by Robson, Roy
Black Hole of Calcutta
Charnel House
32
H moved through the entry-level reception area - all was shattered fragments; it was hard to make much out apart from the remnants of coats strewn across the floor by what must have been the cloakroom - and what was left of the staircase. He picked his way up the steps carefully; there was not much left to hang on to.
Fuck me, these nutters have been chucking grenades about like sweets at a kids’ party.
The place had taken a massive hit; he was looking at major structural damage. He made it to the top of the staircase and surveyed the scene, and retched. Small fires were still burning, or smouldering, some of them in what had been until recently human beings. Dark redness everywhere, visible in staccato bursts from a flickering lamp: from the plush of the curtains, to the bits and pieces of flesh and intestine strewn everywhere, to the bloodsoaked carpet. The air was thick with acrid smoke and the butcher shop smell he’d caught outside.
Paramedics - won’t be much for them to do here -, fellow officers and fire fighters followed him up and began their grim work. He moved across the dancefloor, treading gingerly, careful not to look too closely at everything he moved around, and headed for the rooms at the back. He knew there had to be an inner sanctum, where Agapov and his crew would hole up, do their business, have their charlie-and vodka-fuelled orgies.
Bingo. A reinforced steel door blown off its hinges, bodies and body parts clustered around the threshold, all the signs of a surprise attack with very, very heavy tools. H imagined the scene. Agapov and his boys would have stood no chance. One minute it would have been ‘hey, Maxim, you want another line?’ and ‘hey bitch, you come here, now, you eat big Russian sausage’ and the next, BLAM! Uncle Basim and his hillbilly army are at the door with a special-delivery Balkan apocalypse.
H continued his musings. How many people had been killed here tonight? That would be for entire teams of highly trained experts to determine in the coming days and weeks. Clearly, a lot of women will have been killed, and about that he felt sad. H would lose not a wink of sleep, though, over these cruel thugs being dispatched to meet their maker. They had all been gathered in now, by whomever is responsible for the souls of ruthless gangsters, and H was of a mind to think Dragusha and his little firm had done him a favour.
God knows what the payback for this will be...but at least this bunch of horrible bastards is off my plate.
He suddenly became aware of movement in an adjacent room. He heard a door close and someone running down stairs. A back door escape route. H tried two or three doors before he found one that opened. ‘Outside! Quick!’, he bawled, ‘someone’s legging it!’ He rushed to the window and saw, in profile, a man limping slightly but running at speed and turning the corner into Berwick Street. It was Vladimir Agapov.
33
‘It’s good to talk.’ That’s what the TV adverts for British Telecom used to say back in the eighties.
H was having none of it; not then, and not now. He didn’t like the advert, and he’d watched the Oprah Winfrey show a total of once, under duress. Not his sort of thing.
He might open up to Olivia from time to time if something was really bothering him, but his motto had always been more like ‘it’s good to drink.’ He belonged to the old school, and felt no need to talk things out or develop in any way his ‘emotional intelligence’, whatever that might be. Like many men of his generation, and even more so his father’s, his touchstone was the great Bert Trautmann: breaking his neck with seventeen minutes to go was no excuse for him to bail out of the 1956 FA cup final. Bert had done what he was there to do.
And now they roll around on the floor clutching their hairbands if someone so much as gives them a dirty look.
What H wanted, standing in Peter Street amid the shattered glass and wailing sirens with the stench of blood in his nostrils and the image of a pile of ruined corpses still fading from his eyes, was not counselling - if he had a quid for every time Hilary had offered him that he’d be a rich man by now - but a good session.
He pulled out his phone and hit Confident John’s number. Who else was there, now? Only Ronnie, once in a blue moon. John, clearly already the worse for wear, or disturbed from a deep sleep, or both, answered.
‘Hello John, you about? I could strangle a light ale’, said H.
‘H? What time is it?’
‘About half past two, I think.’
‘I’m in bed mate.’
‘Get up then - I’ll be there in twenty minutes.’
He called a cab from Wardour Street and sat down on the curb outside what had once been The Marquee Club; he recalled halcyon nights here watching, as a boy, Eddie and the Hot Rods. Were they still alive? What might they be doing, tonight, in this wrecked, fallen, senseless world? Ping! went the phone. Olivia. He didn’t answer.
Not now. I can’t, not now.
H stared into space, trying, again - how many times had he been forced to do this lately, he wondered - to gather his thoughts, remember to breathe properly and process the world of bullshit and horror he seemed doomed to wade through.
Ping! The phone, again. Amisha. H held the device at a distance, as if he’d never seen it before, and was overcome by a wave of nauseous panic. It seemed to be rising up from his guts and clawing at this throat, at his mouth. Without thinking he launched the phone into the air, it landed in the middle of the road and broke up into tiny plastic shards.
A car had pulled up a little further down the street. He didn’t see it, and Hilary Stone didn’t see him as she got out of it and hurried down towards Peter Street, babbling loudly, her phone glued to her ear.
H’s cab arrived. He hauled himself up, utterly exhausted now, and leaned into the driver: ‘Bermondsey please mate. Silwood Street. Sharpish.’
34
‘Still nothing?’, said Hilary.
‘No maam. His phone’s gone dead. I’ve called practically everyone he knows, or at least I know that he knows, and nobody has seen him since he left Peter Street last night’, Amisha replied.
Hilary wheeled her chair back from her desk, sat back with her hands linked behind her head, and exhaled loudly.
‘The old bastard’s really done it this time. He’s off duty, wanders alone into what will probably go down as the worst murder scene we’ve ever had in London, and disappears from the face of the earth for fourteen hours, or however long it turns out to be. This is all too much, even for him. He’s lost it; I fear he’s really lost it now. His days as a copper are numbered. We’ve got to find him before…’
‘I’m on it maam. I’ve just been making calls until now. I think I’d be better off having a “mooch about”, as he calls it, see if I can lay eyes on him in one of his old haunts. Permission to get out there, maam?’
‘Granted. Don’t come back empty handed.’
But Amisha had been economical with the truth. When she’d spoken to Olivia earlier in the day she’d been told that H was probably ‘on the missing list.’ She was given to understand that this had happened before, and that H would surface when he was ready.
‘When he really needs time to himself he takes it, and there’s nothing anyone can do about it. He hasn’t done it for a while. He used to do it more, he’s been better the last few years. So that would be my guess… I hope to God I’m right’, Olivia had said.
Amishsa was intrigued, and more than a little reassured: ‘But what does he do, where does he go?’
‘He finds one of his old mates and they go on a bender. They drink themselves into a coma. And then they drink some more, sometimes for days. It’s not that uncommon where he comes from. He calls it having a “good drink”, but it’s more than that. I think these guys have some sort of death wish - they push it as far as they can. He gets himself into a terrible state, and these days it takes a lot out of him. I’m afraid one of these jaunts will finish him off. A lot of the people he knows use cocaine as well I think. I’m talking about the older guys do
wn there, not the kids. I’m not sure if H does or not. He says not.’
‘And all this would take place where?’, asked Amisha.
‘Somewhere on his old stamping ground usually. They have their places. There or Soho. I’d start with Confident John if I were you. Find him, Amisha. Please.’
35
Julie let out a heavy sigh and dropped her phone onto the kitchen table for what seemed the fifteenth time. And it was still only 11 am. She hadn’t lived through a morning this long, this endlessly long, since H was out in the Falklands.
‘Jesus, where is he? Why is he never available when you really need to talk to him?’ Justin, sitting opposite her at the table, chewed his sun-dried tomato and kept his own counsel.
It wasn’t like she needed to talk to H very often; he’d withdrawn a long way back from her and the kids after Justin had come onto the scene on a permanent basis.
Julie often thought about H’s final outburst after she’d put him in the picture once and for all, what seemed like half a lifetime ago:
‘Jules, don’t talk to me about that soppy little yoghurt-knitting, sandal wearing, sociologist ponce. I don’t want to see him and I don’t want to hear about him. What is Little Ron going to learn about being a man from that fucking little old Mary Anne?’
‘OK H, stick around then, and he can learn how to be a violent, chaotic pisshead like his real dad. Now there’s a role model for him. Justin’s worth ten of you, you fucking slob. Piss off.’
And now Little Ron was on remand - as confused and unsettled a young man as you could wish to meet. His hearing had been brought forward and by this time tomorrow he would have been up before the beak, and would know more about his likely fate. Julie herself was in utter turmoil, had hardly slept or eaten since his arrest. Little Ron was putting on a brave face; but he was Harry Hawkins’ boy, and they were tearing him to pieces in there. His father’s enemies, sworn enemies, were legion. Only H could deal with this situation; she was out of her depth, and Justin knew nothing of the world Little Ron was now struggling to survive in.
She picked up the phone again, without thinking. Nothing. No maximum-call-charge message from a well-spoken robot, no voicemail. Nothing.
‘It was always like this. When the kids were little and they were ill, and I really needed help, I could never find him. Always on the missing list, always working, always drinking, never in the house…’
‘Well, Jules’, ventured Justin, ‘men from that background, that culture…’
Julie had had enough. ‘What “culture”?’, she shouted, ‘what bloody “culture”? Why are you defending the bastard? All his “culture” ever taught him to do was fight, and work like a maniac, and drink. They're all the same. They talk about family, and honour, and values…and they‘re never there when you really need them. It’s all talk. They’re all the bloody same, whether they’re coppers, or villains, or something in between. All cut from the same damn cloth. Don’t talk to me about their “culture”. Pig-headed dinosaurs is all they are.’
Justin said nothing, and took her hands in his. She calmed down.
‘Cup of tea, my love?’
She nodded yes. ‘If the selfish bastard doesn’t surface today, or show up tomorrow, I’ll never talk to him again. Not for as long as I live.’
36
Nothing had been heard from H. Julie, Justin and Little Ronnie’s brief Michael Church were the full strength of the boy’s support at the hearing. The Old Bailey could still do the business: Julie and Justin, on coming into view of it, had been awed, pacified and made anxious by its imposing majesty.
‘Hanging them high and pressing them down since 1734. Good old British justice’, said Justin, through gritted teeth, as they mounted the stairs.
They got into their seats early, Julie ruminating sadly about the past, the breakup of her family and the miserable prospects for her son; Justin thinking about his old research in radical criminology and keeping to himself his bristling contempt for the ‘site of power’ in which he was now, for a moment, trapped; the lawyer gloomily reviewing his notes. Church had been saying all the positive things on the way up, but was now wearing the face of a man who had been joined during a relaxing session in his hot tub by a giant Richard the Third of unknown origin.
The court was sparsely populated by…whom exactly?, Julie wondered. None of the others present were known to her. Was it some sort of grim, low key spectator sport for those with nothing better to do?
There was a stir in the unseen lower regions of the building and suddenly Little Ronnie was brought up into the defendant’s box. Julie shrieked involuntarily and began to cry. The boy was cut and bruised about the face, and looked emaciated and confused. His mother’s heart bled; she felt some kind of uncontrollable hysteria growing inside her.
Justin moved to comfort her, placing both his arms around her and drawing her into himself. ‘Shh, shh my love’, he said, but was himself shocked and appalled by what he saw next.
The judge had entered, his pinched scowl preceding him. Sir Peregrine Blunt was announced to the assembled company and sat himself down with some ceremony.
‘No, not this old bastard’, he whispered to himself, ‘this reactionary old brute. Not good. Not good at all.’
Is this not the one we were expecting?’, asked Julie.
‘No, this is Old Blunt. He’s one of the old hang ‘em and flog ‘em brigade. As merciless as the day is long. Horrible old pervert.’
‘Why pervert?’ asked Julie, reeling now, as bad news was followed by worse.
‘Oh, just a figure of speech, my love. But they’re all perverts, nasty little leftovers of the old public school establishment. All those beatings and whatnot warped them. Look at his face. I can’t believe they’re still getting away with it. We won’t get much out of this old bastard, I’m afraid.’
The room settled. Church cleared his throat and began his shpiel. To Julie he sounded like a detuned radio, buzzing in and out of her ears. She was on the verge of panic, and her old friend vertigo was making an unannounced guest appearance. She heard ‘…boy with an unblemished record’, ‘…no previous convictions…’, ‘…appeal for clemency…’, and finally ‘bail.’
The Judge halted him with a raised hand.
‘Have you quite finished Mr Church?’
‘Brace yourself, my love’, Justin whispered as gently as he could into Julie’s ear.
‘I have, My Lord.’
Brace yourself.
‘Then I must inform you that I have no intention of granting bail in this case. Your client is charged with an extremely serious offence and in my view presents a clear flight risk. He will not be granted bail, nor moved down to a lower court. He will face the full weight of Her Majesty’s law, here, at the Bailey, in due course. Take him down.’
Little Ronnie was led down. He would not catch his mother’s eye. Julie collapsed to the floor. As he comforted her, Justin fished her phone from her bag and punched in H’s number. Nothing.
37
H’s arms hurt so much it felt like the fire was working its way down from the top of his biceps to the rest of his body. But he refused to cave in to the pain and grimly continued with the chin-ups on the exercise bar in his bedroom for a further minute before collapsing to the floor, gasping for the oxygen he needed to re-stabilise his heart rate.
He’d woken up an hour earlier and downed three pints of water to slacken the raging thirst of a body dehydrated to an extent that only a three day bender could induce. But his body could only deal with so much water. He opened his sock draw and grabbed the bottle of scotch he kept tucked away in the corner, and took a couple of swigs. He felt the soothing effect of the alcohol rush and his muscles relaxed.
Hair of the dog, nothing like it.
Hiding his sharpeners was no more than habit. He knew Olivia knew where his bottles were, and he knew that she knew that he knew. But old habits die hard.
Olivia entered the room. She’d phoned Amisha the pre
vious night when H had turned up, bedraggled and wasted. She’d taken one look at him and winced when she thought about the amount of alcohol coursing through his bloodstream, but left him alone as he stumbled up the stairs and crashed into bed. She didn’t reproach or harangue him. She had simply put a cover on him and kissed him gently.
‘I’m surprised you can still do chin-ups after what you’ve put your body through the last three days.’
‘Don’t start Liv.’
Olivia had heard the tales of how super-fit he had been in his army days and in the early days of his police career. She had seen pictures of the once legendary six-pack and the powerful biceps. Wouldn’t it be wonderful, she mused, if he could look like that again? But he didn’t. In fact he looked like 10lbs of shit in a 5lb bag as he admired his paunch in the full length wardrobe mirror. A soft, uncontrollable giggle forced itself from Olivia’s mouth.
‘What?’ he said.
‘Nothing, get ready. Your driver says ten minutes’ she said, as she left the room.
H went through the rest of his morning routine. As usual it was that bit at the end, the sweeping of the thatch of thin grey hair across the crown of his head, that caused him the most anguish. But thoughts of fitting a rug or having a weave never entered his mind. Celebrity-style hair surgery was not for Harry Hawkins.
Then the ring on the doorbell. Since H’s disappearance Olivia and Amisha had spoken a couple times. Their old enmity was fading.
‘Hi Olivia. How’s the patient? Will he be ready for work?’
‘He’ll be ready. I’m pretty sure he’s had enough alcohol to stun an elephant, but his powers of recovery are still mindboggling.’
Amisha entered the living room; H was gulping hard from a cup of coffee.