Sonata of the Dead

by Conrad Williams

  ‘The way the words slant forwards, a heavy slant…’ She puffed out her cheeks. ‘Wow. You could say the person is hysterical, or is prone to hysteria. He overreacts. He loses touch of himself, his inner feelings, his control, his self-denial. And following on from that, he is influenced by the emotional worth of a situation rather than any person caught up within it. He is indifferent to feelings of others.’

  ‘Jesus,’ I said.

  ‘And here, loops within loops… a tendency to secrecy. Deliberate concealment. He omits. He deceives and misleads. The omission of information in the hope it hides the truth. And perhaps he does this even to conceal things from himself…’

  ‘Is there anything here that chimes with what you saw before, in that first batch of pages I gave you?’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ she said. ‘It’s difficult to say. Writers… writing changes from person to person, even within the space of a few months. Circumstances can alter handwriting. Moods. Illnesses.’

  I glanced through some more of the sheets. Whatever typewriter these pages had wound through was grimy and knackered, or maybe just the misery in the words had turned it that way. And some of the lines didn’t hang quite right. ‘Sometimes I wonder what became of all the school friends. It’s natural.’ That impersonal ‘the’ where you’d expect a ‘my’. It said something about him. It gave me the creeps.

  I rubbed my face. Days of stubble rasped back in response. It was a loud sound in the room. I watched the beat of Romy’s heart transmit itself to the necklace hanging against her sternum.

  ‘How is your stroke pressure?’ she asked. She placed the papers on the floor and knelt on the bed. She lowered herself on to all fours. Her nipples grazed my thighs as she moved towards me.

  ‘I’ve never had any complaints,’ I said.

  ‘When do you have to see the police?’

  ‘Our meeting is at six a.m.’

  ‘You have an hour.’

  ‘What can we do in an hour?’

  ‘Joel, Joel, Joel…’ she whispered, a teacher admonishing a particularly thick pupil. Her nails scrawled mysterious ideograms across my chest. ‘What can’t we do?’

  * * *

  Mawker didn’t agree with it; not at first. Hell, I wasn’t even sure it was a good idea. I mean, the guy had obviously been on the wrong end of a lot of criticism. He’d already flipped his lid, retrieved it and tried to screw it on back to front. A bit more of a kicking was hardly going to make a difference. But it might. We had to try. Especially now that Niker and Pallant had gone dark and he was running out of targets. We dragged Simm in and read him the riot act. He kept pleading that he’d thought it was all just a big literary joke but the disgusted looks on our faces soon shut him up. He handed over the rest of the manuscript and the letters and Mawker told him he was lucky to be escaping a prison sentence. He sat there now, his face sadder than a diabetic’s treat cupboard.

  It was in all the papers that day. The Hack. I guessed Simm had been in touch with them. He was determined to get a payday of some kind it seemed. Fuck it. Get it out in the open. Maybe someone had seen something and would come forward. Maybe The Hack himself would suddenly find the pressure of nationwide coverage too great and either surrender to the police or top himself.

  ‘This mad berk, this evil fucker,’ Mawker said, ‘is clearly trying to attain the notoriety he thought he’d get via publishing by knocking off people on his writerly shit list.’

  ‘Have a promotion,’ I said. He gave me a look but didn’t react. We were in his office on the ninth floor at New Scotland Yard. No photographs on his desk. No Tupperware lunchbox, lovingly prepared for him. Instead there was a greasy cardboard box sticking out of the wastepaper bin, and the high reek of curry. Coke cans were strewn around like tokens on a coach’s tactics board. He needed a haircut. His shoes were scuffed. What looked like a bead of apricot jam clung right at the tip of the V of his tie. It smelled in here, and not just of chicken jalfrezi. It was Mawker’s sweat, a tart compost of anxiety and anger. No amount of Pledge or Windolene sprayed by the cleaners could shift it. On his desk was a computer. Someone had affixed a sticker to the back of it which read ‘Ello, ello, ello, PC PC’. It was a laugh a minute in this place.

  ‘And this moniker they’ve given him. The Hack. Because he has some ambitions as a writer. And also, it’s a reference to his MO, although we haven’t released any specific details on that.’

  ‘Double promotion. Mawker, you are on fire, son.’

  ‘Can it, Sorrell,’ he said. ‘I’m just summarising what we know.’

  I handed him an index card from his desk. ‘I reckon you could write everything you know on that card. With space left over to draw a giant cock. And balls.’

  ‘We’ve had top brass talk to the BBC,’ Mawker said. ‘They’ll let us run something during the ten o’clock news. But there’s no guarantee he’ll be watching. If he’s not writing or shedding blood, what? He sits up late at night with his Ovaltine to see how the latest McEwan has fared?’

  ‘They don’t do reviews on the ten o’clock news, Mawker. Do keep up.’

  ‘Whatever the fuck it is.’

  ‘Anyway, we have to try,’ I said. ‘Simm can do it. Or one of his publishing cronies. “This guy can’t write for toffee. He couldn’t write his way out of a wet paper bag. No future in this game.” Really pile it on. Get the radio stations to pick it up for their bulletins. Get it on tomorrow’s front pages.’

  Simm licked his lips and flicked his attention from me to Mawker and back to me, as if we were playing invisible tennis. ‘I’m not doing it,’ he said, and widened his eyes for emphasis. They looked as if they might just bug out of his face and make a bid for freedom. ‘And anyway, what would it achieve? You hit a wasps’ nest with a stick, you won’t do it again. I don’t want him after me.’

  ‘He’s already after you,’ I said. He blanched.

  ‘We need to get him angry,’ Mawker said. ‘Lure him out. Get him to make a mistake.’

  ‘And if he doesn’t?’ Simm was chipping away at my resolve. He was right. Of course he was right, but I had nothing else in the ideas tray. It was either this or wait for him to strike again. And we had no idea who his next victim was likely to be. What was crippling me was that it might be Sarah; he might know where she was, even if I didn’t. At least this way we could set him up with some potential targets that we could keep close to until he made his move from the shadows.

  ‘Like I said,’ I said, ‘we have to try. Anything come through from forensics, Ian?’

  ‘You only call me “Ian” when you want something.’

  ‘Well it is your name. Granted, it’s not the one I choose to use half the time.’

  ‘Nothing from forensics, not that it’s any of your business. No prints. No DNA. He’s not a knobber. No hairs or fibres, so either he’s naked and bald as a coot when he attacks, or he’s super lucky.’

  ‘Or super cautious,’ I said.

  ‘In which case this might not work,’ Simm said. It felt as if the words were leaping from his mouth, working on any little point of weakness so as to disarm, anything to take him further from where we wanted to go. His body followed up, repositioning itself, all eager, open. I decided he must be quite an act at the various negotiation tables of London’s publishing industry. ‘He’ll smell a trap a mile off. And then he’ll keep his head down for as long as it takes until things have cooled off. You’ll scare him away. Maybe for good.’

  ‘We take that risk,’ Mawker said. ‘At the very least the spree is over and we can go back over the evidence and approach this in a more thorough, by-the-numbers fashion. We’ll catch him, but it’ll take time. This way I think we get a crack at catching him more quickly.’

  ‘I don’t want anything to do with it,’ Simm said. His body had closed up again, like a shellfish at low tide.

  ‘It’s too late for that,’ I said, and then to Mawker: ‘What’s the setup?’

  A BBC crew were coming around to New Scotlan
d Yard the next morning. Ten a.m. sharp. Tula Barnes would be there, as well as an experienced and well-respected editor from Janner & Fyffe, one of the city’s oldest publishers. The footage would then be able to be repeated as much as possible throughout the day, maximising the chance of The Hack seeing it.

  ‘Let me see if I can bring something else to the party,’ I said. ‘If you think giving him a kicking over the quality of his metaphors isn’t good enough, there might be some other way we can sting him.’

  ‘Like what?’ asked Mawker.

  ‘Give me till tomorrow,’ I said.

  ‘We haven’t got the time. We need to work on what we’re going to say now.’

  ‘Well do that then, but allow for some extra material.’

  ‘Christ, Sorrell, this is going to be some ugly clusterfuck, I can feel it in my bladder.’

  ‘Let’s hope so,’ I said.

  * * *

  It was five minutes quick march round the corner to check on the dead letter drop. As before I took my time, glancing up and down Birdcage Walk and across at the park, where the swans were being fatted for the Queen’s table. It was late afternoon and the traffic was picking up, but there were few pedestrians down here. I watched a woman jog by with various high-end fitness gadgets appended to her torso and arms, then ducked next to the tree and found a piece of paper folded up into the knot of roots.

  51°30’59.26”N 0°10’33.61”W

  13.04. @ 0000 WTFIGO?!?

  Solo

  Midnight tonight. I opened the map on my phone and fed in the co-ordinates: Paddington Station. I struggled for the literary link. Hadn’t there been a Sherlock Holmes novel where they took a train from Paddington? The Hound of the Baskervilles maybe? Or was I thinking of the film? Fuck Sherlock Holmes and his hound. It didn’t matter. I was hyperventilating.

  Solo.

  She was getting in touch. Presumably she’d caught wind of the shitstorm and was trying to make contact with allies. I ran my thumb over the dimpled surface of the typed note and my mouth went dry. She had written this. She had delivered this. WTFIGO? She used to say that when she was a kid: ‘What the Figo?’ I’d always assumed it had something to do with the Portuguese footballer, until Rebecca explained to me.

  I snapped my head up, convinced she was here, that she was watching. I peered into every knot of bushes, every nest of shadows, and pareidolia tricked me into thinking there were faces there when there weren’t. I pocketed the note and after a moment’s pause, decided to leave one of my own.

  I’ll be there, I wrote. I couldn’t sign it. I didn’t want to risk scaring her off. I only hoped she didn’t recognise my handwriting.

  23

  Praed Street, just shy of midnight. Little traffic, fewer pedestrians. Lights on everywhere. This city knows no darkness. Not any more. Not the literal kind, anyway. I hurried past St Mary’s Hospital – the place gives me goosebumps for all manner of reasons (Sarah was born here; much later I met a monster within its walls).

  The slip road down to the Paddington Station entrance is like a throat. You got a sense of how huge the floor space was way before you stepped upon it. The roof gave you a clue, as did the wide way in. Shadows stretched off, dense and palpable. The breath from that yawning mouth was every kind of hot: grease, diesel, resentment. Spent tickets shifted around the threshold in eddies of wind. I heard footsteps – brief, hurried – and they sounded like high heels. A woman rushing to make a last train. A lover hurrying into the arms of one who had waited for her arrival. There was a sense of the station winding down. You could hear its fatigue in the creak of the shutter doors and the tick of cooling engines. The smell of a thousand travel-weary bodies hung in the air, and I grew tired just getting the slightest hit of it; the pall clung to the shed roof, all the humours of a busy day in a London hub.

  I stood just inside the entrance for a while, watching the shadows and light. Staff in dark blue uniforms clustered on a platform. I heard laughter. I saw sodium light glance off spectacle lenses. About a dozen people were staring at the departures board. I scanned the faces. I strained my eyes looking for the shape or the gait or the posture of a girl I no longer knew. I kept out of the pools of light and edged towards the escalators. The statue of Paddington Bear was just alongside. I stared at that little bronze creature for a while, remembering childhood afternoons watching the TV incarnation.

  This wasn’t right.

  It was gone midnight, but that wasn’t the problem. It just didn’t feel right, in the way that Peter Pan had. Yes, things had changed. There was imminent threat now, blood on the ground, but the dead letter drop was designed to neutralise that. Only the Accelerants knew about its location.

  Something had gone wrong. I wondered if there had been any kind of danger sign agreed, an abort code of sorts, should a meeting not look likely to be fulfilled. I stared down the platforms. I remembered when I first moved to London you could drive right in to the station from the north end. I’d dropped Rebecca off here once, when she had to catch a train to Bristol for some symposium or other. It had been noisier and smellier back then. Farting trains. Taxi fumes. Smoking on the platforms. Overly loud tannoy announcements by real people rather than today’s pre-recorded digital robot voices.

  Getting on for ten past. Just me and Padders. Please look after this bear, thank you.

  She wasn’t coming. Perhaps she had seen me and melted into the night. I’d do the same thing if I’d been in receipt of a message written in a hand I didn’t recognise. Do a recce, leg it if I wasn’t happy. Maybe I was early and she was late. I moved, fast, and found a spot behind one of the ticket machines near the ticket office. A guy wearing headphones came through buffing the floor with an orbiter. A teenager with a large backpack was asleep on a bench.

  She wasn’t coming. Nobody was coming. Nobody I wanted to see, at least.

  All the lights went out. The departures board stuttered and died.

  I felt my back bristle. I moved out from behind the ticket machine and heard the consternation of staff on the platforms, and passengers cheated of their information. A fire alarm went off. People began moving towards the exit. I stayed put, shrinking into the deep shadow of an entrance corridor. I heard the clatter of roller shutters as they crashed down.

  About a hundred metres away, a figure moved out of a thick darkness that was wadded up against the far wall. I kept losing it in the gloom. It wasn’t Sarah, that was for sure. It was like a magnet shifting through iron filings. It coalesced and disintegrated. The absence of light, or of anything on the figure that might have reflected it – glasses, belt buckles, polished leather – meant that it sometimes shrank from view. I couldn’t track it. And then it would be over there to the left, a little closer now. It was ranging from side to side. I had the horrible feeling that it was trying to sniff me out. I imagined something blind, something monstrous with unhinged jaws sucking in the flavour of my warm body, homing in. But now I did see something gleaming, and it was a broad blade. I thought it might be a machete, but that could have been fear enlarging it. I was torn between running for my life and sticking around in the hope that I might catch a clearer glimpse of my stalker and put a face to the threat, level this playing field. Maybe even disarm him, finish it tonight.

  But fear was a series of tiny eggs hatching in my gut. The last time I’d fought a man with a blade, I’d almost ended up with a new mouth. I felt weak and tired, the comedown from a jag of adrenaline at the thought of being reunited with my daughter once again. And maybe this wasn’t about me. Maybe this was a guy coming to rob Paddington Station. With a machete. Yeah, right. The shakes intensified when I thought of that weapon piercing Gower, Treacle and Taft, making steaks of them, life spraying in trajectories created by a millimetre-thick edge of steel.

  I got moving myself, but not before I decided to match the figure’s trickery. I slid my watch off my wrist and into my pocket. My wedding ring too. Buttoned my jacket and turned up the collar. I headed for the edge of Platform 1 and d
ropped on to the tracks as quietly as I was able. Hugging the wall under the lip, I made for open air, crouched low alongside the rails.

  I passed under Bishop’s Bridge Road, and waited for a while in its shelter. The space under the roof of the station was utterly black. How hard could it be to replace a fuse? And then a footfall on track ballast; the harsh music of crushed stone. The weapon was fully brandished now; it swept the air before it in broad, slow arcs. I backed away, ready to run if need be. The sight of the steel made the scar on my face ache.

  I was relatively new to violence. That realisation bit deep, and I felt my confidence dissolve, as if the puddles of oil beneath this bridge were draining the vitality from me. I’d made up for it in the intervening years since that callow fifteen-year-old was kicked to a shrivelling pile of snot and tears outside a fish-and-chip shop in Childwall. I couldn’t remember the name of the thug who’d attacked me, nor the reason for his assault. An askance look? A spilled drink? One of the two, or something else equally pointless. A girl, a car, a gesture.

  I remember getting into the bath that night and my whole body felt raw, as if I’d been dragged along the road until my knees and elbows and knuckles had been skinned. I’d got out of bed like a guy who’d just had a hip operation. Bruises had opened up beneath the skin in science fiction colours. I was convinced that he’d loosened some of my teeth, but it was transitory. When you’re a teenager, you heal fast and forget quicker. I got fit. I got fleet. I learned some moves. A bit of judo, a bit of boxing, a bit of karate. I picked up some krav maga later on. Just enough to know when something was coming, how to block it, create space, counterstrike and get away. Fists and feet and knees and heads I could cope with, despite the blunt force they provided. Sharp steel, though, and firearms – all of that was above my pay grade.

  If I kept still, kept in these dark shoals, shrank, buried my head in my arms, slowed my breathing and listened to the sedate crunch of stones as he approached, he would walk right past me. I could grab a handful of aggregate, fling it in his face when he turned back, gain a split second, enough to unleash hell upon the soft parts of his body before he could reposition himself, bring the machete into play. Or I could just watch him go. Follow him to his lair. Either way I could end it. If I ran, he could sedately plot his route to my daughter’s doorstep. But I’d been trying to do that for five years and she’d been a step ahead all the way. I had to believe that I was the professional PI here. He might know more about slice and dice, but I was the tracker. If I couldn’t find my daughter in all that time – and my need was greater than his – then it wasn’t a foregone conclusion that she was in any kind of immediate peril. She was not stupid. She had become even more of a ghost since Martin Gower died. She understood the danger and was concealing herself from it.