“If you get an ambulance I won’t go with them, and I’ll tell them about your involvement. Leave it. Don’t you get it even now? This had to happen. Get me somewhere quick.”
The only place I knew nearby was hardly paradise.
Chapter Nineteen
There must be some way outta here
Said the Joker to the Thief
Bob Dylan
I helped Marty stumble through the Tunnel, as he grew weaker and the blood now trailed behind him, the smell of the wound mingling with the stink of the place, watched by a hundred or so ruined eyes who offered neither pity nor assistance. Freud was busy in his filthy ramshackle den reading the bible aloud.
“‘Yet she multiplied her whoredoms, in calling to remembrance the days of her youth, wherein she had played the harlot in the land of Egypt. For she doted upon their paramours, whose flesh is as the flesh of asses, and whose issue is like the issue of horses.’” He stopped and looked at us. “Bible. One of the most pornographic books imaginable.”
“This is Marty. He’s been shot,” I said, stating the obvious.
“So I see. Sit down, pilgrims. Make yourself at home.”
I helped Marty down, and he lay crumpled on the floor, his face a filigree of pain lines, his skin grey.
“He won’t go to hospital,” I said.
“Very wise. Hospitals. Factories of pain and mutilation. Let me guess. He took one for the team, perhaps one meant for you, so you feel responsible. So now there exists an unlikely bond. Let me further guess – somehow Brissot is behind this, a concealed agent of violence and retribution.”
“Something like that,” I said.
“All this is unfolding very nicely.”
I’d had enough. I picked up an empty bottle and flung it at the filthy, streaming wall. “Jesus, can you shut up and think of some way of helping?” I said.
Freud’s smile faded and he moved close to me, eyes reptilian, breath stinking. Something dark and sinister and frighteningly lost stared out at me. “You came to me, Rook. You sought me out. You chose not to ring for an ambulance.”
“He didn’t want one,” I said feebly.
“Exactly. So he is where he should be, and as he wants to be. The world’s trouble runs in mad lightning strikes. You can’t stop it.”
Marty groaned. The stain in his middle seemed like a red sun. Freud looked at him and smiled gently. “Pilgrim. You’d like something to ease all this?”
“Yes,” Marty gasped.
Freud rummaged through a cardboard box, found a bottle and poured half the contents into a filthy mug. He offered it to Marty, who sipped it. Freud held his nose until Marty’s mouth opened and then tipped in the rest. Marty gagged but swallowed and lay back, rasping. Within a minute he opened his eyes, pupils hugely dilated, and seemed to relax.
“It was never meant to be like this. Me and Andy were OK. Why did I always want bloody more?” He laughed as if everything in the universe had dissolved into a huge joke, and his pain had migrated to a far country. Then he sat bolt upright and looked around. “Oh yes! I see it coming!” he said.
I moved to him but Freud stayed me with a hand. Marty slowly lay down again and his breathing slowed to almost nothing. Finally, after what seemed like an age he said, “It’s done,” and stopped.
I took his pulse but it was silent. He was silent.
“What did you give him?” I asked.
“My own special brew. Heroin, morphine, diazepam.”
“Enough to kill him.”
“More than enough to send him on his merry way. Wei la la. Au revoir Marty the Pilgrim. Perhaps we should intone a few words over the recently departed.” He opened the battered bible. “‘Behold with a great plague will the Lord smite thy people and thy children, and thy wives, and all thy goods: And thou shalt have great sickness by disease of thy bowels, until thy bowels fall out by reason of the sickness day by day.’ Two, Chronicles, twenty one, verses fourteen and fifteen. Beautiful and fitting.”
He smiled at Marty’s body. Freud had to be one of the most unhinged people I’d ever come across. I felt sick and weary, but with a growing bile which I recognised was a simple desire for retribution. I wanted payback. Freud was looking at me.
“I have one more crucial piece of information about Brissot which will be of use to you,” he said.
“What is it?” I asked.
“First, you have to pay the Ferryman,” he said, glancing at Marty’s body. “How much left do you have to spend on your credit card?”
“Probably eight or nine hundred,” I said.
“Then that’s the price. Let’s go,” he said, standing.
I looked at the body. “But what about Marty?”
“Sweet Thames, ding dang dong flow softly while I sing my song while the dead men shred their bones. Some of my subjects will dispatch him down river, where he will roll out into the broiling Atlantic and swell and fatten and feed the leviathan. How much more fitting than being fried in a bloody crematorium microwave. How much grander. Let’s go. The shops aren’t open forever.”
Everything with Freud had a price. It was also as if gaining information from him demanded a penance, and some new twist, perhaps to see how far he could go. In my case it was quite a distance, especially as now the bit was between my teeth. He told me we would have a beggar’s banquet that would be talked about in the Tunnel for years to come.
And so it was that I found myself with Freud and four of his raggedy followers, all looking like something freshly trawled from a sewer, and smelling as ripe, Freud at the head wheeling a battered, rusty supermarket trolley into Harrods. Customers stood aside in horror. We got to the food hall and Freud stopped in front of a salesman, a short man who looked him up and down with undisguised contempt. The name tag on his lapel – Harold Stoper.
“We wish to avail ourselves of one of your majestic hampers,” Freud beamed.
“Perhaps you’d be better off at the Salvation Army, sir,” said Harold.
Freud smiled broadly. This was exactly the sort of battle he’d hoped for. “Well, Harold, the servility, the condescending sneer, the façade of good manners beneath which lurks the threat of violence – how familiar it all is.” He leaned in closely and whispered, “Call security because we’re not leaving, and also call the fucking manager too, bonzo.”
Within five minutes a security guard and the manager arrived, the latter an equally chubby man with an Hercule Poirot moustache. Anxious as I was to leave, I found Freud’s manipulation of events compelling. It was like being part of a surreal ragamuffin opera. He allowed confusion to reign for a few minutes, then took a whistle from his pocket and blew it shrilly. Everyone stopped. The manager looked around for help that wouldn’t come. The Ralph Lauren suits, Prada shoes and three hundred pound haircuts all stared in curious disgust.
“Standards of courtesy here have been woefully remiss, so far,” said Freud grandly to everyone, taking out and waving a wad of notes fresh from my account. The manager smiled, now beetroot cheeked, hoping this was a bad dream. “Our money is as good as the next person’s, is it not? We are a democracy,” continued Freud. “But old Harold here is letting the side down badly. The Napoleon syndrome. Inferiority complex. A handicapped personality striving to compete. Bedwetter as a child. Failed at school. Unsuccessful with women. Fearing he is an intellectual dwarf, he has, in fact, become one.”
Harold now wanted to kill Freud. The manager stepped in and decided to make the best of a bad job.
“See to these customers,” he said, and marched away.
The horrified Harold had to endure twenty minutes of humiliation before two Belgravia Hampers, stuffed with champagne truffles, blueberry conserve, pâtés and cheeses, two cases of Hostomme champagne and a few bottles of brandy, were piled on the trolley and Freud led his merry band out. I caught up with him. He was sniffing a ripe cherry camembert.
“Now your end of the bargain,” I said.
He smiled at me.
“The
coup de grace. Brissot is not Brissot.”
“What does that mean?”
“He is an invention. A fabrication. Persona non gratis.”
“He made up an identity for himself?”
“No. I did.”
I wasn’t expecting this. Freud’s methods of psychotherapy were unorthodox. He told me that Brissot was actually Charlie Haynes, formerly an intelligent but severely depressed young thug who worked for a criminal gang called the Hooleys as a drug runner. Freud gave him free therapy in exchange for cocaine. Charlie had a dispute with his boss, Declan Hooley, and battered him to death with a baseball bat. He ran to Freud, who gave him a new identity and the rumour circulated that Charlie had disappeared to South America. Brissot began his own little empire and flourished. Freud said that at some level Charlie now really believed he was Brissot. He had a birth certificate, passport, both testifying to the fact. Charlie had evaporated.
“Why didn’t you tell me this before?” I asked.
“Because I was waiting for the cheese,” he said, sniffing another rare cheese, “and now I have it. The knowledge is yours. It appealed to me because he thought he was acquiring a venerable name but didn’t realise I chose it because no one knows the truth about Brissot. Was he a spy? Where did his sympathies really lie? His identity is ambiguous. That’s why it appealed to me. Charlie’s vanity only allowed him to see glamour and romance whereas I saw an identity mess. If you take the lid off Charlie’s psyche you will find a cauldron of maggots and something dark and formless. Some might call it evil.”
I left him leading his people back to the Tunnel. He turned and waved.
“I’ll see you very soon,” he said, knowingly.
Chapter Twenty
The lunatics have taken over the asylum.
Richard Rowland (attributed)
I went home to shower and change. Cass was immersed in her paper on laughter. It was wonderful to see her so engrossed. Pride welled in me, along with a great longing for this moment to still everything and annihilate the chaos of my life. She turned and smiled, then frowned.
“I’m thinking of focussing on the idea of laughter as Aristophanic ridicule of the world. Nietzsche’s notion that this is one of the great human inventions. What do you think?” she said.
For some absurd reason I wanted to cry.
“Perfect,” I said. “I’m already looking forward to reading it.”
“But don’t think I’m entirely taking a back seat on the case. I want to help,” she said.
An idea occurred to me.
“Actually, Cass, there is something you can do for me. I want you to ring a Community Centre and ask if a lad called Kev is OK. Tell him Dr. Rook sends his best wishes. It is related to the case.”
I gave her the number. She looked at me curiously, then smiled and nodded. We had a deal.
I changed and went to the university. I made my apologies for not attending a Research and Development meeting I was meant to be chairing. Mrs. Simpson made some coffee and we chatted while Alfred did a great impersonation of my more pompous ramblings in the background: “It is sometimes an appropriate response to reality to go insane… the truth of things is only a temporary agreement between people until they realise they are all wrong…” I realised that Kierkegaard’s cage needed cleaning and that the little hairy philosopher himself was in need of a radical diet. Mrs. Simpson said she’d keep him on seeds and grapes for a week. I deleted a dozen emails from Audrey without reading them. All the time I had been mulling over my next move and now decided to go into the lion’s den.
First I rang Lizzie and got the answerphone. I left a message saying I loved her and that I knew, secretly, she didn’t want a divorce and thinks of me constantly. David picked up and told me to fuck off – he still hasn’t forgiven me for stealing Labour Party data from his computer and for humiliating him in front of his constituents. How petty. Some people can’t let the smallest things go. I took two of my fake ID badges from a file marked PLATO and IDEALISM in my battered old cabinet. I went online and printed out several dozen photographs. Twenty minutes later I stopped at a superstore and bought an official looking blue cotton jacket and trousers and a peaked cap.
I had a sense that this time I wasn’t being watched. My stalker and potential killer had screwed up, so perhaps Brissot aka Charlie Haynes had withdrawn him, albeit temporarily. It was time to let the cat among the pigeons, timely to make things happen. I drove to Dockside and to the offices of one Eric Tripp, financial consultant with a penchant for international charity work. As I walked along there was a faint bloodstain on the pavement that London feet and drizzle still hadn’t washed away. London is built on the bones and blood of the multitudes and Marty had now made his contribution. I buzzed myself in by saying I had a parcel to deliver. At Reception I asked to see Mister Tripp and was told he was not in the office at present. I said my name was Jacques Brissot and it was bloody urgent. Moments later a tall, harried looking man with beetle brows and a tanned, leathery face, appeared and looked at me blankly. This told me he really did know Brissot, and not only know but fear him. I quickly flashed my fake police ID.
“Detective Sergeant Dawson. Fraud squad.” I smiled. “A word in private.”
“Of course, Detective Sergeant,” he said.
We went to his office and he sat behind a black and chrome desk and tried to compose his thoughts. He was a worried man.
“Mister Tripp. Just now you pretended to be out until the name Jacques Brissot was mentioned. Can you tell me the nature of your association with Mister Brissot?”
“I have many clients. Can you tell the nature of your enquiries?”
“Routine. This is not an official visit, just informal enquiries. However, if you prefer your lawyer to be present, that’s fine. I can wait. Usually when people insist on calling their lawyer they have something to hide, so I’m happy to wait.”
“Is that a veiled threat, Detective Sergeant?”
“Nothing veiled about it, Mister Tripp. I know that you are giving a spuriously legitimate front to a multimillion scam involving fake pharmaceuticals which cause hundreds of thousands of deaths. I suggest that you supply the initial paperwork, means for channelling funds offshore, then help create the bureaucratic fudge to ensure that any criminal investigation runs into a wall of confusion.”
A moment’s silence in which the Titanic sank. I could almost see his world crumble behind the rheumy, frightened eyes.
“I think you’d better leave now, Detective Sergeant… I didn’t get your name,” he said, a line of sweat above his upper lip.
“I’ll leave these with you,” I said, taking a brown envelope of photographs of dying people I’d downloaded in my office. “I thought you might want to send flowers, given that their deaths lie at your door too. What is it Brissot has on you? Drugs? Girls? Porn?”
I left, leaving him both furious and alarmed. His eyes twitched when I mentioned porn so I assumed there were a few dirty secrets in E.T.’s little life. I surmised it would take him five seconds of terrified thought before he telephoned Charlie boy.
Having planted one little time bomb it was time for my second. I drove to Hertfordshire, through the well-heeled villages where, with a stretch of the fancy and a few glasses of Chablis, Merrie England could still be imagined. I knew Charlie would not be at home – he’d be after Tripp; he wouldn’t go to his office in case the place was being watched but would probably arrange to meet him somewhere neutral to find out exactly what Detective Sergeant Dawson had to say. It surely wouldn’t take Charlie and Tripp long to work out they’d been scammed, and probably not much longer before they realised who it was, but by then I wanted to have driven the nails in a little deeper. I only hoped Charlie would take Darnel Thompson with him. If not I could be truly shipwrecked.
I drove up Cucumber Lane to Bedwell Lodge, now wearing my blue cotton suit and peaked cap. I parked in the lane and picked up thirteen small pebbles, then thirteen flower petals from wild daisies, a
nd pocketed them. As I approached Bedwell Lodge, I heard a song belting out from somewhere. I walked in the drive and around to the gardens. Manicured lawn, well-tended rose garden, tennis court beyond. A young woman in a leopard skin bikini was lying either asleep or unconscious on a flower bed embracing a large croquet hammer. A French bay window looked in on a large elegant drawing room with a grand piano, a couple copulating furiously on top of it. Tom Jones’ horrible song Sexbomb blasted from open windows and five metres up on a wide sill above a bay window, a chubby young man with ginger wavy hair and wearing what seemed to be a giant nappy was doing a lewdly provocative dance and miming the words: Cause you’re a sexbomb sexbomb you’re a sexbomb uh, huh, you can give it to me when I need to come along give it to me sexbomb sexbomb you’re my sexbomb and baby you can turn me on baby you can turn me on…
I resisted the impulse to vomit and went to the front of the house. I knocked on the front door and could hear noise within but no one answered. I pushed the door open and entered a short dark hallway. I called out but there was no response. At the end of the hallway was a beautifully carved oak staircase, and to the right was the drawing room with the couple on the piano. They were clearly busy with their duet, so I turned left, through a small dining room, then a kitchen area. A young man was sitting cross legged on a wooden table smoking a hookah pipe and was clearly away with the fairies of Bedwell. It looked like crystal meth. I waved a hand in front of his eyes and they followed seconds later. The brain was on a serious time delay.
“Hello. I’m from the water board,” I said showing my fake ID.
He looked blank.
“There’s a problem – leakage into the mains from a sewage farm. I need to check the whole place. Is the owner here? Jacques Brissot?”
He focused, then said wavily, “Gone. Gone,” and fluttered an arm out.
“Is that you, sir, or Mister Brissot? Gone, I mean?”
“Jacques gone,” he said.
“And Darnel Thompson?”
“Gone. All gone.”
Beyond Good and Evil Page 9