As another scattershot of grit hit the glass Julie pushed himself out of bed and went over to the window.
Even through the streaks and smears it was obvious it wasn’t Josh Raines down there.
Taff stood in the street grinning up at him like some bedraggled Romeo. His usually unruly hair was matted flat to his scalp and his clothes hung on him, two sizes too big for his bones, like rags on a skeleton. He was still wearing those bloody sunglasses.
Julie wrestled with the latch on the sash window. There was a trick to opening it. The window latch had been painted shut once upon a time, though most of the gloss had been picked away over the intervening years. The wood around it was a honeycomb of woodworm that threatened to crumble as soon as any weight was applied to it. He worked the window up inch by inch, then leaned out to shout down, becoming Juliet to Taff’s rain-soaked Romeo. “Why didn’t you ring the bell?” Hardly, hark, what light from yonder window breaks? he thought.
“Chop-chop, Julie, places to go, people to be,” his partner called up.
The change in him over the last week was harrowing. Taff was dying. That was the only logical conclusion he could make looking down at his partner. Erratic behavior, rapid and inexplicable weight loss, his hair unkempt and thinning, deep dark bags under his eyes—he was a shadow of the man he used to be. But that it had all happened to him in a week, that his body had been so utterly ravaged in such a short time that was something else. That was shocking. Even cancer didn’t devastate a man so absolutely, so rapidly.
“What are you going on about?”
“Got a meeting. Need you to be on your best behavior, so, in the immortal words of The Price is Right, Julie Gennaro, ‘Come on down,’ pretty boy. More haste less speed and all that. Don’t want to be late.”
Julie crumpled the piece of paper he had in his hand and tossed it at the bin in the corner. There was one word written on it. It was all he’d managed in an hour of thinking:
Lockwood.
He kept coming up against the name; here a Lockwood, there a Lockwood, everywhere a fucking Lockwood. That family was haunting Julie. Their influence on the Rothery was pernicious, and the more he dug into the goings-on of the criminal underworld, the more he began to grasp just how much of a cancer they had always been in the body of London. There was an entire wall in Joshua Raines’s flat given over to the crimes of the Lockwoods dating back a hundred years. They were shockingly varied in scope and brutality. It wasn’t a stretch to see how Joshua Raines had demonized them, reframing Gideon and Seth Lockwood as bogeymen, but in reality all they were was a pair of old-time Bad Boys cut from the same slab of unpleasantness as the Krays and their fellow hoodlums.
But Josh’s outlandish claims that the old patriarch, Seth, who had kidnapped some silent movie star over ninety years ago, was the same new Lockwood kid that had turned up in the Rothery recently? Well that wasn’t helping his case, that’s for sure. Yes, there was a more-than-passing similarity between the man in the old movie and the new kid on the block—assuming the footage hadn’t been doctored—but that was genetics, wasn’t it? There were only so many variations of the same DNA-rendered face that were possible before the family tree started to repeat itself.
Everything comes back to the Lockwoods, he thought as he grabbed the battered leather jacket off the back of the chair and headed down to the street.
It wasn’t a comforting thought.
They were the kind of people you just didn’t want to get mixed up with, not if you valued the simple things like two testicles and them both being attached, not doing a bloody yo-yo impression.
He slammed the door behind him and half-ran down the narrow stairs. “What’s up?”
“Long story, Julie,” Taff held the car door open. “You’re driving. Get in and I’ll tell you all about it on the way.”
There was someone sitting in the back, a woman. She had her head down and a scarf wrapped around the lower part of her face so all he could see were her eyes.
He thought about not getting in, but Taff put a bony hand on his shoulder and eased him down, just as he would shoehorn a suspect into the back seat of the squad car. Taff closed the door and came around to his side. He moved awkwardly, running his hand across the rooftop as he went around to the passenger seat.
Julie turned in his seat to introduce himself. “Hi.”
She didn’t answer him.
He shrugged and turned back to face-front, but kept on watching her through the driver’s mirror. She met his gaze with amazing eyes, the pair of them sharing a moment of disturbing intimacy through the backward land of the glass. In that moment all he could think of was doing unspeakable things to the woman—or more accurately having her do them to him. He shivered, the chill running down every bone in the ladder of his spine. There was something very familiar about the small part of her face he could see. She seemed to be saying: This is me, all of me, I see you. And all he could think, lost in her eyes, was that he wanted her to consume him. She was such a beautiful woman, but there was so much sadness in her eyes.
“Fire her up, buddy boy,” Taff said, slapping his thigh and breaking the moment.
Turning the ignition, the radio crackled with some long-lost minute of the ’80s, though it was only half-tuned into the station.
Julie didn’t indicate as he pulled out into traffic.
“Okay what’s the big secret?”
“It’s a surprise.”
“Where are we going?”
“Work. Hot lead. Big case. Gonna crack it wide open. You’ll see. They’ll pin a medal on us for this one, mon ami.”
“Pretty hard for me to drive somewhere when I don’t know where we’re going.”
“You can find your way, I believe in you, but you only have so long,” the woman said from the back seat. There was a weird distorted quality about her voice, like it was crackling over a distant sound system rather than coming out of her mouth. He wasn’t sure how he was supposed to respond to that. “Before your life disappears in this ugly country.” There was something familiar about that. It was such an odd thing to say, but he was sure it wasn’t the first time he was hearing it.
“In other words: ‘Onwards, Macduff,’” Taff offered a translation, and Julie realized where he’d picked up that particular mangling of the Bard.
They drew level with a silver Volvo at the first set of lights.
“Does this have something to do with where you’ve been all week?” Julie asked.
Taff seemed to think about it for a moment, inclining his head slightly to the left, then the right before he offered his partner a wry grin, “It’s got everything to do with where I’ve been, boyo,” which was no help at all. “Faster. Time’s a-wasting.”
His hand fluttered up toward his glasses.
The woman in the back seat hissed and his fingers fell away.
Julie peeled away from the junction, leaving the silver Volvo standing at the lights. After a few minutes Taff reached out and grabbed the wheel, pulling down hard on it and taking the car off the road. The front wheels hit the curb, mounting the pavement as the back end slewed and the car slid sideways; they nearly hit an elderly homeless woman struggling with a shopping trolley filled to overflowing with bulging grocery bags filled with her pathetic life as she shuffled along the road. She wore slippers on her feet and her stay-ups were around her ankles.
She stared daggers at them as they raced away, shaking her fist uselessly at their back window.
“Jesus, Taff, what the fuck do you think you’re doing? Are you trying to get us all killed?”
Taff just chuckled and shrugged. “Missed the turn.”
“Just let me drive the damn car. Where are we going?”
“Take us over the water.”
Shop façades blurred into one, as though the stores themselves were offering cheap clothes, vegetables, curries, and new homes all under one roof.
Five minutes later he knew where they were going; there was only one place they cou
ld be going: the Rothery.
The woman in the back seat didn’t speak again the rest of the journey, but she did reach out at one point to rest a hand on Taff’s shoulder, although through the mirror it seemed as though her hand rested an inch inside it, burrowing down into the muscle and bone, not on it.
Julie noticed that weird blue luminescence again.
He’d assumed it was down to late-night streetlights washing back into the car, but it wasn’t, it came from the woman. He didn’t know how she did it; makeup maybe? Some sort of pigment in the powder? And in that moment, he knew exactly where he’d seen her before; Joshua Raines’s house, the night they were called out to respond to the break-in. He didn’t like it. He didn’t like it one little bit. He looked at Taff. What had his partner got himself mixed up in?
Once they were inside the labyrinth of the estate itself it was a little more difficult to guess what their final destination would be, but Taff talked him through it turn by turn until they pulled up outside the boarded-up front of the old Latimer Road cinema. There was another car parked across the street, by the back of the Scala, but otherwise the street was deserted.
It was like stepping back in time.
The billboard still advertised the last matinee performance, a triple bill, The Punishing Kiss, The Devil’s Flesh, and Wallflower Girl. There was nothing particularly remarkable about that, apart from the fact that it had survived years of exposure to the elements and aerosol cans of the Rothery unscathed, but right there next to the devil, right there delivering the killer kiss, right there with her anything-but-platonic eyes, was the woman in the back seat. The eyes were unmistakable, as now he saw it in its natural habitat up on the billboard, was her face.
Myrna Shepherd.
He turned to look at her, and then looked back at the poster, then back at her again. It was her. Somehow. And she’d been at Josh Raines’s place the night he disappeared. Forget Taff; what the fuck was he getting involved in here? Dead movie stars in the back seats of police cars? Old-school criminals from those brutal, postwar days back and giving it large around their old stomping grounds? Josh Raines’s obsession with the coldest case in town was beginning to make sense, and that was maybe the most unnerving part in all of this. That lost Hitchcock film and the madness of Raines’s flat in Rotherhithe didn’t seem so outrageous. He felt like he was teetering on the edge of a deep dark hole. It was ridiculous; all of it. Ridiculous. She had to be some sort of look-alike, one of those paid Kissogram girls or something, someone who made her money off her looks. She couldn’t be the same woman from the posters in front of him. Forget Occam’s razor, she just couldn’t be.
Julie took a step back toward the street—away from the car, away from the cinema, away most importantly from the woman and his partner.
Taff leaned on the woman in white as he clambered out of the car. Julie refused to think of her as Myrna Shepherd. She was just the woman. She didn’t have a name. His partner moved uncertainly despite the easy smile on his hollow face. “Inside we go, don’t want to keep him waiting.” The woman helped Taff up the five steps to the old cinema’s glass doors. The concrete was cracked, the doors blacked out.
Taff reached out and pushed against the door, and against all the odds it opened.
There was no light inside. Julie followed him inside. As he ventured into the old foyer, he tasted the must of fifteen airless years in the back of his throat.
With every step farther into the old cinema, Taff seemed a little weaker than the last, the simple act of walking exhausting him.
“What’s wrong with you, mate?”
“Nothing. Life is good, Julie. You worry too much.”
“Maybe. Maybe not. What are we doing here?”
“God, you’re full of fucking questions today, aren’t you? It’s a bust, Julie. I told you. A deal going down. We’re about to do our job. We’re the good guys, Julie. We’re on the side of the angels. I’ve been watching this gang for a while. Got a tip it was happening today, and didn’t want to leave you out of the glory, partner. We’re a team. One for all and all for one.”
Julie Gennaro wasn’t buying it. He didn’t need a sixth sense to know this didn’t feel right. “We should call for backup.”
Taff pushed the sunglasses back onto the bridge of his nose.
He pointed toward a door marked SCREEN ONE. The sign above it was lit, whereas the sign above the door to SCREEN TWO wasn’t. “We’re gonna make the front pages with this one, boyo.”
Julie remained unconvinced, but what could he do?
He followed Taff and the woman into the dark theater.
33
THE LAST PICTURE SHOW
The inside of the old Latimer Road cinema stank of stale air and forgotten dreams. It wasn’t difficult to imagine what the place used to be: while the concession stands were gone, the glass cases were preserved like museum exhibits, thick with a patina of dust, still displaying their stickers offering popcorn and Pepsi at what now looked like bargain prices. There were posters for films Julie could barely remember promising they were coming soon. Great swathes of the old red carpet were sodden underfoot from cracks in the glass skylights. Looking up, Julie saw several birds nesting inside the rafters.
He heard a ruffle of sound off in the distance. Bird wings.
“I don’t like this, Taff.”
“Shhhhh. We don’t want to show our hand too early, boyo. Let’s get a bit closer to the action before we announce ourselves, shall we?” But for all the reasonableness of his words, Taff made no effort to keep his voice down. His words echoed through the foyer of the old cinema. “Screen One. That’s where the magic’s happening,” he said, allowing the silent Myrna Shepherd look-alike to lead him by the arm. Julie was struck yet again by his reliance upon the woman and just how awkwardly he actually moved, but he followed his friend.
Where the red carpet wasn’t wet it was worn threadbare by the scuffing of feet and ground-in popcorn.
The woman seemed to be coming animated—alive—the closer they got to the double doors at the end of the corridor. A cardboard cutout of a B-movie action hero waited where the usher would have stood once upon a time collecting tickets.
He heard noises coming from behind the doors.
Voices.
But they were far too loud for it to be normal people talking, unless their conversation was being broadcast across the loudspeaker system.
A chink of bluish light seeped through the crack between the double doors cutting a vertical slash through the darkness ahead of them. Taff pushed his way through, the Shepherd look-alike one step behind him, steering him forward with her hand on his shoulder.
Julie followed them, the big doors swinging closed behind the three of them as they stepped into the theater.
He could just about make out the tiers of old red-velvet chairs curving around the room. There were twenty rows and more down to the big screen where a black-and-white film was playing.
He recognized the scene from outside The Peabody building where Eleanor Raines and Claire Greet shared the screen for a few seconds. Magnified a dozen times to fill the huge screen Eleanor’s beauty was even more obvious than it had been in all of those publicity stills back at the flat.
Number 13.
It was proving to be remarkably popular considering it was supposed to be lost.
Huge crystal chandeliers dominated the ceiling, their lights dimmed for the feature presentation.
Gideon Lockwood sat in a wheelchair on the dais before the screen, and behind him, Seth, stood with both hands on the old man’s shoulders. The constantly moving light of the film played with their features like putty, remolding them over and over again. The light lent his skin a peculiar oleaginous texture.
“Ah, Huw, so glad you could join us,” Seth called, his voice carrying up to them easily. “And good of you to bring Mr. Gennaro with you. Julius,” he said amiably, “I’ve been looking forward to meeting you.”
“I can’t say the same,�
�� Julie said, trying to work out what—beyond the fact that Taff appeared to have delivered him to the gangster—was happening.
“Such hostility. I was rather hoping we could be friends.”
“I’ve got enough friends,” Julie said.
“One can never have enough friends in this life, Mr. Gennaro.”
“Are you making me an offer I can’t refuse?” he turned to leave, but found the woman blocking the door. She lit the entire auditorium far more effectively than the backlight of the scene on the screen. There was no getting away from the fact that the luminescence came from within her. It wasn’t makeup or pigment or anything applied to her skin. There was a shoal of light swimming around behind her eyes.
“Please, do me the courtesy of listening. And if you still feel the way you do, you’re free to go. You have my word.”
“Listen to him, Julie. It’s not what you think. It’s worth hearing him out. He’s special.”
“He’s not fucking special, he’s a crook, Taff. Remember what they are? They’re the people we’re supposed to protect everyone from.”
“Please?” Seth said again, still smiling amiably. “I’m not like Gideon here. I’m not trying to take over the city and have no interest in setting your feet in concrete and dropping you off the Embankment.”
“The times they are a-changing, is that the lie you’re peddling?”
Seth nodded. “Well, the only way you’ll find out is to listen to me.” He motioned toward the front row of velvet seats directly under the big screen. Julie was sorely tempted to just push past the woman and go, but for the fact that Seth was screening that supposedly lost Hitchcock movie and Eleanor Raines was up on the screen again, surely proved at least some of Josh’s less fabulous claims as far as the criminal went. Besides, he told himself, listening wasn’t the same as selling his soul.
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