by Steve Finbow
***
Further into the woods. Whoever is after her must have found her parents’ address. Whoever is after her must think she plans to go to the police after what she saw. What she knows. What does she know?
***
Any knowledge I have of the whereabouts of Sarah Beckford is slowly being eaten up by minutes, soon to be hours. Whatever time they let me go, will probably be too late. Unless it’s now. Unless that’s what Mordechai is arguing about. Oh, no. The head replacing Mordechai’s in the small portrait window is that of Sergeant Dumar. Thinning hair, spots, a large boil pulsing on his neck just above his shirt collar and it’s rubbed raw, angry, fit to bursting.
***
In the forest, Sarah leans against a tree. Men killed. Ozan couldn’t have known about the drugs. Could he? Did he know? Most of the people were sick. She could smell it – the faeces, the urine, the vomit.
***
The door opens. Lazy for most of his life, dedicated wholly to himself and his pleasures, once Mordechai gets into his stride, it’s surprising what he can achieve.
‘Well?’ I say.
‘They have nothing to hold you on. Dumar’s gone to get the paperwork. He’s keeping you here out of spite.’
‘Hmmm. And I wonder where that comes from.’
‘They’ve questioned Sarah’s father. He couldn’t tell them anything. Barely conscious. They’ve put a guard on him.’
Dumar enters brandishing forms. Mordechai takes them from him and starts to read them through.
***
Under the trees. This morning. Then. Sarah runs. Crawls through the hole in the chain-link fence, down through the alley at the back of the yards, out into the cold morning, scant of traffic, the air newborn, pink and rosy, her breath visible as she runs, tears falling, her muscles pumped with oxygen, she has never run so fast. So far.
***
‘Sergeant Dumar,’ I say in my most ingratiating and false voice, ‘may I use the little girls’ room?’
‘I’ll get a WPC to escort you.’
‘Why?’ Mordechai says, ‘You’re releasing her.’
‘Very well. It’s there.’ He gestures vaguely to his left.
As I leave the room, Dumar’s mobile rings. Z-Cars theme tune. He steps out of the room. I turn the corner and wait.
***
On a carpet of leaves. Now. This morning. No money. No phone. In the pocket of her sweatshirt, she finds her Oyster card. She hardly ever uses it. She jumps on a bus, heads north, then another until her credit runs out, and there – the welcoming shadow of the forest, its trees a canopy she can crawl under, her bed, a refuge. Then. Now?
***
‘I can’t talk. Not here,’ Dumar says.
‘–––-’
‘All I know. She said Epp… Gotta be Epping Forest.’
‘–––-’
‘I can’t. 30 minutes.’
***
I find the ladies’, open a cubicle door, and sit on the toilet. Epping Forest, of course. I’ll get Mordechai to call Balzac while I sign those forms. I flush and walk back to the room.
‘Mordechai, phone Balzac. Tell him Epping Forest.’
‘Some sort of code?’
‘No. Just that. Epping Forest.’
‘OK. Sign those release forms. They’re kosher.’
***
‘It’s ringing, boss.’
H looks at me. I look at him. Bite my lip.
‘Ronya. Dîlan. Where are you?’
‘–––-’
Now my mobile rings.
‘Mordechai. You get her out?’
‘–––-’
‘Ozan wants to know,’ Dîlan says.
‘–––-’
‘Epping Forest?’
‘–––-’
‘OK. OK. Tell The Mermaid to call me.’
‘I think you’d better tell him that, Ronya. Boss, Ronya.’
Dîlan hands Ozan the phone and moves towards the door. H puts a hand on Dîlan’s chest. Dîlan throws a punch and I step in, take it on my upper arm. Fuck! Dîlan pulls a knife and lunges at me. This time, H has got my back and cracks Dîlan over the head with a pool ball, he goes down, blood spurting all over my All -Stars.
‘Fucksake,’ I say, shaking my shoes.
‘Dîlan! Dîlan?’ Ozan shouts.
‘He’s out cold,’ I say.
‘He was doing something up there other than washing his vitals. Let’s get out of here.’
As we all turn towards the door, it opens and in walks Martin Eaves. Large as life. Scary as hell. Dressed for violence. And the worst thing is, he’s smiling.
‘Balzac. H. Ozan.’
‘Martin,’ I say.
‘Who’s this fella?’ he says poking Dîlan with the toe of his boot.
‘No one. We were thinking about popping out, so if you wouldn’t mind, Martin.’
‘Jonathan sent me here to ask you, or him, or him, or even him,’ he kicks Dîlan in the balls, Dîlan doesn’t stir, ‘if you know where a certain Sarah Beckford might be.’
‘Can we go and discuss this in the Ale Emporium, or somewhere?’ I say, ‘Tick-tock and all that.’
‘You tell me and we can all leave. Maybe buy you a pint or two, eh, H? Jonathan thinks she might know the whereabouts of a little delivery of ours.’
H grunts. We’re all twitching and all thinking the same thing: the three of us could take him. Definitely. Maybe. If we were lucky. Got in first. But what if we didn’t. Maybe not. Yeah, let’s leave it.
Dîlan stirs and Martin stomps on his head, leaving his sole’s dirty imprint on the poor guy’s forehead.
‘Epping Forest,’ Ozan says, and H and I turn round and make zipping motions with our hands. Too late.
‘OK. Thank you, Ozan. You’re a gentlemen. Now, that was easy, wasn’t it?’
‘Right, who’s for a pint of Stella, then?’ I say.
‘Keys, Ozan,’ Martin says.
Ozan, defeated, his jowls grey, his eyes bloodshot and weepy, throws Martin the keys.’
Martin gives Dîlan’s head a final kick. Blood trickles from his ear on to the already bloodied floor.
Martin smiles. As he’s about to leave and lock the door, he says, ‘Balzac, I owe you one for that Filipino maid you recommended. I’ll let you keep your mobies.’
He goes out. He locks the door.
***
‘Longest day of my fucking life,’ I say, looking at Ozan and H. ‘Another way out, Ozan?’
‘Yeah, back door. This way.’
Ozan leads us through the back, past crates of aubergines, bundles of okra, plastic trays of frozen lamb and chicken, boxes and boxes of tomato ketchup sachets. He unbolts the back door and we slip out into the yard crammed full with old car parts, rusty bikes, even a disused pram. We clamber over this junk to the back wall, then over that into an alley smelling of piss and petrol. As we move toward the light and noise at the end of the alley, the upstairs of Ozan’s café blooms orange and showers the back yard with glass, brick, and burning wood. The boom sets off car alarms and dogs and a thick cloud of smoke leaches from the window, flames licking the greasy paintwork.
‘Fuck,’ says Ozan.
‘Fuck,’ says H.
‘Badirkhans,’ I say.
The street slows, stalls, stops. Silence. Then jerks back to life, people running, shouting, the traffic halt, brooding. I hope that somewhere someone is calling the fire brigade.
***
‘It’s done,’ Ronya says, knotting a headscarf.
‘And the girl?’
‘We think Epping Forest.’
***
The force of the blast blows the front windows and door of the café out into the street. People sit on the pavement, in the road, some holding handkerchiefs, Tshirts, whatever is at hand, to staunch the blood flowing from heads, arms, and torsos. Luckily, none seem to be seriously injured. Sirens can be heard coming from Manor House and Turnpike Lane.
***
; ‘Can the information be trusted?’
‘It’s from Dumar,’ Ronya says.
***
On Green Lanes, Homo Sapiens Sapiens Jones asks, ‘What now, Balzac?’
‘Epping Forest. Split up. Search it. I don’t think we’re going to be the only ones.’
‘I’ll take my Bonny,’ Ozan says, nodding towards his blue and white Triumph.
‘H?’
‘I am vehicularly embarrassed, Balzac, old man. Not to say, challenged and bereft.’
‘Bollocks. I’ll call The Mermaid see how soon she can get here. Taxis aren’t gonna try coming through this,’ I say, gesturing at the mayhem.
***
‘And the consignment?’ asks the man.
‘We have all of the packages and most of the people from both shipments,’ Ronya says.
‘And it’s being processed?’
‘Yes. And the girl will be dealt with. She saw too much. And the Eaveses will want to know for certain who ripped them off. I will look for her.’
‘Epping Forest, you say?’
‘Yes.’
‘It could take you all night.’
‘It could.’
‘Deal with the Eaveses later. Find that girl.’
‘Yes, Mr. Badirkhan.’
***
On Green Lanes, Ozan shouts across the road, ‘Milan!’
A skinny boy hanging around outside the baker’s jumps to attention, runs across the road, hurdling the injured and the debris.
‘My spare keys. Fetch them.’
The boy runs off down the street and returns within a minute.
‘Here,’ Ozan says, taking off a set of keys from the ring.
‘Take the Saab.’
‘You’re a gentleman, Ozan,’ I say, ‘See you there. Keep in touch.’
***
I lean back against the ripped passenger seat of Mordechai Marx’s jeep, exhale, look across at Mordechai and say,
‘Surely you can afford something better than this rust bucket?’
Mordechai stares ahead, he really doesn’t have the time to be ferrying me this time of the day, rush hour, through the busy North London streets, but then he doesn’t have much option – he owes Balzac quite a few favours.
***
Jonathan Eaves relaxes as much as he is able to in his Jacuzzi. He is reading Jake Arnott while listening to Benny Goodman. He knows that little shit Inaccessible is tailing Balzac, waiting for the chance to get his petty revenge, but he wishes it was back in the day, back in the day when he could give Balzac a little slap – cheeky little prick. He bites his lip until blood trickles down his chin. But he can’t, he can’t go cuffing Balzac over a woman. Not the done thing.
‘What the fuck does Meredith see in him?’ he shouts to the empty room.
He looks down at his phone as it begins to flash. He closes his eyes and imagines himself picking up the phone and looking at the display and the letters spelling out that name – Meredith. Carefully placing the Arnott on a stool holding his dressing gown, he lifts the phone, pushes the button and says,
‘Martin. Any news?’
***
Mordechai stares ahead. ‘Ignore me, then,’ I say as I flick open my mobile and press four to speed dial Balzac.
‘Where are you?’
‘We’re on our way to Epping Forest to look for Sarah. I don’t think we’re the only ones. Where are you?’
‘Mordechai’s dropping me off at the Beckford house so I can pick up my car.’
‘Someone bombed Ozan’s place. We were lucky to get out of it alive. I think that Ronya bird is working for the Badirkhans.’
‘I thought they were locked up. For years.’
‘So did I. Dunno. But nobody else would have the bottle to take on Ozan, the Eaveses, and the Punishers.’
‘Who?’
‘Mikey – my new nickname for him – punisher – get it?’
‘Yes. And, Balzac?’
‘Yeah, doll. Darling. Meredith.’
‘This is no time to be joking. Find Sarah.’
‘I will. We will.’
‘Dumar told someone on the phone about Epping Forest. Not sure who.’
‘Nor am I. He’s been working for the Eaveses for years but I have an inkling he was also taking backhanders from the Badirkhans.’
‘I’ll pick up my car and join you. I’ll call you when I get there.’
‘No. You stay put.’
‘No, Balzac. I’ll be there in half an hour or so.’
‘Mer…’
***
‘Epping Forest,’ Martin says. ‘Ozan told me, he was with Balzac and H. No sign of Meredith, though.’ Martin waits and listens to the silence, knowing that that last name will feel to his older brother as if someone is raking his spine with a cutthroat razor. Martin can hear the Jacuzzi’s jets, the feathery rush of his brother’s breathing. Martin smiles.
***
I hang up. Mordechai and I are back at the Beckfords’, the streetlamps are just coming on, giving the avenue a cold coppery glow. Police tape is stretched across the front gate and a policeman flexes his ankles on the path outside the door. A few neighbours are still twitching curtains and a few more stroll past the house walking dogs that don’t need walking, buying milk that will sour in the fridge, wearing hiking shoes they bought for that never-taken holiday in the Brecon Beacons.
***
Jonathan in the bath. Martin says, ‘I locked them in Ozan’s. I won’t go into it now but there was some kind of explosion after I left. Nothing to do with me. That dipstick Inny was keeping an eye out. Said they got out. Ozan went off on his motorbike and Balzac and H in a car – a Saab, he thinks.’
***
I say my thanks to Mordechai and he shrugs and trundles down the road, his WWII jeep coughing smoke and rattling like a suit of armour on a trampoline. Where would they start looking? Sarah must’ve gone in Chingford way. That’s the way I’d go but if she’s been in the forest since this morning she could be anywhere. I’ll drive to Chingford and call Balzac from there.
***
Jonathan in the bath. Silence. Martin imagines his brother in the Jacuzzi, one hand on the phone, one hand on his under-used cock thinking of Meredith.
***
It’s getting dark. I wouldn’t fancy hiding out in the forest when it’s dark. Adders, slow worms, rats. God knows what lunatics – camping out, drinking, satanic rites even. I’ve started to frighten myself. Jeez! If Sarah would only whisper to me. Tell me about the things she sees – the vegetal ruins of fallen trees, the giant fungi that look like Japanese fans, the sounds of the birds, the rustle of the undergrowth. But she doesn’t. She can’t.
***
‘Where are you?’ his brother’s voice shocks Martin back to the present.
‘On my way to Chingford.’
‘Wait there for me.’
‘Jonathan, you really don’t need to get involved. I’ll sort it. You stay there with your book, and your rubber duck, and your fond memories.’
‘I’ll see you there.’
‘You’re the boss.’ Martin guns his car past a loitering bus and crosses the River Lea.
Jonathan is indeed holding his cock. For a second it comes to life, stirred by the memory of Meredith Le Fanu’s long red hair, her thin legs, her small breasts, nipples the colour of wild roses, the blush on her throat a subtle shade of dark pink, the rest of her skin pale, proper, perfect. For three months, Jonathan Eaves was happier than he’d ever been. Happier than he’s ever been. Apart from his brotherly love for Martin, he has never felt anything for anyone. Ever. Meredith kick-started his feelings, raced them around tracks he never knew existed, gunned his emotions until he felt he was losing control, and then she slammed on the brakes, seized the engine that for a while was his heart, stripped it down, sold it for scrap, and then burned the remains, leaving it desolate and untouchable on a deserted slip-road. Somewhere. Bitch.
He snaps out of his reverie and rises from the tub, unawar
e that he has splashed the Arnott with soapy water. He steps on to the hard rubber mat, switches off the Benny Goodman, reaches for a towel, and selects a new track. He dries himself, goes into his bedroom, into his walk-in wardrobe to dress, in the background Linkin Park’s In the End savages the speaker system.
As Denman opens the bathroom door to see if everything is all right with his boss, he catches sight of Jonathan Eaves in the mirrored doors. Jonathan is naked, his body still streaming and steaming with bath water. Each muscle taut, tendons pulled tight, scalp prickling. Denman freezes, begins to back out of the bathroom as he watches his boss’s face twist and sneers, eyes wide, wild, and red, mouth open in a horrendous rictus, gold fillings visible, tongue swollen, uvula vibrating, spit covering the glass tiles – Jonathan Eaves screams, his mouth forming a perfect zero, a zero crammed with teeth and rage. Rage.
***
A row of cannabis plants yields in their wake, trodden down by impatient feet, strangely human in colour. Nor does the tide spare local flora. Oxeye daisies trampled in its onslaught. The purple leaves of Devil’s-bit scabious torn and scattered. Willow-herbs rock on their skinny stems. Fleabanes burst like burning novas, their small sun heads exploding in bursts of pale pink petals, golden-yellow pollen. Bluebells ring out their own death knells, falling to the ground in heavy drops of chalk-blue and steel-lilac. A surging horde of fear, primitive, relentless. Onward they stream, a mass of fur, and flesh, twitching whiskers, inquisitive noses. Black as the earth from whence they came, a very part of it, rising from its unforgiving denseness. Thousands upon thousands, like a river running through the forest; a river bearing needle-sharp teeth, eyes like pure shards of jet. Fly-agaric nod their polka-dot skirts in deference; the sickener, with its sore thumb of a cap, hitches a ride in their wake. Muntjac scatter, fallow deer lift their heads from the herbs, grasses, and leaves they graze upon, blink their long eyelashes, bleat, squeak, and dash to the hope of safer ground; rabbits, not so lucky, not so fleet of foot or mind, the beasts devour on the move, stripping fur, swallowing whole, meat ripped in passing, resected, left to the next creature, and the next, until bones, gnawed and grained like petrified branches of a long-dead world, are all that remain. And the pack moves on. And the oak, the poplar, the beech, and the birch seem to lift their skirts of leaves from the creatures’ path, their trunks shivering with the feel of the beasts’ fur, the beasts’ fur in turn crawling with mites, lice, and fleas. The colony, over one hundred yards in length, twenty yards wide, a river in flood now, rapids of live things, parting, converging, cleaving, cleaving, body upon body upon body, devouring beetles, flies, pupae and larvae, the beasts’ mouths endlessly working. Some of the horde climb trees, impatient to reach their quarry, moving like a black wind through the pollarded branches, once home to now-flown woodpecker, skylark, nuthatch and rook. Common lizards scale the bark, fleeing from the plague. The beasts in the trees catch them, hold them with their busy feet, dissect them with their merciless jaws. The beasts come as a disease carrying disease with them, a seething flow of death and consumption. Some females give birth on the march, only for the young to be eaten by those who follow. Only the great queen, the grotesque birth machine, as large and as naked as a sow, bloated pink, may produce the mischief that is this army of rats. In times past, the throb of their hearts, beating as one, had courtiers, hunters, beaters and cattle drovers scurrying to the safety of their towns; kings and queens quaked at the sight of the horde’s scouts combing the rich pickings of regal debris; highwaymen, too, fled in their wake, leaving bags of useless booty, the rats taking pearls back to the queen, their symbol of fealty. A blurred glow of black through the dappled light, gathering itself, spattering leaf and seed with urine and faeces, the horde moves on, smelling the air, catching on it a scent, a scent of something human. The sound of their heartbeats now almost mechanical in their oneness, the soft chitter of their ever-feeling whiskers resonating with touch, with texture. Their ears prick as they hear their quarry run a finger along her eyebrow, wipe off a drop of moisture hanging there. They hear the scrape of her skin, the swoosh of her hair. She sits with her back against the tree, oblivious to the onrush, not hearing them, unaware of their approach. On they come, smelling her sweat, her perfume, the dirt under her nails, the seeds caught in the treads of her shoes. The beasts excited now, their enemy in sight. The queen birthing one, two, three, four, more, countless, squirming pups, their skins the colour of the night above, eyes open, aware, ready to join their mother’s subjects, willing to rip and to tear, to shred and to cut, their incisors coated with blood and milk from the queen’s teats. The horde is nearly on the human now, the final push, around the great oak, the tree an island in an ocean of rats, leaping, dropping from branches, slinking through the undergrowth. Then she hears it, quiet at first, something steady under the crepitation of the leaves above, something droning, relentless, increasing, now drowning out the soft roar of the planes overhead, the distant whisper of traffic, and, along with that buzz, that nightmarish murmur, comes an odour of the earth, from the earth, an encroaching stench choking her, and she clutches her face, turns, sees them as if they are one creature, one huge beast with many eyes reflecting tiny moons in each, a multitude of mouths and teeth, their pink inquisitive feet strangely human, she sees them in the branches above, in the leaf litter, on the trunk of the tree she rests against. She tries to stand, and they are in her hair, scaling her legs, she feels their whiskers tickle at first, probing, sentient, their furless tails like small snakes slithering over her skin, and then the nip of their teeth, exploratory then quickly driven, her face a mesh of blood and rat saliva, some tear her hair out by the roots, others move inward, into her vagina, her anus, her mouth, probing, nipping, wet with her fluids, sodden. Once the body is prone, the clothes torn, the hunks of flesh rendered down, the inner organs divided, the bones gnawed on with teeth as yellow as the disgusted moon, the rats once again prick their ears and listen, for from her lair the great queen calls them home, she too desires to feast on human meat.