Jerusalem

by Alan Moore

  With a bad mood coming on he flips through the remainder of the intro, anxious for the consolation of the plates, perhaps a touch of Glad Day to lift up his spirits. What he finds he has forgotten is the great predominance of gloomy or downright disturbing images that typify the noted angel-whisperer’s oeuvre. Here’s Nebuchadnezzar crawling nude and horror-stricken through a subterranean underworld, while here’s the corpulent Ghost of a Flea embarking out onto its twilight stage, a bowl of blood held proudly up before it. Even on those pages where the ghouls and monsters are not present, such as the entirely saint-and-seraph decorated and yet overwhelmingly funereal Epitome of James Hervey’s Meditations among the Tombs, a graveyard damp is everywhere. Belatedly Studs realises why that last Blake exhibition at Tate Britain some time back, in company with his contemporaries Gilray and Fuseli, was subtitled Gothic Nightmares. He reflects that if Blake doesn’t turn out to have a Northamptonshire connection then he ought to have, sporting a dismal attitude like that. Northampton was the birthplace, in Studs’ estimation, of the modern Gothic movement and the painter, poet and print-maker’s obvious preoccupation with mortality would have gone down a storm at any of those early Bauhaus gigs.

  He finds that he is mumbling the chorus of “Bela Lugosi’s Dead” beneath his morning coffee breath and lets his thoughts drift from the job in hand back to those black and silver nights of twenty, thirty years ago. Studs had been one of the Grand Guignol troupe that gathered like Carpathian fog around Bauhaus 1919, as the ensemble of good cheekbones were then known. There had been Studs himself, and Uber-roadie Reasonable Ray. There had been lead guitarist Danny’s otherworldly brother, Gary Ash, and naturally there had been Little John. From what Studs can recall about the genesis of twentieth-century Gothic there had never been a morbid master-plan or style agenda underlying all the vampire references and the haunted Delvaux railway stations on the picture sleeves. That stuff had all emerged from individual members of the band and, by extension, from the town that they’d grown up in; from its creepy thousand-year-old churches, from its sectioned poets, immolated witches, heads on pikes, dead queens and captured kings, this mould and madness all distilled into Pete Murphy channelling Iggy Pop over a weave of Ash’s riffs from an internal biker film and the aortal rhythm section of the brothers David J and Kevin Haskins. And from these absurdly entertaining origins a flood of mortuary chic, flensed pallor and cadaver soundtracks had arisen to engulf the Western world in melancholia and makeup, yet another purely local fever escalating into a pandemic.

  On the soft peripheries of Studs’ hungover vision a septuagenarian in a rose anorak heads for Military History like a scud. He sits surrounded by cloud-chamber sibilance, letting his gaze rest on the open book without focussing the attention. The plate swims and its predominating blacks swirl into a miasma, a vortex of mausolea, a dark whirlpool opening before him as if some hired goon has just cold-cocked him with a sap. Meditations among the Tombs. He thinks back to the evening of the funeral for Little John, the patrons of the Racehorse wading waist-deep, wonderstruck, through the lamenting little guys in town for the event, fifty or sixty of them on a Lilliputian pub crawl up the Wellingborough Road and what must it have been like when they started singing? Nobody there from the Persian royal family, by all accounts.

  It had all been to do with the potential stain upon the bloodline, as Studs understands it. Given all the enemies that Little John’s U.S.-supported tyrant granddad had in Persia back then in the ’Fifties, just a few years after he’d been parachuted into power, it was decided that for the Shah’s daughter to produce a malformed child would simply be providing these antagonists with ammunition. Better to pack off the infant to the other end of nowhere, somewhere so obscure that nobody would ever hear his name again or even know of his existence. Like Northampton. Was it any wonder he and John had ended up among the Bauhaus entourage, surfing the purple velvet and the glitter? They were two of the town’s many Gothic flourishes.

  The library drifts in and out of form about him and for some reason he finds himself remembering a wholly nondescript perambulation in the company of the hard-drinking dwarf, with John’s complexion scourged by alcohol until towards the end there was more blotch than face. Where had they been that day, the two of them, and why should he be thinking of it now? Studs has a ghostly memory of the Jazz Butcher as being somehow part of the event, although he doesn’t think that the impressively credentialed singer-songwriter had actually been present on the unremarkable occasion that is inexplicably obsessing him. More likely he and Little John had either both been on their way to visit the musician or were otherwise returning from just such an interlude, trudging the sulking backstreet rows between the Butcher’s house up near the Racecourse and the draughty chute of Clare Street closer to town centre. Where exactly was it taken, the imaginary snapshot that seems stapled to Studs’ forebrain, with the little man stamping ahead of him through thin gunmetal puddles down a silent strip of houses? Was it Colwyn Road or Hood Street? Hervey Street or Watkin Terrace? All that he remembers is the picked-scab paintwork and the greying gauze of the net curtains over …

  Hervey Street. Of course. Widening his eyes he does a ‘sudden realisation’ take, then narrows them again to peer at the small type beneath the gloomy Blake plate. Maybe if Studs thinks of it as being noir rather than black he’ll come to like it more, but there below the mournful imagery is all the confirmation that he needs for now: James Hervey’s Meditations … it’s the same name, the same surname, even though that doesn’t prove it’s the same man or that he was associated with Northampton. After all, the town has got a Chaucer Street, a Milton Street, a Shakespeare Road and a few dozen other names commemorating persons without even a remote connection to the place, but all the same Studs has a hunch about this Hervey, and his keen-honed P.I. intuition never fails him.

  Except when it does, of course. He winces as he recollects one of his trips with Little John to the casino, to the Rubicon down in the Boroughs just off Regent Square. It may have been the same night that his wee companion launched himself onto the roulette table like an extra ball, but what defines the evening in Studs’ memory is his own half-baked behaviour. He’d been a different person then. To be specific, he’d been James Bond in a hypothetical reworking of Casino Royale. Oh, he’d got the tux, got the black bowtie, everything. When it was getting late, he’d tossed his last remaining big-stakes chip onto the table and then, without even bothering to see where it had landed, turned and walked away from the roulette wheel with the manner of a man who’d made and lost more fortunes in an afternoon than others had accomplished in a lifetime; someone devil-may-care and assured in his relationship with chance and destiny. However, with a week’s rent riding on what was apparently a wholly unobserved louche gesture, he was obviously expecting to be halted in his casual saunter from the table and called back by an astonished croupier to collect his unexpected but extensive winnings. When this failed to happen, he’d been devastated. Studs likes to believe, despite the overwhelming evidence which clearly contradicts his theory, that the forces governing existence have a dramatist’s approach to human narrative. He likes to think such entities might have a fondness for last-minute death row pardons, million to one gambles or hair’s-breadth escapes and, as a consequence of this belief, has largely led a life of serial disappointment.

  But not this time. He feels certain somewhere deep inside, beneath the steel plate that’s been in his skull since he selflessly took that landmine in the face at Okinawa, that here’s where one of his hunches finally pays off. This Hervey schmuck is hiding something, Studs is sure of it, and maybe if he’s breathed on hard enough he’ll give it up. Cracking his knuckles menacingly he stands and, taking the Blake book with him, heads towards what seems to be an unoccupied internet connection, or interrogation room as he prefers to think of it. He plans to use every low-down technique he knows to loosen up the suspect, everything from good cop/bad cop to a four-pound bag of oranges that damage the internal
organs but don’t leave a mark upon the skin. Or, failing that, he’ll Google him.

  Sure enough, Hervey cracks before the sheer brute force of the search engine and before long Studs has got him singing like some kind of devout Calvinist canary. There’s a slew of largely Christian websites that have references to the man, and while the language is so flowery that Studs finds himself in need of anti-histamine, he strikes gold with the first page that he looks at. It seems that James Hervey was a Church of England clergyman and writer, born in 1714 at Hardingstone, Northampton, with his father William serving as the rector of both Collingtree and Weston Favell. Educated from the age of seven at the town’s free grammar school, blah blah, goes up to Lincoln College, Oxford, where he runs into John Wesley, blah blah blah, buried in Weston Favell parish church … Studs struggles to maintain his trademark glower in defiance of the rush of jubilation he is currently experiencing. This, he’s certain, is the lead he’s looking for. Okay, there’s no direct connection to the Boroughs, but at least this new material puts Hervey at the scene.

  Suppressing a compulsive urge to call the helpful library attendant Toots, he asks if she can print out all the Hervey scuttlebutt he’s found already, throw in Hervey’s Wikipedia page and maybe while she’s there the entry for Northampton Grammar School. Studs has a notion that Ben Perrit might have been a pupil up there on the Billing Road at one point, and although this seems a tenuous link between James Hervey and the Boroughs, right now it’s the only one he’s got. He tries a weather-beaten roguish wink on the librarian right at the end of his request but she pretends she hasn’t noticed, probably assuming that it’s palsy. Paying for the printed sheets he twitches one eye randomly at intervals to further this assumption, reasoning that he can handle condescending pity better than a court case for harassment. He suspects that a defence of ‘maverick who won’t play by the rules’ would sway few juries if employed by an apparent would-be rapist.

  Taking the slim sheaf of papers, he opens his carry-all and bags the evidence according to procedure, so that he can read it later. Exiting the library he retraces his steps down Abington Street, carefully avoiding the white polka dots of spearmint spackle which surround the precinct’s islands of hard plastic seating, having no desire to be too literal about this gumshoe thing. The Grosvenor Centre, with its giant Roundhead helmet hovering above the entrance in a Castle of Otranto tribute, is a synaesthetic blur where the piped music has a tinsel dazzle while the coloured lighting chimes and echoes off along the scintillating mall. He rides the elevator up to the requisite level of the car parking facilities in company with an elderly couple who are both tutting and fussing with the zip of a plaid shopping-cart as if it were their poorly-dressed and backward offspring.

  When he finds his vehicle, most probably a Pontiac or Buick, possibly a beat-up Chevrolet, he climbs inside and tries his best to bring a dangerous loose-cannon quality to fastening his seatbelt. As the engine growls to life like a sleek predator, albeit one that’s in the later stages of consumption, Studs smiles to himself in case an in-car close-up is required. This is a facet of his job that he’s familiar with, a role in which he feels entirely comfortable. He’s burning rubber to keep an appointment with a place of worship, and it ain’t because he’s itching to confess his sins. He’s doing what comes, to a private eye, as naturally as lovelorn one-night stands or breathing: Studs is heading for this pitiless town’s murky outskirts, hoping to uncover a dead body.

  Weston Favell and its parish churchyard are no more than two or three miles from Northampton and it wouldn’t do him any harm to take the Billing Road, up past the Grammar School or the Northampton School for Boys as the establishment has been more recently rebranded, just to cast an eye over the place; to case the joint. Ideally he’d prefer to roar out of the town to an accompaniment of screeching brakes and pelting gunfire, but the vagaries of a notoriously contorted traffic system mean he has to take a left into Abington Square when coming off the Mounts, circle the Unitarian church to bring him back the other way, then make another left turn into York Road before even getting to the Billing Road down at the bottom. Waiting at the foot of York Road for the lights to change he thinks again of Little John, having already noticed that the brass plaque which identified Toad Hall has long since been removed. It’s a damn shame. They should have kept the place up as a conservation area, a reservation for the dwindling and endangered population of the chronically unsightly, those who were too squat and medieval-looking or those with too many warts.

  The lights change and he corners onto Billing Road, the off-white bulk of the beleaguered General Hospital across the busy thoroughfare and on Studs’ right. From what he knows of local history, which is a lot considering that he was brought up on the unforgiving streets of Flatbush or the like, the hospital had been originally established as the first outside of London on its earlier site along George Row by an unlikely pairing of the preacher Philip Doddridge and the reformed rake Dr. John Stonhouse. Studs has learned a thing or two about the motion picture industry over the years and thinks the story has the makings of a great chalk-and-cheese buddy movie. He’s considering a scene where only a work-squad of raddled eighteenth-century hookers volunteering out of loyalty to Stonhouse sees the new infirmary completed under budget and on schedule, when he passes the high hedges of Billing Road Cemetery looming on his left. Not quite the graveyard that he’s looking for but still an excellent example of the species, and about the only local landmark which the Luftwaffe seemed capable of hitting back in World War Two, perhaps in an attempt to lower the morale of British corpses. He imagines it, the midnight flash amongst the sleeping headstones, the attendant spray of dirt and bone and flowers, the marble shrapnel with somebody’s name on.

  An unfolded sunlit panorama out through the front windscreen is compressed to the unreeling comic strip of brick and garden without sky in his side-windows, residential detail ravelling away behind him in the Studebaker’s wake. Across the road on its far side Saint Andrew’s Hospital smears by, blind walls and iron railings with that barrier of tall and restless evergreens beyond them as a natural firebreak for the uncontrollable blaze of delusion kept contained within. When you consider all the more-than-usually gifted if not incandescent individuals that have been confined there, Studs supposes you could view the institution as a necessary annexe or extension-wing of rationality, put up to house an information for which reason has no measure. Or some bullshit like that, anyway.

  He slows as the winding asylum frieze concludes; runs into the façade of the Northampton School for Boys, its low wall bounding a trapezoid forecourt over which presides the lofty and improving early twentieth-century building, with its more contemporary additions fanning out towards the east across the former tennis courts. A visibly amused quartet of lads in the requisite navy blazers jeer and jostle by the school gate, possibly returning from their dinner hour and no doubt dutifully categorising their subjective universe into gay and non-gay components. While the erstwhile grammar school has failed to produce quite as many notables as the adjacent mental home, you have to give it marks for trying. Francis Crick was once a pupil as apparently was Hervey, with Ben Perrit as a possible. Studs thinks he heard that Tony Chater, a no-nonsense card-carrying commie and for twenty years editor of The Morning Star, was also on the register, as was young Tony Cotton of chart-scaling 1980s rockabilly purists from St. James’s End, the Jets. Poor old Sir Malcolm Arnold, on the other hand, retained the singular distinction of having attended both the boys’ school and the famous funny farm next door. On his last day of term the juvenile composer would have saved himself a lot of time and effort if he’d just scuffed his way up the cycle path and through the front gate, taking off his jacket, cap and tie resignedly before a sharp U-turn delivered him into the tranquilising green continuum of St. Andrew’s. From the corner of Studs’ right and slightly lower eye he watches the august establishment evaporate into his slipstream, a receding fog of pink and grey shrinking to fit the rear-view mirr
or as he guns the Packard on to its sepulchral destination.

  Further down towards the lower reaches of the Billing Road, with relatively well-off family homes to port and little else save open fields to starboard, Studs gets the uneasy feeling that he’s overlooking an important detail, maybe in his observations on the recently passed School for Boys, although he can’t think what. Was it something to do with how the school was built, its architecture, or …? No. No, it’s gone. Some way before he reaches Billing Aquadrome he takes instead the left turn that will convey his Plymouth De Soto up amongst the honeyed stone of the original village accommodation and the gravel drives of later dwellings, into the unnaturally hushed and watchful lanes of drowsy Weston Favell.

  After several minutes he locates a place where it appears that somebody might park their vehicle without being consequently burned to death inside a wicker man. Studs knows these gentrified communities, the money that they represent, and can’t shake off the feeling that he’s probably been monitored on long lens by a spotter from the Women’s Institute since he pulled in. Clambering from his bullet-perforated Nash Ambassador he sizes up the intestinal tangle of sun-buttered streets, byways for the convenience of a different century, and grudgingly acknowledges that places like this, these days, are where all the serious murder-money’s to be made. The smart detectives, rather than pursuing cold-eyed gangland slayers down a hypodermic-littered inner-urban alleyway, are relocating to the sticks, to sleepy English hamlets where ladies in twinsets and retired brigadiers reliably attempt to poison one another on a weekly basis. All this white-on-white crime. It’s a crying shame.