by Jane Goodall
Sharon rolled her eyes. ‘That’s what you always say.’
Inside the building there was nothing but a concrete space with two lifts. They went up to the tenth floor, where Zig led the way along a corridor strewn with cigarette butts and crisp packets, and knocked on a door near the far end. A middle-aged woman appeared and looked at them through thick spectacles.
‘Johnny’s not here,’ she said.
‘Do you know when he’ll be back, Mrs Mullighan?’ asked Zig. ‘Could we come in and wait for him?’
The woman held the door open for them. She was small with a pleasant, rather timid expression on her face and showed no sign of disapproval at their appearance.
They were standing in a poky sitting room with squat furniture and a green and brown patterned carpet, but over by the wall was something that didn’t belong there. At first Sharon wondered if it was a giant washing machine, but there were stacks of paper beside it.
‘Do you want some orange squash?’ asked the woman. ‘I can do you a round of sandwiches if you’re hungry.’
Sharon didn’t wait for Zig to reply. ‘Yes, please,’ she said. She was actually very hungry.
Zig went over to the machine and lifted the lid.
‘What is that thing anyway?’ asked Sharon.
‘It’s the photocopier. Here. I’ll show you.’ Zig picked up a sheet of paper with a photograph of Kaiser in his mask, holding the mike up to his wide open mouth. She put it on the glass plate on top of the machine and lowered the lid, then pressed a button. There was a clanking noise, followed by a flash of green light, and another sheet of paper shot out of a slot in the side. Zig grabbed it and laid it next to the original. It was an exact copy.
‘This looks like it was taken up at Highgate,’ Sharon said. ‘Let’s see if there’s any with me in. Maybe I’ll get on the cover of Yeller. Never know, do you?’
They sat on the floor. There were half a dozen shots of the Suddens in their masks, but none of Tuesday’s fire show. Zig wasn’t interested in them. She was sifting very fast through the pages, spilling them across the floor then gathering them up again, swearing between her teeth.
Mrs Mullighan reappeared with a plate of sandwiches. ‘Ham and cheese,’ she said. ‘I had a bit of ham in the fridge. I thought you might like a bit of ham.’ She picked up a handbag from the chair in the corner. ‘I’m going out for some ciggies. Will you be all right?’
‘Sure.’ Sharon smiled at her. ‘Thanks for these.’ She ate the sandwiches while Zig continued to go through the papers. ‘How come Mrs Mullighan lets all this go on in her living room? Not exactly convenient, is it?’
‘Mrs M’s a bit loopy, like I told you. John has to keep an eye on her. But she’s got a pension and a council flat, and that’s a convenience from his point of view.’
‘Well she can’t be all that hopeless. These are good sandwiches. You should have some.’
‘She’s quite capable of spending all day making sandwiches when there’s nobody to eat them. Anyway, we didn’t come here to eat lunch, Sharon.’ Zig pointed to the stacks of yellow paper by the copying machine. ‘You go through that lot. I’ll take a look in his bedroom.’
Sharon sat on the floor and began flicking through the stacked pages. She soon figured out that they were all prepared as pages for the fanzine, in repeated sets, and that there was nothing much in them that she hadn’t seen before. Except that the Deff Row page now had only two faces on it. She put a copy in her bag, then stayed there for a minute, cross-legged on the floor, looking round.
There was something sticking out of the back of the sofa — a broken spring, maybe. But there wouldn’t be springs in the back, would there? She reached up and touched the protruding bit of metal, which had torn through the knobbly brown fabric of the cover. It wasn’t a spring, because springs were curved and this was just a straight prong. She pulled it and it came out quite easily, a long smooth piece of steel. She pushed it back in and went to find Zig.
*
Number 93 Lots Road looked worse than its neighbours. The cracked windows were taped over with newspaper, which wasn’t such a bad thing from the squatters’ point of view, Aidan thought. No prying eyes from the street. He tried the door. It stuck a bit, but wasn’t locked. He shut it behind him as silently as possible and edged forward into the dim, empty space.
For a few seconds he was confounded by the vision of something inhuman — a monster thrown into glowing relief at the far end. As his eyes adjusted to the low visibility, he realised it was a mural lit from above so as to create the illusion of some giant two-legged beast climbing the stairs.
But this place was confusing to the ears as well as the eyes. He heard traffic, then a train passing, and underneath was the constant rhythmic noise of some heavy machinery. That would be the power station, which had underground loading and transport systems. If he concentrated hard, he could almost distinguish between the background noise and the virtual silence of the house itself — though that didn’t have to mean it was empty, so he proceeded cautiously.
The pinlight torch wasn’t ideal for this situation, but letting its miniature roving beam discover the layout of the place yard by yard, he made his way around the perimeter. Where were the walls? They’d been knocked out — all of them — leaving just the outer shell. The ceiling was still in place, but what the daddy-o was holding it up? And this wasn’t just one house, it was two of them, knocked together. Whoever did it hadn’t finished the job very well, because bits of broken wall were left sticking out from the sides and up from the floor. Both back doors were boarded up with heavy planks, and the second of the front doors was crudely bricked in.
One step at a time, he made his way towards the staircase at the far end. The floorboards felt solid enough, but you never knew. He held his breath when the shaft of light momentarily dimmed, as if a shadow had crossed it. Maybe there was someone up there.
He stood still, listening. It was repeated, twice: a soft percussive sound, very light, the shadow crossing. He moved to the foot of the staircase and looked up to see, framed in the centre of the daylit square above, the outline of a cat. It remained at its post on the windowsill, watching him as he climbed towards it. As he reached the top step, it made a bound to the left and stood in front of one of the doors, arching its back and making a silent miaow. Aidan sat on the top step and held a hand out towards it, letting it take its time before making another move. After a few more miaows, reaching the verge of audibility, the creature came forward and brushed against his knuckles.
‘Okay, hot stepper,’ Aidan murmured. ‘Let’s do some lookin around.’
Becoming more confident that the cat was the only presence he had to reckon with, he explored the rooms, taking photos and picking up samples from the array of spare parts and broken gadgetry. It was impossible to tell how many people might be living here — there were mattresses strewn over the floor in one of the rooms and the furniture in the other looked distinctly as if it got slept on.
As he started back down the stairs, the cat ran ahead of him and into the semi-darkness below. It stopped, a shadowy silhouette sitting neatly in the middle of the floor, and when his torch beam caught its eyes, there was another miaow. It wants something, Aiden guessed. But what? This time he did the approaching and it stayed put, swishing its tail against the floor. The pinlight of the torch hovered around it, revealing something he had to investigate more closely. He knelt and traced the edges of the floorboards with a finger. They were cut across, as if to make a trapdoor. The boards came away easily, creating a good-sized opening onto another flight of stairs, down which the cat instantly disappeared.
Aidan stood for a moment, considering the options. If there was anyone down there they’d have heard him moving around by now and had plenty of opportunity to ambush, unless they were waiting for him to put his foot in a trap. A flight of steps like that would be the worst place to get ambushed. After counting them with the torch he made a dash for it, jumping the last three steps and getting his
back to the nearest wall.
He was standing in a small alcove, facing a door fastened with an oversized padlock. Inspecting the keyhole, he noticed scratches in the metal. Someone must have had a go at this — but they evidently didn’t know what they were doing. It took Aidan all of thirty seconds to release the mechanism with a pick he made from the wire Jimmy had provided for exactly that purpose.
Inside, the torch revealed a light bulb. He found the switch and stood there, taking in the bizarre sight that confronted him. A long narrow room with a row of masks strung across the centre, all hollow eyes and lurid mouths. Everywhere there were faces: on sketches pinned to the wall, photographed in close-up, displayed in open books, sculpted in brown clay and white plaster. He crouched to look at the floor where someone had dropped a bottle of yellow paint. The thicker edges of the pool were still tacky. The drain over by the wall was yellow too, so there had been some sort of clean-up attempt.
Before setting to work with the camera, Aidan took care to replace the three boards that made the trapdoor, in case anyone should come in through the front door and see the light. It was easily done because there were grooved handholds on the underside of the boards. Evidently someone was in the habit of making themselves very private down here, and you could see why. The place was decked out like some personal Rocky Horror show, with its grimacing masks and plaster-cast heads and its array of murderous looking equipment: vices, knives, saws, razors, skewers, long-bladed scissors, bottled chemicals and boxes of matches.
The masks hung up on the line were garish things suitable for a stage show, but there were others. On the workbench along the side of the room was a row of plaster heads, some of them thickly coated with latex. Putting the camera on the bench, he slipped on his gloves and gently peeled at the edges of one of the latex sheets.
It came away easily, and when he pushed the concave form outwards, the face of a man was revealed, so perfectly detailed it might have been the real thing, lifted from a corpse with a scalpel. He photographed it before inverting it again and replacing it on the sculpted head. One of the other heads was coated all over, front and back, with the two halves marked off by a fine cut running up the sides of the neck, over the ears and across the scalp. Then he noticed that the line was created by a length of red thread, which was anchored either side of the mould. A cutting thread. When he pulled the ends taut, the two halves of the latex cast sprang apart and the thread came away in his hand.
*
Johnny M’s bedroom didn’t have much in it: a bed, a little bookcase, a stack of newspapers and magazines in the corner. Zig was sitting on the bed surrounded by scrapbooks and loose photographs. Seeing Sharon, she shut the scrapbook she was holding and sprang to her feet in an awkward movement that sent dozens of photos cascading onto the floor. Sharon began gathering them up.
At first she couldn’t see anything of interest in them. They were just snapshots of passing cars, doorways of buildings, people walking down the street. Then she noticed that the car was always the same car — a little green one — and that there were lots of pictures of the same long-haired woman going in and out of buildings. In several shots she was at the entrance of the Chelsea police station. The sign was clearly readable behind her. In another she was coming out of a hotel called the Fyfield, and there were several of her outside a camera shop. Sharon took one from the pile and laid it on the bed, then went back through those she’d just looked at, pulling out another, and then a third.
‘Look,’ she said. ‘That’s the same place in all these. The camera shop. And, hey! Here’s one of Logan Royce.’ Zig wasn’t looking. She was rolling the scrapbook up in her jacket so she could put it into her string bag without it being visible. ‘What’s in that?’ asked Sharon.
‘Dunno. I’ll take a look later.’ Zig gathered up a stack of photos and combed through the edges of it with her thumb as if it was a flick book. ‘Better put these back,’ she said. ‘I found them in the top drawer over there.’
‘Aren’t you even interested in them?’ Sharon asked.
‘Maybe not.’ Zig had an odd expression on her face, as if something had upset her, and turned aside to collect up the rest of the scrapbooks. ‘These were under the mattress. Give me a hand, will you.’
The mattress was lumpy and heavy, so Sharon had to hold it up while Zig laid out the books on the mesh underneath, but the sound of a key in the front door forced a botched completion of the cover-up. They heard Mrs Mullighan come rustling into the next room.
‘I did some shopping,’ she said. ‘Just a few things. I don’t like to run out.’ She took the bags to the kitchen and came out again, cleaning her spectacles on a tea towel.
‘Our Johnny should be back in a minute,’ she said.
Zig shot a glance at Sharon. ‘Unfortunately we’ll have to be going now. Thanks for the sandwiches.’
Mrs Mullighan put her glasses back on, using both hands to adjust them over her ears. ‘I’ll tell him you were here, shall I? I’m afraid I don’t remember your name. I know I seen you before,’ she said to Zig. ‘But I don’t think I seen you.’ She looked at Sharon and smiled shyly.
‘I’m Louise,’ said Zig promptly. ‘And she’s Sue.’
Getting out of the flat was an agonisingly slow process of nods and smiles and repeated goodbyes, but once the door was closed they ran. Halfway along the corridor was a grey door marked ‘Fire Escape’. Zig threw it open and they scuttled down the concrete stairs, their footsteps echoing loudly in the sound chamber of the enclosed stairwell.
39
‘What’s with the Louise and Sue routine?’ Sharon asked, sprinting to catch up as they crossed back towards the World’s End Passage.
‘I decided it’s best if Johnny doesn’t know we’ve been there.’
‘Well I suppose he wouldn’t be that pleased to have two women turning his bedroom upside down.’
‘Look, Sharon — ’ Zig was still maintaining the forced march. ‘There’s someone I have to talk to.’
‘Fine. There’s someone I have to talk to as well. Back thataway.’ Sharon pointed eastwards, towards the Sloane Square end of the neighbourhood. ‘See ya later.’
It was a relief to get shot of Zig for a while, and anyway there was someone she needed to see. If Logan was in all those photos, he had to be mixed up in this and she could guess how. He must have been asking too many questions. But that meant he might have found something out, didn’t it? In which case, perhaps she could find a way to get him to share the information. Since so many of the pictures showed him going in or out of the Cloisters, that had to be where he lived. Sharon walked up the King’s Road, thinking it was hotter than ever and wondering if all the people around here were just going mad with sunstroke. As she approached the Cloisters, she saw a bloke coming out with a great big cut on his arm, dripping blood onto the pavement. He was talking away to a friend as if he hadn’t even noticed the problem.
Inside the building, there was a trail of blood on the linoleum floor and a cleaning woman was attacking it with a mop. Actually, Sharon realised, she was not the usual type of cleaning woman but a girl about her own age, a dark girl with afro hair, who wore jeans under her apron.
‘Sid — ’ she complained as Sharon passed her — ‘He’s never happy unless he’s got blood pouring out of him.’
The splatter trail seemed to lead all the way up the staircase. ‘Someone should make him clean it up himself,’ Sharon said. ‘Why should you have to do it?’
The girl smiled and shrugged. ‘It’s a job, innit? Pays the rent.’ Sharon hesitated for a second, then asked, ‘Do you happen to know which number Annie’s in?’
The smile grew wider. ‘Annie? She’s up on the fifth floor. Why don’t you make her come down?’ She yelled out, ‘Annie! Annie!’
A few seconds later, footsteps began to echo down the stairs. ‘Flo? What’s up?’
‘Someone to see you.’
‘Sharon!’ Annie shouted, sticking her head over the banisters an
d looking down the stairwell. ‘What you doing here?’
Maybe everyone in the building was used to this way of communicating, but Sharon preferred to wait till Annie was in normal conversation range before she answered.
‘I’m after Logan Royce. Any idea where I can find him?’
Flo held up a finger and shook her head from side to side, slowly and emphatically. ‘Don’t get mixed up with him, kiddo. Different girl every night, that one. That’s if he can get em.’
Sharon blushed. ‘I don’t mean I’m after him. Not like that. I want to talk to him about a story he’s writing.’
‘I don’t think you gonna be lucky. I haven’t seen him for three days.’
‘You sure about that?’ Sharon asked.
‘When there’s no used coffee mugs in his room, he isn’t there. Trust me. But you can try.’ Flo led the way down the passage and knocked on the door of number 7. ‘Logan! You in there?’ She winked at Annie and opened the door with one of the keys hanging from her belt. ‘See? No coffee mugs on the desk. No jockey shorts on the floor. It’s just like it was when I cleaned it up on Tuesday morning. Now it’s Friday. That’s three days, isn’t it?’
‘Would you mind if I have a quick look round?’ asked Sharon. ‘I did an interview with him last week and I need to see what he wrote. I don’t want him printing stuff he’s made up.’
‘Go ahead,’ Flo said. ‘Just as long as nobody sees.’
Sharon scanned the contents of the room: a phone and a typewriter on the desk, some clothes slung over the back of the chair, an open suitcase full of socks and underwear on the floor. Annie and Flo were standing in the doorway gossiping, so she probed a bit further. In the desk drawer there was a little stack of notebooks bound with a rubber band — all the same type, with plain brown covers, just like the one they found at Highgate. She was about to slip them into her bag when the phone rang, prompting her to shut the drawer guiltily as if she’d been sprung. Then, without really thinking what she was doing, she picked up the receiver.