by Jeff Noon
‘Well, yes. His suicide is a valiant act. Self-sacrifice. But if Lucas was in fact murdered, then he’s just another victim. The myth dies.’
Hobbes thought for a moment. ‘The thing that Brendan Clarke wanted to show you, the item of memorabilia …’
‘He wanted to show me the evidence. The proof that Lucas had been murdered.’
‘And what was the proof?’
‘I don’t know. How can I know? I arrived too late.’
‘He gave no indication of what it might be?’
She shook her head.
An obvious motive came to Hobbes. ‘So maybe Brendan was killed because of what he knew?’
‘Yes. That’s what I’ve been thinking recently,’ said Simone. ‘The murderer has got away with it for seven years. Now someone was closing in, and they had to be killed.’
‘But why carve the mask on his face?’
She frowned at this. ‘I’m not sure. A punishment. A warning. Probably for some crazy messed-up personal reason that we can’t yet work out.’
He wasn’t happy with the words ‘we’ and ‘yet’. But in truth, Hobbes was no nearer an answer than she was; he simply didn’t know.
He signalled to Barlow, who came over and handed him a clear plastic wallet containing a single piece of A4 paper. Hobbes held this out towards Simone. ‘This is the sheet of paper found crumpled up in the victim’s mouth. There’s blood on it, I’m afraid.’
She took the plastic wallet off him.
Hobbes explained, ‘Most of it is typewritten, with some handwritten corrections added here and there, probably at a later date.’ He nodded at her. ‘Simone, I was wondering if you could shed some light on it for me.’
‘I’ll try.’ She examined the paper through the plastic. ‘Yes, this is definitely Lucas’s handwriting. That’s his signature at the bottom.’
‘Good.’
‘When we talked after the gig, Brendan told me that he’d bought some of his personal belongings. This must be one of them.’
‘But we now know that this is a photocopy.’
‘That makes sense, actually,’ she said. ‘Serious collectors often make copies for their everyday use, and keep the originals in a safe place.’
Hobbes leaned closer. ‘What can you tell me about the song itself?’
‘How do you mean?’
‘Is there any particular reason why this one was chosen?’
‘Let’s see.’ Simone studied the lyrics. ‘The song is called “Terminal Paradise”. It’s from the King Lost album. But it’s curious.’
‘Why?’
‘Well, this is an earlier version of the song. The words are not quite the same as the recorded version.’ She looked up. ‘Lucas showed me some of his songs in draft form, but not this one. Most of the lines are the same as later on, but a few are different.’
‘Do you have any idea at all why this ended up inside Mr Clarke’s mouth?’
Simone shook her head.
‘No.’
She looked back to the paper in her hand and this time her eye was drawn directly to a certain word. Hobbes saw a shiver come over her.
‘What is it? Something of interest?’
‘Yes.’ Now she looked surprised. ‘But I don’t know what it means.’
Hobbes stood up and walked over to her. Barlow followed.
‘What can you tell us?’
She indicated the lyric sheet. ‘You see the changes here, that Lucas made in biro? Well, those are the lines that were actually used in the song, as later recorded. But the typed words, here, these are his first thoughts. Now, you see this verse, the edited version, here …’ She pointed to a group of four lines and sang them quietly, almost to herself.
There’s no escaping it:
Every sin has its price.
Let’s hope that moonlight triggers
A password for Paradise.
‘These are the words as recorded on the album.’
Hobbes nodded, ‘Why is this important?’
‘Well, now look at what Lucas originally wrote for that verse. Here. Do you see?’
He studied the original typed-out words as Simone read them aloud:
There’s no escaping it:
We love what we cannot kill.
Let’s hope that moonlight triggers
A doorway to Edenville.
Hobbes looked at Simone. ‘Well, I prefer the official version, definitely.’
‘Oh, so do I. But these were his first thoughts.’
‘And this means something to you?’
‘Not to me. But to Lucas. That one word: Edenville.’
‘Let me see.’ Hobbes took the lyric sheet from her hand and studied it. He saw the typed word Edenville crossed out with a blue line and the word Paradise scrawled above it.
Simone explained: ‘Brendan Clarke mentioned it to me after the gig, in the dressing room. He asked me, “Have you ever heard of Edenville?” And I said no. I asked him what it meant, but he wouldn’t tell me. And that was when he told me that he had proof of Lucas being murdered.’
Hobbes said, ‘Are you getting all this, Barlow? It’s important.’
‘Yes, sir. Every word.’
Simone carried on. ‘But later on, travelling home, I vaguely remembered Lucas saying this word to me once.’
‘You can’t remember precisely?’
‘No, not clearly. Not at first. But I started to read through my old journals of the years when we first met. And there it was. Edenville. The word seemed to jump out at me after I’d skimmed a few pages, as though I subconsciously knew where it would be.’
‘And?’
‘Luke said it to me a couple of days after we’d first got together. Our relationship was very intense. He was, I truly thought, the love of my life. We shared secrets, lots of them. But this one he wouldn’t share. He just said, “One day, if the time is ever right, I’ll tell you the story of Edenville.” And that’s all I recorded from the conversation.’
‘So he never told you. And you still don’t know what the word means?’
‘No. I have no idea.’
‘It might be a place? A real place?’
‘Or imaginary,’ said Barlow.
Simone thought about this. ‘All we know is that the word seems to be important to Lucas, to his life, his work.’ She referred to the lyric sheet again. ‘But here he’s scrubbed it out, changed it. He won’t sing it out loud. He doesn’t want anyone to know about it, not directly. He’s ashamed, or scared. Maybe it’s something from his past, from his days growing up in Hastings. You see, Lucas often took ideas, feelings, or even actual events from his life, and twisted them, exaggerated them, to form the subject matter of his songs. But he always hid the truth behind poetry, metaphors, symbolism, and the like.’ She thought for a moment, and then added, ‘Once we were talking about the popularity of King Lost, and he told me how everyone thinks they know the secret of King Lost, fans and critics alike, but the fact is, not one person’s got it right, nobody’s broken the code.’
Her voice trailed off.
Hobbes resisted the urge to prompt her, waiting until she was ready to speak again.
‘And the truth is, I’ve always suspected that Lucas didn’t kill himself.’
‘And why do you think that?’
She looked at him. ‘On the last night I ever saw him alive, face to face, Lucas made a promise to me. This was just before he disappeared, after the final gig. The promise wasn’t made directly, not then, it was more a feeling shared between us. But later on he did put it into words. In a letter that he sent to me on the morning of the day he died.’
Hobbes waited. Gently, he urged her on. ‘And what did he promise?’
Simone searched inside the old suitcase and pulled out an envelope. She handed this to him. It was already open, slit along the top edge, and addressed to Simone Paige at this, her Camden address. ‘He posted this on the day that he died, you say?’ She nodded. He checked the postmark. Hastings, 25 Aug 74. He
pulled out the letter inside and unfolded it. It held a single line of handwritten text.
Simone explained, ‘He’d been away for three weeks, no one knew where. And then he sends me this.’ She hesitated. ‘I’ve never shown it to anyone before.’
‘Why not?’
‘I don’t know. I suppose I could never quite unravel its meaning. But not just that. I was scared. That I actually knew the meaning too well. And the truth of it was too scary to contemplate. And then later …’
‘Go on.’
‘Well, the message contrasted so much with his suicide note.’
‘Yes, I can see that.’
Hobbes read the brief message a second time.
I’ll come back for you. Keep waiting, my love. Luke X
Simone made a sound. He looked up at her. ‘Are you all right?’
She wiped at her eyes and looked away, embarrassed. ‘It’s so full of promise,’ she murmured. ‘And the kiss at the end. It’s too much to bear.’
He had to agree with her.
This didn’t sound at all like a man who was about to kill himself.
The Silhouette
Hobbes dropped Barlow off at Camden Town tube station and then drove on towards the West End. He had one last job to do before he could even think about sleep, one last place to visit, and he wasn’t looking forward to it. Along the way, he thought about the case as it currently stood. The first full day had now passed, and what did they know? Two nights ago, Brendan Clarke and his band Monsoon Monsoon performed a gig in honour of Lucas Bell. Clarke took on the late singer’s King Lost alter ego for the night. After the gig he introduced himself to Simone Paige, one-time girlfriend of Bell. Brendan told Simone that Lucas had not committed suicide; rather, he’d been murdered. Brendan said he had proof of this. A few hours after the gig, he himself was murdered by person or persons unknown. Early the next morning a young woman was seen leaving the victim’s house. And then some twelve hours after that, Simone Paige arrived and found Brendan dead, his face sliced into a cruel version of the King Lost mask.
Those were the facts. Beyond that, everything melted away into fog.
Edenville. It was important, he knew that. And according to Simone Paige, Brendan Clarke seemed to link it to the idea of Bell’s murder.
Hobbes managed to find a space in the multi-storey car park on Brewer Street, and from there made his way on foot to his destination. The streets of Soho were packed with revellers. He could sense the excitement in the air, the fear, the joy, the lust. Though he was aware the square mile was a sink pit, a dark maze of streets, and a hellhole if you took the wrong turning at the wrong time of night, my God, how he missed it.
He walked past posters offering support for the IRA hunger strikers and grafitti calling for Maggie’s demise, and then slipped down an alleyway at the far end of Wardour Street. It was off the main drag, this place, hidden away in the shadows. La Silhouette. A members-only club. The French name always made him smile; this couldn’t be any further from the romantic boulevards of Paris. He tapped on the door and was greeted by a face he knew from the past, one of the cloakroom attendants, Karen. She looked surprised to see him, but thought about it, and shrugged and let him in. ‘It’s your funeral, Detective.’ He followed the sound of jazz along the corridor into the lounge. This was an after-hours drinking den, a leftover from the old Soho scene of the fifties, when failed, dirt-poor, alcoholic artists and poets sat around the alcoves arguing about their latest masterpieces. Now the place was frequented by off-duty coppers, the hard nuts of the Met, plainclothes bruisers, a good number of them as corrupt as shit in a blocked-up toilet. And two or three of them, Hobbes had to admit, were bloody good at their job, and more or less fair with it.
The last time he’d been here had been two nights after the Brixton riot.
Heads turned as he entered the place, and one by one conversations fell silent. All eyes were on him.
‘Christ, Hobbes!’ a rough-sounding voice spat out. ‘Are you looking for trouble?’
It was Leonard Mawley, a punch-drunk detective sergeant approaching the age of fifty. He’d been turned down so many times for promotion he was now riding out the days till his thirty years’ service was up, not giving a nun’s fart about anything but his own back.
The music was cut off.
‘No, I’m not.’ Hobbes kept his voice cold, stating the truth. ‘I’m looking for whoever it was wrote the word “scum” on my front door last night.’
He heard a chair scrape across the floor. Another. Someone behind his back said, ‘Fucking hell.’ A voice filled with hate. Hobbes didn’t turn round.
Mawley stepped close to him. ‘Now what makes you think it’s anything to do with one of us?’
‘An educated guess.’
‘Oh, is it now? So you’re showing off, are you?’ Laughter. ‘You’ve got an education?’
‘I just need—’
‘Yes?’
Mawley’s ruddy face was inches from his own. Hobbes could smell the booze on his breath, mixed in with the stench of a recently consumed chicken chow mein.
‘I need to see the room, Len.’
Mawley guffawed. A couple of the other men joined in.
‘Fuck me, but you’ve got some balls on you.’
Flecks of spittle landed on Hobbes’s face. He fought the urge to wipe his skin clean. Mawley grinned, wired for a fight. His mouth opened and closed. But then another man stepped into the light.
‘That’s enough, Leonard. Back down.’
Mawley immediately followed orders. Hobbes turned to the newcomer. It was Chief Superintendent Lockhart, Hobbes’s old boss. His eyes glared for a moment in the smoke-filled room, like those of a wild animal. Then he smiled and clasped his hand around Hobbes’s shoulder. He laughed out loud.
‘Here he is. The prodigal returns.’
The voice was so full of charm and good humour that Hobbes was tempted to relax. But he knew better than to be pulled into the game.
‘I need to see the cellar.’
‘Still looking for evidence, is that it?’
‘No. Not at all.’ Hobbes shook his head. ‘I know what happened down there.’
‘Of course you do. You being a witness and all. Well, more than a witness, I think.’
Before Hobbes could answer this remark, Lockhart summoned the club’s barman: ‘Joseph, fetch us the key, there’s a good man. You know the one I mean.’
Joseph did. He walked around the bar, a lumbering hulk in a white shirt, a purple velvet bow tie and matching cummerbund. He handed over a brass key ring.
‘Go on,’ Lockhart called out to the room. ‘Get your snouts back in the trough.’
His underlings all did as they were told, quite happy to be insulted by their leader, and the hubbub of conversation started up again. Lockhart led Hobbes along a corridor and down a flight of steps into the cellar. He opened a heavy wooden door with the key and went through. Hobbes followed.
It was a small room, far smaller than Hobbes remembered it on his previous visit. Bare plaster walls, windowless, almost airless, a single vent clogged with dust. A bulb on a frayed brown flex. And when the door was shut behind him, as it was now by Lockhart, the walls seemed to close in even further. Hobbes felt his throat constricting.
Lockhart came close. He seemed unaffected by any kind of claustrophobia. ‘Maybe you’re not the prodigal son, Hobbes. Maybe you’re Daniel returning to the lion’s den.’ He didn’t wait for a response. ‘So then. How does it feel, being back down here?’
The chief inspector hadn’t changed a fraction in the last four months: skeleton thin, his bones clearly visible under the tight skin of his face. His grey-blue eyes stared at Hobbes without a hint of compassion in them.
‘How does it feel?’ Lockhart repeated.
‘Bad.’ It was a simple answer, hardly adequate. But what else could he say? ‘They’ve cleaned up the place,’ he added.
‘That they have. Washed the blood off the walls.’
<
br /> The remark hit Hobbes like a blow to the stomach, and without a moment’s thought he was cast back to the night when his life changed irretrievably, and everything he knew and loved about being a policeman was tainted by sin.
Nearly three hundred policemen had been injured on the Friday and Saturday of the Brixton riot, back in April. About sixty civilians also received injuries. It was sheer bloody luck that no one had died, on either side of the battle lines. Yet in the press the coppers were being openly blamed for the disturbance, painted as the villains. And then, on the Monday night, when some kind of normality had returned at last to the London streets, Detective Charlie Jenkes and one of his old Vice Squad cronies, Paddy Boyle, had rounded up a young black man and dragged him into La Silhouette. It was a quiet night in the club, coming on for half past ten. Hobbes had been drinking there for a couple of hours along with Len Mawley and a few other officers, all of them well pissed up by then. Hobbes shouldn’t have mixed the beer with the painkillers he was taking for the cut on his head, but there it was. With the riot still buzzing in his skull, he’d watched in a daze as his two colleagues had dragged their captive down the stairs into the cellar. He and Mawley had followed, curious as to what was happening.
The man was in his twenties, and obviously on drugs. His eyes were looking ahead without focus. He was pressed back against the far wall of the room, held in place by Paddy Boyle as Jenkes paced the room, his hands bunched into fists.
‘What’s he done?’ Hobbes asked.
‘The bastard was mouthing off to one of ours on the street,’ Jenkes answered. ‘Paddy here saw the whole thing. He called us cunts. The whole lot of us. Pigs and cunts. Blamed us for attacking Brixton.’ He turned back to the young man. ‘Isn’t that right, boy?’
The black man stared back at him, suddenly defiant. He didn’t have the look of an agitator.
‘Charlie, he’s just some Soho dropout, a junkie. Look at him.’
‘He spat at the officer,’ Boyle said. ‘I saw it. Right in the face.’
‘Fuck,’ Hobbes said. He couldn’t think of anything else to say.
Jenkes grimaced. ‘Well now it’s his turn.’ He rasped his throat and drew up a gob of saliva which he spat out directly in the black man’s face.