Bloody London

by Reggie Nadelson

  BLOODY LONDON

  Contents

  Cover

  Title

  Copyright

  Dedication

  About the Author

  Also available by Reggie Nadelson

  Part One New York, October

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Part Two London, November

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  This eBook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  Version 1.0

  Epub ISBN 9781409007500

  www.randomhouse.co.uk

  Published in the United Kingdom by Arrow Books, 2006

  1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

  Copyright © Reggie Nadelson 1999

  Reggie Nadelson has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.

  This novel is a work of fiction. Names and characters are the product of the author’s imagination and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  First published under the title Sex Dolls in the United Kingdom in 2002 by Faber and Faber, London

  Arrow Books

  The Random House Group Limited

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  Random House (Pty) Limited

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  The Random House Group Limited Reg. No. 954009

  www.randomhouse.co.uk

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  Papers used by Random House are natural, recyclable products made from wood grown in sustainable forests. The manufacturing processes conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin

  ISBN 9780099497790 (from Jan 2007)

  ISBN 0 0994 9779 4

  Typeset by SX Composing DTP, Rayleigh, Essex

  Printed and bound in Great Britain by Cox & Wyman Ltd, Reading, Berkshire

  For

  Alice, Fred and Justine,

  with love

  BLOODY LONDON

  A journalist and documentary film maker, Reggie Nadelson is a New Yorker who also makes her home in London. She is the author of seven novels featuring the detective Artie Cohen (‘the detective every woman would like to find in her bed’, Guardian), most recently Red Hook. Her non-fiction book Comrade Rockstar, the story of the American who became the biggest rock star in the history of the Soviet Union, is to be made into a film starring Tom Hanks.

  Also available by Reggie Nadelson

  FICTION

  Skin Trade

  Hot Poppies

  Red Mercury Blues

  Somebody Else

  Disturbed Earth

  Red Hook

  NON-FICTION

  Comrade Rockstar

  London

  November 5

  London! The exhilaration, the anticipation washes over me and a light layer of gooseflesh ripples up my arms. I can’t shake it, in spite of everything, this thrill of travelling, that I’m allowed to go wherever the hell I want. Just going makes me happy. All it takes is the dough. If, like I did, you grow up in a lousy landlocked city with walls the height of the world – it’s how Moscow felt when I was a kid – you never lose it, the sheer physical pleasure of going.

  Suddenly, the plane coming in now, there’s a hole in the clouds. I cram my face against the window. England looks like it’s on fire. I’m looking down and I see it, the landscape dotted with remote fires, like war breaking out in the suburbs. It seems prehistoric and post-nuclear at the same time. But then the clouds come up again in fast black-gray rolls, the fires disappear, the PA system crackles with pilot babble, Enjoy your Stay. No one mentions the fires. Then the cabin lights go out.

  We’re down.

  Welcome to London.

  I’ve never been to London, or Europe either, not really, not unless you count East Berlin when I was a kid or a couple of days’ vacation in Poland once. (Some vacation!) I’m here to finish something that started at home in New York when Thomas Pascoe was murdered in a swimming pool on Sutton Place. The answers are here in this foreign place.

  Around me, everyone is busy with the stuff of arriving, rubbing their eyes, yawning, scavenging for things they dropped under the seat, stuffing duty-free into their carry-ons. No one on the plane knows me or why I’m here. I’m just a guy in a crumpled tweed jacket and a denim shirt. My legs, too long for these seats, are cramped up and I’m trying to unfold myself and stretch, and thinking at the same time I’m glad I bought some decent Scotch at the duty-free and that too many people are dead.

  Too many people died in New York, Frankie Pascoe most of all. And I owe her. I think about her, waiting for the fatso ahead of me while he shuffles off the plane. I owe Frankie, and the obligation gnaws at me. In my pocket I can feel the sharp edge of my passport against my fingers, and the envelope with British cash in it and keys for a borrowed apartment. I wish to God I had a gun.

  I don’t have a weapon. Can’t, not here. Anyway, I’m unofficial, an ex-New York City cop with a license to work private cases in America and that’s about it. No gun. I don’t know my status here, but I miss the gun like hell, like you miss a body part.

  My fingers fidget with the Swiss Army knife in my pocket. The woman next to me with the spiky racoon hair says “What’s so funny?” and I shake my head and say “Nothing” because I’m laughing at myself. What would I do with a little red Swiss Army knife? Threaten the bad guys? Mostly I use it for the corkscrew attachment, to open wine. A cop with a corkscrew. I could have been a waiter.

  “Welcome to Britain. Enjoy your stay.”

  The guy at immigration stamps my passport, I ride the escalator down, grab my suitcase off a luggage carousel, head out into the raw London night and climb into a square black taxi. I leave
the window open. I want to see what England feels like without glass between it and me. The air is dank as hell. In front of me all I can see of the cabbie is his beefy shoulders and a pony tail. He’s a talker.

  “American?” The cabbie says without turning his head. “Where from?”

  “Yeah.”

  Again he says, “From?”

  “New York. What’s with the fires?”

  He chuckles like he knows I missed the joke. “Guy Fawkes,” he says. “Back, you know, 1600s or something. Bloke name of Guy tries to blow up Parliament. They trussed him up, burned him. Something like that. Bonfire Night every year, a bit like your Halloween, only now we have that too.”

  We cruise along a highway and into town and it’s late, there’s not much traffic.

  Now I’m hanging out the cab window and laughing. Everything, every car, cab, lamppost, mailbox, street sign, billboard, every store and café is foreign, even McDonald’s and the GAP seem different, especially at night in the harsh air. I even hum “A foggy day” just for the hell of it.

  London’s big. Planet London. I watch the blur of unfamiliar places, small houses, big boulevards, department stores. The driver points out Buckingham Palace, then a long avenue leading away from it, green spaces on either side.

  Big Ben, the clock face lit up, slides into view between trees, like a postcard. Then Parliament. I tune out the cab driver and lose myself in the passing city. The cab turns left, drives fast along an embankment, the river’s on my right, a few boats are winking on it in the distance. In a square on my left, behind a low iron railing, a bonfire is burning, dying out. Then I see the figure.

  The driver points it out, a scarecrow or ragdoll, perched on the spikes of the iron railing. The light turns red. He slams on the brakes.

  “Penny for the guy?”

  It startles me, this soft, ugly, ragdoll face coming through the half-open window. It brushes against my face. I pull back. A couple of drunks are pushing the thing in my window, in my face, yelling “Penny for the guy?” They laugh, a drunken slurry giggle, then stagger away to some cronies, three other guys drinking beer on the sidewalk. One of them sticks the dummy back on the spikes.

  The light changes, but my excitement’s gone, punctured by the creeps with the doll. A faint feel of gauzy dread takes its place. My feet and lips buzz with it and I grab a cigarette out of my bag, light up, take a couple of fast drags.

  The river, when we cross it, has a silver-black surface, hard, flat and dark. Behind me, when I twist my neck, I can see the Tower of London. I slept through history when I was a kid, but I remember the Tower of London. Murderous place.

  The narrow lane where the cab turns in, in spite of the renovations and fancy shops, feels claustrophobic, closed-in, old, melancholy. The shops near by are mostly dark, except for a restaurant where yellow light dribbles into the street.

  “This is it, mate,” the driver says. “Butler’s Wharf. Very nice.” He pulls up in front of a renovated warehouse.

  I stick some cash in his hand, haul my suitcase out of the cab, into the building, which is slick enough, the lobby, the elevator. The apartment is on the top floor.

  The hallway’s silent. Somewhere a dog whimpers. Fumbling the unfamiliar keys, I get the door unlocked. Inside, the place is dark, a quiet, empty place no one lives in. I scratch around the wall for the light.

  There are light wood floors, white walls, an open kitchen, a table, a few canvas chairs, not much else. There’s a bedroom and bathroom, bed, dresser, closets. A digital clock next to the bed. I can hear the numbers flip over.

  Suddenly I feel dog-weary, sit down hard on the bed. Next time I look at the clock, it’s three in the morning. My head’s thick with jetlag and fatigue, eyes cruddy with sleep.

  The duty-free Scotch is in my bag and in the kitchen I find a glass and pour some out. Somewhere, from another apartment, I can hear music, very faint, very far away, a dreamy ballad, maybe a show tune, and I take my drink and head for the sliding glass doors. On the balcony outside are a pair of wicker chairs, the kind with high curved backs.

  The door isn’t locked. I slide it open. The wind’s blowing hard now. Below the balcony, the promenade that runs along the river is deserted. Lightbulbs strung between the lampposts along the riverfront tinkle against each other, glass on glass, an eerie noise, like the metal bits on a flagpole, clinking, warning me. Balancing the drink in one hand, I reach out to push the door wider. I need some air.

  It’s ten, twelve days since Pascoe was murdered; it seems longer. He was on his way to London the day he died. The Pascoe murder’s infiltrated my life; whatever killed him, I want it over. I want to stop it all before it crashes over everything. I feel like a surfer in a huge wave. I don’t know why this image keeps coming to me, I’ve never done any surfing in my life, but it’s suffocating, the wave breaking over me, breaking my arms and legs, people I know around me on their own boards, yelling for help. Somehow I have to find the right coins to put in a slot that will make the water recede. If I don’t find them, if I don’t stop it, it will drown everyone I care about.

  The Scotch is mellow in my mouth. Then the lights in the apartment flicker and go out and I reach for the switch on the wall. A fuse has blown, but I don’t care, I’m going to bed after a smoke, and I feel in my pocket for cigarettes and a lighter, go further out on the balcony and grab a chair. Under my hand, the smooth wicker is oily from the damp.

  You know when something lousy’s coming, you think you sense it before, but maybe afterwards you can’t remember if you really knew, if it was the anticipation that made your gut turn over and your skin crawl, or if it came to you later. Later. After you saw it.

  It’s coiled up inside the wicker chair. One of the stuffed figures like a scarecrow, a dummy, and it’s the size of a baby. There’s a photograph stuck to its head with pins. The picture is cropped. Only the features show: mouth, nose, eyes. There are holes punched in the eyes. I’ve seen this before: a picture, the eyes cut out. It’s a warning. They throw acid at you or cut out your eyes, it’s an old curse. They make you blind, then they kill you.

  The damp night is making the skin on my arms crawl like there’s ants on it and I grab the crumpled picture and hold my lighter up so I can see it better, but the light goes out in the breeze. Again, somewhere in the building, a dog whines.

  I get inside, shut the balcony door, flick on my lighter again. The flame makes shadows jump on the piece of paper I’m holding. There’s a peculiar smell, now I get a whiff, something musty in the apartment, maybe just a mouse that passed through and died here, maybe that’s all. I gulp the rest of the Scotch in my glass and ignore the stink. The paper I’m holding has been swiped out of a file and printed off the Internet, and when I hold the lighter closer I can see the face.

  The wind is coming through a crack, and I open the glass door again then slam it so hard it rattles. Then I lock it.

  Where’s the fuse box? I bang around looking for it. I want the lights on now. The photograph I ripped off the dummy is in my hand.

  I’ve never been in London before in my life, no one knows I’m coming, this is a borrowed apartment. But the dummy in the wicker chair on the balcony was intended for me. To spook me, and I know it. Where’s the goddamn fuse box, I think again, holding my lighter up high, squinting at the picture that I know was left for me because the face in it, the eyes cut out leaving only brutal holes, is mine.

  Part One

  New York, October

  1

  Blood floats. It was the first thing I noticed that morning. It spread slowly outward over the water in the swimming pool uptown.

  The stink of chlorine was intense. The lights the cops had rigged made their faces flat and white as they worked the edge of the swimming pool, maybe twenty guys, like the sorcerer’s apprentices, some slow, some brisk, homicide, forensics, photographic. The pool was a large rectangle, the tiles, at the bottom and around the rim, dark blue with gold flecks in them. On their hands and knees,
the crews took water samples, dusted, sifted invisible shreds of cloth, hair, skin, determined, hopeful, doubtful, like men panning for gold in permafrost. Whenever I’m at a scene I usually think about it in metaphors, men digging in permafrost, that kind of thing; it passes the time and keeps you sane.

  The morning Pascoe died, it was a Monday, I was drinking hot black coffee at the fish market before it was light, watching Italian guys in big rubber boots unload a crate of red snapper onto a bed of cracked ice. I was working a possible case at the market, a theft. Just a job. But I like the fish market early in the morning. The sun comes up. The East River turns pink, the breeze that day was soft as powder and when the mist burned off, the sky was bright blue. Then my beeper went. I looked at it, and twenty minutes after I got the message I was at the swimming pool on Sutton Place.

  The body, already bagged, lay on the slippery tiles. Catch of the day, I thought. I heard one of the guys crouched by the pool hum a Beach Boys tune to himself. “Little Surfer Girl”, he hummed. In New York City, the terrible and comic always lie, as my first boss used to say, side by each. But all Sonny Lippert said to me when he looked up and saw I’d arrived was “I got a Russian for you.”

  “Dead? The dead guy’s Russian? On Sutton Place?” I looked at the body bag.

  “No, man. The Russian’s a witness. The dead guy’s a teabag. And rich. Very very rich, very important, very connected, very dead also. You heard the name Pascoe?”

  “Yeah, I maybe read something.”

  “Thomas Pascoe. British. Pushing eighty. Big time. Investment banker. Lawyer. Charities up the wazoo.” Sonny paused to let it sink in.

  I let it sink. “And?”

  “Head of the co-op here. Thomas Pascoe was head of the fanciest co-op in New York City. I bet there’s plenty of people mad as hell at him.”

  “How’d they do him?”

  Sonny chuckled. “That’s the kicker. They tried to whack his head off. I swear to God. Head of the co-op. In the pool. Where the old lady found him, the Russian. Come on.” He looked at his watch. “She’s in shock. They said give it an hour, I’m still fucking waiting.”