Hell Is Empty

by Conrad Williams

  There were adhesive labels, the gum fossilised by time, marked ACTIVE affixed to each one, although someone had slashed a black line through the word. Inside each folder was a series of sealed envelopes, only marginally less rancid than their containers. Names had been typed across the centre of these envelopes. Dates in pencil told when the files had been opened and when they had been closed. I slit open the first of the packages (there must have been around sixty or seventy of them in total) and pulled out a neatly organised sheaf of documents. Despite my initial disdain towards Mawker, I now silently thanked him. My curiosity had been piqued. And there was something about the paperwork of thirty years ago that appealed to my Luddite self: typewritten statements, carbon copies, index cards, dot matrix printouts on perforated sheets, handwritten notes (Oi, Jenks, bet you beers that Pascoe is all over this. Pint later?). There were photographs and negatives, long, beautifully penned letters, maps of a partially lost London that lurked just under the skin of this shining, twetny-first-century metropolis. It was like opening a time capsule. I reached out for a glass that wasn’t there.

  I went to make some more coffee, though I’d already had my day’s ration. Something to keep me from the thought of booze, the habit of it. If anything, Mawker’s files were giving me a jones for vodka, or more likely a Scotch and water… Wasn’t that what all the sheepskin coat-wearing, Ford Sierra-driving coppers were drinking back in the day when these files were causing coronaries and divorces?

  I sipped my coffee while I flicked through the sheets, glimpsing ghosts. Nearly known names and addresses. Tip-of-the-tongue stuff. Slant-rhymes in a dissonant memory. Many of these people dead now. Many of these addresses turned to rubble or morphed into millions of tons of gleaming glass and steel. The misdemeanours on their criminal records, some of them almost laughably old-fashioned; cute, even. Ernest Percival, fifty-two, of 6 Walmer Road, London W11 had apparently, at midnight on the night of 20th December 1961, stolen two frozen turkeys from Pyrkotis Butchers in Camden and then tried to hide them in a tree when approached by police officers.

  Jesus. I trawled through three or four envelopes until I realised I was sitting in an uncomfortable position on the kitchen stool and cultivating a cricked neck. I stood up and stretched and took the pile through to the living room and stretched out on the sofa. It was old shit, but it was interesting, in the way any document from the past is interesting. A window on a world you used to know but is now so alien it seems drawn from dreams.

  One envelope in particular caught my eye. The word SKYLARK was written upon it. I tore it open and out poured a glut of horror. I saw the photographs first. Large monochrome prints of what at first seemed to be pictures of carelessly spilled black paint. But paint didn’t contain body parts: fingers and faces. These were bodies that had been obliterated. What could do such a thing? But I knew full well it had nothing to do with weaponry. This was catastrophic injury sustained in a fall from a great height. This was what we used to describe in the police as ‘pancaking’. We had to collect what didn’t stay inside the bodies with a scraper. I’d dealt with one, a couple of months before I threw my serge uniform and tit helmet at the Chief Superintendent and walked out. A Russian couple who had thrown themselves off the top of a multi-storey car park in West Kensington. They didn’t look too bad, all things considered. They were lying on their backs in the snow. They were still holding hands. Blood had leaked from their ears, the only hint at fatal injury, until we tried to transfer them to the ambulance. It was like trying to heft an octopus. There was no structure to the corpses, the bones having been pulverised. It helped, in a freaky way. You could believe that what you were wadding into the body bags was anything but human. Lover’s leap. Hellish romantic.

  ‘Skylark’ was apparently the nickname given to an evil bastard who’d been getting his jollies pushing construction staff from the top of skyscraper building sites in the early 1980s. London was enjoying a boom back then, and in-demand architects were sketching their erect pricks, passing them off as blueprints and pocketing acres of green. The capital was going up in the world in more ways than one. There was no obvious motive for what Skylark was doing, but there were a few theories written down on memos. Political activist? Anti-capitalist? Protesting against the verticalisation of London? Worth looking into. Anybody on file?

  Presumably not, because nobody had ever been caught.

  4

  He answered and I could hear him at work, prepping something. The chunk of a knife as it blurred through onions or carrots or Jerusalem artichokes. ‘You’ve got some nerve, calling me.’

  ‘If I had a penny for every time someone said that to me I’d be able to buy a small packet of cheese,’ I said.

  ‘Last time I saw you, you were in my cellar, gobbing off as per.’

  ‘Come off it, Danny,’ I said. ‘I was just looking for someone, as per. And then you started pushing buttons, trying to get me involved in one of your illegal bareknuckles.’

  ‘And what?’ he said. ‘You came to arrest me? You’re as much a copper as I am a dishwasher. And anyway, I’ve got half the Met coming to my gaff, getting involved in those “illegal” fistfights. So fuck off.’

  ‘I’m not calling about that,’ I said. ‘I’m calling because of you. I need your help.’

  ‘So fuck off,’ he said again. ‘I don’t know x, I haven’t seen y and z ran off to Gravesend with a tart.’

  ‘I’m not after any leads,’ I said.

  ‘So what is it?’ he said. He stopped prepping and I heard him put down the knife. I heard it make a metallic noise – schrang! – and my wounds sang in woeful recognition. ‘You want me to teach you how to make pastry?’

  ‘I need to get fit.’

  ‘So join a gym. Go swimming. Eat kale.’

  ‘I need a foot up my arse.’

  ‘I can’t help you,’ he said. ‘Do you have any idea how busy I am these days? It’s not just Stodge. I’ve got Nom in South Ken, Nom Nom in Belsize Park and Om Nom Nom opening in Soho first quarter of next year. We’re three weeks off Christmas and I’ve barely got time for a shit.’

  ‘Bollocks,’ I said. ‘You’ve got an army under you. You’ve got no books scheduled and I’ve checked the Radio Times. No Christmas special showing plebs how to tease boiling sugar into the shape of reindeer antlers.’

  ‘I’m off to Mexico in March to do some filming.’

  ‘Well March is March. I’ll be out of your hair after one session.’

  ‘One session? What use is that to anyone? And anyway, I can’t give you one session. I’ll put you in touch with a personal trainer I know.’

  ‘No. It has to be you.’

  ‘Fuck’s sake, Joel. Why?’

  ‘Because I won’t give up for you. I won’t dare shame myself for you. Someone I know. I’ll give it up and not care one fart if some faceless twonk is trying to get me to swing kettle bells.’

  ‘There’s a compliment in there somewhere, I’m guessing.’

  ‘How do you keep yourself in shape if you haven’t the time? You look like Michelangelo’s David. Only with a smaller cock.’

  He sighed; I could tell I had him. I reckoned he’d quite enjoy making me look like the gasping shamble-muppet I was. I pressed home. ‘Come on, Danny. Let me shadow you. Just for one session. Just until I can breathe without fear of dying on the spot. Show me the rhythms. Teach me the rhymes. I’ll owe you.’

  ‘Big time,’ he said. ‘If you don’t keep up, I’ll drag you down to the cellar and risk ruining my hands on your dumbfuck face.’

  ‘Deal,’ I said.

  I heard the scrape of the knife as he picked it up again and I had to grit my teeth. The sound of it as it went through an aubergine or a gala melon. I felt my stomach recoil.

  ‘Be at the entrance to Hampstead Heath on Highgate Road at six a.m. tomorrow morning. If you’re late by as much as one nanosecond I’ll be gone.’

  ‘I’ll be there,’ I said, thinking, Fucking six a.m.?

  5

>   I got out of bed as soon as the alarm went off at five a.m. I had a quick shower to spray the sleep from my groggy bones and put on some sweats. Hat, gloves, fleece. Quick banana then out. I say out, but at the door I felt the familiar dark forces threatening to send me back to my cower blankets. It was too dark, too open. In the end I had to bring Sarah into it, just to help me get clear of the damned building. I turned it all into a dangerous game. It was the only way it would work, though of course playing that role again – gallant Dad coming to rescue the daughter in peril – came with its own set of peculiar risks. I stood at the end of Crawford Street and thought of Sarah just around the corner, being dragged away by Graeme Tann. I thought of all the angles of his face, the mocking smile, the deep-set eyes. The hand around her mouth. That filthy hand wreathed in its nicotine reek. Around Sarah’s sweet mouth. That got me moving. Blood up, it got me around the corner. And the next. And the next. And on, until I was at Baker Street and sinking into blessed enclosure. I kept my scrutiny of my fellow passengers to a bare minimum. I didn’t want to risk being recognised, or invite any kind of exchange while I was down there. Strangers make me nervous these days. I was as likely to try to pull their intestines out via their nostrils as I was to return a chirpy ‘good morning’. Not that anybody ever said anything to a stranger in the Tube. I think someone might have tried in 1975 but it was later proved to be a case of mistaken identity.

  I changed at King’s Cross (don’t we all?) and caught a Northern Line train to Hampstead. There was mist in the air. I felt the moisture of it catch in the stubble on my face. London was a bowl of green-purple shadows. I watched for a while the aircraft warning lights on the Gherkin, the Shard, Thatcher’s Cock, and it was like some kind of archaic pattern just beyond my understanding. It was a pulse that spoke of the beats and secrets of altitude, a knowledge gained by those privileged to suck on that rarefied air.

  ‘You’ve got the posture of a man used to sitting at a desk reading emails all day,’ Danny Sweet said. He was in a vest and running shorts. His trainers looked more expensive than my car. ‘You look like mashed shit. Are you ready?’

  After running hard on the spot for a couple of minutes, he showed me some dynamic stretches that threatened to put me in hospital before we’d even travelled an inch. I couldn’t touch my knees, let alone my toes. ‘You don’t just start stretching. Especially in this weather. You’ll rip a hamstring or tear a calf like it was a pitta bread fresh out of the oven. You warm up to warm up.’

  ‘So does this kind of thing help you in the kitchen?’ I asked.

  ‘Course it fucking does,’ he said. Damp blond scissors of hair swung in front of his eyes. He always looked as if he was disgusted, no matter what he was doing or saying. I wondered if he’d said ‘I do’ to his wife with that look on his face, as if he’d seen dog hairs in the crème anglaise. ‘The levels of cretinism in some of my so-called staff are difficult to get my head around. But exercise helps to level me out. I still mete out some epic bollockings, but, you know, if I didn’t have this hill here, I’d be in prison for assault.’

  ‘Back in prison,’ I corrected him.

  He paused in the midst of a deep lunge, the muscles in his arms squirming against each other beneath the tattoos of carp and eagle. ‘That part of my life is over, you twat,’ he said. ‘I’m a successful chef. I’ve got Michelin stars floating in my piss. I’m literally picking wads of cash out of the back of my sofa. I don’t need to involve myself in any shit any more.’

  ‘Apart from the illegal fisticuffs.’

  Now he stood up straight and leaned in close to me. I could smell something exotic in his skin, on his breath. Remnants of his poncey breakfast, no doubt. Quinces and flaxseed and goji berries and civet crap. I don’t know.

  ‘Are we here to talk about what I might or might not be up to or are we here to get your sorry arse into shape?’

  ‘You’re right,’ I said. ‘I apologise. Force of habit.’

  ‘What happened to you, anyway?’ he asked, appraising me the way he might a box of rotting organic veg.

  ‘Bad end to a bad night,’ I said. ‘No gossip in the kitchen?’

  ‘We don’t gossip in the kitchen,’ he said. ‘We fucking labour.’

  ‘I got carved up like one of your pork loins,’ I said. ‘I’ve been out of action for months.’

  ‘At least you won’t have to worry about getting a stitch,’ he said. ‘You must have fucking hundreds.’

  ‘You can have some of your own if you’ve got wound envy.’

  ‘Come on,’ Danny said, and took off up Parliament Hill at a speed at which a cheetah might have raised its eyebrows.

  I followed as best I could but after a minute my calves felt stiff enough to split. Cramp spilled hot ants down the back of my right thigh. I looked around for the clown sawing logs at this unholy hour but it was my own breath churning in my chest. And those lights down in the urban crucible, shimmering like end-of-life coals. It really was a most distracting sight.

  ‘What the fuck did I fucking say?’ Danny demanded. He hadn’t even broken a sweat. Aircraft lights stuttered above the London Eye.

  ‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘I’m rusty. I’m coming back from rock bottom.’

  He drew me off the path into cold, wet grass. ‘Follow me,’ he said. He made sure my back was to the view. We spent fifteen minutes swapping between cardio exercises – fast repetitions of squats, press-ups, planks and crunches – and, when it sounded as though I might rupture a nut, recovery spells with some deep breathing and basic yoga. He ran me ragged all over Parliament Hill, along the paths, then off road, up and down inclines, until I felt a deep burning in my thighs and calves. The cold had gone away; I felt sweat creating slick layers between my clothes. Steam radiated from me when we stopped for more exercise. I looked like a walking vent.

  ‘I can’t,’ I said.

  ‘You can,’ he said. ‘You will.’

  There were moments on that run when I did not feel comfortable, and I’m not talking here-come-my-guts discomfort because that was pretty much a constant throughout. No. It was tied to feelings I’d experienced before, out in ‘the field’ as opposed to ‘this field’. The tingle of pursuit, knowing someone was hot on my heels or keeping a beady one on me from a distance. I felt it now, while Danny forced me to go harder, to turn my quads, trikes and glutes into tenderised steak.

  ‘Do you have any idea how much work you have to do to be able to survive one three-minute round in the ring?’

  ‘Three minutes?’

  ‘You fucking joke. Long, intensive sessions with the big bag.’

  ‘I bet. I bet you spend hours pummelling your big bag. If you’re not getting your dishwasher to do it for you.’

  ‘It’s not rocket science, Joel. You have to put in more than you take out. Same with everything.’

  ‘Suet pudding?’ I asked. ‘Anal sex?’

  ‘So push yourself now and you’ll suffer tomorrow but the day after your body will thank you.’

  ‘It won’t.’

  ‘It will. Now come on.’

  I put my head down and set off at a gentle trot. I made sure Danny’s expensive running shoes remained visible, but credit to him – he’d cut his pace significantly to allow me to match him. That was all I saw. My toes and his heels and their monotonous tread on the glistening path across the Heath. But then another pair of shoes joined us to my right. I looked up and there was a lean, wolfish guy with a bald head and week-old stubble keeping pace with me. He didn’t meet my gaze. Nor did the guy who ghosted in on my left. Shorter, stockier, wearing a bobble hat and a snood that concealed the lower part of his face. We looked like a sweatier, slower version of the Red Arrows.

  I heard the slap of a foot behind me and there, not two feet away from my sluggish arse, was a loping beard and dreadlocks, dressed in neoprene so tight it might need scalpels to get it off him.

  But even with three guys tracking me, the tingle, the not-rightness, was still there and my nervy litt
le glances left and right went further afield than my companions, though they probably thought otherwise. I couldn’t see anything though. Which meant they were very good at concealing themselves, or my watch-it gland had crashed and burned.

  ‘What the fuck is this?’ I called out to Danny. ‘Synchronised cunts?’

  Danny stopped and I ran into the back of him.

  ‘Fifty press-ups,’ he said. ‘Last one to finish gets a leathering.’

  I was taken by surprise; the others were already four or five in. ‘What do you mean, “leathering”?’ I asked, as I got down to it. I hadn’t done press-ups since the last year of high school. And sex didn’t count, apparently.

  Nobody responded. I was in the late thirties, convinced I could feel the connective tissue around my wounds beginning to separate, when the others finished and rose, sedately, to their feet.

  ‘How do you keep it together in the last few rounds when your body is willing you to throw in the towel but you can’t because to do that is to lose. What do you do, Joel?’

  One of them threw a punch at me but it was telegraphed and it was easy to dodge. I moved my hands out in front of me low, fearful of a blow that might unwrap me where I was weakest. The other one launched a kick and it wasn’t hard but it caught me right in the back of my knee, causing my leg to buckle. Off balance, I put out a hand and gibbon no. 1 caught it, hoisted it north and punched me hard in the face. I felt it in the marrow. Blood began leaking down the back of my throat.

  ‘We’re not in the ring,’ I said. ‘I’m never likely to be in the fucking ring.’ Blood sprayed. I was like a porpoise with a ruptured blowhole.

  ‘Everyone’s in the fucking ring,’ he said. ‘You’re born into the fucking ring. And every day you either win or lose.’

  ‘Fuck off, Danny,’ I said. ‘I asked for help because I’m weaker than a vegan’s handshake. I don’t want to go back to hospital.’

  He came up to me and planted his gorgeous trainer right up my bum bone. It felt as if my spine was going to pop out between my teeth. Danny remained close enough for me to suspect he’d got his foot stuck, but it was only so he could ladle on the theatre.