The Natural Law

by Steve Attridge

  The Natural Law

  Steve Attridge

  © Steve Attridge 2014

  Steve Attridge has asserted his rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.

  First published in 2014 by Endeavour Press Ltd.

  This edition published in 2018 by Endeavour Media Ltd.

  Table of Contents

  Chapter I

  Chapter II

  Chapter III

  Chapter IV

  Chapter V

  Chapter VI

  Chapter VII

  Chapter VIII

  Chapter IX

  Chapter X

  Chapter XI

  Chapter XII

  Chapter XIII

  Chapter XIV

  Chapter XV

  Chapter XVI

  Chapter XVII

  Chapter XVIII

  Chapter XIX

  Chapter XX

  Chapter XXI

  Chapter XXII

  Chapter XXIII

  Chapter I

  ‘We are all equals in thinking about death, and we all begin and end thinking about it from a position of ignorance... Having no content, we must speak of death metaphorically.’

  Jeff Mason

  Even as I approached from behind and her head was down looking at something on the laptop, I knew she was trouble. I was right about the nail varnish but hadn’t anticipated a blonde. Red handbag, red shoes. If this was a film she would signify danger and sex. Given that it was Marylebone station on a rainy, chilled night, what I could see now as I sat opposite her and she snapped the laptop shut was grief like slashes of sky, etched beneath the make-up and in the lost blue eyes, which also saw menace in everything. The eyes flicked around like nervous little creatures with lives of their own and she couldn’t focus. I guessed she had an attention span of about ten seconds, but that was because she was troubled, not stupid.

  She’d sent a message to my Rook Investigations website earlier in the day. I felt the familiar twinge of excitement born of fear that is one of my many poisons. An addict of danger despite being something of a coward, I always wonder if this is the one that carves out a road to some new and hopeless derangement of knowledge and pain. Marylebone station. 6 pm tonight. Victoria and Albert outside tables opposite Burger King. I’ll have an open red laptop on the table. MK. No name, just initials. Why Marylebone? Nice and public but not too big or busy, even at 6 pm. Perhaps it meant they were coming from out of town, like me, and had timed the meeting for trains in and out. Red laptop. Flamboyant. Someone who wants to make a statement, but if they want to do it through the colour of a laptop, they can only be desperate. Red. No, a woman. I made a bet with myself. Twenty pounds says it’s a woman, probably with matching red fingernails, perhaps even coat or shoes. A woman with a problem…and a secret. I was right, except for her being blonde.

  “You’re alone?” she asked.

  “Ain’t no one here but me and the pigeons.”

  “You’re not what I expected.”

  “You were expecting a six foot five Puerto Rican with a bandolier of bullets across his naked chest and a sabre scar down one cheek?”

  “Just someone better dressed and less exhausted looking. Someone to inspire a bit of confidence. I bet you never take off that greasy old leather jacket. ”

  “I’ve made a mental note of that and when we next meet I’ll wear a Gucci suit and a deep tan. And you’re right. I wear this jacket every day. It’s the most enduring relationship I’ve ever had.”

  She didn’t smile. Neither did I. We had yet to unearth something funny and I assumed that whatever she wanted me for would not be a barrel of laughs. I looked at her and calculated.

  “Within a three mile radius of the Elephant and Castle. Maybe Blackheath. Left school at sixteen but did…a course in Beauty Care – nails and stuff. Then when the two kids came along you gave it up and anyway there was money coming in so you didn’t need to work. But you have aspirations. There’s a Dickens novel poking out of your bag. You probably did evening classes. At your local tech.”

  Now I had her attention, she looked at me properly. Her anxiety level racked up to about six on the Richter scale.

  “How did you know who I am?” she asked, surprise overcoming the nest of trouble inside her.

  “I don’t know who you are. I just know a few things about you.”

  “I came from Peckham, not Blackheath. And I did evening classes at Goldsmiths. I’ve since done a lot of things. How did you know I’ve got two kids?”

  “There’s a Little Pony sticker on your laptop, so I knew you had a girl, unless you’ve never grown up, and meeting at six suggests you had post school arrangements to make, and you mentioned Burger King so you knew where it was. You’re not a BK girl, but my guess is you have a son who loves it; usually girls prefer Macdonald’s. I imagine you waiting for a train while your son tucks into a double cheese.”

  “Clever patronising sod.”

  “Sometimes I get things spectacularly wrong. I also know from the way you’ve been twiddling your wedding ring that all isn’t well with your marriage. Your husband missing?”

  “He’s dead.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  I got us coffee and she told me her story. Her name was Mary King. Her husband had been Andy King, a second tier criminal, often the front man for overseas deals – stolen or pirated DVDs, electrical goods, but he’d got a hitch up to the big time, she said, though she didn’t know what it was. For once he hadn’t felt it was safe to tell her. He’d started to behave oddly – not sleeping, anxious all the time, then he was called to Istanbul, apparently for a business meeting, which was not uncommon, and was found in his hotel room, shot through the head. The day of the funeral Mary received a text. She showed me. Andy deserved it. Say nothing and I’ll leave you and your children alone. Gladiator. Number unknown. This raised a lot of questions. What was Andy involved in? What had he done to annoy someone to the point of murder? What did Mary know that she should keep to herself? Who was Gladiator? Presumably not Russell Crowe. She had no answers. By talking to me she had probably already put herself in danger. Perhaps she knew something without knowing its significance. After an hour all I had were more questions. She gave me two regular contact names – a Jamaican called Loz and someone who occasionally fenced goods called Jimmy the Stump, due to the fact he had only one hand. She had brought me Andy’s address book and a few transit documents for stolen goods. She said he’d done a lot of business in Istanbul recently. I told her to email me details of payments in and out of their bank account for the past year.

  She looked at her phone. Time to go.

  “It wasn’t a marriage made in heaven but it was all I had,” she said. “He loved the kids. The dream was to earn a lot for a few years then disappear – I fancied Fiji.” A tear rolled down one cheek. I don’t go in for grief counselling with clients so I looked down until she recovered.

  “I’ll make a start. A hundred pounds a day plus expenses. It’s cheaper than anyone else but I do my best. Watch your back. If you notice anyone hanging around your house, or if you get calls from someone you don’t know contact me. You’ve got my number?” She didn’t have my number, which means she couldn’t have given it to anyone else. “One last question. What do you want from this?”

  Something hardened in her.

  “I just want to know who it was. I want a name for my husband’s killer so I can curse it.”

  Fair enough. I watched her walk away, carrying her little universe of pain. Criminals, and the complicit wives of criminals, are simply people who’ve made different choices. I often prefer them to the rest of humanity because they have
the sniff of danger about them, the simper of secrets. It isn’t that I like them; they are just sometimes more interesting to observe. Also, there was always the remote possibility that if my father is still alive, I may come across him. All I know is that he was a middle ranking gang member, mostly warehouse thefts, a few lorry heists. I have a dog eared photograph where he is all shadows but there is the suggestion of a crooked smile. My mother told me nothing when I was growing up, and now she is mostly away with the fairies, so even if she wanted to tell me something it would probably come in a stream of consciousness only those same fairies would comprehend. I must visit her soon.

  Before I’d even met Mary King I had a sense something was about to happen. It’s like a buzzing in the ears. You can’t see the bug but you know it’s there in the dark, near, and that it means you harm. Senses heighten, things accrue significance. For me it began with looking at a car crash. Everything connects eventually.

  Chapter II

  ‘Where there is mystery, it is generally suspected there must also be evil.’

  Bertolt Brecht

  The car seems to make up its own mind. A blood red jaguar bored with the monotony of traffic breaks ranks, and increases speed as it careers across to the lanes of oncoming traffic, spilling a helmeted cyclist who cartwheels through the air like a kicked beetle. A terrified woman yanks back her pram before the car vaults the pavement, now apparently determined to launch into the Thames propelled by a twin turbo death wish. The front buckles as it slams the wall, a lurch of metal and rubber as it takes the impact, the driver’s white head smacking into the windscreen and bouncing back. The head breaks; the glass does not even crack. Bullet-proof. Probably the whole car is armoured against imaginary attacks, all at taxpayers expense, supported by the erroneous conviction that a politician’s life is worth more than the rest of us. Hugh Dillsburgh, MP for somewhere in the shires and big cheese in the Foreign Office. RIP. I wondered what would happen to the car. Even after a rip like this it would be worth the collective annual salaries of ten sheet metal workers.

  “Dad, how many more times are you going to watch that crash? You’re weird.”

  Cass, my beloved daughter, my avocation, my palliative and occasional torment, sat on the sofa in my cramped living room, looking at me with her ruminating mix of bewilderment, love and approbation. Living with me off and on, alternating between maternal concern and childish horror at my own car crash of a life, our love burns bright in the darkness between us. Since she discovered my double life, philosophy lecturer by day, Rook Investigations by inclination, I had not so much risen in her esteem as cracked the grid by which she could measure me. I was simply a father, fact. I was also, bizarrely, her university tutor and tomorrow morning I would enter my office, ten minutes late, to begin her 2nd year option course on Natural Law. I tried to work out how, given that I had no desire to teach the unteachable to a bunch of debt ridden teenagers, even if Cass was one of them, I could end the session early. I am as passionate about ideas as I am dispassionate about teaching.

  I stopped the YouTube film of the crash, helpfully captured by some passer-by on their iPhone. The official mainstream news, never to be trusted, said he had suffered a fatal heart attack. He would be loved and missed by all. A man of remarkable abilities and abundant integrity. A sure sign he was probably a weasel of the first order, but I am biased and have an ulterior motive for watching this little drama on a loop. Dear old Hugh was the boss of David, my former best friend and now my ex-wife’s lover. I kept watching in the ludicrous hope that David would suddenly appear in the car, and would die as horribly as his beloved boss. We are all creators of our own life scripts and are infuriated when our central role is suddenly usurped, when our desires are thwarted, and we realise we are not the author of our lives at all, but, like Prufrock, a bit part, a footman to our own passing time, a pair of ragged claws. And so it was, David Hills, MP and dipshit of the first order, remained annoyingly intact, and would no doubt at this moment be cradling a glass of Merlot in one hand and my ex-wife Lizzie’s breast in the other as he launched into a sanctimonious dribble of lamenting grief, while secretly hoping that the now very vacant diplomatic post would drop greasily into his open paws. I often find that if you think the worst of people, you are rarely disappointed. However, I was already asking other questions. Did the glorious Hugh have a history of heart problems? Why wasn’t he wearing a seat belt? Did he normally drive himself? Would anyone else ask them? Probably not.

  Then I got the message from Mary King. After talking to her I decided to see Jimmy the Stump first. I planned to go the next day. Before that I had to show my face at the university. In my department changes were abounding with all the excitement of having a wart removed. New scents. The dying air beating feebly with new blood. I had successfully engineered a complete nervous breakdown for my Head of Department, Jeremy Tregown, a bitter and incomplete man who underestimated his nemesis – me. Someone should have warned him to go quietly into that goodnight of academic obscurity and not seek conflicts for which he was entirely unfitted. He was neither generous nor gifted and I feel no remorse. I wandered down the corridor when the new Head of Department’s door opened. Audrey Pritchard, Professor of Social Something-not-very-interesting, white startled hair, anaemic and bowelled, squinty, wet lips, a hint of the Georgian fop about her. She smiled, her mouth like cooing baby eels.

  “Dr. Rook, hail fellow well met. A minute of your time.”

  “I’m late for my seminar,” I smiled back.

  “Then you’ll be a minute later,” she said, and I entered her inner sanctum. It was a scary cave of graphs and charts and numbers sanctified by a few posters of Suffragettes.

  “Your reputation goes before you and, as we both know, a reputation is a dangerous thing,” she said, still smiling.

  “I have a reputation?”

  “For going your own sweet way. For being cavalier. A law unto yourself.”

  “Who would have thought?”

  “And I just wanted to say how much I admire those qualities. And wouldn’t it be a salutary thing if we could harness them to enhance the profile of the department? Which is why I’ve drawn up this.” She produced a neatly printed sheet of A4 with my name at the top and next to it the ominous phrase: ‘TARGET SHEETS FOR AUTUMN SEMESTER’. “You’ll see I’ve given you a pleasing range and balance of targets for the next three months. Purely academic, administrative and pastoral. I want you to find yourself in these challenges. I’ll be monitoring them closely and my door is always open.”

  I glanced at my next three months. One conference paper, a book proposal, designing a distance learning module and I was also to be PDP (Personal Development Plan) Staff Tutor.

  “I’ve taken the liberty of calling your first Staff PDP meeting on Friday at 5.30 pm. We don’t want it cutting into the ordinary working day, do we? Anything you’d like to ask?”

  “Yes, more of a request, really.”

  She continued smiling.

  “Could you stop smiling? It has associations of dementia. Hospitals. Cabbage. Decay.”

  Battle lines had been drawn. I got to my office and then couldn’t face it. The salt had gone from me. I opened the door and a dozen fresh faces turned.

  “Cancelled. Afraid the new Head of Department insists I count paper clips for the next two hours. Think about the following: what is the relationship between what is good and what is right in theories of Natural Law?”

  Cass looked at me and shook her head wearily.

  In the car park I took a few deep breaths of suburban chill and got in my ancient Saab. I thought I would cold call on Jimmy. Sometimes if people know you’re coming they prepare what to say. I like to catch them off guard sometimes. During the drive I amused myself with plotting the perfect murder so that David would be out of my life forever and Lizzie, my beloved ex, crystal woman of my whisky dreams, would grieve and I would comfort her with honeyed words and wine, and we would dissolve out of our c
lothes into bed and all would be restored, and the myriad complex brutalities of betrayal and the thousand small shocks that weaken love and ache the flesh would be gone in the darkness of an eternal night.

  My phone bleated and I read a new text: Marylebone. Good meeting? So it begins. Gladiator. Number unknown. Only Cass could have known about my meeting, unless someone had hacked my laptop, and that had never happened before. I had every firewall and viral protection known to man and machine. And why were they so interested? I had barely started this investigation and already someone was monitoring me, presumably the same person who contacted Mary King and probably killed her husband.

  *

  Jimmy lived near Baker Street in a tall red brick building of apartments. I rang and said on the intercom that I was a friend of Andy King’s. He buzzed me in. I walked up two flights of grim stairs that smelled of sour milk and rotten vegetables. He opened the door and looked me up and down, then stood aside and I entered a world of birds.

  In the small living room there were over fifty cages, with budgerigars, canaries, macaws, small grey parrots, and many varieties I couldn’t recognise, but all watchful, chirruping, bobbing on perches, hitting tiny bells with their heads, looking crazily in mirrors. There must have been sixty birds in the little room. I started to count but they kept moving and I stopped eventually at fifty eight. A dozen or so green and blue budgies clung to the curtains and one flew up to me and perched on my shoulder.

  “Griselda. She likes you. Must be your smell. Usually she hides from strangers.”

  I knew from the din that the adjoining rooms were also full of birds. The Bird Man of Bakerloo. I could see why. Living in a city gives you the illusion of movement and life, whereas in reality you are a brick in the wall. The birds gave him a promise of flight, a dream of escape, but despite the cacophony of twitters and cheeps and the abundance of feathery life, it depressed me. Caged birds give me the jitters. I can’t breathe. My throat closes and I want to free them, then run with them until they are safely skywards and free of the world, until some predator bites off their head. I’m the same with zoos, now politely called bio parks or conservation parks, but still a place where you cage wild creatures and charge people to gawp at them. As much as Jimmy clearly loved these birds, from looking around the room I could see abnormalities, such as repetitive behaviour; a blue-green budgie head weaves back and forth, another shifts constantly from one foot to the other; there was obsessive grooming in which several birds were plucking out their owns feathers, and aggressive behaviour as two singing canaries cheeped harmoniously then tried to peck a lump from each other. Things caged diminish me. I’d rather take my chances in the jungle than die quietly in the airport lounge.