28
ESMERALDA
Raymond Land was gobsmacked. He read the email once more.
After their recent run-ins with the Home Office, he thought he’d seen the last of his old superiors, unless they happened to bump into each other at their Masonic temple. Oskar Kasavian, their vampiric Home Office security supervisor, had been shunted off to some godforsaken, hellish outpost somewhere in what was left of the British Empire, Baffin Island, perhaps, or Cardiff, but Leslie Faraday, the staggeringly incompetent Home Office liaison officer and the ultimate budget overseer of London’s specialist police units, had been kicked upstairs so that he now also had many of the City of London’s divisions – except the two largest ones, cybercrime and terrorism – on his books.
Land couldn’t believe his eyes. How could someone as stupid as Faraday actually get promoted? This was the man who force-fed his children tainted pork on national television to prove that there was nothing wrong with supermarket meat; the man who complained in Parliament about the lack of decent immigration controls while employing a Filipina nanny and a Vietnamese gardener, both of whom he paid in cash because they weren’t registered for tax; the man who once caused a riot in Brixton Prison for insisting that ‘the brains of black offenders are less developed than ours’. And here he was back again, demanding to know why the unit was interfering in matters which didn’t concern them.
This is my lot, Land thought, writing bad-tempered emails to bosses I don’t respect in games of territorial ping-pong. No wife, no life, no hope of promotion, just ticking over until the ever-receding date of my retirement. At least my father got given a clock when he left the service, even if it did break down the moment he got it home.
Like so many others of his generation, Land was the son of a policeman, and had started out in a time before initiatives and protocols, before ‘community support’ and ‘response’ and ‘early intervention’, before the era of overpaid consultants and unpaid interns, before think tanks and policy exchange and all of the other career-nurturing enterprises that merely placed more layers of paper between a caring copper and a panicked kid waving a knife. He knew in his heart that he should have been like Bryant and May and stuck to his guns, refusing promotion and working out there on the London streets. At least there was still a grimy exhilaration to be found in the resolution of those tragic and often depressingly familiar stories. It was a satisfaction borne from direct contact with life, something he hadn’t had in years.
Direct contact.
He went in to see the detectives. The room was so dark that May was blanched by the light from his computer terminal. His nose was almost touching the screen because he was too vain to wear glasses. Bryant had his eyes shut and was listening to some horrible caterwauling woman on his ancient record player. He held up an index finger, indicating that Land should not move until the aria had ended.
‘Ivanhoe,’ Bryant explained, eyes still closed. ‘Gilbert and Sullivan’s least successful opera, utterly dreadful.’ He removed the disc and dropped it into his wastepaper basket, slotting another in place. ‘I’m switching to these. Ultimate Hard House Anthems. Did you get your theoretical door fixed yet?’
‘Direct contact,’ said Land. ‘That’s what he wants, isn’t it? He’s not doing a Goldfinger.’
‘I’m sorry, Raymondo, but for once I can’t see exactly what you’re thinking.’
‘You know: “Do you expect me to talk?” “No, Mr Bond, I expect you to die.” Goldfinger didn’t stick around to see 007 get lasered in half, did he? This bloke’s right there, chucking petrol bombs, pouring tar, hammering red-hot masks on to people, for God’s sake! He’s strong, maybe works with his hands. He’s taking direct action and making a point. Have you tried the hostels?’
‘Yes, but it’s almost impossible to narrow down the numbers,’ Bryant explained as his stereo speakers bellowed a noise that sounded like a busload of pensioners going into a ravine. ‘There’s big money to be had in hostels these days. They’re not subject to regular planning laws so they’re cash cows for councils, and their booking systems are hopelessly porous.’
‘Then try foundries, workshops, anywhere people work with their hands. Can you turn that down a bit?’
‘We’ve already done that.’ May slapped his hand on a quire of papers. ‘Names and addresses. My colleague here likes everything printed out, so if you really want to help us you can wade through them for us.’
‘Absolutely. More than happy to. I’ve got another idea—’
‘What’s going on?’ asked Bryant suspiciously. ‘Raymondo, are you actually trying to help?’
‘Yes, that’s the general plan.’
‘Wonders will never cease.’ Bryant fired his most probing stare at the unit chief. ‘What are you up to?’
‘I’m fed up with sitting in the other room stringing paper clips together while you two actually get to work things out,’ Land admitted.
‘If you really want to do something, then I think I have a job for you. Hang on.’ Bryant scrawled something on the contents page of Neuter Your Own Pet and ripped it out. ‘Oh, and you’ll need my list of questions. I hope you can read my writing.’ He was about to give Land the page, then withheld it. ‘Promise me one thing. That you won’t question what I’m asking you to do.’
‘OK, I promise,’ said Land, accepting the grubby page and folding it into his pocket, even as he wondered what he had just committed himself to.
Land looked at the address again and decided that there must have been some kind of mistake. After alighting from the tube at Finsbury Park, he had watched in horror as a man urinated against the window of a bread shop in broad daylight. Following Bryant’s directions, Land turned off the main road into some kind of fenced-off truck park where grass struggled up between broken cobbles, making his way between dog turds and iridescent puddles of oily water, towards a row of penumbral railway arches. He found himself standing beneath the one that had been marked on his page, and looked about for signs of life. From the shadows, a bedraggled rat watched him uncertainly.
Bryant had assured him that someone would appear, but all Land could see were petrol drums, leaking ten-litre cans of ghee, piles of wood, shattered yellow house bricks and several sawn-off green lamp-posts knotted together with baling wire, looking like outsized sticks of asparagus. He leaned against the remains of an old blue Nissan lying on its roof and waited. From somewhere nearby came the sound of a cat having a fit.
The door of the Nissan suddenly opened and caught Land on the backs of his legs. Out crawled what appeared to be a spherical ball of grey rags. A reek of ammonia filled the air. Land looked down in horror as the ball unravelled and stood upright, revealing something that could possibly be a turnip four hundred years past its sell-by date or a very small, very wide woman. ‘You’re late,’ she said. ‘Where is he?’
Land looked around, panicked. ‘Where is who?’
‘Arthur.’ The turnip-woman looked around to see what he was looking for. ‘He’s supposed to be with you.’
‘He sent me along by myself.’
‘That’s cheating.’
‘He’s a busy man.’
‘He’s my husband.’
Land was beginning to feel an uncomfortable prickling on the back of his neck that warned him he was out of his depth. ‘Who are you?’
‘I’m Esmeralda.’
‘What do you mean, he’s your husband?’
She spelled out the words slowly and loudly, baring blackened teeth. ‘Try. To. Follow. What. I’m. Saying. He. Is. My. Husband. I. Married. Him.’
This was all too much for Land, especially as it had now started to rain hard. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I was just told to come here and— How could you be married to him?’
‘It was a citizen’s marriage.’ She rubbed one filthy finger over the other in a peculiarly witchlike gesture. ‘He doesn’t know we’re betrothed, obviously. I don’t want to make him over-emotionable. But it’s legally blinding. Not h
ere, just in an obscure part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, where the matrimblial laws are very different. That’s where I met him, during the reign of the Emperor Franz Joseph. I was a Hapsburger. With onion rings. Of course, that was before I fell on hard times. Arthur had the most beautiful eyes, like goldfish bowls filled with Toilet Duck. And his teeth were like stars. They came out at night.’
She’s a raving loony, realized Land. Bryant’s done it just to wind me up. He consulted the piece of paper with his detective’s questions. ‘Mr Bryant told me to ask you about fire mythology.’
‘The fire! Yes, the fire! My husband needs me, just as it was foretold! Come with me.’ She led the way across the muddied dump to the darkness of the railway arches, where a simulacrum of a room had been laid out under the dripping brickwork.
‘Everyone needs a place where the soul can find tranquisity,’ announced Esmeralda, bracing herself and issuing a sound like someone gently lowering a toecap on to a set of bagpipes. ‘Excuse me. Sprouts.’
Land looked about. There was a lumpy red Axminster rug, an eviscerated brown leather armchair, its stuffing spewing through burst seams, a broken yellow standard lamp with a torch taped around its top, a Primus stove, a kitchen table with three legs and several half-collapsed bookcases packed with mildewed volumes of Hungarian history and back issues of Vogue.
‘Please remember to wipe your sleet,’ said Esmeralda, adopting a comedy-toff voice. ‘Ay’d make you a drink but it’s the maid’s day orf.’
Land made a show of thrashing his shoes clean and waited while his hostess rooted about among the twisted bookshelves. OK, he thought, this is a test. Arthur wants to see if I can come back with something.
‘So, fire, eh?’ she called back over a hunched shoulder. ‘You know, there are places where fire reveals the future. Oh, yes. The shape of cinders leaping from the hearth foretells births and deaths, or the arrival of an important visitor. And of course the flames themselves transmute into tableaux that only the wise can interpret. Fire-reading was always practised by the oldest woman in our village.’
‘What village was that?’ Land asked.
‘Hampstead Village. The hearth mother protected the fire and prevented it from burning out. The Devil, too. When a fire won’t draw, it’s because the Devil is nearby. You must never throw bread crusts into the fireplace because it will drag Satan down your chimney. Oh, yes. Fire is resurrection. Think of the phoenix, reborn in flame. Fire is Purgatory. It cleanses and purifies.’
‘But fire kills people,’ said Land, feeling he should say something that made sense.
‘We must all die in order to be reborn. The myth of Osiris, not reborn into normal life but into a higher plane of consciousness. “I shall not decay,” says Osiris in The Book of the Dead, “I shall not rot, nor putrefy, I shall have my being, I shall live.” Osiris the god of the afterlife, with green skin and leaves for hair, from which we gain the English myth of Jack-in-the-Green, the god of natural regeneration.’ Esmeralda spun around and rolled her eyes at him meaningfully. Something fell out of her nose. ‘Eternal life is the eternal dream, a fever-dream of spermatozoa, the prima materia which explodes with the birthing-heat of the universe, the driving force of the world. Oh, yes. But balancing Osiris is his sister Nephthys, the goddess of mourning, of rivers and night and the Fall. Mary Magdalene is Nephthys embodied, a symbol that proves our world has fallen.’ She pointed down at the mildewed carpet. ‘Before we can rise again we must touch the lowest point, battle our demons, journey through madness. Fire is our only way out of darkness. It is the tool of revolution, the weapon of the rebel cutting the bonds of imperialism, a sword for one who has already fallen.’
‘Who are you?’ asked Land, staying downwind but intrigued nevertheless.
‘Who was I,’ she corrected, dragging down books, glancing inside them and casting them aside. ‘I was a scholar, an iconoclast, an academic, an epidemic of torrential genius. With knowledge comes opinion, and opinions are not wanted in the grand halls of knowledge. In short, I was chucked out of Oxford by a bunch of wankers. Oh, yes. For teaching insurrection. Of course I was; it’s my specialist subject. Ah, here it is.’ She raised a damp-fattened book and cracked it open on what Land assumed was her knee. ‘Do you know what distinguishes those who seek to harness the iconoclastic properties of fire? Most revolutionaries are not afraid to die, but the fire-wielder expects to perish. Everything must burn. Everything. Otherwise there can be no rebirth. This is the pure heart of the cosmic riddle; for goodness and purity to rise, all must first be lost.’
‘And that’s in there, is it?’ asked Land, pointing to the book.
‘This?’ Esmeralda looked surprised. ‘No, I’m deciding what to have for dinner.’ She raised the cover so that he could read the title: Nigella’s Favourite Pasta Recipes. ‘Stay if you like; I have a spare plate somewhere. You investigate things, don’t you? So do I. I could take you under my wing and show you a few new wrinkles.’
‘That’s kind of you, but no thanks,’ said Land, backing away.
‘Never mind. It’s been lovely. We must do this again!’ called Esmeralda as he retreated. ‘Are you married?’
‘No,’ he replied, thinking about his newly implemented divorce.
‘Well, you are now!’ she shouted, rubbing her filthy fingers at him, and he stumbled off for the safety of the high street.
29
TRESPASS
It was time, once more, for someone to die.
The mixture wasn’t very hard to make. A blend of saltpetre, charcoal and sulphur, one to oxidize, two to provide the propellant. The main problem was its slow decomposition rate, which meant that unless it was placed under pressure, or in some kind of tube or box, it would simply burn out.
It was granulated, but sensitive to changes in the weather, so the timings were hard to predict. He wasn’t a scientist but had been able to find everything he needed online, and the instructions were simple. He liked using different methods of dispatch; it kept everyone on their toes.
He had allowed for a mere handful of deaths, nothing in the grand scheme of things. Hell, seven cyclists had been killed in the last two weeks on London’s roads, and the world had not stopped turning. But worlds might be transformed by removing the right people.
At the outset of his plan, the riots were simply fortuitous. Now he saw that the deaths could propel events. They could really count for something. So far the press had been silent. Well, he would change all that.
He let himself into the boarding house. The hall was poorly lit and smelled of vegetable stew. The landlady heard him on the stair and popped out of her room as if on a spring, something she did with the regularity of a Bavarian barometer. ‘So you’re back, Mr Flannery. Because I wondered when you’d be in. I didn’t see you yesterday.’
‘Well, I was out looking for work, Mrs Demitriou,’ he explained.
‘Only I did ask for the rent in advance, and there are my other tenants to think of.’
He failed to see how his non-payment of the rent affected anyone else who lived in the house. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, ‘it’s very hard finding a job right now, but I’m hoping something will happen by the weekend.’
‘Very well.’ She spoke with an air of exhausted patience. ‘Only if you can’t pay by Sunday, I’m going to have to ask for my keys back. And you know that if I find any damage to the room, you’ll have to pay for repair or replacement.’
The old bitch was clearly counting on that. She had seen around the edge of his door and noted the charts and clippings he had pinned up everywhere. Not that she had a hope in hell of finding another lodger to take the room, because there was a palpable smell of damp, the boiler didn’t work properly, the sink leaked and there was a great brown stain spreading over the ceiling like a shadow on a smoker’s lung.
‘Oh, there’s a package for you. Mr Demitriou took it in but he can’t be the concierge, not with his back. So just this once, then, yes?’ She indicated a brown cardboard box on t
he floor.
‘Thank you.’ He collected the box, which was surprisingly heavy, and headed for his room.
He had no money left for food now. He raided the Demitrious’ kitchen when they were watching TV and ate out-of-date sandwiches he found in shop bins. There were always plenty to be found behind the takeaways in the Square Mile. He was used to being hungry. It didn’t bother him. But the stomach cramps were getting worse, and he knew he needed a stronger antacid. He cursed himself for not searching through Jonathan De Vere’s bathroom cabinet properly.
And there was another problem, some kind of police unit that had been appointed to investigate. He’d seen several of them in King’s Cross wearing matching black jackets that weren’t standard police issue. And there were two men who seemed to be in charge, one in a huge overcoat who looked incredibly old, the other a little younger and smartly suited. There was also an Amazonian woman with dyed blonde hair who resembled some forgotten movie star. They weren’t regular Met officers. He couldn’t imagine how they had been assigned, or why, but he needed a contingency plan to take care of them. He knew that if he deviated too far from the original idea and started extemporizing, he increased the risk of being caught.
Locking the door behind him, he set the box on the kitchen table and cut it open. Inside was the final item he needed. Everything else was in place.
He had decided against gunpowder because of the problems of placing it under pressure, and settled instead for fulminate of mercury, a primary explosive that was very sensitive to friction and was used mainly for blasting caps. The crazy thing was that they kept it in the science labs of most secondary schools, and it was absurdly easy to get hold of because it wasn’t considered part of a terrorist’s arsenal. The equipment in the box ensured that he would be able to move it freely. All he had left to do was pack it correctly and prepare its installation.
Bryant & May - The Burning Man Page 18