I think so. ‘Is the person digging these people up the same person taking chunks out of them?’
There was a long pause. Laurier’s voice, when it returned, was more careful, more sedulous, more seductive. Bo could suddenly see how Laurier was a good policeman. He would hate to be in an interrogation room with him. He was slick. He was a serpent.
‘Who said the bites we discovered were from a human mouth?’
Bo struggled to answer but could only convey an insinuating silence. Laurier penetrated it.
‘Do you know something we don’t?’
‘I just guessed. They looked human.’
‘Yeah,’ Laurier said, suddenly sounding weary. ‘That bite radius shit.’
‘And I’ve seen … things.’
‘Talk to me, Dreyfuss. Speak slowly. Speak some sense.’
Bo considered putting down the phone. He didn’t know what he wanted to say. He had called Laurier on an impulse and now things seemed to be sliding away from him. He could see Laurier jotting his name in a notebook. Maybe getting someone to run a check on him. He was in his thoughts now, whereas five minutes previously he hadn’t been.
‘Just … suspicious figures. Loners on the street. I think they might be violent. They had a look about them. They … I was just wondering if you’d seen anything? Or had any reports?’
‘We get reports every day, son. We live in fucking London. “Loondon” they call it in here. We’re busy, all right? We’re trying to find out what’s going on with the disinterments. We don’t need your paranoid witterings to bog us down. If you know something, then squawk. If you don’t, then fuck off and stop mithering.’
‘I’m sorry,’ Bo said. ‘I just –’ The line went dead.
Bo tossed his handset on to the sofa. Brilliant. They had him down either as a potential suspect or a time-waster, a nut.
He stormed to his darkroom and switched on the safelight. He sat on the floor and rubbed his eyes until they were sore, trying to push some ideas into view. But all he could think about was how he had been unable to stomach any food for the last two days.
In the red glow of the safelight, his hands seemed too smooth and soft to belong to him. The half-moons of his fingernails were jet black, ragged. He wondered if the previous night’s dream had been a dream after all.
The process chemicals are at the right temperature. There are two rolls of film to be developed.
Like a Marine reassembling his rifle after cleaning, you could do this in your sleep. You wish you did. It might distract you from what occurs when you are in that alien country you enter every time you switch out the light.
You remove the film in total darkness. You always shut your eyes when you do this, as if keeping them open brings greater risk of the film’s exposure to light. You cut the tapered leader square, carefully load the film on to a spiral, and place it in the stainless steel developing tank. Pour in the developer quickly; development begins the second the chemical makes contact with the emulsion on the film. You tap the tank against the work surface a few times to get rid of any bubbles. For ten seconds of every minute the film is being developed, you must tip and shake the tank to ensure a uniform flow of fresh solution. Start the timer.
Gone midnight, where do you travel? And why? You peel yourself away from the soft, warm curves of your woman or your dreams and dress quickly. You pad downstairs and stand on the doorstep. Why do you sniff the air? Why is your face upturned to the night, as if bathing it in the light of the moon?
The chemicals react until the second all is drained from the developing tank, so you also have to do this quickly. Now pour in the stopper until it overflows the neck of the tank. Agitate to neutralise any remaining developer. Pour away the stopper and add fixer. This stage can take up to ten minutes. Again you must shake the tank regularly. Wash the film thoroughly for thirty minutes with cool, filtered water.
You walk away from people, yet towards them. From light to shade. From noise to silence. You walk barefoot through dew-soaked grass. The moonlight is sometimes so intense that it blinds you. Everything is painted by its strange pallor. You tread through this talcum wasteland expecting to see footprints following you when you check behind. In the urban quiet, you can sometimes hear a heartbeat. You can’t tell if it is your own, or that of someone pursuing you, or of the city itself. It can’t possibly belong to the person you are going to see.
You hang the long strip of film and remove excess water with a sponge. You lightly blow a cool hairdryer over it. When it’s ready, you cut the negative into strips and place them, one at a time, on a lightbox. You pull out the Schneider loupe that goes with you everywhere and find your hand shaking as you try to identify the shots you need to enlarge. Here’s the one taken at the graveyard in Stoke Newington. And here, on the other film, are the shots of the events in Liverpool Road. None of the pictures contain any immediacy for you. It’s almost as if you never took them. You make the enlargements, your hands falling to tasks they know almost better than themselves. The test strip, the cleaning of the negative and the enlarger; the familiarity is a balm that anaesthetises you from the fresh shock of the images stolen from recent days as they loom out of the ghost-white printing paper. A picture at the cemetery of a face you don’t recognise, snapped in an attempt to break into the horror of that day. Close-up, blurred, the features loosened by shock, the skin white. The eyes filled with a crazed look, of hunger, of lust. Fear.
The shots at Emma’s flat on Liverpool Road: plenty of handshake, crazy angles, images taken from an aspect of retreat. You slip the shots into a glassine bag and tuck it into your sweatshirt.
You switch off the safelight and emerge into a room that seems to have been infected by the artificial dark of the past few hours. The digital camera is in your hand though you never remembered pausing to pick it up. You lock the SLR in a suitcase and stow it in the back of the wardrobe. No development, no darkroom from now on. You feel as though you’ve been living your life more fully on the photo paper than in reality. The Ixus will go everywhere with you now. It will be the only way to keep hold of reality, a shield to protect you; a charm to ward off the changes you feel inside.
There are three messages on your mobile phone, all of them from Keiko. You delete them without listening. You must not see her again. She’ll be safer that way. And then the phone is ringing again and her name is in the display and your thumb hovers over the touchpad. But to let her in is to kill her.
You hurl the Motorola at the wall and watch it turn to plastic rain.
Darkness is coming and you can feel every cell of your body reaching out to meet it. You pack a rucksack. You check your wallet for cards and cash. You check the phone book. No Vero, R. No disappointment because it’s no surprise. So it’s to be done the hard way.
You go out. You’re hungry and you’re beginning to intuit what it is you’re hungry for. You pull off the tarp, climb astride the Ninja, and kick it to life. The dark fills your nostrils and settles against the back of your throat. It jags around your brain like an inhaled narcotic.
North or south. East or west. It doesn’t really matter. All roads lead to the same dark little bolthole. The taste of insects on your tongue. The spectral glitter of chitin.
Darkness has fallen and there are mouths to feed. You open the throttle and let fly.
That face from Abney Park cemetery. That was you, wasn’t it?
That was you.
9. CARBON
FIVE DAYS AFTER his final visit to the prison, on a late afternoon in early December, Malcolm Manser got his driver Jez Knowlden to pull in at the Esso garage on Edgware Road and fill a gallon container with 4-star. They then drove to a pub in Notting Hill where Manser disappeared into the cellar with the manager and a member of the door staff. Twenty minutes later he returned to the S-type with a bin bag wrapped tightly with gaffer tape. He placed this on the back seat and instructed Knowlden to follow him up the main road while he did a little shopping.
He bought three disposable Bic lighters, a garden spade, and two large green plastic sacks for garden waste. He bought a black Maglite torch. He bought two steak-and-cheese subs from Sub City and gave one to Knowlden. They ate them while parked illegally on the main road, laughing at the people who went into the retro clothes shop to buy overpriced rags.
A call came through from Tim Chandos at New Scotland Yard. Sarah Hickman’s car had been found in Southwold. It wouldn’t be long before they picked her up.
‘Don’t pick her up,’ Manser said. ‘We’ll sort it. We’ll take it from here.’
* * *
Jez Knowlden was known as ‘Knocker’ to his friends because of a dirty fighting habit. He invariably got the first punch in, although it was more like a rap, as if he were knocking on a door. The blow would come from up high, directed down on to the bridge of the nose, which bled easily if hit right. Once a man was bleeding, the fight was over: they often had no stomach to continue. If you saw Knowlden eyeing the space between your eyes, step back and walk away because big pain was coming.
He had served in the first Iraq war as a driver for the Army. When he came back to the UK his ability behind the wheel brought him to the attention of the Secret Service, for whom he spent five years shuttling ambassadors, diplomats, ministers, and other VIPs through late-night London streets. He was the prime minister’s driver for his last six months of office. Driving was his life.
He was dishonourably discharged from MI6 for drug offences: off duty he was signing out cars with false papers to make overnight cocaine runs up to Edinburgh and Glasgow. He received a five-year suspended sentence, escaping prison thanks to the intervention of a number of high-ranking military and government staff. Nevertheless, he gravitated towards the criminal fraternity and used the cover of his new job – driving HGVs for a brewery – to continue trafficking between Scotland and the major cities south of the border. He ended up as a chauffeur again when he was being stopped by motorway police more times than he felt comfortable with, but this time it was for Big I Am villains trying to be something they weren’t: drug dealers, pimps, and gun sellers. He drove second-hand souped-up BMWs, Bentleys and Mercs, almost always in black or white. He was wiping down seats covered in come, coke, and Krug. The deals being negotiated in the badlands of south London were for three-and four-figure amounts. Skulls were being cracked for £150. He was taking orders from teenagers who wanted 50 Cent pumping on the car stereo all day and who thought class was an off-the-peg suit matched with Nike trainers and plenty of bling. The gold was so soft, it bent if you looked at it.
He almost crashed a car one night when his boss for the evening told him his shoes had cost more than Knowlden earned in a month. The guy went home with a bloody nose, and Knowlden was finished in the underworld.
In May 2003, Knowlden was back in HGVs, working for a removals firm specialising in trans-continental relocations. He and his mate, a fey student called Colin with a beard that looked like an accumulation of dust, had spent three hours hefting boxes filled with books and more crockery than could ever be used by a young couple, newly married or no, into a dilapidated pile of Charentaise stone situated in a blink-and-you-miss-it village fifteen miles north of Cognac. The job finished, they repaired to the town eager to quench their thirst with some of the famous spirit manufactured there and maybe bring a couple of bottles back for the gimps at HQ who were on less glamorous duties.
They hit the bars full steam, knowing they weren’t expected back before the following evening and could sleep off their inevitable shitstorm headaches in the wagon’s cabin on one of the open parking lots up in the industrial area of Chateaubernard before the long haul back up to Le Havre.
‘What’s this half-pint shit?’ Colin said, when they asked for their first beers. ‘I’ve been working like a bastard. My throat’s drier than a nun’s cunt.’
‘You have to specify that you want a large beer.’ The voice came to them from their left. They both turned: a guy wearing immaculate clothes, sunglasses. He had a bald head and a neatly trimmed full beard. He was looking down at the bar, at his glass of Ricard and jug of water. ‘The French … they’re a civilised lot over here. They think you want a beer, it’s something to wet your throat with while you chat about Camus or Sartre or Zidane. Une grande bière, s’il vous plaît.’
‘Grande bier, hey?’ Colin said, rubbing his pathetically coated chin. He made his order and a pretty waitress came back with a litre of Pelforth. It had been poured into something that resembled a glass bucket. The boy was overjoyed.
