Trilogy: The First Three Books in the Amber For Go Series

by Paul Harris

  Sol could see the dark iron fence of the park ahead of him. The branches of a birch tree hung over the fence as if they were bidding to escape the confines of the park. He heard voices as he passed the factory on his left. Two ghostly figures were standing in the entrance to the alleyway, almost engulfed in shrubbery. They seemed to be having some kind of whispered altercation. Sol glanced surreptitiously in their direction to see if he could recognise them. He couldn’t. Although he could see that they were both thick set men, he couldn’t see their faces. It was almost as if they had no faces.

  At the corner, he turned into Park Lane, crossed the road, and ran his hand along the railings. He sucked in the almost intoxicating breath of the foliage beyond the fence. Flowers of all colours and descriptions perfumed the air and lent a beauty to the world the like of which nature alone can produce. He paused outside the gate of the park because he felt as though he were being followed. He turned around and looked back down the street but no one was there. He put it down to the feeling of paranoia that had of late descended on him. A grey squirrel caught his attention as it skipped along a branch above his head, rustling leaves and spilling tiny twigs into the street.

  Sol toyed with the idea of buying an ice cream from the van that was parked near the gate but relented. A match appeared to be taking place on the bowling green on the far side of the park. Through the open gate he could see people sitting in the small pavilion and on the scattered benches. Some of them occasionally clapped their hands together but from where he was standing he couldn’t hear the applause over the sound of the trees gently rustling overhead and children screaming in the playground.

  Sol crossed the main road and entered Darwin Street. The houses all looked the same. Outside one of the houses, two women were sitting on deck chairs in their front garden chatting. An old tumble drier lay on its side in the long grass beyond them. Its door was missing and Sol wondered, quite pointlessly, what had become of it. He removed his hood and said, “Morning, ladies.”

  The women, for indeed they were no ladies, scowled back at him without breaking from their conference. He smiled to himself, satisfied with the predictability of their surliness. He took the newspaper from his pocket and scanned the front page for the fourth time and continued on his errand.

  Several houses along, a man was washing his car. His vintage Cortina sat on some crooked and cracked paving slabs that the man had laid amongst the soil and beaten grass. There was no dropped kerb to facilitate the vehicle sallying forth among its more contemporary descendants. The Cortina had come to this place to die but, for now, its immaculate yellow paintwork and chrome wing mirrors sparkled in the sun. The man stepped back, chamois leather in hand, to proudly admire his completed project.

  “Good morning,” said Sol cheerfully as he went by, also casting an admiring look at the old car. The man pretended not to hear him. Sol folded the newspaper and walked the last few metres on to his destination.

  He raised the brass door knocker at number forty-seven and rattled it against its brass plate several times. He waited. There was no reply. He knocked again, this time with a little more gusto and began to feel impatience creeping into his already fraught disposition. When no reply was forthcoming to his third round of yet more frenetic knocking he turned and walked back along the garden path to the white-painted wooden gate. He laid a hand on the shiny steel latch and then paused. He paced back to the front door and knocked again, this time with his clenched fist. Still there was no answer. He took the newspaper from his pocket, rolled it up as tightly as he could and fed it into the letterbox in the middle of the door. He heard it drop onto the floor inside the house. Satisfied that this was the best that he could do, he walked back along the path, passing the white car that was parked next to him on the drive. He closed the gate carefully behind him, making sure to secure the latch, and retraced his steps along the street, kicking out at a length of steel that was lying abandoned on the pavement. It span to a halt beneath an over-hanging bush.

  “Morning,” said the man who owned the mark 4 Cortina, his sleeves rolled up and soap suds all over his hands.

  “Too late!” Sol snapped at him.

  The two women were still sitting on their chairs talking without breathing. One of them was balancing a cup and saucer in her lap, the other was inhaling from a cigarette. They watched him as he walked past them. Sol wondered why it was that their natural facial expressions oozed so much malevolence and mistrust. They began to talk about him. He couldn’t hear what they were saying but he knew that they were talking about him. He wondered what it was they thought they had to say about him. He pulled his hood back over his head defiantly, and then crossed the road. He bought an ice cream and entered the park.

  Timmy stood outside the café and watched Sol walk all the way to the end of Ambrose Street and turn right at the park. He decided to take a walk down to the river with no particular purpose in mind. He wondered why it was that his friend seemed so jumpy of late. He wondered why he was so scared of Rodney, and he wondered if Rodney was really all that bad. Everything was so confusing.

  Sammy Patel was standing outside his shop talking across the street to one of the taxi drivers who was parked outside the cab office on the opposite corner. He and Timmy nodded an acknowledgement to one another as he passed and Sammy continued to talk to the driver in a language that Timmy couldn’t understand. There was much that he failed to understand and all he wanted to do was make sense of it all.

  The traffic was standing still in both directions pumping out toxins into the atmosphere. The traffic was almost always stationary along Bridge Road as they queued incessantly for the lights to change to amber at the junction with the High Street. The fumes made Timmy feel ill; they made him feel dizzy. He suspected that the carbon monoxide rotted your brain cells and made you impotent, and that this theory of his would account for an awful lot of the strange behaviour that he personally witnessed on a daily basis.

  He noticed Bothwell walking towards him along the opposite side of the road. He called out to him but couldn’t be heard over the steady and endless hum of idling engines. He waved but Bothwell didn’t see him. He watched as Bothwell stopped outside the Trumpet and spoke to Henshaw House. They seemed to speak for quite some time. The traffic lights changed and the queue inched towards the bridge ever so slightly. Timmy’s view of the Trumpet was obscured by the words “Fowler Welch” painted high on the side of an articulated lorry, so he walked on.

  A crowd of people were standing outside the Volunteer gazing towards the river. Blue lights were reflecting and flashing off the whitewashed walls of the underground station. A double decker bus had stopped at the lights near to the cinema and hadn’t moved for an age. Timmy couldn’t see beyond it but he knew that something bad was happening. Instead of bustling along with their eyes to the ground and their heads in the clouds, pedestrians were milling around and loitering on corners; twitchily looking around them; taking everything in where normally they would be quite content to absorb nothing at all of their environment. The obligatory camera phones were unsheathed and presented at arm’s length to the unfolding scene.

  The bus driver pounced on a rare opportunity and dragged his bus through the narrowest of gaps between two cars, across the junction and onto his stop in the High Street. Now Timmy could see.

  The bridge approach was cordoned off and there were police cars parked along it for almost as far as the eye could see. An ambulance was blocking the footpath outside Tattoo Palace. Its back doors were wide open but no one was inside it. A flashing blue halo engulfed the whole scene. Policemen were speaking into two-way radios. Timmy could hear them crackling with static even from where he stood. One of the police cars sounded its siren and sped off across the bridge as if in hot pursuit of somebody. A helicopter passed overhead but it was impossible to see whether it was a police helicopter or not against the sun which had risen high in the sky like the Star of Bethlehem over Tattoo Palace.

  A female police o
fficer began to bark instructions and the assembled constables organised themselves into a line. They removed the blue and white striped tape and pushed the gathered onlookers further back towards the traffic lights, and further back still, before reinstating the cordon. Two men in suits stood beside the shuttered up window of the tattoo parlour talking. They had grave and very important expressions on their faces. One of them took a packet of chewing gum from his pocket. He offered a stick of gum to his colleague before popping one into his own mouth. As he chewed, he turned his head towards the corrugated steel shutter behind him and pointed out the red graffiti to the detective sergeant beside him. The sergeant nodded, took out a notebook and wrote in it “rip spida”.

  Detective Inspector Chisholm called a police photographer over and instructed him to take a picture of the shutter before sending him inside the shop where the flashlight of his camera could be vaguely discerned from the street outside. Another police car drove off across the bridge but this time without sirens and without lights, and then another followed it. The party seemed to be breaking up until an unmarked Renault Espace approached the cordon and was hastily allowed through. A middle aged man with a neatly trimmed beard stepped from it. He shook hands with the two detectives, next to whom his tweed jacket and flannel trousers seemed oddly inappropriate. He took a medical bag from the Renault and was shown into the tattoo parlour by a policeman. The two detectives followed him. The flash of the photographer’s camera could still be occasionally seen through the gap between the curtains of an upstairs room.

  A paramedic emerged from the building and climbed into the back of the ambulance. Timmy watched him as he searched for something. He could see the beads of sweat on the medic’s brow but he saw no sense of urgency; no panic; just a very business-like routine. The medic wiped a sleeve across his forehead and took some sheets of paper from a cabinet. He re-entered Tattoo Palace as the photographer and the two detectives were coming out.

  Timmy crossed the road and began to force his way through the crowd towards the police barrier. At the tape, he noticed one of the police officers staring back at him. He instinctively looked away and saw Lola standing not five paces away from him. He edged towards him and tapped his elbow.

  “What happened?” he whispered.

  Lola wiped a film of sweat from his bald head with his open palm. “They found Spider.”

  Timmy opened his mouth. He was going to ask “where?” but even to him it seemed a ridiculous question under the circumstances so he decided to say nothing at all.

  But, Lola had already anticipated Timmy’s characteristic line of questioning. “In one of the bedrooms upstairs.” A police officer casually moved towards them and seemed to be listening to what Lola was saying which wasn’t very much at all.

  “Did he have a heart attack or something?”

  Lola looked at Timmy and shook his head grimly. “No. They’re saying he was blowed to bits.”

  Timmy gasped. “By a bomb?”

  “No, of course not by a bomb. The windows would be smashed to smithereens if there’d been a bomb. They’re saying he was shot up bad.” The policeman was still listening to them. He nodded at Lola as if to confirm the rumour.

  “Why?” asked Timmy, his eyes as wide as they had ever been. “What for?”

  Lola shrugged. “Who knows? I suppose it’ll all come out in the wash.”

  Timmy had always, up until now, held the belief that Lola very seldom did actually wash and even now could vaguely make out the aroma of stale body odour as Lola moved his arms around. “I suppose so,” he said.

  The man in the tweed jacket who, it appeared, was a police doctor of some description exited the tattoo parlour and headed back to his car. He was shortly followed by two ambulance men carrying a stretcher. Upon the stretcher was what looked like a bundle of blankets but it wasn’t. It was Spider or at least it was what remained of Spider. It was Spider’s corpse. Timmy gasped again and pointed silently at the body as if he thought he was the only person who could see it. A communal gasp, echoing Timmy’s gasp, worked its way around the crowd of onlookers. A distressed murmur broke out and then one or two voices became slightly raised. Untargeted indignation began to mount as the stretcher was slid into the back of the ambulance. A paramedic climbed in beside Spider and the two ambulance men returned to their seats in the front of the ambulance. The driver started the engine, the police opened up the cordon, and Spider was off to the big tattoo parlour in the sky, without the siren, without the flashing blue lights and without much excitement at all.

  The crowd began to disperse but the police cordon would remain where it was for the best part of another week. Lola and Timmy looked at one another with awe in their faces. Lola wiped more perspiration from his head.

  “Do you know you’ve got soup or something all down the front of your shirt?” Timmy said.

  “It’s vegetable madras,” replied Lola in a very matter-of-fact tone of voice as the two of them headed back towards the Pig & Whistle to perform their very own post-mortem.

  Archway Station

  I didn’t know what to do. Who would know what to do? You see detective programmes on television every day but, in reality, where would you actually start? So, I decided, in the spirit of all great detectives from Columbo to Miss Marple, to begin at the scene of the crime.

  I travelled up to Archway on the train one Sunday morning, catching the bus down to South Wimbledon and jumping on the Northern Line. To my surprise, the once thriving pub on the corner had been turned into a supermarket. I bought a newspaper for the long and tedious journey north but the idea that pubs were being transformed into yet more supermarkets gave me plenty to occupy my mind anyway and only added to my bitterness and feelings of injustice.

  Being a Sunday morning, there was for once no great crush. I had a carriage all to myself. The recently mopped floor shone and smelled, surprisingly pleasantly, of disinfectant. The seats were newly upholstered with blue fabric; the driver’s announcements were clear and informative and occasionally even humorous; the windows were clean with a noticeable lack of graffiti; this was indeed the age of the train.

  I spread my newspaper on my lap and began to idly scan the previous week’s football results from Germany and, lo and behold, England were top of their group; this despite Peter Crouch dragging some poor fellow around the pitch by his dreadlocks. When we arrived at Waterloo and the carriage started to fill up with tourists, I turned to the front page and immersed myself in a debate regarding the future of the Guantanamo Bay prison facility in the wake of three alleged suicides. By the time that I’d attempted to rationalise the practise of rectal rehydration and feeding as justifiable means of obtaining information, I arrived at Camden Town where I changed trains.

  I left my newspaper on my seat and marched along the white tiled corridor that links the two northbound platforms, weaving in and out of bewildered visitors and their cameras and their Harrods shopping bags. The next train was far busier than the one up from Wimbledon and I elected to stand by the door for the three remaining stops. As Kentish Town and Tufnell Park came and went, distant memories flashed before me: Weller at the old Town and Country Club; an Indian meal in Tufnell Park; the first time I ever had a balti.

  I leapt from the train at Archway and raced towards the escalator. I examined everything as I stepped into the ticket hall and fed my travelcard through the ticket machine. I scanned the walls and the floors without the remotest clue what I was looking for; a blood stain; a murder weapon possibly. But then, if there were a weapon the police would have long since discovered it, bagged it, and finger printed it. Any stains would have been eradicated by mop and bucket and copious amounts of bleach. I raised my eyes to the ceiling, despairingly, realising that I had, as everybody had warned me, embarked on a futile mission.

  The ticket booth was closed and there was a handwritten sign hanging in the kiosk window declaring as much. I thought I saw a smear of blood on a tiled pillar beside it and walked casually in tha
t direction. What would a trace of blood tell me? Nothing, that’s what, absolutely nothing. It was hopeless. On closer inspection the blood stain turned out to be a patch of discolouration on the ceramic tile.

  As I hovered aimlessly, a member of the Underground staff approached and hovered with me. She followed my gaze for several seconds until she could no longer contain herself.

  “Have you lost something?”

  I looked at her enquiringly, an element of confusion seemingly getting the better of me and turning me mute.

  She leant towards me and whispered as if I were an imbecile. “Are you looking for something, Dear?”

  I looked from the stained ceramic tile to her and back again. Then I looked her up and down and smiled. “Pardon?”

  “You seem to be looking for something. What did you lose?”

  “My friend.”

  “Were you supposed to meet them here?” she said, still talking in a tone of voice that suggested that she thought I’d lately escaped from some kind of asylum.

  “He was my only visitor. I feel like I owe him this.”

  “Do you know where you live?” she asked, ever so gently.

  “We weren’t always friends.” I looked her in the face. She had dark, dark skin and dark eyes. Her features were ageing pleasantly and her concerned smile suggested a tender nature. “Of course I know where I live. Why wouldn’t I know that?”