Down into Darkness

by David Lawrence

They were using an interview room at Notting Dene. Stella and Harriman stood in the corridor, each holding a carton of vending-machine coffee, thin and bitter. They could hear the noise from the front desk: drunks, victims, people with nowhere to go.

  Harriman said, ‘He’s a face. Big-shit businessman.’

  ‘You think that makes a difference?’ Stella sipped and grimaced. ‘Really?’

  ‘No, but he didn’t do it.’

  ‘No, he didn’t. Not unless he changed his suit and swallowed the knife in the time it took the security people to get there.’

  ‘It’s our guy,’ Harriman said, ‘isn’t that what you’re thinking? This time he gets the right man, gets Morgan, but his timing’s off. The knife cuts – he meant to decapitate him, but Morgan fought back.’

  ‘Yes,’ Stella said, ‘I think it’s our guy.’

  ‘Bowman?’

  ‘Let him go.’

  ‘His solicitor’s on his way.’

  ‘And so?’

  ‘I was thinking of the cocaine.’

  Stella laughed. ‘Flash business dude snorts coke. There’s one for the record books.’

  ‘We’d hand him over if he was panhandling the subways, Boss.’

  ‘He’s our only witness.’

  ‘Near-witness.’

  ‘Yes, near-witness. He was there.’

  ‘And saw nothing.’

  ‘Maybe he’ll remember something. At the very least we need him for purposes of elimination: fingerprints, DNA… Let’s keep him on side.’

  ‘Maybe he’ll be good for some investment tips.’

  ‘Investment?’ Stella laughed.

  ‘Bit of inside information,’ Harriman said, ‘a nod and a wink. Impoverished copper one day, rich bastard the next.’

  ‘Tell him he can go,’ Stella said. ‘Thank him for his time and cooperation, tell him we’ll need to speak to him again, give him the leaflet on counselling services.’

  ‘Why do you think he was there?’ Harriman asked. ‘Him and Morgan… what’s the connection?’

  ‘God knows,’ Stella said. ‘Wheelers and dealers, movers and shakers; they’re all up to it.’

  The sky was growing light when Harriman got back to his flat. He undressed in the hall and went into the bedroom, which was empty and shouldn’t have been. He walked through to the kitchen and found Gloria making coffee. She looked him up and down as he stood butt-naked in the doorway.

  ‘You cut right to the chase, don’t you?’

  He grimaced. ‘I have to be up in a couple of hours.’

  ‘Why wait till then?’

  He put on a robe, and they sat at the breakfast bar with their coffee. Gloria made some eggs. Birds started up: London birds, they never sleep either. Harriman kissed her. He said, ‘No point in going back to sleep now.’

  ‘But going back to bed?’

  ‘Different thing.’

  Gloria was tall and full-breasted and slender-hipped and had flawless skin to go with her Latin looks, but that wasn’t the reason why Harriman was starting to think he’d like her to be around all the time.

  Wasn’t the only reason.

  Stella made some notes, sent some emails, drank a couple of vodkas. She found the paper with Delaney’s piece on Bowman and was momentarily confused, as if the man were somehow out of context. She read it and found out just what a hotshot Stanley Bowman was. The piece was accompanied by a portrait of the man that made him seem younger and better-looking than Stella remembered, his goatee, his gunslinger’s moustache.

  She took a pair of kitchen scissors and cut the photo out, then pinned it to the white-board along with the SOC photos, the living face to face with the dead.

  71

  Acting DI Brian Collier stood in the doorway listening as Stella briefed the team. He looked like a man with a dismal two-day hangover that just won’t lift. In the doorway was where Mike Sorley had usually stood: not in deference, simply allowing his officers to do what they did best. Collier’s retreat from centre to periphery had been noticed by everyone, though some thought it had come a little late.

  Stella said, ‘Traces of blood in the hallway, on the stairs to the basement, disturbance to plants in the next-door garden… It’s as much as this man has left of himself. Forensics tests are being made, but we’re pretty certain he gained access to the empty house and crossed gardens to get to Neil Morgan’s.’

  ‘He’s athletic,’ Frank Silano observed. ‘Upper-body strength.’

  ‘We’re getting CCTV from the area, as many tapes as we can for the square and the surrounding streets. That includes the street where we think he must have gained entry to the empty house.’

  ‘If he bypassed the alarm,’ Andy Greegan said, ‘he must have known where to look.’

  ‘Okay,’ Stella said, ‘who do we talk to?’

  ‘The builders and the scaffolders,’ Greegan said.

  ‘Scaffolders,’ reflected Harriman, ‘the pit-bulls of the construction industry.’

  ‘What about MO?’ Maxine was scanning the SOC report. ‘Did he write anything on Morgan or leave that triple-vee sign?’

  Stella shook her head. ‘No.’

  ‘In too much of a hurry,’ Harriman suggested.

  ‘But we’re sure it’s him?’

  ‘Let’s hope DNA will tell us. Until we know differently – it’s him.’ Stella paused. ‘Here’s our problem. We don’t know how long his list is or who else might be on it. If it wasn’t for the writing – the notion of some purpose or another – the victims would look completely random. We can’t secondguess what’s coming next.’

  As the briefing broke up, Collier walked away. Stella found him in his office, the desk he had so meticulously cleared now piled high. He said, ‘It could have been a nice black-on-black or some bag-bride getting done for her stash, but no, I walk straight into a fucking serial, I draw some mental bastard who runs round my patch topping people like the wrath of fucking God.’

  Stella placed some files on his desk: a drop in the ocean. She said, ‘It’s lousy luck.’

  Collier looked at her. ‘Are you enjoying this, Stella?’

  ‘No, Boss, I’m not enjoying it. People are dying.’

  ‘What’s the pattern here? He’ll stop or he’ll make a mistake and get caught: isn’t that what we’re relying on? A mistake.’

  ‘A mistake would help.’

  ‘Or else he’s never caught. He just becomes history.’ Collier lit a cigarette. ‘Like me.’

  Candice Morgan had flown back from her girls-only funtime break and was sitting in the relatives’ room wondering if her husband was going to come back to her from the operating theatre dead or alive. She had asked the question a number of times, and no one seemed eager to give her a straightforward answer.

  Morgan had been on the table for five hours while surgeons removed a haematoma cluster from his brain. The knife wounds had been cleaned and stitched with little attention to cosmetic effect; surgery took precedence. The cut to his face went from the left point of the jaw, across the mouth and nose, up the right-hand cheek, to snag the corner of the eye and then into the hairline. Given that the surgeons had scalped Morgan and trepanned him, it seemed less a disfigurement than a grace note.

  A nurse looked in to let Candice know that the operation was still in progress. Candice asked, ‘Is he going to die?’ Half an hour later a different face asked if she would like a drink. Candice asked, ‘Is he going to die?’ When the surgeons were finally done with Morgan, a consultant came to see Candice to let her know that the operation had, so far as they could tell, been successful and that her husband was not dead. ‘Yes,’ Candice said, ‘but is he going to die?’

  When Ricardo had realized that the face he’d seen in the rear-view mirror that night close by Wormwood Scrubs was Bowman’s, his thoughts first turned to blackmail.

  You want a large piece of my action, you bastard? No, I’ll have a large piece of yours.

  The problem with this idea, and Ricardo knew it, was that it
would require nerve that he suspected he didn’t have; it might also require muscle he knew he didn’t have. He thought of Sekker and people like Sekker: he’d met such people before; they were a special breed; they lacked qualities that most people took for granted – a conscience, for example, or regret, or pity. Most of all they lacked imagination. They were people who could nail a man’s hands to a chair and chat to him through his screams. He decided to cut his losses and move on. Harefield was rich pickings, but the world was full of people who knew how to steal without knowing what to do next, people in need of a middle man, a match-maker.

  It was early afternoon, and the view from the eleventh floor of Block B was of a flawless blue sky warped by rolling scarves of pollution. A flock of gulls cruised by on their way to the garbage dump. Ricardo sat with Tina over a Pat’s Pizza and made plans; he’d heard that there were some unlikely areas opening up. The Midlands. Nottingham, he told her, was a real frontier town.

  Tina put the TV on and watched a love story in which things kept going wrong. Ricardo lay back in his chair, eyes closed, but he wasn’t sleeping; he was planning. He might not have the balls to front Bowman, he thought, but there were other ways to make the man’s life complicated.

  In his mind’s eye Ricardo could see a little bomb with a very long fuse.

  Maxine Hewitt and Sue Chapman were sitting in a dimly lit room watching CCTV footage. They had the lights down because the tape quality was poor. They watched citizens going about their business, observed, recorded, unaware.

  All those lives, Maxine thought, all those connections.

  ‘It’s crap,’ Sue observed. ‘You couldn’t ID anyone from this. Kids in hoodies steaming a shop, you’re looking at a blur with something blurry inside it.’

  People walking their dogs, people shopping, couples hand in hand, Big Issue hawkers, Gideon Woolf crossing the road at a run, his long hair flying, the tails of his long coat flying, just beating a black Freelander as it switched lanes.

  Ricardo said, ‘Don’t tell Stella where we’re going.’

  ‘I can get in touch, though?’

  ‘Oh, yeah. Yeah, I want you to get in touch. Definitely.’

  ‘It was a long time. I hadn’t seen Stell for a long time.’

  ‘The thing is,’ Ricardo said, ‘I’m going to fuck him up.’

  ‘Sekker?’

  ‘Sekker’s boss.’

  ‘Okay,’ Tina said. ‘Good. How?’

  ‘It’s complicated.’

  Tina nodded. ‘Okay.’ A thought occurred to her. ‘Will he know it was you?’

  ‘No. This is a long-range thing. It’s a hands-off thing. We’ll be gone.’

  ‘To Nottingham.’

  ‘Somewhere.’

  ‘Nottingham sounds good.’

  The movie was on its way to a happy ending, bad luck reversed, all obstacles overcome, the lovers steadily but surely advancing to limitless joy.

  ‘Stella’s part of it,’ Ricardo said. ‘Some information I need to give her. Maybe you could do that.’

  ‘Okay. I’ll tell her. What is it?’

  ‘Later,’ Ricardo said. ‘I haven’t got it all straight yet.’

  Delaney said, ‘What’s Stanley Bowman doing on your crimeboard?’

  Stella told him. She said, ‘Neil Morgan and Stanley Bowman – two off your Rich List, am I right?’

  ‘Two of fifty.’

  ‘But these two are connected.’

  Delaney laughed. ‘They’re all connected. Money connects them. Influence connects them. Friends in high places connects them. They’re connections themselves.’

  ‘So what is it, exactly, that connects Bowman and Morgan?’

  ‘Who knows?’

  ‘Not me,’ Stella said, ‘but I’d like to,’ and she looked at him.

  ‘I can try.’

  He was opening a bottle of white wine. She fetched some glasses and put olives in a dish: olives and wine, the evening sacrament. The first long sip tasted wonderful, cold and crisp, the aftertaste of gooseberry.

  He said, ‘So what do you think?’ as if the question had only just been asked, as if it were fresh in both their minds.

  Which it was.

  Stella put down her glass and crossed to him. She held his hands to her breasts, as if she were swearing an oath. ‘I have to sell Vigo Street first.’

  ‘No, you don’t. We’ll sell this, buy somewhere, the money from Vigo Street can come along later.’

  Stella nodded. She said, ‘Yes. Okay. When?’

  ‘Whenever you like.’

  They kissed. They clinked glasses. She felt elated and completely lost.

  Candice Morgan sat at her husband’s bedside and watched the heart monitor throw its little loops. She had spent some time with the consultant after Morgan had returned from theatre; she had asked whether he was going to die. The consultant had said he thought not. In fact, he was pretty sure of it.

  The pay-to-view TV was showing a news broadcast in which chaos played side by side with disaster. Candice watched without watching, her mind elsewhere. She was thinking, Don’t die. Please don’t die.

  The room was warm, and Candice dozed for a while. The TV threw flicker-frames on the wall, and the sound of sirens floated up from the street. After ten minutes or so, she woke and looked across at the bed. Morgan lay on his back, utterly still, the monitor ticking and blipping. Candice stared at him, nothing in her face of softness or concern.

  Don’t die, you bastard.

  72

  Silent Wolf in the rain-lashed alleyways, in the dark dead ends. His principal adversary was Ironjaw, a cyborg made almost invincible by radical surgery. Research had shown that Ironjaw was almost as popular as Silent Wolf with the kids who played the game, and the game-makers were already developing an Ironjaw spin-off.

  James and Stevie Turner sat side by side on their grandparents’ sofa and took Silent Wolf through another adventure. The swirl of his coat, his snarl, the glint of a street lamp on the blade of his knife… Desperadoes and lowlifes came at him out of the shadows and were sent straight to hell. James was well on the way to Level 8, where Silent Wolf stood on the edge of Ironjaw’s Badlands Abyss, his death toll in the upper hundreds.

  Their grandparents hated the game for its indiscriminate violence, and they hated the fact that James and Stevie played it in every spare moment. They tried confiscating it, but the boys became badly upset; they almost seemed to be suffering withdrawal symptoms, and Stevie’s nightmares became more frequent and more distressing. It was difficult enough, trying to cope with their own grief and their daughter’s limitless depression, without also having to deal with two boys who rarely spoke, who seemed to have retreated into game-world and the violent streets of an unnamed city.

  ‘What is it?’ the grandfather asked. ‘Why do you like this game so much?’

  ‘It’s him,’ James said. ‘It’s Silent Wolf.’

  *

  The grandfather played the game when the boys had gone to bed, but the technology was too fast and too subtle for him. Next day he asked James to coach him, thinking, maybe, that if he could be part of it, he could break into their world, get close to his grandsons and help them.

  James talked him through the rules and the moves. Silent Wolf stalked the streets; the weather worsened; the skies darkened; red-eyed killers came at him from every doorway.

  Stevie said, ‘And he killed Daddy. Why was that?’

  Later, the grandparents talked. They could see what was happening, they could see why the boys were so addicted to the game. It was a necessary fantasy. Because if a cartoon character had killed their father, then, obviously, their father couldn’t really be dead.

  That night, the grandfather put the game into the player again. He didn’t get far, so he cancelled it and watched the title-trailer: slanting rain, a distant lightning strike, Silent Wolf slipping through the crowds on Mean Street, taking an alleyway short-cut. A man emerged from hiding, a cleaver in his hand. Silent Wolf high-kicked; his
knife glittered in the light from a bar-room window; the man went down.

  It repeated endlessly, balletic and bloody. The grandfather backhanded a tear from his cheek.

  The bleachers were up in Byrite, the cage in place, the fighters standing by the gate. Going into that space was like entering a tunnel in a windowless train. Voices swarmed on the walls and crowned over the cage like a firestorm. The fighters jogged on the spot, looking away from each other, looking at the floor. One of them was a white guy with dreadlocks: a Wigger, thick in the chest, his shoulders and biceps a little rockfall that went all the way to his bunched fists. He curled a gobbet of spit on his tongue and blew it down between his feet.

  Ricardo was making a book. He and Tina would be gone soon, but there are cage fights all over, and he expected to find this sideline wherever they happened to wind up. Ban cock-fighting, ban badger-baiting, ban dog fights, ban foxhunting and the next blood sport will be man on man in a seven-foot-high cage with no way out. Cage-fighting was covering the map. It was almost respectable: Mike Tyson had flown in to MC some Manchester fights.

  There were few rules: no biting, no head-butting, no eye-gouging; that aside, it was go anywhere, do anything. The only other thing banned was avoiding trouble – no pussies in cages. The fighters wore thin leather gloves, so you knew that blood would be drawn, bones would be broken, damage would be done, and deaths were a distinct possibility. For Ricardo, it had all the potential of a growth industry. Set up the contest, charge an entrance fee, take bets on the fights, pay someone with a Super-8 camera to film each bout, then distribute the DVDs through your CAGE FIGHT KILLERS website.

  The fighters went into the cage along with the referee. The baying from the crowd grew; Ricardo raced up and down between the bleachers taking bets, all of which were going on the Wigger, which wasn’t too surprising, since his opponent was slighter, his torso sloping down to a narrow waist. Worst of all, he was a good-looking guy. How could a pretty boy win a cage fight? With a two-man contest, though, you could only come second, and there was money in the purse for the loser.

  Ricardo took a bet from Sekker, who was sitting on a ground-level seat close to the door. Sekker grinned. ‘It’s an execution, this.’