The Unblemished, page 26
He couldn’t do it. At best he would be laughed down, at worst he would be told to hand in his card and shown the exit and that would be another refuge closed to him. He wondered briefly if that was what his internal motors were pushing for, flushing him out into the open for the inevitable epiphanies and confrontations to take place, but although he understood the logic and the relief to be found in such an outcome, he shied from it, from the raw self-destructiveness of an act that was so unlike him.
He rubbed his arms – it was always a touch on the chilly side in here and he always forgot to compensate for it in his choice of clothes – and turned his attention to the large entry doors as another reader came through, flashing her ID card to the security guards at their desk. He kept hoping to see someone he recognised, someone to encourage him that he was not alone; in truth he was hoping Keiko might arrive, but no friendly face had shown itself as yet. At least to balance that out there was no obvious hostile presence either. No staring, either blatant or peripheral, no sense of danger encroaching, no seeds on that strange eyelid grid of his, exhorting him to help. No pain or wetness in his hand. It was as if he were sealed in lead here, impervious to anything looking for him on the outside. Why was that? How could it be? He had seen them everywhere else. On the forecourts of petrol stations, on boats on the Thames, in the park, in windows of houses both run-down and luxurious. All of his hideaways became known to them and invaded by them before too long; they were like cockroaches.
Maybe now, as he thought this, they were forming an orderly queue at the admissions office, applying for their ID cards, explaining their need to do some research.
A woman working steadily through a great stack of political biographies looked sharply up at him as he tried to contain his laughter. He gripped the edges of the book he was holding and forced himself to relax. He had been trying to shave an hour or two off his sleep patterns and was down to maybe four or five hours a night now, although his behaviour during his waking hours was becoming increasingly erratic. They could tell something was not right and had been pleading with him to rest, to close his eyes so they might properly blossom.
It’s part of what being the map-reader means, one reminded him.
You should give yourself to us, to your task, another said. You asked for the map, you must shoulder your responsibilities.
And another, darkly, added: If you do not do your job, the map will be taken from you. Do not expect to survive this process.
He was reaching a crossroads, clearly. He would need to step out in one determined direction before long or face being pulled apart by competing forces. Something inside him that was being eroded by this new element in his life, that was compelling him to help the development of this strange breed, was eager to complete the transition, but he was not so far gone that he did not balk at what that induction demanded. He feared for his sanity and his strength, appalled that the breaking down of his defences might include a sudden appetite for human flesh. As long as he was in command of his own thoughts, he would fight that. Which meant that he was inviting his destruction at the hands of those relying on him to forge a path for them in the city. Already some splinter faction, headed by the grotesque in his scarf and red, shorn hair, were intent on killing him no matter where his loyalties lay. Hiding was the coward’s way, but it was the only way, as far as Bo could see.
His fingers fumbled with the edges of the photographic volume he had meant to peruse as a form of solace, but the images were too violent, too close to what he was experiencing to offer any sort of comfort. Even from a purely technical point of view, he was unable to admire the work collected in front of him. Increasingly, photography was redundant in his life, despite his insistence on carrying the Ixus around in his pocket. Documenting the savageries of the world could only work if you distanced yourself from what you were framing through the viewfinder. As the target for so much of that threat, it was something he could not claim. The images he saw on these glossy pages were not the world-class achievements of unique visionaries, as he might once have decided, but the shameless invasions of opportunists. He persevered, though, if only to keep his brain occupied and distracted from fears of attack, or thoughts of sleep.
Another hour passed. He felt his eyes grow heavy, but could not allow himself to sleep, not yet. Sleeping gave the green light to the others. He had to find an irregular pattern so that they were disoriented. He wanted their behaviour to lack any fluidity, at least until he had found Vero and forced him to take the map back. Then they could do whatever the fuck they wanted; he would be gone. The burned rubber and exhaust fumes the only clue as to how. He would scoop up Keiko and take her away from the danger, smother her with kisses and apologies, beg for forgiveness. I never abandoned you, he would tell her. I abandoned myself. You weren’t safe, nobody was safe, the way I was.
She’d castigate him for his behaviour, for his lack of faith in the strength of their relationship; she would be ice cold with him for days, maybe even weeks, but he knew she would come around eventually. He had to believe that. Especially if he could make her see what he was dealing with. The scars on his hand would persuade her. The drop in weight. He could show her how he drooled when blood was nearby. He could get her to follow him as he picked up the scent of a fresh corpse and watch as he dug it up for others to devour while he fought the craving to do the same, like a recovering junky locked in a room with a hill of cocaine.
Coffee, he thought. I need coffee.
He pulled on his jacket and walked past the security staff, who were deep in conversation, worried looks on their faces, too involved with each other’s problems to notice him leave, and headed down to the café on the floor below. Industrious students were hunched over laptops plugged into the wall. Couples shared muffins and lattes. A large screen highlighted current exhibitions. Cool gusts from the air-conditioning sifted down from the vents.
Bo bought a cappuccino, avoiding the inspection of the staff, and took it to a table at one end of the seating area, his back to the wall so that he could see everyone as they entered or exited. Driven by an embarrassment that had always attended him when he sat on his own in public with a drink or a meal, he reached in his back pocket for his notebook; he’d almost forgotten it since this whole episode began, but there it was, filled with the notes from his job at The Urbanite; names of those he had photographed, the meetings he had attended, appointments he had kept. Business cards were tucked into a cardboard wallet at the back of the book. He flipped through them, wondering if this plumber was now something crazed by the smell of dead things; if this taxi driver had dismembered anybody in the back of his cab; if this Detective Inspector …
Laurier. Bo got up immediately, answering an urge to call him. He had to give himself up. There might be a cell in it for him. Counselling. Treatment. Maybe, if he explained his plight, the map could be forcibly removed with radiotherapy, chemicals, surgery. He could prove that he was the graverobber that the tabloids were foaming about. He would show them the desecrated graves that had yet to be reported.
He almost ran to the public phone booth situated by the locker room. He fed coins into the slot and dialled the police number. It rang two dozen times before Bo realised it was not going to be picked up. He rubbed the card with his fingers and felt an odd depression on the surface. Turning it over he noticed a mobile phone number had been written in Biro on the other side. He tried it. It rang for so long he thought the network provider’s answering service was about to kick in when the dialling tone vanished, replaced by thin, tortuous breathing.
‘Joseph Laurier, please,’ Bo said. High heels clattered across the hall behind him. He could hear water in the fountain, the tearing of a receipt from the register for a customer in the bookshop. He heard people transferring their belongings into clear plastic bags used in the reading rooms. He closed his eyes. Nobody was answering although there was clearly someone there.
‘Detective Inspector Laurier? Is that you? This is Bo Mulvey. You remember? You know, Richard Dreyfuss.’
‘Mmf.’ Tired. Frail.
‘Sorry? Look, I’m ringing about the graverobber. I need to speak to you. I have something to confess.’
Something approximating a moan floated down the line to him. It sounded tired, pathologically tired. Bo could imagine it belonging to a much older man, not to someone as lithe and lucid as the snide, hawkish copper, someone who had struck him as enjoying his job perhaps too much. A lifer. A pro. He could tell from the sound that Laurier was in trouble, that he might even be dying.
Bo didn’t know how to fill the silence that pooled between them. It struck him that of every person he knew who could offer him help and strength, Laurier had always been his best bet, if only he’d been able to shrug off the feeling that the policeman was too dismissive of him, or, conversely, too suspicious. That he suddenly sounded like an invalid was a shock that broadsided him.
‘Where are you?’ he asked.
‘Aah,’ Laurier managed. ‘Aah.’ And then the link was dead.
Aah. Bo bit his lip. It had to be. There was nothing else it could be; nothing else he could think of.
Yard.
London was a different city now, in early December. Bo was hit by the immensity of the place, or rather, the loneliness of it. Hardly anybody walked its streets; those that did were as owl-eyed as himself. He told some of them to leave, to get in the car and go, but they either looked at him as if he were mad, ignored him or told him to go himself, without any of Bo’s firm politeness. There were no cars, no buses. He wondered what the state of the country beyond the metropolis must be like for there not to be helicopters in the sky, men in khaki driving jeeps, troops dressed for biological warfare, rifles at the ready, reporters from all corners coming to find out why London was going to sleep.
He took the Ninja south through Holborn, along Kingsway to the Victoria Embankment where three men in suits hailed him and pursued him east, parallel to the river until he reached the Houses of Parliament. He swung around Parliament Square into Victoria Street. Outside the glass front of the Department of Trade and Industry, a woman with red, shorn hair threw a blazing carrier bag at him. It missed him by inches, landing on the road where it burst, sending a long arm of fire across the tarmac; the smell of petrol followed him, as did her mostly unintelligible stream of invective.
He turned on to Broadway and stowed the bike out of sight behind the Italian restaurant in front of New Scotland Yard. His blood was up, his legs jittery from the unprovoked attack. He scanned the street for other threats. There was no uniformed constable at the door to greet him. The eternal flame was doused. A figure slouched in the doorway of the Post Office across the road, reluctant to step out from the shadows. A man in a hooded top was too intent on what he was scooping into his mouth from a greasy cardboard box on the steps outside St James’s Park tube station to notice Bo cautiously approach the entrance to the police headquarters.
There was nobody at the reception desk. Potted plants were strewn across the floor, their pots shattered. Soil was scattered around, imprinted with frantic footprints. An arc of dried blood was a ghastly rainbow painted upon one wall. A lift door was opening and closing on a motionless leg poking out into the corridor. Bo stood for a moment, listening to the building make itself known around him. The lack of traffic, of phones ringing, of the general hubbub of people milling around, meant that the steel and concrete and glass moaned and sighed with the infinitesimal strains of realignment, or in sadness at some of the things they must have witnessed over the years, or over the last few days. Perhaps even hours.
Bo couldn’t understand why Laurier was still in the building, with the stink of death coming off it in hot, hard pulses. Maybe when he had said, had tried to say, ‘Yard’, he had meant some other place bearing the same name, or perhaps Bo had simply misheard him. But he doubted it. Laurier would have come here once the trouble started, to co-ordinate responses in the incident room, or whatever it was called here in the real world. Any involvement he had had with the police had generally come from TV. He imagined plain-clothes officers, dour experience burned into tired eyes, smoking over plastic cups of coffee while ‘Guv’ told them to get out there, knock on some doors, do some legwork. It would be good to find such a room to find out if they had any more clue than he as to what they were up against, and what measures had been taken by way of a response. He guessed, then, that some kind of planning suite was what he needed to look for. First, though, it made sense to seek out Laurier’s office.
In a visitors’ book behind reception he found several entries by people coming to fulfil appointments with the Detective Inspector. Most of them referred to an office on the sixth floor, according to a building plan taped to the rear of the reception desk. Bo slipped along the corridor to the lift. He stepped inside and, gritting his teeth at the churned pulp of the dead man’s face, dragged his legs inside, allowing the lift doors to close. He punched the relevant button and the lift ascended. They were passing floor four when the dead man sat up. He was spitting blood and air from a vague hole in his face.
‘That Bernard? That Bernard?’ he was saying, or trying to say. His head was like a garishly decorated cake whose centre was under-cooked.
Bo crouched and put a hand on the man’s back to support him. It was incredibly hot and slicked with blood. He pressed his fingers into the man’s neck to search for a pulse but they kept slipping free. Some of the man’s own fingers were gone, snapped off like green twigs from a branch. Through the blood on his leg Bo saw that most of his left calf had been stripped away from the bone. He couldn’t see from the damage how much of his face remained. Death was all over him; he just didn’t seem ready to acknowledge it yet.
‘What happened?’ Bo asked.
‘Hundreds,’ the other man said, suddenly becalmed as if all he had been waiting for was the sound of somebody else’s voice. He heaved air through that puncture with an intensity that belied his condition. Bo could feel the strength ebbing from him. He smelled the sudden, sour smell of waste as the man emptied his bowels. Everything was abandoning this sinking ship, but he clung on. ‘I ran. This way. Because I didn’t –’ and here he actually laughed, an awful, ragged, sucking wheeze that Bo flinched from ‘– want my. Death. To be. Captured. On CCTV.’
‘Do you know Joseph Laurier? Where I can find him?’
‘I don’t know if. Anybody. Survived.’
‘But I talked to him on the phone, not too long ago.’
The man slumped a little in Bo’s arms; a red eyeball swivelled towards him.
‘They were. Fast. But clumsy. Like kids, really. They were like kids let loose. In a toy shop. They held me. Down. They ate. My leg. My fuh– my fucking. Leg. While I watched. They left. Everyone for. Dead. They didn’t. Finish. Anybody off. No mercy killing. Terrible injuries. Pain. The pain so. Bad. But I don’t feel. It. Any more.’
‘Laurier,’ Bo said.
‘Kill me,’ he said.
‘I’ll get you an ambulance.’
Another snort of laughter. A choking fit. He felt, beneath Bo’s hands, like something bad liberated from an abattoir skip and shovelled into a thin bag.
‘There are no. Ambu. Ambu.’
He lay there, saying ‘Ambu’ until the life drizzled out of him. The lift had stopped at the sixth floor, had opened and closed its doors for him and was now waiting for further instructions. In a moment of claustrophobia, Bo lurched for the button to open them again, spilling him into a corridor filled with more crazed red daubings. He felt insanity reach out like a boy in a childhood game of tag. He flinched from it. Concentrated on breathing. Concentrated on one foot in front of the other. Getting through, because there was no alternative. It was this, or the black hole.
Bodies were strewn about like garden furniture after a hurricane. Some of them were still breathing, but so terribly injured that the rise and fall of their chests was as much as they could manage. Bo ignored them and moved deeper into the maze of offices. He proceeded slowly, conscious that the violence was long over, but aware too that all of its perpetrators might not have vacated the building. The hum of strip lighting was all he could hear.
And then, gradually, the temperature increased. Bo hesitated, wondering if a fire had broken out somewhere up ahead. But he could smell no smoke, nor hear the kind of subdued roar that a house fire creates. Sweat stippled his skin, prickled beneath his clothes. The blood of the man in the lift was turning to gum on his biker jacket. He edged forwards, wishing he had a weapon, and closed his eyes for a few seconds. It was enough to have a swarm of warnings pop behind his eyes. He was being begged, cajoled, and demanded out of the building. The tiny grid opened into a furious network of bright activity. There were fizzing seeds all along it now, where previously it had hosted the occasional blip. Something had been activated. Something that he was not meant to know about.
He felt a convulsing inside him, a great shock. Perhaps his task as the map-reader, as this superficially alien city’s translator, had come to its end. Perhaps now he was disposable. They knew this place as well as he did, no doubt more so. Its old patterns had come shining through the modernism. The shape of many of its streets were really no different to the way they had been five hundred years ago. London was still a warren. It jealously retained its shambles and alleys, the veins of darkness feeding that tired, determined heart. The force of their alarm and anger knocked him; he put out a hand to steady himself and it slid across the wall, as if it itself were sweating.
He inspected his fingers and found a thin mucus coating them. Here and there it threatened to thicken, became tuberous, like the dense funnel webs of spiders he had searched for as a teenager on tropical holidays. Further along the corridor, as it twisted and turned, these rudimentary ‘webs’ became more structured, substantial. They began to interlink, providing awkward obstacles for him to climb over. The lights here had been switched off, or had failed in the bizarre humidity. Bodies began to appear, bound within these snowy pockets, ostensibly unharmed, but grey-skinned, drugged into lethargy. He recognised Laurier as one of them.
