Sonata of the Dead

by Conrad Williams

  * * *

  Ryan Taylor lived in a flat in an estate in Dalston. I got there by nine a.m., pessimistic about my chances of catching him before he went off on his jobs for the day. There was a guy sitting in a Ford Kuga smoking a cigarette and reading the newspaper. I asked him if he knew Ryan Taylor and he nodded.

  ‘Out though,’ he said. ‘Early bird. Back late and all.’

  I thanked him and checked the list of jobs again. I’d arranged them into order travelling south to north from this Dalston beauty spot. There was no guarantee that Ryan would have done the same, but it made sense to do it this way, especially if speed was of the essence.

  I really didn’t want to do this, but I couldn’t think of a way around it. It might eat up a big chunk of the day; there was every chance I’d only catch up with him when he arrived back at his flat. At least, if that happened, he’d be dead on his feet and unlikely to give me any trouble.

  In the end I found him almost immediately. But I was lucky. He’d stopped off at a café on Kingsland Road for his breakfast and he’d locked his bike – a stripped-back single-speed Dawes Mono in bright yellow, a real mustard bike – at head height on a railing opposite, presumably so he could keep his eye on it while he waited for his bacon bap.

  I stood by his bike and let the air out of his tyres. He came out with a white paper bag, the cleats on his soles skittering on the pavement. He was hunched over to balance himself against any sudden slips and he wore one of those ridiculous speed helmets that resembles an elongated teardrop.

  ‘You look like a shit velociraptor,’ I said.

  ‘You’re the cunt gave my brother grief,’ he said.

  ‘So he managed to call you after all? Anyway, he gave himself grief. Everyone has the option to make the right decision and avoid grief. The alternative is time-wasting and bruises. I wonder which way you’ll go.’

  ‘You made my decision for me when you let the air out of my Halos. You fuckhead.’

  ‘I just want to know who booked the delivery of a manuscript to a literary agent – Patrick Simm – on Albemarle Street in the recent past.’

  ‘Who gives a fuck?’

  ‘I do. And so do the police. We’ve got reason to believe the person who sent it is a murderer. We want to stop him before it happens again. You could help.’

  ‘I’ll consider it after I’ve used my pump on your arse.’

  ‘Leave your filthy little fetishes for your Dalston hellhole,’ I said.

  He came for me and I sidestepped easily. His cleats slipped on the pavement and he fell awkwardly, his left leg shooting out to the side.

  ‘Ooh,’ I said, wincing. ‘Unintentional yoga.’

  He got up, haltingly, and leaned back against the railing. ‘You’ve fucked my groin,’ he said.

  ‘Words I hope never to hear ever again,’ I said.

  ‘That’s me buggered today,’ he said. ‘That’s my wedge gone.’

  ‘I’ll compensate you. The full whack. In return for some information.’

  He slid down to the ground and pressed a gloved hand against the top of his thigh. ‘What makes you think I should remember a job that might have happened weeks ago?’

  ‘I don’t know. Maybe because it was unusual in some way. Maybe you saw something you didn’t want to see. Not a usual client. A client who paid over the odds to do something that the post office could have done for much less.’

  It was starting to rain, but it was little more than a fine mist. It beaded on Ryan’s woollen cycling jersey. The radio fastened to the bandolier around his chest chuckled and chirped. He wore Lycra cycling shorts; his calves were taut, nut brown, cabled with veins. He stared at me.

  ‘Come on,’ I said. ‘I need to get a wiggle on. Rack what passes for your brains.’

  ‘Woman,’ he said. ‘Older woman. But toned, you know. A MILF. Hell, maybe even a GILF. I’ve got no qualms about ancient pussy, as long as it’s bookended by top tatas and a bubble arse.’

  ‘I’m sure she’d be thrilled to know that,’ I said. ‘Name?’

  ‘No name.’

  ‘Address then?’

  ‘I don’t remember. Somewhere out in Waltham Cross.’

  ‘If you could narrow that down a bit.’

  ‘I don’t remember.’

  Yeah, you do, I thought. A guy like you who might be fit, but has bad teeth and eyes that are too close together. A guy whose hair always looks greasy and lank no matter how much you wash it. You haven’t had a girlfriend for some time because they don’t like your shithole address or your shithole brother or your shithole mouth. Or maybe it’s your total lack of respect for anyone, let alone the women you lust after. The smirk on your lips – unnecessary, unsuccessful, unearned – that makes you look contemptuous, not beguiling or sexy or mysterious, as you’d have it. Your eyes constantly looking at the tatas or the bubble and never any deeper than that. Evenings in the pub with your no-mark mates, leaning back against the bar. Do that. Had her. Till it bled. And then back home to a microwaved pot and Pornhub and a spit-slicked fist.

  I came to and his face was a bubbling, fizzing mask of blood and snot. He was moaning at me, maybe he was begging me to stop. My right hand was mashed into a fist, hair matted against it. I’d hit him so hard that one of my knuckles had been dislocated and driven back into my hand. Sirens wailed. So did he.

  I let go of him and dropped to my knees. ‘Where in Waltham Cross?’

  And then I heard that he wasn’t begging me to stop. He was reciting an address, over and over. I leaned in close to his mouth.

  Station Approach.

  28

  I was heading back to the car when a plain-clothes crime-fighting duo in an unmarked black BMW 3 Series pulled up, blocking my way. Their radio hissed and spat with dead code as they pushed me into the back seat.

  ‘We don’t need to do this,’ I said. ‘Not now at least.’

  ‘We do, actually,’ said the driver. He was bald and there were spidery white scars all over the skin. ‘We had a complaint from a guy about you. This guy was wearing his breakfast. Noodles, apparently. Someone saw him stuck in a window of an archway warehouse in W6 and called the police. He wasn’t trying to break in, he was trying to break out. It was his shop. Someone had locked him in. You, specifically.’

  ‘Hello, Ian,’ I said.

  Ian Mawker was sitting in the back seat reading the Daily Mail. He was sucking food out of his teeth and he pointedly did not look up when I joined him.

  ‘You’re under arrest,’ he said.

  ‘Oh, fuck off, Ian. I’ve got an address.’

  ‘An address for who?’

  ‘It’s “whom”. And it’s him. The Hack. We can be there in half an hour if you stick your ice cream jingle on.’

  ‘Where you’ll be in half an hour is a cell in Stoke Newington nick. What’s the address?’

  ‘You don’t play this game very well, do you? You think I’m going to tell you unless you loosen your girdle and relax? We go together or not at all.’

  ‘If you don’t tell us, nobody goes, and time ticks on. Sarah could still be okay now. In half an hour, who knows? Or is that “whom” as well?’

  ‘Hey, Humpty,’ I said to the driver. His eyes drilled into mine via the rearview mirror. ‘Did you know that an anagram of “Ian Mawker” is “I am a cunt”?’

  ‘Wanker, surely,’ said passenger seat, a virulent-looking streak of dung with his hair styled in what we used to call a fanny fringe back in junior school.

  ‘Shut it, Pascoe,’ said Mawker.

  ‘Ian,’ I said. ‘Let me in on this.’

  ‘No. Fucking. Chance.’ He folded his Daily Mail and slipped it into his inner pocket. ‘But I’ll cut you a deal. You give us this address, we collar the bastard, you walk. No arrest. No charges. You’re free to go back to missing the urinals at your favourite watering holes. You can go home to your psycho cat and frot yourself off against him some more.’

  I stared at him. He was serious. He wore that goading e
xpression of his, a look that said: Go on, test me, see what happens. He wanted me to push my luck. He wanted me in a cell.

  I decided to push anyway, one last little go. ‘This is my daughter, you fuckhead. If she dies because you go in there with a hard-on—’

  ‘We’ll play it by the book, I promise.’

  ‘I don’t trust you to piss through the right hole,’ I said.

  ‘You know, you never say anything nice to me,’ he said. ‘I’m not sure you ever have, even when we were cadets. And I’m not too bothered about that. That ship has sailed the fuck off. If you said something nice to me now it wouldn’t sound right. It doesn’t sit nicely with you, saying nice things. I imagine it tastes bad on your tongue. It wouldn’t surprise me if you called your mother Old Vinegar Tits. And the so-called women you spend your nights with, I bet they don’t hang around too long because of it.’

  My hands were white fists on my thighs. If I punched him now then that would be it, no matter if I gave him the address and offered him a massage and breakfast in bed.

  ‘If I walk away and you find Sarah, you bring me back. You let me see her straight away, no matter what state she’s in.’

  ‘You have my word.’

  I gave him the address in Waltham Cross and stepped out of the car.

  * * *

  There was a coffee shop. There was a bar. I wanted coffee. So I chose the bar, because (I kidded myself) I could always order my coffee there. Booze was a backup, if I really needed it. I’d never be able to order a cocktail from a bean-dedicated barista. Not that I was going to sink a hard one at this time of the day. Haha. No way.

  I resisted the urge to hop in a cab and welly it up the road to Waltham Cross. I’d only muddy the waters and distract Mawker from fucking everything up in his own special way. Better to wait and listen for the fallout.

  I took my cucumber martini to a dark corner; fatigue followed me. I sat and traced the frosted sides of the glass with a finger and felt the strain of the week hunker down on my eyelids. The pale green drink reminded me of the colour of the eyes of a cat that once used to visit us in the garden of our house in Lime Grove. It was a pretty cat, ash grey, with beautiful eyes. It walked with a pronounced limp. One of its rear legs was stiff from an accident or some congenital condition, and it hobbled around, but without any apparent discomfort.

  In that room of hot, hard camera lights.

  Sarah made friends with the cat. If I got close it would give me the slow blink and the question mark tail but any attempt to pat it would be met with claws and teeth. But not for her. It would roll on its belly and allow her to tickle its chest and throat.

  The click of mechanical pencils and digital recorders. Pages flipped in reporters’ notebooks.

  Alien colours roamed around the back of my eyelids. I wasn’t going to sleep. What was it my nana used to say when she sat back in her armchair? When I was a kid, visiting with Mum and Adam. ‘I’m not having a nap, I’m resting my eyes.’

  I thought of Martin Gower in a seedy little room of urban heat and fashionable decay. The soft, buttery light from a flash. Sarah parading in front of an arctic-white photographic background. Fan on. Catch lights in her eyes. A light coating of Vaseline on the slender muscles of her calves.

  Journalists in here too, somehow, scribbling descriptions into their pads, leaning in close to ask questions. How long do you think you’ve got, Miss Sorrell?

  It’s Peart. And it’s Ms.

  P-E-R-T…

  P-E-A-R-T, you perve. Don’t they teach you how to spell in journalism school?

  Journalism school. The Teeline shorthand book in Gower’s room.

  I flew out of sleep and knocked the martini to the floor. The glass smashed, and faces at the bar whipped my way. I was thinking of skltns.

  SLX Sesh.

  SLX had nothing to do with camera models or photographic studios. It was a street name that Gower had written down, but minus the vowels, which is what journalists do with words before they turn them into shorthand squiggles.

  I asked the guy at the bar if he had a London A–Z map, and he handed one over after he’d underlined the seriousness of my crime by noisily emptying the dustpan of broken glass into the bin.

  I flipped to the index and ran my finger down the S columns. Nothing under ‘Sa’ or ‘Se’. But here: Silex Street, SE1.

  I checked my watch. Twenty minutes since I’d been planted on the street by Mawker. They probably wouldn’t even be in Waltham Cross yet. Southwark wasn’t a million miles away. It was something to do. I might at least find some evidence of where Sarah was staying, if it wasn’t Silex Street itself. She might even be there now.

  I called Jimmy Two and told him where the car was and asked him to pick it up for me at a time suitable to his schedule within the next half hour thanks very much. Then I caught the London Overground from Haggerston down to Canada Water where I nipped on to the Jubilee Line. I was in Southwark within forty minutes. No calls or texts from Mawker. They must be there now. I closed my eyes against the suggestion that there must be a stand-off between police and villain. The Hack firing pot shots at them from a bedroom window, or worse, holding Sarah hostage while Mawker utterly fucked up the negotiations.

  I checked my phone again. No headlines. Nothing happening. Not yet.

  Silex Street was around a five-minute walk south of the Tube. It was a nondescript street of mainly purpose-built flats. None of the windows suggested the airy room in which Sarah had been photographed by Martin Gower, but at the north end there was a substantial building largely boarded up, with some of the higher windows smashed. At some point in its history it had been known as Newspaper House, but that sign over the main door was now little more than a series of ghosted letters, chipped off by vandals or weather and time.

  I tried the door but it was locked. I had to climb over a concrete wall at the end to access the rear of the building. Locked containers rusted on a wasteland of aggregate and plastic. A chain-link leash was attached to a metal post driven into the ground, but whatever dog had been tied to it was no longer around.

  There was a metal door at the back with a corner eaten through by rust. There was enough space to crawl in. Someone else was doing so on a regular basis: you could tell from the tracks in the dirt. I got on my belly and wriggled under. I could smell dead candles and hot grease in Styrofoam containers – somebody was inhabiting this space. I was in some kind of antechamber; not quite warehouse, not quite loading bay. A place where minions stacked and unstacked. A forklift zone. A huge roll of paper turned to pulp, bruised with mould, stood like a monument to the age of hot metal. There was a stack of trade magazines shrink-wrapped in plastic and lengths of nylon binding. Rats had chewed this protective coating away and shredded the innards for nests.

  I listened to the air circulating through the chambers and channels of the building for a few moments. I tried to detect some current warmth within it; the flavours of chewing gum and coffee. The surfacing of lipstick and leather. But it was all just stale and sour and old.

  I pushed on, trying to avoid the feeling that I was being consumed.

  29

  The way was partially blocked by a water-bloated door that sagged on its hinges. Someone had laid a mat inside, the kind you use to wipe off your wellies before setting foot in a house. The words GO AWAY were branded into the centre.

  I went through the doorway and into an area where once had existed some kind of machinery; printing presses perhaps, although all of it was gone now. There were only a series of grooves in the cement floor, and a variety of bolts and brackets and sockets. A folder, swollen with moisture, containing old copies of the Southwark Advertiser had been left in a corner. A calendar girl from 1989 wore a cherry-coloured bikini and hair so back-combed it was porcupinian. Someone had scrawled fresh marker pen over her breasts and pudenda, given her a moustache and googly eyes. I had to stifle a breath because I thought I knew who had done it.

  SLX sesh. Silex session.

&nb
sp; This was some squat, some roughly photogenic make-do urban studio blessed with the kind of scarred brickwork and large arched windows that a cameraman likes to use to create a mood. It was a cliché mood, but it never seemed to go out of fashion. Grunge was popular, whether off the back of a musical legacy twenty years old, or linked to policies of austerity. It spoke of us against them. It gave those lacking privilege and entitlement something of an edge.

  Now under the scorched smell of wax and stale reefer I could detect other notes, notes closer to home. White Musk, a scent Sarah always liked; cheap but distinct. Perhaps a little too cloying, but a kid’s scent; a young woman’s scent. The hot, vinegary smell of takeaway Chinese. Dad, can I have sweet and sour pork? A bottle of Strongbow cider.

  Jesus Christ, Mawker, get on the blower and tell me you’ve nailed the swine. How much time do you need?

  But he wouldn’t, would he? He wouldn’t be able to bring himself to contact you. If. You know, if.

  Stone steps. One became two became many as the acoustics created greedy echoes, as if the building was revelling in a noise it had not known for many years. It gave the impression of pursuit, and it took me a while to relax and understand that I was alone. But that wasn’t true. Somebody was living here. A person was making a small corner of this old newspaper factory into their home. I came upon a den of sorts, off a corridor on the third floor. Patterned throws bulldog-clipped to cracked windows. A sleeping bag. A nest of make-up. Newspapers stacked haphazardly: The Independent. The Guardian. A headstrong daughter. A dad who failed.

  Books lined a wall, their pages bloated with damp. Caitlin Moran. Joan Didion. Siri Hustvedt. Clothes strewn around the lip of a gaping suitcase. I checked them. T-shirts and leggings and jeans in the main. Size ten. Doc Martens. Converse. Size five. Nothing else in the case beyond a few hotel soaps in their wrappers. A few free Barclays biros. Some forced experience this was. I hoped there might be a diary. Something to make concrete this suspicion that I was in the midst of my daughter’s life.