The Mammoth Book of Best British Crime 9

by Maxim Jakubowski

Joe was listening to “Rotterdam”, a track on the Githead album Art Pop. When he’d last been to Paris he’d played the Friendly Fires single of that name over and over. Earlier in the year, walking through the Neuköln district of Berlin, he’d selected Bowie’s Heroes album and listened to one track, “Neuköln”, on repeat.

  He switched it off. It wasn’t working. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn’t. The chugging, wiry pop of Githead didn’t fit this bleak riverscape. The breathy vocals were a distraction. Instrumentals worked better.

  He didn’t have long. A couple of days. The producer, Vos, wouldn’t wait any longer. The American was a busy man and Joe knew he had already more than tried Vos’s patience with repeated requests to have a shot at writing the screenplay, or have some input elsewhere on the movie. For now, at least, the script had John Mains’s name on it and Joe knew he could count himself lucky to be scouting locations, albeit unpaid. He hoped that by showing willing and maybe coming up with some places that not only corresponded to what Vos wanted but also helped to back up his own vision of how the film could look, he might still get to gain some influence.

  Joe turned back on himself and selected a cheap hotel with a river view. His room, when he got up to the fourth floor, managed to reveal very little of the Nieuwe Maas but if you craned your neck you could just make out the distinctive outline of the Erasmus Bridge. They called it the Swan; to Joe it looked more like a wishbone, picked clean. Did swans have wishbones?

  The room itself was basic and while you wouldn’t necessarily pick up dirt with a trailing finger, there was a suggestion of ingrained grime, a patina of grease. Joe quickly unpacked his shoulder bag, placing his tattered Panther paperback of The Lurking Fear & Other Stories by the side of the bed. He checked his emails and sent one to Vos to let him know he had arrived in Rotterdam and was heading straight out to make a start.

  He walked towards the centre. The kind of places he was looking for were not likely to be found there, but he wanted to get a feel for the city. He’d known not to expect a replica of Amsterdam, or even Antwerp. Rotterdam had been flattened in the war and had arisen anew in the twentieth century’s favourite materials of glass and steel. But really the commercial centre could have been plucked from the English Midlands or the depressed Francophone cities of Wallonia.

  A figure on top of an anonymous block of chrome and smoked glass caught his eye. It was either hubris or a remarkable achievement on the artist’s part that Antony Gormley’s cast of his own body had, by stealth, become a sort of Everyman figure. A split second’s glance was all you needed to identify the facsimile as that of the London-born sculptor.

  Only absently wondering why there might be an Antony Gormley figure standing on top of an office block in Rotterdam, Joe walked on. He stopped outside a bookshop and surveyed the contents of the window as an inevitable prelude to going inside: Joe couldn’t walk past bookshops. It was their unpredictability that drew him in. They might not have his book in stock, but then again they might.

  This one had the recently published Dutch edition of Joe’s crime novel Amsterdam. He stroked the cover, lost for a moment in the same reverie that always gripped him at this point. The thought that the novel was this far – this far – from reaching the screen.

  Leaving the bookshop, Joe spotted another tall figure standing erect on the flat roof of a shiny anonymous building 200 metres down the road.

  When Vos had optioned the book, Joe had thought it was only a matter of time, but delay followed delay. Vos had a director attached, but couldn’t find a writer the director would work with. Joe had asked his agent to show Vos the three unsold feature-length scripts he had written on spec, but the agent had explained that Vos and his director were looking for someone with a track record. Which was why Joe made a bid to write the adaptation of Lovecraft’s “The Hound”, Vos’s other optioned property, but the response was the same. Hence the visit to Rotterdam to look for empty spaces and spooky graveyards.

  On the Westzeedijk, a boulevard heading east away from the city centre, Joe came upon the Kunsthal: a glass-and-steel construction, the art gallery had a protruding metal deck on which were scattered more Gormley figures in different positions. Lying flat, sitting down, bent double. Inside the gallery, visible through the sheet-glass walls, were more figures striking a variety of poses. Two faced each other through the plate glass, identical in all respects except height. The one inside looked taller, presumably an illusion.

  Joe had missed the original Gormley exhibition in London, when cast-iron moulds of the artist’s body had popped up on rooftops across the capital. Leaving the Kunsthal in his wake, he caught sight of another figure at one corner of the roof of the Erasmus Medical Centre. He realized he had started looking for them. This was Gormley’s aim, he supposed, to alter the way you looked at the world. To get into your head and flick a switch. As public art, it was inescapable, insidious, invasive. Was that a good thing? Was his work really a “radical investigation of the body as a place of memory and transformation”, as Joe remembered reading on the artist’s own web site? Or was it all about him? All about Gormley. And if it was, did that matter? Wasn’t Joe’s novel all about Joe? Who’s to say Lovecraft’s essays were the extent of his autobiographical work?

  Joe was halfway to the top of the Euromast when his phone buzzed. The incoming text was from Vos. John Mains, the scriptwriter, was going to be in Rotterdam, arriving later that day. They should meet, compare notes, Vos advised.

  Joe scowled. He reached the top landing of the structure and exited on to the viewing deck. The panorama of the city ought to have dominated, but Joe couldn’t help but be aware of the ubiquitous figure perched on the railing above his head.

  He tried to think of a way in which he could get out of meeting up with Mains. He’d lost his phone and not received Vos’s text. Amateurish. Didn’t have time. Even worse.

  He checked his watch. He still had a few hours.

  At the foot of the Euromast he found an empty fire station. He peered through the fogged windows. A red plastic chair sat upturned in the middle of a concrete floor. A single boot lay on its side. Joe took a couple of pictures and moved on. A kilometre or so north was Nieuwe Binnenweg. With its mix of independent music stores, designer boutiques, print centres and sex shops, this long east-west street on the west side of the city would be useful for establishing shots. At the top end he photographed a pet grooming salon, Doggy Stijl, next door to a business calling itself, less ambiguously, the Fetish Store. There were a few empty shops, more cropping up the further out of town he walked, alongside ethnic food stores and tatty establishments selling cheap luggage and rolls of brightly coloured vinyl floor coverings.

  The port of Rotterdam had expanded since Lovecraft’s day to become the largest in Europe. Why the late author had chosen to set his story here did not concern Joe; indeed, he had no reason to suspect Lovecraft had ever set foot on Dutch soil. The references to Holland and Rotterdam in particular were so general he could have been describing any port city. All credit to Vos, Joe conceded, that he had chosen to film here rather than in Hull or Harwich, or the eastern seaboard of the US, for that matter.

  Joe’s westward migration out of the city had taken him into one of the port areas. The cold hand of the North Sea poked its stubby fingers into waste ground crisscrossed by disused railway sidings. Ancient warehouses crumbled in the moist air. New buildings the size of football pitches constructed out of corrugated metal squatted amid coarse grass and hardy yellow flowering plants. Interposed between one of these nameless buildings and the end of a long narrow channel of slate-coloured water was an abandoned Meccano set of rusty machinery – hawsers, articulated arms, winches, pulleys. Elsewhere in the city this would pass as contemporary art. Out here it was merely a relic of outmoded mechanization, with a possible afterlife as a prop in a twenty-first-century horror film.

  There had been a few adaptations of Lovecraft’s work, successful and otherwise, and they weren’t all by Stuart
Gordon. Just most of them. Joe wasn’t sure where Vos’s film was destined to play, arthouse or multiplex. As he lowered the camera from his eye, he caught sight of a dark shape behind the machinery. Tasting a rush of adrenalin, he moved his head for a better view, but there was nothing – or nobody – there.

  Disconcerted, he backed away. In the distance a container lorry crunched down through the gears as it negotiated a corner. A faint alarm could be heard as the driver of another vehicle reversed up to a loading bay.

  Keileweg had been the centre of the dockside red-light district before the clean-up of 2005 that had driven prostitution off the streets. If he hadn’t done his research, Joe wouldn’t have guessed. He found Keileweg devoid of almost any signs of life. The street was lined with boxy grey warehouses and abandoned import/ export businesses. A dirty scarf of sulphurous smoke trailed from a chimney at an industrial site near the main road end of Keileweg. On the opposite side, a little way down, a building clad in blue corrugated metal drew Joe’s eye. Christian graffiti decorated the roadside wall: “JEZUS STIERF VOOR ONS TOEN WIJ NOG ZONDAREN WAREN”. The building’s main entrance was tucked away behind high gates. High but not unscalable. Approaching the dirty windows, Joe shielded his eyes to check out the interior. The usual story: upturned chairs, a table separated from its legs, a computer monitor with its screen kicked in, a venetian blind pulled down from the wall, its blue slats twisted and splayed like some kind of post-ecological vegetation.

  The place had potential.

  Likewise the waste ground and disused railway sidings running alongside Vier-Havens-Straat.

  Slowly, Joe made his way back into town photographing likely sites, even throwing in the odd windmill in case Vos wanted to catch the heritage market.

  He returned to the hotel to shower and pick up his emails, including one from Vos telling him where and when to meet John Mains. Joe studied the map. He left the hotel and walked north until he reached Nieuwe Binnenweg, where he turned left. At the junction with Gravendijkwal, where the traffic rattled beneath Nieuwe Binnenweg in an underpass, he entered the Dizzy Jazzcafé and ordered a Belgian brown beer. He drank it quickly, toying with his beermat, and ordered another. Checking his watch, he emptied his glass for the second time. As he stood up, his head spun and he had to hold on to the back of the chair. Belgian brown beers were notoriously strong, he remembered, a little too late.

  Two blocks down Nieuwe Binnenweg was Heemraadssingel, a wide boulevard with a canal running up the middle of it. Joe stood on a broad grassy bank facing the canal and beyond it the bar where he was due to meet Mains. He straightened his back and breathed in deeply. He needed a moment of calm.

  A soft voice in his ear: “Joe!”

  He whirled around. A figure stood on the grass behind him, legs slightly apart, arms by his side. The lights of the bars and the clubs on the near side of the street turned the figure into a silhouette; the lights from the far side of the canal were too distant to provide any illumination.

  Joe stood his ground, straining his eyes to see.

  The figure didn’t move.

  And then a shape ghosted out from behind it. A man.

  “Joe,” said the man in a gentle Scots accent. “Didn’t mean to make you jump. Well, I guess I did, but you know … These are a laugh, aren’t they?” He indicated the cast-iron mould as he moved away from it. “Easily recyclable, too. John Mains.” He offered his hand.

  “Joe,” said Joe, still disoriented.

  “I know,” said Mains, smiling slyly.

  He was about Joe’s height with an uncertain cast to his slightly asymmetrical features that could go either way – charmingly vulnerable or deceptively untrustworthy.

  “Busy day?” Mains asked, moving dark hair out of his eyes.

  “Yeah.”

  “When did you get here?”

  “This morning.”

  “How did you get here?”

  “I flew.”

  “Shall we?” Mains gestured towards the far side of the canal.

  They walked towards where the road crossed over the canal and Joe was the first to enter the bar. Rock music played loudly from speakers bracketed to the walls. They sat on stools at a high table in a little booth and a bartender brought them beers. Joe observed Mains while the scriptwriter was watching the lads in the next booth, and he wondered what anyone would think, looking at them. Would they be able to spot the difference between them? Was Mains’s precious track record visible to the naked eye?

  Mains looked back and it was Joe’s turn to redirect his gaze.

  Mains said something and Joe had to ask him to repeat it.

  “I said I haven’t booked into a hotel yet.”

  “It’s not exactly high season.”

  “No.” He took a sip of his beer. “Could you not have taken the train? Or the ferry?”

  “What?”

  “It’s not very environmentally friendly to fly, especially such a short distance.”

  “It was cheaper.”

  “Not in the long run, Joe. You’ve got to take the long view.”

  Joe looked at the other man’s dark eyes, small and round and glossy like a bird’s. A half-smile.

  “So what have you got for me?” Mains asked.

  Joe hesitated. He wondered if it was worth making the point that he was working for Vos. He decided that since neither of them was paying him, it didn’t make much difference. He was about to answer when Mains spoke again.

  “Look, Joe, I know you pitched to write this script, but we do have to work together.”

  “I know, I know,” Joe shouted into a sudden break between tracks. The boys in the next booth looked over at them. Joe returned their stare, then turned to look at Mains. “I know,” he continued. “Here, have a look.”

  He handed Mains the camera phone on which he’d taken his pictures and Mains flicked through them using his thumbs.

  “Great,” he said, not particularly sounding like he meant it. “I suppose I was expecting something more atmospheric.”

  Joe tried to keep the irritation out of his voice – “I guess the Germans weren’t thinking about that when they bombed the place to fuck” – and failed.

  Another group of young men entered the bar. Joe didn’t consider himself an expert on the outward signifiers of particular social groupings, particularly in foreign countries, but he wondered if Mains had brought him to a gay bar. One of the newcomers glanced at Joe, then switched his attention to Mains, his eyes lingering on the tattoos on the Scot’s forearms.

  “Are you hungry?” said Mains.

  “I haven’t eaten all day.”

  “Let’s go get something to eat.”

  As they got down from their stools, Joe felt his head spinning again. He really did need something to eat, and quick.

  They ate in a Thai restaurant. Joe smiled at the waitress, but it was his dining partner she couldn’t take her eyes off.

  “You’d better write a decent script, that’s all I can say,” Joe said to Mains, argumentatively, as the waitress poured them each another Singha beer. “It better not be shit.”

  Mains laughed.

  “I’m not fucking joking. When’s it set, for example? Is it contemporary?”

  “It’s timeless, Joe. It’s a timeless story, after all. I’m sure you agree. Grave-robbing – it’s never a good idea.”

  “Tell me you’re not writing it as a fucking period piece.”

  “Like I say, it’s timeless.”

  “Fuck’s sake.”

  As they left, Mains slipped the tip directly into the waitress’s hand. Joe thought he saw her fingers momentarily close over his.

  Out on the street, Joe wanted nothing more than to drink several glasses of water and get his head down, but Mains wasn’t done yet, insisting that they go to a club he’d read about near Centraal Station.

  “I’m fucked,” Joe said, pulling a face.

  “Ah come on, man. It’s new. I want to check it out and I can’t go on my own.”


  Why not? Joe wanted to yell at him. Why the fuck not?

  But instead he allowed his shoulders to slump in a gesture of acquiescence.

  “Good man!” Mains clapped him on the back. “Good man! Let’s go.”

  They walked together through the city streets, dodging bicycles. Joe knew he was making a mistake. He just didn’t know how big.

  They reached West-Kruiskade. The nightclub – WATT – was located between a public park and an Asian fast food restaurant. Dozens of bikes were parked outside. Bouncers looked over a steady stream of clubbers as they entered. Joe and Mains joined them.

  They waited to be served at the bar.

  “The glasses are made from recycled materials,” Mains said.

  “Right,” said Joe.

  A bartender cracked open two brown bottles and poured the contents into two plastic glasses.

  “They have a rainwater-flush system for the loos,” Mains went on.

  “Brilliant,” Joe said in a deliberately flat voice.

  “The lighting is all LEDs. Renewable energy sources.”

  “This is why you wanted to come here?” A disgusted grimace had settled on Joe’s face.

  “The best part is over there.” Mains turned and pointed towards the dance floor, accidentally brushing the shoulder of the girl next to him, who turned and stared at the two men. “It’s a brand new concept,” he continued, ignoring the girl, who eventually looked away. “Sustainable Dance Club. Energy from people’s feet powers the lights in the dance floor.”

  Joe concentrated on trying to remain upright. He drank some beer from his recycled plastic glass. Something Mains had said in the restaurant came back to him.

  “You know you said grave-robbing is never a good idea?” Joe looked at Mains, whose face was unreadable. “Surely what we’re doing is a form of grave-robbing? Adapting the work of a dead man without his approval.” Joe finished his beer. “I’m not saying I wouldn’t have done the adaptation, offered the chance, but still, eh?”

  Mains stared back into Joe’s eyes and for a moment Joe thought he had outwitted the scriptwriter.