by Fiona Mozley
The spot is next to an alleyway that leads to a large area enclosed by plywood boards, emblazoned with the lettering and logo of a well-known building contractor. Behind the boards, there is a noisy building site. It has been there for several years and keeps changing shape and enveloping then releasing new tracts of land. Nobody Robert knows has seen what is being built behind the boards, but he probably could have found out easily.
If he read newspapers, listened to the radio or watched television other than football, he would know that a deep hole is being dug. A new underground line is being built, deep below the earth. The plywood boards mask huge machines. Diggers loosen the topsoil and move piles of earth, before shifting it onto trucks and out of the city. Vast drills bite into the bedrock. They swirl and cut and push debris to the surface. There are pumps to pour water to cool the drill as the friction rises. The machines rumble. The rock and soil and buildings around them rumble too. As the hole gets bigger, the machines go deeper. The rumblings get deeper too.
Robert leans against the wall, steadies himself and catches his breath. As he waits, he sees a figure approach, slowly. The streetlight is reflected on her pale skin and her synthetic clothing. She looks herself like a slit of light, a single ray, the crack between a door and its frame. She continues to wander toward him and he blinks several times to clear his vision. He tries to steady his focus so he can see the figure as single and crisp, not double and frayed.
“Oh,” he says as she gets near enough to be feet and legs and arms and body and a head with hair and a face. “It’s you.”
She slinks forward and joins him in the shadows. He looks at her eyes and sees the blood within them and the lines beneath them, as he did earlier in the day. He sees the cracks in her skin around her nose and mouth and scars where previous cracks opened, healed, opened, healed.
“What are you doing here?”
Her reply is whispered. “Archbishop sent us out looking for the tremors what I felt. They’ve gone home, but I’ve stayed. I know this is where it’ll start again.”
The reply means little to Robert. He’s too far gone to listen.
He nods all the same, and grasps Cheryl’s arm; Cheryl, who is known to most people in this part of the city as Debbie McGee.
Robert leans in and says to her: “You take care of yourself, now. Promise me you will.”
She promises in fragile whispers.
“You take care of yourself and if you get in any bother—any bother at all, mind—come straight to me and I’ll sort it out. You hear. Straight to me.”
A fragile nod.
Robert pushes himself off from the wall against which he’s been leaning, and shunts himself down the road toward home.
Cheryl, the woman they call Debbie McGee, remains. She returns to the building site. She finds the opening of the huge crater, and a ladder leading down. She descends. She does not return.
The End of September
Suburbs
The city is far too clean. All the good dirt—the earth, the soil, the compost, the organic matter—has been cleared away, shunted along tarmacked streets and out to the suburbs. It sits in gardens and parks, and at the center of roundabouts and the sides of motorways. Surfaces are wipeable. Windows are washed, carpets are hoovered, countertops are disinfected. Even the streets are cleaned, cleared of dust, dead pigeons, fallen leaves. There is no time for good dirt. No time to let it settle, dissolve, disintegrate, rub along with the dirt that’s already there, then re-emerge as something new and beautiful: a flower, a tree, a decorative fungus. Instead, there is grime: the residue of noxious solvents, a thin film of condensed smog on buildings, soot that seeps into nostrils and the pores of skin.
In the suburbs, Jackie Rose sits on her garden bench. Jackie likes her garden and she likes to garden. She has lived in this house for thirty years. She and Keith have raised three sons here. All three are tall, athletic, intelligent and kind. Jackie and Keith couldn’t be more proud. The eldest is at university but still lives at home. He gets the train to Queen Mary and studies engineering. His name is Harry. They named him after Prince Harry. Jackie cried when Diana died. The second son is an apprentice carpenter. Andy is probably the most handsome: girls stare at him in the street. Jackie takes a strange, vicarious pleasure in it. Yes, she thinks: this is my son. I made him. The youngest is Mark. He is studying for his GCSEs. He’s got a girlfriend but Jackie and Keith think he might be gay.
Jackie sees the garden as hers. Everything else belongs to her and Keith together: the house, the cars, the motorhome, the furniture. But the garden is hers alone. “My garden,” she says. “What have you done to my garden?” when the boys hack through the tulips with a football. “We’ll get that for my garden,” when she and Keith spot an attractive planter at the garden center. “How’s my garden looking?” when she’s away from home, working on a case.
She plants, prunes, mows, puts up wire for the climbing roses, and bamboo poles for sweet peas. She digs holes for the bulbs then tops them over with compost. She trudges and tramples and squelches in green wellies after they’ve had rain and the ground is good for turning. Now it is autumn, she sweeps fallen leaves that have shrivelled, browned and crisped.
There are also weeds: unwanted, interlopers. There are dandelions, daisies, clover, moss. They infiltrate the pristine lawn Jackie and Keith set down when they bought the house: strips of turf rolled up like sacred scrolls, laid side by side to stitch themselves together over that first summer.
Jackie wages war on weeds. She wages war with a miniature pitchfork, secateurs and chemical weapons. She hoes, she scarifies, she pulls weeds from between the patio stones with clenched fists before they have time to settle. She rips, tears, snips, swears.
It’s a Tuesday morning in late September. It is the equinox. The day is as long as the night and the night is as long as the day. The temperature is moderate. There is dew on the grass and a thin covering of mist. It’s 6 a.m. Keith brings Jackie a cup of instant coffee with milk and sugar. Jackie is holding an arch-top folder and flicking through some of the documents held within.
Soon afterwards, she heads off to work, at a police station in central London. She goes to the office of her commanding officer for a quarterly review. She brings with her the notes and cases she wants to discuss and the details of the resources she thinks her team needs.
Michael Warbeck is sitting behind his desk, leaning back in his chair, looking at his phone and tapping on its screen with his two thumbs. He looks up briefly as Jackie walks in and then he says, “I’ll be right with you, Rose.” He continues to tap.
Jackie settles herself in the chair in front of his desk and places her bundle of documents on her knees. She begins to riffle through them and pulls to the top the ones that are most worthy of discussion.
“Right with you,” he says again. “I just need to …”
He trails off.
“You writing a novel?” Jackie asks. It’s rude but she’s too old to care. She can retire in just three years.
Warbeck chuckles in a hollow sort of way. She can tell that he’s affronted, but not enough to cause her any bother.
“Sorry,” he says with a toothy smile. “What can I do for you today?”
“It’s my review,” says Jackie.
“God, is it? That’s come around quickly.”
“Every three months.”
“Goodness me. It feels like you were here yesterday. You’ve obviously loomed large in my thoughts these last few months.”
“Sir, I’ve printed out some graphics to help you better understand the situation the department is now facing.”
Jackie finds that Michael Warbeck responds better to images than to words. Bullet points are also useful as they arrange the words into shapes, if words are needed at all. Since his promotion above her eighteen months ago, Jackie has become an expert in concision. She can now fit three months of her department’s work onto a single side of A4 paper.
She pushes the document a
cross the desk. He picks it up, casts his eyes over it, then puts it down.
“I know,” he says. “Why don’t you set it all out to me here and now. Speak to me, Jackie.”
Jackie smiles. She expected this. She pulls some more notes from her folder.
“Sir, things are getting much worse. If there were a disease that made people disappear, we’d say we had an epidemic on our hands. Vulnerable young people are being reported as missing at a rate I’ve never seen before. Men and women. The men we suspect as suicides—that’s what the evidence points to, and on that score I’m not sure it’s something we as the police can do much about. The women, on the other hand, well, the evidence my team have collected points to sexual exploitation and trafficking. These are women from difficult backgrounds; many are first- or second-generation immigrants, some illegal immigrants; many have been on our radar before, either us the police, or social services; many grew up in foster care, and then they just disappear, and there’s no one around to do all that much about it.’
‘It doesn’t sound like it’s been a very productive few months. Any success stories? Found anyone?’
‘Sir, I’m afraid the people we find are people who would probably turn up anyway. I can’t say we’ve had much luck in uncovering the whereabouts of these individuals I’m talking about. What we need is better strategies for identifying these vulnerable people in the first place, and we also need to be working more closely with other teams within Serious Crimes—the Sexual Exploitation framework—so that we can do more to prevent grooming and trafficking.”
“Jackie, Jackie, stop there for a second.” Michael Warbeck holds out a hand. “I know that’s where you wanted to be. We all know that. You had your heart set on Sexual Exploitation. But it just didn’t work out with the arrangement of personnel we had available. We needed you on Missing Persons. I’m sorry, but that’s just the way it is. Now, I hope you’re not using this as an opportunity to segue into that line of work.”
“No, sir. My priority is to find people who are reported to us as missing, it’s simply that better links with other teams would help us achieve that. Let me give you an example.” She riffles through her papers and brings out a case file. “This is Cheryl Lavery, sir, a.k.a. Debbie McGee.”
“As in the wife of Paul Daniels? The one from Strictly Come Dancing?”
“Yes, sir. That’s her nickname. She and her man were known to go around Soho performing magic tricks. Hence the names. He’s Paul Daniels.”
“I see.”
“One way or another, Cheryl Lavery has been known to social services and the police for a while. She’s a drug user, she’s spent a long time without a fixed address, she has been convicted for shoplifting, public indecency and solicitation. Finally, she was reported missing about three months ago. Now, we don’t know for sure, but we suspect she has fallen victim to a pimping ring. They take vulnerable people like her, who may have been working regularly or occasionally on the streets, and they set them up in a brothel somewhere and work them around the clock.”
“Well, in that case, that’s a job for a different unit.”
“But if we worked together. If we sent a small team on secondment.”
“Jackie, I’m not sure we’ve got the budget for secondments.”
Jackie steadies herself. “Absolutely, sir. It’s just, I can’t help but feel frustrated when we encounter the case files of all these people who’ve gone missing, who could have been helped. Who could still be helped.”
Michael Warbeck nods sympathetically. “It’s a difficult one,” he says. “It’s one of the most difficult things we have to come to terms with as police officers. It’s very easy to become emotionally involved in our case work.”
“It’s not that, sir. It’s a case of productivity.”
“Jackie,” he says again, getting up from his chair. “I’ll tell you what, we can reconvene later. I’m afraid I’ve got meetings at Whitehall I should be preparing for. I’ll tell you what though, I’ll have a read of your report, and there might be something in it that I can raise with the Minister. How about that?” He holds out his hand for the papers.
Jackie understands that she’s being dismissed. She collates some of the key documents along with her summary and longer report, and hands the bundle to her commanding officer, certain that they will have very little further contact until her next quarterly review.
Hunting
Agatha takes the dog out early to avoid the kinds of people who walk their dogs after 9 a.m. She would like to avoid all other dog walkers but, in London, this is impossible, and she read that puppies need to be socialized, so it’s a good idea to allow Fedor to meet others of his kind. If he is to encounter dogs, she must encounter dog walkers. In her experience, the ones who emerge before 9 a.m. are preferable to the ones who emerge after 9 a.m. The former are the kinds of people who get up early and get on with their days, and have things to do—jobs, etc. They’re hard-working, disciplined people and their approach to their dogs is similar. People who walk their dogs after 9 a.m. are slovenly. They’re not likely to have jobs or commitments, and they’re likewise lax in their approach to their animals. Whenever Fedor gets into scraps with other dogs, it is after 9 a.m. Agatha has decided this is no coincidence.
This morning she slept in and is out later than she intended. She holds Fedor’s lead while Roster follows, carrying the dog’s coat—in case the weather changes—and other items of dog-walking paraphernalia.
“What’s that one?” Agatha asks Roster. She points to a dog in the distance, running between trees and sniffing the leaf litter.
“A pointer,” Roster replies.
“Wrong,” says Agatha. “It’s a Vizsla.”
“A Vizsla is a type of pointer.”
“From Hungary, yes. But you can’t just say pointer. If you say pointer without any qualification then I’ll think you just mean a standard pointer, not a Vizsla. Imagine if you pointed at a Clumber spaniel and just said spaniel.”
“Imagine,” says Roster.
They continue to walk along a gravel path beneath a canopy of trees. Beech masts are strewn across the grass with the first fall of umber leaves. Fedor strains at his harness. Agatha looks around for hazards, then leans down and unclips the lead.
He has grown significantly in the last three months. He has now reached his full, adult height, although his torso hasn’t yet filled out—his growth has been channeled through length rather than weight. His shoulders jut out and his spine is visible through his fur, from neck to hip. Each connected vertebra is distinct, undulating like cursive handwriting on a page.
Fedor speeds away and buries his long dart of a nose in the lively aroma. Agatha is struck by the extent to which dogs use their noses to navigate the world, and how their experiences of the world must be so different from those of humans, led by their eyes. Dogs scoop from the air the fabric of the earth. When Fedor presses his face into the leaf litter, he breathes morsels of the rotting leaves, and particles of fungi from the soil beneath. He breathes the urine and the faeces of mice and voles, or he might detect the owl that flew overhead the night before, swooping silently to capture its supper. Through its nose, a dog deals with history.
Agatha’s senses only decipher the present. To access the past, she must rely on the testimony of others.
She was the sixth daughter of Donald Howard. He fathered no sons. The first pregnancy occurred unexpectedly. In 1934, aged fourteen, Donald knocked up a girl from his village. Marry her, everyone said. He didn’t marry her. He fled. He moved to the capital and found work as a butcher’s apprentice in its East End, near the marshes. He sectioned hogs and swept their blood and excrement from the slaughterhouse floor. He became a skilled handler of sharp blades.
His second daughter was also the granddaughter of the butcher, his employer. When the pregnancy was discovered, the butcher came at him with a cleaver but Donald was faster and ducked and swayed and caught the old man in the belly with a carving knife. He s
wept up the butcher’s blood and dumped him in the canal with a dumbbell fastened to his ankle. Local gangs, everyone said. It was known the butcher had failed to comply with the demands of the hard men who ran the neighborhood. Donald went along with the story, and this time he did marry the girl. Together they became figureheads for the backlash against these gangs, and the result was a new gang, with Donald at the helm. The gang was built upon the premise of seeking revenge for the slaughtered butcher but it became more violent and detached from its original purpose. Donald rallied local lads and they drove the previous gangs east, and they took control of much of the gangland business. They ran brothels and backstreet casinos and smuggled cigarettes and alcohol.
By the time the war came, and with it conscription, Donald had already suffered two separate knife wounds to his left thigh and had begun to walk with a limp. He avoided military service but other men of his age did not. Donald worked this to his advantage. His influence spread. So did his reputation. It was around this time that his first wife left him, and with her went his second daughter. He’s changed, she said. He’s changed, everyone said.
After the war, Donald bought property in central London. Prices had slumped and much of it was in disrepair through wartime poverty or outright bomb damage. It was going cheap. A few years previously, Donald Howard had gone to see a motion picture in full technicolor at the Leicester Square Trocadero. Its name was Gone with the Wind. Land, it’s the only thing that matters, Mr. O’Hara had said to his daughter. Donald had taken these words to heart. He bought and he bought. All the money he earned from his illicit activities was poured into property in Soho. He ran more brothels, and strip clubs, and underground gay bars, and he became achingly, blindingly rich. Another wife. This one was significantly more glamorous than the last: she had aspirations in musical theater and smoked cigarettes using a long, red cigarette holder. Three more daughters, five in total. He and his glamorous wife named these daughters after London landmarks: Angel, Chelsea and Victoria.