by Ivo Stourton
“What happened? Nothing happened. He was mad, same as I said. We looked and we looked and we found nothing. You know he actually said to me if it had been a white fellow had gone missing, we would have found him. I said only if he was hiding in the coal shed, son. He didn’t like that!” He smiled at the memory of how little the dead man had liked it.
“Did you get anywhere with tracing the brother?”
Minor shook his head emphatically. “He just vanished. Well, people do, don’t they?”
“Any leads? Anything odd about the case?”
“Plenty of odd stuff, but all talk. There was talk at the time of all sorts, because of what he did. Some people were saying a competitor of Nottingham had kidnapped him, like they had some underground lab somewhere to keep him chained up, or else they’d done for him to stop him perfecting the Treatment for Nottingham. Some people said Nottingham had nabbed him to stop him going over to the competition. We even had a call saying he’d been kidnapped by the Chinese secret service.”
“What did you think? Personally I mean.”
Minor shrugged. “He was an odd-bod. Didn’t have much of a life outside his work, except some charity bits and bobs, and church. Nothing tying him to the world but his ideas, and that’s a thin enough tether for anyone. Could be suicide, could be he just left.”
“Did you ever find out what he was working on?”
“No. But the brother told us all his research was gone. Don’t ask me how he knew. Tried to tell us it was proof of his kidnap theory.”
“Did you ever hear mention of something called the Tithonus Effect?”
“No. What’s that?”
“Just something someone said to me. Did he ever give you a picture of his brother?”
“You’ll find something on file.”
“This complaint...”
“You want to know if there’s trouble there for you?” Minor grinned. “There’s no nasty surprises on that one, saving what was there before we came on it. He was a very rich man, that Mr Egwu, and I think he hired his own men to keep looking after we’d dropped the case. But you can speak to the senior officer if you really want to check.”
“Who was that?”
“Don’t you know? Superintendent John Yates of the Met.”
Oates prided himself on his poker face, but something must have shown, as Minor smiled at him.
“Ask for you special did he? I bet he did, I bet he did. He used to ask for me special.”
Oates changed the subject, and the two of them chatted about people they had both known. Minor claimed he wanted news of them, but whenever Oates told him anything that looked like a divergence from the historical position, he just snorted and cited some incident from his own time on the force. He produced these anecdotes as if to refute the present, like a paleontologist brandishing the fossil record at a Catholic bishop. “Dick Owen will never go higher than Chief Inspector. I remember…” Bhupinder called, but Oates ignored it. They ordered another round, Oates asked for that cigarette after all, and for a while what with the smell of the pub and the old stories the two of them were friends again. They had settled into a brief silence when Minor said, “I was sorry to hear about your girl.”
Oates looked round quickly to see if any of the men had heard. They gave no sign, but still Oates felt the reference get loose on the floor of the pub. Once it was out he would never get it back, it would be away in the walls, chewing at the wiring of his authority.
“Yeah,” he said, as he got up to leave, “take care of yourself, Felix.”
“I’m alright, Detective Chief Inspector. It’s you as should be watching your back,” he said, and with that the moment of warmth between the men was dispelled, and Oates went back out into the rain. From the street he took one last look through the grimy window of the pub, and Horace was still wearing the umbrella perched at a jaunty angle behind his ear.
He shook his head for Felix Minor. Drink had made him paranoid, with all the self-aggrandisement of a full-blown ‘they’ out to get him. The psychic injury done him by his conviction had left him stranded in his glory days. Minor and Miranda were like two pilgrims walking the same trail, the old man in his dingy little pub where no one had changed the carpet in thirty years, the new-young woman in her state of the art pleasure dome, each of them searching for the shrine of their own youth. Minor was, if anything, more successful – his grievance provided a watertight seal against the present. Perhaps every man and woman walked their life on a see-saw, and one day a single footfall tipped the balance between the significance of past and future.
Oates remembered his own mother looking through photographs in her retirement home in Southend-on-Sea, and the signed picture she had been sent by a favourite pop-star, himself long dead. The past had become reality for her, and she spoke to her son quite cheerfully of their father, dead for ten years, as if he had just popped next door. Oates could accept that fate for himself, even the quiet horror of the doilies and the soft seaside rain, but it seemed as if the fulcrum of significance was retreating inexorably backwards, so that fifty and then forty and then thirty years old were somehow unbearable.
He thought about what Miranda had told him of St Margaret’s, that the real secret of promoting the feeling of youth was to remove from people their sense of responsibility. He could understand that, because the thought of his kids and the murder and his men back at the spa made him feel old. He could see the temptations of the retreat into the womb, where even the burden of conscious thought could be dispensed with, without needing the courage to let go the gift of life.
THE MORE HE considered what Minor had told him, the less he liked it. Why would a man with a grudge against Nottingham book himself in for a holiday at St Margaret’s? Why for that matter had they taken the booking, and why had Charles not seen fit to mention the history to Oates and the investigating officers? As a public relations officer he could hardly be unaware of a man publicly making accusations of foul play against his employer, even if it had been five years ago. Why had John not warned him?
Oates couldn’t share Minor’s enthusiasm for the idea of deliberate deception. Being part of one of the institutions routinely fitted up for conspiracy had taught Oates to dismiss conspiracy theories out of hand. The kind of people who believed in such things were either half-mad like Minor, or else deeply innocent of the world, toys still in the packaging of their teenage bedrooms. Apart from anything else, the Met lacked the funding and organisation required for a decent conspiracy. Perhaps his boss simply hadn’t spotted the connection. Only the files with their archival memory had picked up the link.
Still, it was too much of a coincidence to have the company implicated, however loosely, in one brother’s disappearance, and for the other to turn up murdered on their property half a decade later. If Prudence Egwu really had kept paid men on his brother’s case, perhaps they could give him more information. They must have written reports, submitted expenses. Oates knew there wasn’t a front garden in the suburbs more meticulously kept than a private detective’s expense forms. He remembered the victim’s address from the file. He decided to drop round there to see if he could find any record of the investigations before the tech team arrived.
He took the Underground. When he sat down on the padded bench, he saw someone had scratched the letters ‘M.R.’ with a coin onto the carriage window. By Notting Hill Gate tube station the shops were still open, but the shopkeepers had taken their goods from the window displays. One store selling cephoscopes on the corner had nothing in the window but a handwritten sign saying No stock or cash kept on premises. The street where Prudence Egwu had lived swept down from Camden Hill, wide and tree-lined. The houses themselves stood back from the road, with gleaming black front doors beneath porticos at the tops of stairs. Despite the cold Oates grew warm as he toiled up. The house was near the brow of the hill, overlooked by nothing but sky. The door had a keycard lock, and he used his police pass to open it.
The entrance hall was
flagged with black and white marble tiles. Oates opened the set of double doors on the left hand side and whistled. The dining room was thirty feet long. He flicked the lights. Down the length ran a long mahogany table, polished to the point where a ring of dim stars floated underneath the chandelier. The chairs were green leather buttoned in shining bronze, with wooden eagle claws for feet. On the walls there hung a picture composed of a couple of childish squares in oil. It was altogether the kind of room that seemed too expensive to be the property of any one man, but existed in Oates’s mind as a place which could be hired out by the rich for weddings and funerals.
The thing that affected him most deeply was not the opulence of the furnishings, but the space. Space was the rarest thing in London, and as the space for the body was curtailed, so the mind was similarly circumscribed. The physical barrier presented by the walls of his cubicle at the office and the be-suited bodies of tired men on the tube prevented his mind from wandering as effectively as if his thoughts had been creatures of flesh and blood. And what was that sound? Silence! No chatter of phones, no hard drive whirring, no traffic, no television, no neighbours moving in the walls, shattering the illusion of solitude. With this much quiet, a man could be dignified. The room made him uncomfortable in a way no blood spattered back street could ever have done.
He pulled one of the seats out from the table, but it looked so clean he hesitated to sit down. He set it back in its place, being careful to align the balls clutched in the carved talons with their corresponding dents in the thick carpet. He pictured the financier with no next of kin to hear of his death, sitting alone at the end of that long table, flanked by twenty empty chairs. Oates thought fondly of the clutter of his own home, and the toys on the carpet.
He went over to look at the modernist painting. He couldn’t see the point of it, and the very fact that someone like him thought it pointless would be part of its attraction. He knew instinctively that there were people in the world, rich people, who would think that this painting was worth more than him and a thousand like him. And in financial terms, they would no doubt be right. The working life of a DCI would not produce enough money to move the painting from a wall in this house to a wall in someone else’s. It was offensive for a thing like this to hoard millions between the four wooden planks of the frame, when the Met had not the manpower to protect the weak of the city.
He went over to the silver drinks tray standing fully crewed with cut crystal decanters on the sideboard beneath the painting. He wouldn’t normally of course, but his encounter with Minor had forced him to break the seal, and he needed to take the edge off his irritation. He liberated the whisky bottle from its silver collar, and poured himself a measure.
Oates left the room and wandered back down the hall to the study, and knew he had found what he was looking for. Above the desk there was a portrait of Prudence Egwu as he had been before the Treatment, an elderly black statesman in a suit and tie, standing with his hand resting on a globe. Oates raised the glass to him.
One side of the office had been converted into a strong wall. A safe-like box about a foot in depth was fitted with a panel over the surface, and a shutter of bonded steel a couple of inches thick that could descend over the entire recess. The shutter, which locked with another keypad at the wall, was raised. Out of curiosity Oates passed his police card over the keypad, and it bleeped red. Someone had gone to the trouble of disabling the factory settings; only the proper code or a warrant frequency would release the lock. Inside the alcove were hundreds of paper files in slings. Oates knew that men like Prudence Egwu trusted the physical security of their homes over the computer. When you kept important files on your computer, you never knew whose skinny fingers were reaching up the wires to rifle them.
A couple of the folders had been pulled from their moorings, and lay strewn on the carpet. Oates squatted to leaf through the pages, but without context they were meaningless. He found graphs, columns of numbers in a spreadsheet, photocopies, some with notes written in a tidy hand in the margin. The labels of the files still hanging in their slings were marked with letters and numbers, and gave no clue as to their contents. He looked up, and noticed the cameras hanging in the corners of the room.
The security panel was mounted on the wall of the study. Oates set down the glass on the desk blotter, and scrolled in fast rewind backwards through the hours since he had been woken by Grape’s call. The grainy screen showed 1:45am as a masked man approached the front door and entered the keycode. As the door opened the intruder looked back over his shoulder at the empty street, craning out from the portico with an almost comic furtiveness. Oates tracked him through the hall, where he switched the light on, stood for a few seconds, then thought better of it and switched it back off.
In the few seconds of illumination, Oates was surprised to see that the mask he was wearing was an ornate Venetian titillation, with tiny bells hanging from the colourful papier-mache crest. He used a lighter to see his way through the hall to the study. He entered another code into the panel of the strong wall, which lifted into the air. He did not need to pause to read the files, by the light of the flame he carried he removed two neatly from their slings and slipped them into a leather satchel. Then he pulled others from the shelf and spread them over the floor in a simulation of disorder. He went back out through the hall, and closed the door behind him. On the doorstep, blithely unaware of the external camera, he removed his mask to reveal the face of a handsome young man.
With the mask off, the expression made Oates want to protect him from whatever it was he had gotten himself involved with. He looked so proud standing there, and so relieved, already congratulating himself as a master criminal as he prepared to slip away into the night with his illicit bundle. Oates waved to him on the little screen. I’ll be seeing you later. He looked forward to finding out what was in those missing files.
The awareness that he was not alone in the house dawned slowly on Oates. It was an atmospheric phenomenon, brought to a sudden focus by the sound of a muffled shout from upstairs. Oates removed his gun from the mooring in his belt. He walked softly into the hall, risking a look up the stairs. He returned to the security panel and worked the keypad. Number of occupants in house? Three. Location? Study, one. Master bedroom, two. Would you like to signal the police? All our alarms are silent and confidential! Oates lingered over the question for a few seconds, and pressed ‘Decline’.
He mounted the stairs, grateful for the deep pile of the carpet. The sounds were coming from a closed door on the second landing; as Oates drew nearer, they took on the unmistakable quality of a man or woman being beaten. There was the sharp sound of a slap, and then a muffled cry, the rumble of a low voice and the shrill quaver of a desperate response. He pressed his ear to the door to try to gauge their position in the room. He stood back, and kicked the door in.
In the first instant of apprehension, the thing on the bed in front of him was a monster. It seemed to be tearing itself apart, one half begging for release, the other half urging on the coupling. Like some horrible manifestation of his own conflicted instincts, the thing incited violence and begged for peace from two different mouths. After a few seconds the image of the demon dispersed, and Oates realised that it was a man raping a young woman whose arms were handcuffed to the posts of the wide headboard. The man was so intent on his work that he did not even hear the crash of the door behind him, but the woman, whose wild eyes stared over his shoulder, saw Oates and her screams intensified.
Oates holstered his gun. He grabbed the man’s shoulder and flung him backwards. He stumbled off the bed but managed to keep his footing, his erection bobbing in the air in front of him in an obsequious greeting. He was a young guy, late twenties and well built, a fact from which Oates took a momentary savour; no need to hold back with a guy built like that.
The man had the presence of mind to cast about him for a weapon, and his eyes alighted on an open backpack on the floor, from which protruded an effusion of metal and le
ather objects. He dipped for it and came up clutching some kind of sex toy, two vibrating balls attached to a length of silk. Just for a moment the two men paused, breathing heavily, and looked at the absurd device with which he had armed himself.
He swung one of the love eggs at Oates. It bounced with a harmless clatter against his shoulder pads, and Oates punched him in the face. As the blood began to flow from his nose he cried out, “No, no, no,” in the high-pitched, querulous tones of an old lady remonstrating with her Pekinese. He turned to run, but Oates grabbed him by the hair and hurled him through the door of the bathroom. He hit the marble wall of the tub. He scrabbled to right himself on the bathmat and had found his feet before Oates could get through the door. He went to slam it shut, but the floor of the bathroom was wet and his feet went from under him. He collapsed backwards into the tub, and Oates was on him. He grabbed him again by the hair, and all the time he kept saying, “No, no,” only now there was no more sense in it than a dog’s barking.
Oates noticed that the soap in the tray beside the bath still had its wrapper on, as if this was not someone’s house but a fancy hotel. He held the man’s head under the tap and turned it with his free hand. The flared spout erupted with a pressurised stream of freezing water, and Oates left it on. When he finally shut the water off the “nos” had stopped, as had the struggling, and the naked man turned on his side to glub and spit mouthfuls of water into the gold plughole. Oates took off his coat and hung it over the towel warmer. He dried his hands, took out his handcuffs, and yanked the man’s wrist over the edge of the tub to fix it to the pipe running underneath. Finally he picked up the pair of trousers that lay crumpled in the corner of the room, and husked the wallet.
“What do you want? I’ll give you anything you want, just please, don’t hurt me.”
This raised a giggle from the room next door.
“You fucking bitch!” the man shouted. “You set me up, you little fucking whore! When this is over I’m going to find you and I’m going to…”