Hell Is Empty

by Conrad Williams

  He’d gone the whole hog, adding stations and textured landscapes and people standing on platforms. He must have spent thousands on it. Pounds and hours.

  ‘Yeah, it’s all fascinating,’ I said. ‘Now what happened at Cold Quay?’

  ‘I set up the tracks,’ he said. ‘I got a cut of every transaction. Drugs coming in. Weapons.’

  ‘Weapons?’

  ‘Yes. Knives, mainly. Shivs. Never used. More for intimidation purposes. I wanted out. Two years of trundle back and forth and I could afford to retire.’

  ‘I don’t care about that. I want to know about Tann.’

  ‘Tann was interesting. He was like… I don’t know… a glass of tap water when he came in. He was there, but you wouldn’t notice him unless you were looking for him. He sat and watched. He was a sponge, soaking up the prison politics, the cut and thrust. He was endlessly flexible, like I said. Yes sir, no sir. And then suddenly he was arranging things for people. He was the man you went to if you needed a dirty book, or a bottle of Jack, or an eighth of resin.’

  ‘And that kind of ability means brownie points.’

  ‘He wielded immense influence. Nothing much to look at, Graeme Tann – at least not back then, he’s bulked up a bit in the last few years – but who needs physical intimidation when you’ve got everyone in your pocket?’

  ‘Including you.’

  ‘I’ve been up front with you. I didn’t have to be. I’d appreciate it if you kept this between ourselves.’

  ‘Why should I?’

  ‘How about if I share a little extra information with you?’

  ‘Like what? How you used to dress up as The Fat Controller and let Tann lick your whistle?’

  ‘Tann used to get visits.’

  ‘All prisoners get visits. Christ, even I visited him.’

  ‘Ian Mawker,’ he said.

  ‘Mawker?’

  ‘Ian Mawker visited Graeme Tann on a number of occasions. And I have it on good authority that he was there on the day of the riot. He was there when it was happening.’

  ‘Whose authority?’

  ‘Good authority.’

  ‘So what?’ I said. ‘Maybe he was there because I asked him to try to get some information out of him.’

  ‘Because that’s how things work, isn’t it? Civilian you instructs high-ranking officer to be his servant.’

  ‘So why was he there? Why was he visiting Tann?’

  ‘Ask him,’ he said.

  I felt anger rising. At him with his crooked little cryptic smile. At his games. ‘Enjoy your choo-choos,’ I said. ‘I hope it was all worth it.’ I left before I succumbed to the urge to take one of his locomotives and force-feed it to his anus.

  16

  I risked it. How hard could it be? I mean, I now looked like some fascist nut. I needed to get my laptop and make sure I’d turned off the iron. Maybe I just wanted to be a stubborn prick and to show anybody who was watching that I wasn’t going to be cowed by them.

  Just to be safe, though, I got in through the alleyway at the back, letting myself in through the communal door where all the bins are lined up. I hurried up the stairs, quiet as I could be, checking carefully at each turn because I was sure there’d be some nutcase who’d been put there to wait for me on the off-chance that I would show up like some stubborn prick.

  Nobody here. I couldn’t believe Tann wouldn’t have this place staked out; surely he’d know this was my pad by now. If he held sway over a dodgy screw at the nick, then there was every chance that he had informants who knew how to hack into personal files and extract this kind of data.

  The flat, without Mengele, was quiet and grey. He really brought the place to life, even if his raison d’être was to deliver death unto all. I retrieved my laptop from behind the sofa cushion and stuffed it in a rucksack. I looked around the flat longingly, wishing I could stay, but it was too risky. It was mid-afternoon, the sun leaving the sky, which was turning the colour of petrol. I’d suffered a long wait coming back, the motorway reduced to one lane because of an accident. I was hungry and tired, but I was always hungry and tired. I’d forgotten what it felt like to be rested and replete.

  I went out the way I’d come, stealthy as a ninja wearing slippers. Back in the car. Back on the road. The whole operation had taken just over five minutes.

  Except.

  Well, there was a car behind me.

  London, you say. No shit, you say.

  And yes, it may well have been my paranoid guardian angel whispering away in my ear, but part of me was trying to persuade me that I’d seen the car earlier, as I had arrived. Not that it was particularly remarkable. Just a silver-coloured Skoda Octavia. Two people sitting in it. But I’d noticed it, even if only peripherally via the sleepy back brain. And I’d noticed it again now, as I drove through Marylebone in the direction of Marble Arch. I kept telling myself it was nothing, that I was reacting like a hair trigger, and that at every roundabout or traffic light they would turn a different way and I could laugh at myself for being the world’s biggest tool. But they kept on after me, staying three or four car lengths clear, staying on me even when there were cars or buses between us. I turned left and turned left and turned left until I was back where I started and they were still there. It was as if they didn’t care that I could see them. They were relentless.

  And so now what? They were either Tann’s lot or Mawker’s lot. I could either try to lose them or I could confront them. There was something attractive about that: blocking them at a red light and swinging the door open. If it was Mawker’s lot, they might just tell me to get back in the car and stop acting like John Wayne. If it was Tann’s lot, I might just be turned into a fine red mist. But then if they were after me to kill me they could have done that already. Who’d have thought being followed could be such a brainteaser?

  Lose them, then. And do it quick. I dropped into second and hurled the car into a side street, got up to third. Touch the brakes and hard right, really make those tyres sing. I opened the window and listened. An engine protesting – but it could just have been the echoes of my own as I toed it through built-up thoroughfares. I slalomed left and right down a series of streets. I was near Brompton now, around the back of the V&A museum, heading towards Sloane Square. I planned ahead: charge across Chelsea Bridge and get on to Nine Elms Lane, try to find somewhere to hide in the little jungle of warehouses, depots and distribution offices between the river and the railway line.

  I was close to the south side of the bridge, Battersea Power Station like a table turned turtle to my left, when I heard and felt a pop just above my head. There was a sting of pain: blood started leaking into my left eye. I turned to see a bullet hole just to the left of the rear window. I hadn’t been shot (but I wondered by how many centimetres… or millimetres… I’d escaped the bullet); it was a metal splinter that had grazed my forehead. Looked worse than it was. I was more put out that they’d damaged the Saab than the fact they’d got their shooters out in broad daylight after all.

  I wellied it, and came screaming through Queen’s Circus at the foot of Battersea Park at close on fifty miles per hour. Another pop: one of the tyres shredded and control went walkabout. I managed to steady the car somewhat, but she was drifting and the steering wheel was becoming more and more unresponsive until it felt as if I was trying to wrestle it free of an invisible grizzly, intent on mashing us into the wall. I got over the railway bridge but by then I could hear ominous grinding from under the car so I brought her to a stop and got out smartish, tense against the sound of an engine throttling up, and a third shot, which I might or might not hear.

  I sprinted along the main drag, looking for a place where I’d be able to shake off my pursuers, but they were stickier than a teenager’s sock. I thought about crossing the road and trying my luck in New Covent Garden Market, but here they came. If I tried to get over the road now I’d be in full sight of them: they’d turn me into chunky Joel salsa. I heard the squeal of brakes and car doors charging
open. No voices. No entreaties to stop. Death was all over their lack of vocabulary. Silent. Final.

  I did hear the gunshot when it came, for the record, as it whanged off a length of metal fence about a foot from my left ear. I couldn’t help thinking, uncharitably, that had Mawker shown the same kind of commitment and effort over the years then Tann might have been apprehended long before all of this had ever happened and Sarah would still be at home.

  I jinked left down Kirtling Street, Battersea Power Station just up ahead. The site traffic entrance was heavily populated by guys in orange jackets who watched, bemusedly, as I came clattering by. They disappeared too, though, when they heard the gunfire. I don’t know if it was because of the acoustics or whether I’d put some distance between us, but it sounded as if that shot had originated further away than before. I risked a glance back but couldn’t see anything. I kept going along depressingly colourless access roads, past rusting gates topped with razor wire. The tarmac here was layered with pale dust. Cement, most probably. Another shot. Close to my foot; I saw sparks fly off the blacktop. Time slowed. I heard the breath in my lungs churning through each bronchiole. I felt the pulse of blood reach every capillary extreme. Ahead was a squat building with metal shutters and niggardly-looking windows. To the left was a ready mix plant dominated by a mound of sand twenty feet high. Warning signs were plastered all over the gates:

  SAFETY STARTS HERE. LOOK AFTER YOURSELF,

  LOOK AFTER EACH OTHER. USE FLASHING BEACONS OR

  HAZARD WARNING LIGHTS BEYOND THIS POINT.

  On, past a rank of front-end loading static bins. To the right, construction barriers and signs warning that demolition was in progress, but over the fence it was just flat concrete and a single lobster-red digger. Nowhere to hide. In front of me a host of vans and more hi-vis and helmets.

  ‘Help me,’ I gasped.

  Another gunshot. One of the construction guys went down holding what remained of his knee between two suddenly crimson hands. His screams echoed off the acres of pristine glass on the new residential area behind him.

  Fuck it, I thought, and charged through the lot of them before they knew what was happening. They were all either trying to help their colleague or fleeing the scene anyway. Nobody cared that I was bolting for the main doors and the millions of square feet beyond. A LUXURY COLLECTION OF SPACIOUS SUITES AND 1, 2 AND 3 BEDROOM APARTMENTS AND PENTHOUSES, the banners gushed. LAST FEW REMAINING. It could have been describing my nerves.

  I got inside, relishing the darkness, and concentrated on making myself vanish. I had to calm my breath down though. Half a mile flat out had me whooping like something trapped in a vacuum cleaner. I folded myself into shadow by something shrink-wrapped in plastic, and forced myself to relax.

  I thought of all the times Rebecca had cajoled me to attend yoga classes with her and all the times I’d cried off because I felt it was just so much hippy horseshit. I couldn’t touch my toes. I didn’t want to touch my toes. I didn’t want to commune with nature or meditate on my chakras, wherever they were and whatever they were doing. I didn’t want to have twelve-hour sex sessions. Well, I did, but I didn’t want to have to be in the lotus position, twitching my hips once every twenty minutes while breathing in the steam from a cup of green tea and listening to Sting play a lute with his lingam… or whatever Tantric sex entails.

  I wish I’d gone now. Not only because it would have meant more time with the person I spend no time with any more. But because it might have taught me something. I might actually have learned how to control my temper, how to calm my body when it was stressed beyond all reason.

  Instead of this confused sack of grunts and twitches, cracks and calamities.

  But little by little, I came down. If there were two following me then the chances were they’d split up. I guessed the workers were too engrossed in their pal’s knee, or in getting away, to take much notice of what I was up to, but there was every chance someone had seen me duck in here, which meant that they might pass that information on to my pursuers, especially if there was a gun being pointed at them.

  As yet, nothing. I gave it another five minutes and then I gave it five more. Where I was crouched cast no shadows. I’d left no footprints. There was one drop of moisture on the floor between me and the entrance. Perhaps sweat. Perhaps spittle. Nothing else to suggest anybody had been in this part of the building since the fitters brought in the rolls of carpet and the furniture, all packed and stacked and ready to be laid out.

  My leg was screaming at me and so I allowed myself to unfold a little before cramp seized me up completely. And then I saw movement. The slightest change in the angles of light cast across the floor. Someone was coming in. Or rather, was already in and was moving deeper.

  I slid backwards, away from the shrink-wrap, but remained within its shadow for as long as I could. By the time I’d reached the rear of the room, where a corner would lead me to a corridor where, presumably, the lifts were stationed, I heard the soft crackle of a hand as it shifted over the tight bindings of polythene.

  I got up and hurried to the lifts, which gaped open but had no electricity to run them. I bypassed them and skipped up to the next floor. Here I eased open one of the windows, complete with criss-crosses of tape to protect the glass against random impacts of debris. I got out on to a gantry and scampered to where scaffolding still clung to one portion of the new building. I was down and over the fence and on Cringle Street heading east within sixty seconds, pushing hard but keeping one eye on that window and one on the road in case they worked out what I’d done and got back on my heels.

  Lots of cars. No cabs anywhere. No police. Bus stops without buses. I felt the aches and twinges from my injuries, and the training I’d undertaken with Danny Sweet, and the game of footsie I’d played with Karen Leonard’s gammy clutch. Yoga might have helped with all of that too. I determined to get into it if I managed to see this day out without anyone putting any holes in me.

  I got off Nine Elms Lane, anxious by how busy it was and how exposed I was, and ran down to the riverside. I don’t know what it was, but I didn’t feel I’d done enough to lose them. The anxiety wouldn’t go away. Usually, if I know I’ve got a tail on me I can work out who it is and get rid within a matter of minutes. But there was something about this tail that spoke of a deeper professionalism, a more serious commitment.

  The figures in the car. The guy who didn’t have the gun.

  I’d seen him for what, maybe less than a split second? Hunched over the wheel, in profile. A hint of hair. A glimpse of jacket. Dark eyes. Angular jaw. Not a shred of fat on it.

  Stop with the guess who. You know who.

  I didn’t want to accept that, though. Because if it was him, I wasn’t clear. And I wouldn’t be clear. What I had ahead of me would make Butch and Sundance’s pursuit by the superposse look like a game of kiss chase.

  I was saying his name as I ran, chanting it in time with my footsteps. I didn’t want to entertain the thought but I didn’t need to. My chattering teeth gave my fear a voice.

  Henry Herschell. Henry Herschell.

  I’d known Henry Herschell for many years. We’d developed, if not a friendship, then a grudging admiration for each other. We’d never crossed swords in the criminal world. Mainly because I wouldn’t dare. He was one of maybe four or five people that put the shivers through me. But I’d helped him out once, saved him some money on a business deal that was headed south because of a bent partner. And I liked him, despite myself. I liked how he was polite and always well dressed. I liked, too, how wiry and supple he was. I envied him the way he moved, relaxed like a panther but with ready muscles. He was potential kinetic energy, even when he slept. His wife was Japanese – Oka Ino her name was, from Nagasaki – and apparently her nickname for him was Shinnichi because he was a sucker for anything from Nippon.

  He worked wherever he could find a pay packet (an admirable trait, but one that appalled me right at this moment) and I remember one night at Tuzie’s, a s
trip club on Brewer Street where he sometimes worked the door. I stopped by to have a drink with him because I’d seen a beautiful leather jacket he might have liked in a vintage clothes shop in Kensal Town (he was always complimenting me on my own). We sat at the bar and all the girls waved at him and blew him kisses on their way in or out. Because he wasn’t just a bouncer. He was a bodyguard and sometime confidant to these women – Jazz Maggs, Abi Valley, Dotty Pillows – and that was something that maybe I could work to my advantage.

  So I thought we were kind-of friends – as much as it was possible to be kind-of friends with someone who flirted with the lower echelons of crime – but friends didn’t take pot-shots at you in SW8 with what sounded to my educated ears like an 8mm Baikal self-defence pistol adapted to take 9mm rounds. Although that said, I could probably think of a few who wouldn’t say no if given the opportunity. Tokuzo would say no. But only because she’d rather come at me with a flamethrower.

  He’d allowed himself to be persuaded to have a drink – a small measure from a bottle of Gekkeikan sake the management kept behind the bar especially for him. He offered me some, so we sat there sipping rice wine while everyone else drank £20 pints of shit lager.

  A paper fan stuck out of his top pocket. Henry Herschell is a master of Tessenjutsu, a martial art involving use of an iron fan, and his facsimile was a symbol of his prowess. He was something of a clothes horse; he liked to wear silk shirts and expensive moisturisers. He carried a steel comb with him – not a weapon, this, but I imagined he could do some damage with it anyway – and he would whip it out theatrically from time to time to keep his immaculate hair (gleaming with Sweet Georgia Brown) in check. I knew a number of people who expressed surprise at being told of his heterosexuality.

  I liked to ask him about Tessenjutsu, how he got into it (it wasn’t exactly a front-page martial art like karate or judo) and what he was up to (which always guaranteed me an arched eyebrow and a finger pressed to the side of his nose. ‘Himitsu,’ he would say). Every year he and Oka holidayed in Japan where she caught up with her family and he brushed up on his Tessenjutsu skills. He once brought me back a bottle of red ink called momiji. I was grateful to him but I could never shake the murmur from my head that this was some kind of friendly warning. Momiji translates to maple. And it was the colour of autumn leaves. The colour of death. Maybe not. Maybe.