Death of a Bookseller, page 17
Instead of walking home to a long, lonely afternoon in my sad and empty flat, I take a bus to Leytonstone. Even though I’m hungover, the rhythm of the bus as it winds its way through the leafy borough takes my mind off the anxiety churning in the pit of my stomach.
I go for a stroll around the neighbourhood, and it feels good to do something for myself. My walk takes me over the railway bridge, and from the caged overpass, London shimmers, the skyscrapers of the city just visible on the seam of the horizon. Next, I walk through a council estate where I’m greeted by several chubby cats that welcome chin scratches, then over a big grassy roundabout and around the edge of the Catholic cemetery, where jackdaws peck at the earth and the pockmarked graves lean at jaunty angles. I end up on a street lined with cute little shops: several cafés, a florist, an Italian deli, a wine bar, a bookshop, a bakery. Maybe I’ll stop for a treat. A can of elderflower pop, a chocolate muffin, a bunch of gypsophila, or just a browse in the little community bookshop to see if they have anything interesting in stock.
It’s a calm day, a sunny day, the kind of weather that reminds me of spring even though we’re still on the wrong side of Christmas. It makes me feel like good days are coming, like winter will be quick and easy and summer is already waiting patiently in the wings for her turn to shine. I walk slowly, taking in the rich palette of the falling leaves. I really do feel better.
The bookshop smells of fresh espresso. They serve pay-what-you-can oat milk lattes and vegan snacks, and the shelves are stacked with indie books and zines—lots of underground stuff, small print runs from micro presses, as well as the more esoteric titles from the Big Five. There are little woven baskets full of political pin badges and patches by the till.
I wander around, taking in the posters, mentally replanning the shop: I would tidy the racks of zines and move the flyers so customers don’t get confused between what they can take for free and what they have to pay for. I’d refresh the tables, order in a little more stock to make them look fuller, make it all look more appealing. Their Fiction is splintered into too many subgenres, some of which only have one or two titles. Silly. I would alphabetise y the whole section, and then you could lose the busyness of all those unnecessary shelf-talkers. The whole shop would look a little neater, and it would be easier for customers to find specific titles. That would also solve the problem of where to put books that fit into multiple categories—Carmen Maria Machado’s Her Body and Other Parties could sit comfortably in M, instead of being torn between Short Stories, Queer Fiction, and Horror. But then again, it would be a different shop if it was organised alphabetically. Maybe all the signage and overcomplicated subsections are part of its charm.
The Red Parts by Maggie Nelson, a deeply personal memoir about the murder of the author’s aunt and the subsequent trial thirty-five years later, is shelved alongside copies of Bluets and The Argonauts. I like that. I like that it’s with her other work; that first and foremost, it’s hers. Her story, her writing, her auntie, her trauma. I don’t own a copy of Bluets, so I take it to the till in an act of reckless solidarity with the bookshop, even though it means paying double what it would cost if I bought it from work.
“I can’t help but notice something,” I say to the person behind the till. They have round cheeks, a short crop of bleached hair, and an enamel they/them button badge pinned to their shirt pocket. “You don’t have a True Crime section, but you do sell true crime.”
“Uh,” the bookseller says, scanning Bluets and putting it into a neat paper bag stamped with the shop’s logo. “Yeah, some. Not a lot. Like, as a section, it doesn’t really fit with our ethics.”
“How so?” I say, tapping my card on the card reader. It makes a jolly little beep.
They scratch their head and squint, searching for the right words. “I guess it’s just . . . it’s mostly about violence against women? And it tends to be written by men? And it’s, uh, it’s quite anti-sex work, a lot of the time. And, like, we are an anti-carceral collective, so we don’t, uh, we don’t stock work that’s explicitly pro-police, or overtly pro–capital punishment.”
They tap an ACAB pin on their lapel, and I notice bitten fingernails with chipped blue polish. “We have a whole section on police abolition, actually. But, uh. We can order anything in for you. Like, it’s not a problem, we don’t believe in gatekeeping literature, either. Like, it’s all there if you want it, you just have to ask.”
“It’s fine,” I say, accepting the paper bag from their outstretched hand. “I don’t want it, I totally agree.”
My nausea has dissipated, and I take my new book to one of the cafés down the street and order a rose latte and a white chocolate and cranberry muffin. In a window seat, I sip at the frothy pink foam and nibble my muffin and read my book, and while I still feel fragile, I no longer feel sorry for myself.
Outside, a child rides a sweet yellow bicycle in a figure of eight. A woman walks a fat little pug with a face like a crumpled paper bag. Inspired by my surroundings, I reach into my bag for the lilac diary, but it isn’t there. I must have left it at home. My heart sinks when I remember that without my main set of keys, I can’t unlock the heart-shaped padlock anyway.
Determined not to lose my train of thought, I ask the guy behind the counter for a pen, and I start to make little notes in the back of my copy of Bluets, just jotting down whatever I can see out the window. The pen on the page feels comforting.
By the time I leave the café, the sky is streaked with pinks and purples and I’m ready to go home.
ROACH
With a start, I opened my eyes to darkness, the thick blue of a winter’s evening. A strange bed. I reached for Sam, only to find cool sheets that smelled like an alien brand of detergent. My searching fingers found the cold, hard spine of my notebook, lost beneath the pillows. No. Laura’s bed, I was in Laura’s bed, and I had fallen asleep, and now it was late, and it was dark, and I was on the brink of getting caught because the noise that had disturbed my peaceful sleep was the sound of a key twisting in a lock.
Frozen, I listened with mounting horror as the front door slammed shut. The flat shook in response. I pictured Laura in the hallway, hanging up her coat and tote bag, slipping off her shoes, padding barefoot into the bedroom to change out of her work clothes, her shock at finding me, an intruder, curled up for a catnap in her bed. Would she call the police, or would she give me the chance to explain myself—and if she did, what on earth could I say to explain this?
Footsteps, heavy footsteps—not the dainty steps of Laura in her size-six ballet flats, but the substantial tread of an unknown neighbour ascending the stairs to the flat above. I listened carefully to make sure I wasn’t mistaken, but the gap underneath the bedroom door remained dark, the hallway beyond it silent, and the footsteps passed over my head. Relief flooded me with an almost euphoric high, and then I realised that of course it wasn’t Laura: I still had her keys.
In stealth mode, I slipped out of Laura’s bed and closed the bedroom window. As I gathered my things, I realised with a jolt of excitement that the notebook I’d found under the pillow was the lilac diary, the one with the fussy little heart-shaped padlock.
I creeped to the bedroom door and peeked into the hallway. Silence, stillness. Fuck it. I shoved the diary into my bag and let myself out the front door like I owned the place. My heart was hammering, and I broke into a run.
At the bus stop, an old woman in a thick mulberry coat watched me catch my breath, her eyes reflecting an air of judgement. A deluge of paranoia: did I leave everything as I’d found it? Was the bed made before I climbed into it? Did I leave a light on, did I close the window, did I leave anything behind? My brow prickled with sweat. I felt sick, an intrusive image of Laura catching me in her bed playing on repeat in the dark theatre of my imagination.
Across the street, I caught sight of a woman in a camel-coloured raincoat and a midnight-blue beret that matched her shoes. Laura. I had missed her—she had missed me—by minutes. The bed would still be warm. With her keys still in my bag, I wondered if she even knew they were missing yet. I felt powerful, watching her stroll unknowingly towards a locked front door. Did she have a spare set of keys, I wondered, or was she locked out?
A bus pulled into the bus stop, and as I glanced up to check its destination, I was humbled by the familiar presence of the moon. Under her watchful white eye, a cataract in the blanket of night, I could finally breathe. The moon kept me tethered; I’d always felt a real affinity with her. She was of the night, just as I was of the night.
I climbed on to the bus, grateful to make a quick escape.
If I’d left anything behind in Laura’s flat, there was no reason it couldn’t have been from the night before. Laura was drunk, perhaps too drunk to remember exactly how the evening had ended. Maybe she’d let me in to use her loo. Maybe she’d invited me in for a drink. She wouldn’t remember. It would be her word against mine. She wouldn’t remember. All was well.
I checked my phone, and saw a message from Sam. He wanted to meet in Camden, in the Devonshire Arms. A busy bar, a cold pint. An alibi. I fired off a quick message to say I was on my way, then fumbled with my headphones. The chatty babble of the Murder Girls filled my ears, and as I listened to Sarah describe the mercilessness of another killer, the cruel psychological games he played, I felt a sense of tranquillity wash over me.
I turned my attention to the lilac diary. The heart-shaped padlock and the little fairy key were a match, and I opened the diary to reveal several pages of Laura’s girlie bubble-writing. She wrote in short bursts, little scraps of recollection, random phrases. I think about the rhythm of my feet . . . where I walked hand in hand with my mother . . . despite all the pain, and the loss, and the grief . . . tethered to Walthamstow . . . she knew these streets, these trees . . . gone for ten years this summer.
As the bus shuddered to a stop at a set of traffic lights, I felt a soft flutter of excitement in the pit of my stomach. Ten years this summer had certainly caught my eye. Summer 2009 was the Summer of Frost. That’s what the papers called it. It was a summer of death—both for me and for Laura too, it seemed. For me, it was a summer of strappy baby doll tops and pink lipstick, of walking home from school with Abbi and studying passersby, learning to look for the face of a killer on every street corner. How many women were murdered in Walthamstow in 2009? I knew of at least five—not by name but by killer. It had to be Lee, it had to be. I could feel it in my blood, in the marrow of my bones, like a premonition. A detective’s hunch.
The bus pulled into my stop then, and in an almost catatonic state of euphoria, I disembarked. I felt itchy all over as I headed towards the Tube station. Excited, like I could quite easily peel my skin off in pink leathery strips. I’d assumed Laura’s mother had met her maker at the hands of a husband or boyfriend. A marital spat turned deadly, as they so often do. A woman is more likely to be murdered by her partner than a stranger. That’s just a fact. But, if my instincts were correct, I was on the brink of an incredible discovery.
I gave myself a little shake. I was getting ahead of myself, needed to do my research. But the net had narrowed considerably—there was no denying that. I just had to dig into the history of each of the Stow Strangler victims, and figure out if any of them had a daughter called Laura.
By the time I reached Camden, I felt serene. Laura had so very nearly found me in her flat, but dark forces had brought us together for a reason, and they were keeping us apart for a reason too.
The pub was tucked down Kentish Town Road, all darkly varnished wood, stickers plastered over the bathroom doors, a neon orange Jägermeister sign behind the bar. The ceiling was papered with nicotine-stained posters of goth bands and rock stars and vampire movies, stuck down with wallpaper paste twenty years ago or more. I thought of Jackie, strutting under these posters a decade before I was born, smoking cigs and showing off her legs in a leather miniskirt. Embarrassing.
A couple guys, soft around the waist with thinning ponytails, in Motörhead and Metallica hoodies and combats, propped up the bar. A dude with a bridge piercing and an illegible tattoo above his left eyebrow leaned on the beer taps and joined their conversation.
Sam had snagged my favourite table, the one under the Ville Valo poster in the farthest corner of the room. A pint of cider and black, already half finished, sat on the table in front of him, and he was fiddling with his phone.
“All right,” he said by way of greeting, accepting my kiss by offering a bristly cheek. “I’ll get a round.”
He lifted his glass to his lips, and his pale, stubble-speckled throat constricted with each swallow as he downed the last half of his pint. A drop of pink cider rolled from the corner of his mouth and left a dark stain the size of a thumbprint on his Slayer T-shirt.
He moved across the bar with a broad-shouldered swagger. While he ordered us drinks, I pulled out my phone and searched the internet for Lee Frost. The details of the case were so familiar, but the names of his five victims blurred together. At first glance, most of them looked old enough to have a teenage daughter: Meadows, Gamble, and Cordovan for sure, and Matthams couldn’t be ruled out either.
Sam placed a tray of purple pints and two neon orange shot glasses filled with a syrupy black on the table and planted a kiss on my cheek. I picked up one of the shots—Jäger, herbal like an old-fashioned tincture for a sore throat. The sickly smell rose into the air between us.
“Shots ’cause we’re celebrating,” he said with a triumphant grin.
“What are we celebrating?” I asked, lowering my phone.
“Aha.” He smiled a broad, toothy smile, and he was so handsome then, all flushed and excited. He stuck a hand into his back pocket and pulled out a folded piece of paper. He handed it to me, and I began to unfold it, flattening the creases on the sticky table. It was a printout from a website, with all the banners and ads reproduced in pixelated black and white printer ink. He raised his fingers to his lips and pretended to bite his nails.
“What’s this?” I said, even though, clear as night, I could see there was one of my reworked Laura poems typed on the page. My mouth felt dry, the room hot and loud.
“What does it look like?” Sam asked. “I found this poetry website, and I sent them one of your poems, and they liked it, and they published it.”
Vertiginous, the room skewed out of focus. A jolt in my stomach, the heat of the Jäger rising, burning the back of my throat as I read the first stanza.
It was now 5 A.M., and dawn,
a hot, fiery dawn,
was slowly filling a sad, tranquil sky.
“Are you psyched?” he said, putting his arm around me and pressing his nose into my cheek. “Or did I fuck up?” He sounded unsure now, worried that he’d made a mistake.
“I’m speechless,” I said, alcohol and panic fizzing through my veins. “Absolutely fucking speechless.”
“Phew,” he said, relieved. “I panicked for a second, there.”
It wasn’t Laura’s work, I told myself. It was a found poem to begin with. I had just repurposed it again. It was a hybrid. It was inspired by. It was an after. It was an homage. It was a response, an answer. It was a continuation of the conversation. Laura’s work raised questions and my work offered a fresh perspective, a new angle, another way of looking at it, examining it. Poets and writers were always doing that, weren’t they? Referencing each other and circling back to one another? It’s how you created steam, how you created a moment, a movement. And it wasn’t a big publication anyway, just some website that my boyfriend—my boyfriend!—had found because he wanted to be a good boyfriend, wanted to show me how to be bold, how to take life by the throat and squeeze.
LAURA
I smell a rat when six customer orders come through for six tacky true crime books. I shuffle the paperwork with a frown. These names feel familiar; there’s something about them that rings a bell. Atkins. Fromme. Kasabian. Krenwinkel. Van Houten. Watson.
A low-carb diet, a rock band I used to like, Sherlock’s sidekick. No pattern, no connection, but something makes my stomach roil, and so I google the most unusual name—Patricia Krenwinkel—and I’m faced with a 1960s passport photo of a plain young woman, and a picture of an old woman in a courtroom, and a snap of three girls with pale skin and long dark hair, all in matching light blue dresses and dark blue cardigans, smiling like schoolgirls.
Patricia Dianne Krenwinkel is an American murderer and a former member of Charles Manson’s “family.”
Susan Atkins, Leslie Van Houten, and Patricia Krenwinkel. Manson girls.
I open the customer order cupboard and scan the spines. Every time I see a true crime title, I grab it, until I have a stack of around nine or ten. The first is a book called Twisted Tales of True Crime: Murders, Disappearances, and Serial Killers and it’s reserved for a Nannie Doss, who chose not to leave a phone number. I google the name.
Known as the Giggling Granny, the Lonely Hearts Killer, the Black Widow and Lady Blue Beard, Nannie Doss was an American serial killer responsible for the deaths of eleven people between the 1920s and 1954.
The next is a book called Cold Cases: SOLVED, reserved for a Jane Toppan.
Nicknamed Jolly Jane, Jane Toppan confessed to thirty-one murders after her arrest in 1901. And another: Aileen Wuornos. An American serial killer and sex worker who murdered seven men in Florida in 1989 and 1990 by shooting them at point-blank range.
Lydia Sherman. Florencio Fernández. Eric Edgar Cooke. Sachiko Eto. All of them, every single one of them, is the name of a killer.
Eli appears at my elbow and logs into the other till, chatting brightly to a customer as he starts to scan several walking guides and a couple of garish romance paperbacks.
