Then I saw them.
Beside the door of the next apartment, outlined against a panel of night sky, the torch-bearer had the girl propped against the wall with her head bowed, and had his hand locked around her throat. The girl’s face was obscured by glossy black hair that fell as straight as pencils to her shoulders. The man standing before her was square-set and shaven-headed. A stitched scar ran across his crown like the join on a baseball, so deep and poorly attended that the plates had knitted badly, so that his head appeared to have been assembled from skulls of two different sizes.
The girl was barefoot and bare-breasted except for a diamond necklace, dressed only in pale baggy jeans. She fell forward, to be propped upright by her companion. She made a vague, hopeless grab at the arms of the stitch-headed man and sank drunkenly down the wall, doubling over with a high cry of frustration, or possibly laughter.
I took a pace back in alarm when she suddenly thrust out her arms toward me. The stitch-headed man turned in my direction, his features lost in darkness. His still eyes stared, daring a response.
I didn’t wait to find out what he was doing, or what was going on between him and the girl. It was best not to know. In the suburbs you don’t talk to your neighbours even if they’re being murdered. Be it black mass, buggery or bestiality, the general opinion is that it’s best to leave them enjoying themselves so long as everyone’s over eighteen. The black candle suggested something more frightening than witchcraft, possibly that they were Heavy Metal Goths. Slamming the door and running back to the bedroom, I scrabbled for matches and relit the candle, then tore open the zip of my case for jeans, a sweater, a jacket. Unable to lay hands on my trainers, I was forced into heeled shopping shoes, all the while thinking murderers, perverts, I should never have come here. I wondered if she was a willing participant in the kind of masochistic sex games you usually read about in the family newspapers.
Remembering my mobile, I ran back to the kitchen, found it, checked the reception meter and saw there were no bars available. End of the ground floor corridor, that was the only place you could get reception.
I realised there was someone in the apartment with me when I heard the rhythmic sound again. It was louder than before, the ticking of a cheap alarm clock, the repetition of tines on tin. And beneath it a secondary effect, a soft shuffling, like tissue paper being slowly opened.
The front door had been opened and shut, and was shifting back and forth more noisily than ever. Using the stub of candle to relight the lantern, I walked toward the sound. My feet were numb on the cold floor. Space expanded ahead, folding outward into the rooms as I raised the light. I stopped in the doorway to the guest room and shifted the lantern forward.
She was standing behind the door.
She dropped her arms over my head and I screamed, releasing the lantern. The cheap glass didn’t break but oil splashed in a spray of tiny comets, setting the bed quilt alight.
I twisted in her tightening embrace, so that her stomach was against my back, and tried to tip her over, but she proved too strong. Throwing back my head I bumped against her nose and heard her yell, then bit down hard on a sweat-sour wrist. The girl pulled up her hands and I shoved as hard as I could, forcing her against the wall. I held little hope of stopping her, and yet she fell away.
Grabbing the end of the bedspread I flicked it over on itself, so that the burning patches were smothered. One crackling chunk of material floated and brushed against the wardrobe in a shower of autumn sparks. Acrid smoke hazed the air. The girl had frog-dropped to the floor and closed herself into a foetal position at the base of the wall.
I set the candle on the floor and tried to get a clear look, but she twisted from the light. Her lank black hair curtained her eyes. As my fear subsided, I heard her crying. I waited for her to look up, flinching in anticipation of some terrible sight, but her face was magazine-beautiful. She was perhaps eighteen, with empty blue eyes and the angled jawline of a photographer’s model. I recognised her cheap cotton jeans from a recent sale at Uniqlo in Regent Street. The necklace was from Tiffany; I remember I’d seen it on their website and had stared at it unblinking for so long that I’d felt my eyeballs dry up.
She was trying to speak but her voice was undecipherable, a spatula-on-burnt-pan rasp that I assumed was the result of her companion trying to strangle her. But now I saw that there was a white plastic tag pulled tight around her neck, causing her veins to bulge. Her wrists were also connected by a tag, so that she looked like a product that had been delivered to an address and dumped on the floor in the owner’s absence.
She tried to speak again. It sounded like; ‘I need to get –’
I tried to pull the neck tag apart, but she flinched and twisted when I touched her, an eel writhing on a hook. I had no idea what to do. The look of fear on her face panicked me even more. Another flinch, more violent this time. Her legs kicked out hard as her muscles bunched. Should I go and fetch the creepy, condescending Dr. Elliot, or would that be worse?
Running and sliding to the kitchen I pulled open drawers, searching for a knife, then remembered I had seen a pair of heavy spatchcock scissors, designed for cutting chickens apart. I grabbed them and returned to the bedroom where she was lying on her back, muttering and moaning.
I tried to work the tip of the scissors under the neck tag, but as soon as I did so I cut her skin. Blood spurted out over my hands, and she gasped out.
‘I’m really sorry,’ I said, ‘but I have to get this off.’ Gritting my teeth, I pushed the scissors into another spot and more blood welled up. The tag had been pulled too tight. I knew she would die if I didn’t keep going. Apologising over and over, I dug the scissor tip in again. She screamed. I kept going until it was right underneath the ratcheted plastic. But now I couldn’t get the leverage I needed to close the scissors. The tip wasn’t far enough in. I pushed as hard as I dared, but wondered what was killing her now, my scissors or the tag.
With one last shove I shut the scissors, but the tag wouldn’t break. I let go in horror – she was writhing about with the scissors stuck to her neck, the situation made worse by my own stupid actions.
There were odd, barely healed scars on the backs of her hands. I pulled the scissors out and was able to snip her wrists apart. Suddenly she coughed blood right into my face. I dragged her to the balcony doors. She had almost no body fat, and weighed nothing. Her body was cadaver-white and muscular. She still clutched feebly at her throat and the side of her head, but was unable to move by herself. Behind me, the light from the tipped-over lantern fanned and died to a faint blue pulse.
Perhaps I had stretched the tag just enough to let her breathe; I couldn’t see because it was buried in her neck, covered in thick dark blood. I ran and brought her a beaker of water, blundering and spilling most of it in the darkened flat. She winced and allowed the water to overflow her mouth.
‘I have to go for help,’ I said. She fell back, and now I saw that something else was wrong.
Moving the lantern closer, I was finally able to see the side of her head. A bleeding lump rose at the base of her right ear, up toward the occipital outcrop of her skull. I had seen something similar on When Operations Go Wrong. A blood vessel had burst in her right eye. She’d been hit hard. I needed to get her into the light, so I slipped my hands under her armpits and pulled. The stinging reek of the burned coverlet made my eyes water. I lowered her against the wall and pulled the scorched duvet from the bed, wrapping the unburned part around her shivering body.
I wondered if the psychiatrist next door had any useful medical knowledge. I knew I should at least bring him here, but really didn’t want to involve him if I could avoid it. I needed to think and lay down beside her, less a gesture of solidarity than an inability to act decisively. Shoving the spatchcock shears into the rear pocket of my jeans, I put my head back, listening as our respiration matched and phased.
Then it seemed that only one of us was breathing.
I had seen on television how you blow into someo
ne’s mouth and hammer on their chest but I couldn’t. There wasn’t any point – no air could get past the plastic tag. I could feel nothing coming from her nose or mouth. I should never have faffed around for so long. I had acted too late.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Help
WHEN I OPENED the front door again I made damn sure that the stitch-headed man had gone. Only the black candle remained, guttering in the sudden draught. My inability to help the girl was upsetting, but I have no history of being useful to strangers.
I failed to find the battery torch in the lounge, and left the lantern behind because it seemed wrong to leave the body in darkness. When I tried to unglue the black candle the wick was extinguished in splashed wax, and as the spirit of the flame departed I found myself stranded with the front door closing behind me, a truly blind panic tamping down my senses.
The bell on the lintel of Dr. Elliot’s door failed to work without electricity. I slapped my hand against the wood but there was no answer. He’s out, I thought, he’s asleep, he’s refusing to help me, just like the others he told me about. I pressed my ear on the cool maple grain and listened. Nothing. Perhaps I had only seen his dummy at the window. What kind of man kept a dissected corpse on display in his lounge? These people weren’t my kind, I didn’t understand them or want to be like them. The backs of my arms were sweating ice. How much time had passed since I discovered the girl: seconds, minutes, half an hour? The absence of light seemed to rob me of other senses.
Knowing that there was nothing to be achieved by staying in the building I ran on to the stairwell, clinging to the balustrade. I needed light and space, and outside air. The London streets suddenly seemed a place of greater safety. I ran across the darkened lobby and slammed into the glass doors, banging them wide, down the steps and across the quagmire of the quadrangle to the hissing roads beyond, then struck out in the direction of the Embankment road.
Not a soul on the street, a dead stretch of riverside too bare and rainswept for anyone to be walking at night, only a distant garage and the black towers of Lambeth Palace framed in dying oaks. A boarded-up shop, a closed pub, steel shutters, some kind of warehouse, a graffiti-scabbed wall. The odd thin birds I thought I had seen hanging in the branches of a blasted plane tree turned out to be a pair of swaying yellowed condoms. Nothing was what it seemed.
A stream of cars at the roundabout, their windows closed tight, headlights on, drivers staring through their screens as if watching movies, a few people walking with lowered heads across Lambeth Bridge, one man in a luminous silver slicker. I thought he looked young enough to be a policeman, and broke into a run, my shoulder-bag bouncing against my side.
I hadn’t meant to hit the man so hard in the stomach; the pavement was slick and I found myself unable to stop. I knocked the breath from him, jack-knifing him to the kerb. I told him I thought he was a policeman.
‘That’s what you do to policemen, is it?’ He spat in the gutter and stood upright, clutching himself. A student in his early twenties, he had dropped a plastic-covered file of sheet music into the road. I helped him gather up the pages, but had heard him speak and knew he wouldn’t help. He was the kind who didn’t get involved, the kind who lived in Hamingwell.
‘I need to find one. Someone’s just been assaulted in my building.’
‘I’m sorry.’ Seconds ago I had knocked him over and here he was apologising.
‘You don’t understand.’
‘I’m not a policeman. I can’t do anything.’
‘I really need some help.’
‘And I’m really sorry,’ he replied, as if it was unthinkable to help someone. ‘You’re covered in blood.’
He skirted carefully around me and continued across the bridge with his head down. I spotted an onion-shaped man on the other side of the road carrying a length of timber wrapped in white plastic Tesco bags. The clothes he wore couldn’t have cost more than thirty pounds in total, including shoes. My habit of costing out the wardrobe of passers-by had been ingrained by years of semi-professional browsing. Accent and clothes, my only tools to judge a man; pitiful really.
‘Please, could you help me? I need to find a policeman.’
‘Sorry, darling, I’ve got problems of my own.’
‘I’m in trouble.’
He looked puzzled for a moment, scratching the back of his neck until realisation dawned. ‘It’s a bit early in the evening, isn’t it?’
‘For what?’
He gave me a knowing look. ‘You after business? You’ve got paint or something all over you.’
It took me a moment to realise what he meant. ‘I’m not a prostitute.’
‘There’s no shame in it, love. It’s like Toys-R-Us.’
‘I’m sorry?’
‘Working at Toys-R-Us. You know, a profession.’
‘But I’m not. There’s a young woman in my apartment building, and she’s been injured. This isn’t paint, it’s blood. There’s not supposed to be anyone else there, and now she might even be dead.’ You sound hysterical, I thought. Even I wouldn’t trust you.
‘You want to try calling the police, love. Ain’t you got no mobile?’
Thoughts flashed forward. If I called the police they would come to the block and demand to know the identity of the owner. They’d get in touch with Malcolm. He’d complain to Julie, who was already on a knife-edge, and I would be screwed. Which meant, part of me thought selfishly, I would not get paid. I needed the new start and I needed the money.
‘It would only take a few minutes. Please, I don’t want to go back there by myself.’
‘You know what happens to blokes who have a go? Some old dear in East Street got stabbed to death for her phone last week. Seventy-something. What’s the point of surviving wars to get murdered by a schoolkid? You had a fight with your boyfriend?’
‘No, I have a husband. Had a husband. I think there was an intruder. But he may have gone. The main doors aren’t shutting because the power’s off.’ He can’t understand, I realised, because I’m not making any sense.
‘I’m sorry, sweetheart. I’m due up the Welsh Centre on Gray’s Inn Road in half an hour, I’m lowering their ceilings with plasterboard. I can’t afford to get my head kicked in when there’s a job on, I’ve got kids.’
I stood and watched him go, willing him to feel guilty. I’d never noticed how annoying it was to be called Sweetheart before.
The bridge led back toward the Ziggurat. The great white building was softened by the murk from the river. Rain advanced in mizzling clouds, haloing the Embankment lights and hiding the tops of buildings. In a moment like this, London reconnected to the past. I felt like the latest in a long line of distracted victims who had crossed the bridge looking for help. I had absolutely no idea what to do.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
The Boy
THE GREEN LIGHT on my mobile returned at the centre of the bridge. I called the emergency services, something I hadn’t done since my mother’s pressure cooker blew up. Punched 112, selected Ambulance, and got ‘You are held in a queue…’ Friday night in South London. The recorded message only lasted a few seconds, and I was unprepared for the questions that followed, stumbling on the circumstantial detail.
‘Are you a relation?’ asked the controller, assessing the urgency of my request as he waited for the nearest callout, St. Thomas’s, to answer.
‘No, I’ve never seen her before.’
‘But you say she’s in your flat.’
‘It’s not mine. It belongs to a friend.’
‘Does your friend know her?
‘I don’t know, he’s not in the country. Can you just get someone here?’
‘Is she unconscious?’
‘I think she might be dead. She has a thing round her throat.’
‘What kind of thing?’
‘One of those plastic tags they use to do up packages. I tried to get it off but couldn’t. And she’s received a blow to the head.’
‘Sorry, love – w
hich is it?’
‘It’s both. I think she choked first.’
‘She’s been attacked then? You notified the police? Someone tried to strangle her?’
‘Yes, and then she fell on me.’
‘So she was up on her feet after she was strangled?’
‘Yes, and her hands were tied.’
‘Hang on, love, you’re losing me. Do you know the victim’s name?’
‘No, she’s a total stranger.’
The operator was clearly used to untangling confused stories, and calmly promised help as soon as possible. I didn’t trust the ambulance to turn up, so next I called the police. This time I tried to sound more organised in my thinking, and got the promise of a constable, but it sounded as if they were very busy and weren’t too likely to send someone just yet.
Looking along the bleak edge of the bridge, I spotted another passer-by and ran across to enlist his help.
That was when some old bloke backed his car over me.
It was an ancient black Wolseley with chrome bumpers and orange indicators and a steamed-over rear window, which was probably why he didn’t see me. He didn’t hit me hard, but it was enough to knock me off my balance. As I watched him alight from the car, I realised he was very old indeed. ‘My dear lady,’ he called, ‘I’m so terribly sorry. I took a wrong turn and was reversing.’ He was wearing a cashmere overcoat several sizes too big and an unravelling brown scarf that was so long he managed to shut it in the door.
‘I wonder if you could help me,’ I began, climbing to my feet.
‘I don’t see why not,’ he replied, shaking my hand rather formally. ‘I’m a retired police officer.’ He flicked a wallet at me. ‘Actually that’s my library card, I’ve got some proper credentials somewhere.’ He didn’t look like any policeman I had ever seen. They say you know you’re getting older when constables start looking young. This had to be the oldest police officer in London. If you transformed a tortoise into a human being, that was what he looked like, except he had a rim of white hair sticking out like icicles around the sides of his head.
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