The Natural Law

by Steve Attridge

  An hour of banter and drinking. Cass clearly enjoyed his company and thought it good for me. She went out wherever daughters go when they want to worry their fathers, and Symon produced a bottle of Longmorn 1992 Malt Whisky, ninety pounds a bottle. An hour later it was three quarters gone, as was I, and Symon had told me his story. His trading company had started to make rollercoaster profits when the recession hit and people started buying gold. He brokered a US-China deal that minted his bank account and he woke up one morning realising that he need never work again. He sold the company at a huge profit and started travelling, and was now contemplating what to do with the rest of his life. No family. He said he’d become increasingly less interested in the amount of money he’d acquired and had already given a substantial amount away to an anti-gun lobby in the States. I asked why that in particular and he said an employee of his in the Michigan office had been shot walking home, and somehow he felt responsible. It was ridiculous but guilt is an irrational goblin of the night.

  I almost told him about my other life, but even the whisky couldn’t loosen my tongue that much. I cleared out my broom cupboard of a study, threw down a camp bed and before I’d brushed my teeth and wondered what colour my hangover would be tomorrow I could hear him gently snoring. It was good to see him. Almost a relief, as if the past had appeared to validate itself and me with it. Nostalgia is mostly a foreign country to me, but the combination of Symon and a bottle of whisky lifted the portcullis and all manner of madnesses cascaded through.

  I rang Lizzie.

  “It’s me,” I said. Not the most scintillating opening line.

  “It’s one in the morning,” she said.

  “It was your ability to tell the time that first made me fall in love with you.”

  “You’re drunk.”

  “Of course I am, otherwise I wouldn’t be ringing you to say that I still love you and will parade naked and shivering through the streets of Watford, flagellating myself with a toilet brush, in an attempt to win back your heart, but mostly your naked body.”

  She hung up. I fell into a dark sleep and had a dream about my father. He was standing over my bed and I looked up at the shadow and said, “Just let me see your face properly. Just once.” He said, “You’d only regret it.” The night caved in around me and I had a whisky sleep of turmoil and damage, the world shape-changing like a turbulent ocean that carried only indifferent violence in its heart.

  I looked a hundred years old in the morning, a fact confirmed by Cass as she gave me a mug of coffee and two aspirin.

  “How long is he staying?” she asked.

  “Not long, I’d imagine,” I said, my tongue trying not to strangle the words in its puffed misery. She looked at me smugly. “What?” I asked.

  “It’s just that it’s a bit of a first. You enjoying someone’s company. You do realise you have a seminar on Free Will this morning?”

  “Cass, I want you to put up a cancelled notice for me. I’m busy this morning. And ask Mrs Simpson if Alfred is OK.”

  “Who’s Alfred?”

  “I’m sharing my office with him.”

  “But you never share an office. You hate your colleagues.”

  “Alfred’s alright. Take in a few grapes for him.”

  I left her baffled and stumbled out into the grey misery of an English autumn.

  Chapter V

  ‘Those who are easily shocked should be shocked more often.’

  Mae West

  I found Loz playing an old fashioned flipper machine in an amusement arcade in Marine Parade in Southend. The drive down had done nothing to clear my head, but three coffees had made me twitchy and anxious. I counted four hundred and sixteen red cars and two hundred and twenty eight white cars on the way down. Don’t ask me why. I just count things. My mother used to bring me to Southend for caravan holidays when I was a child. The caravans always smelt damp and cabbagey, the communal toilets made me gag, but it nevertheless seemed incongruously exotic to me simply to be near the sludge-grey sea. We would trudge outside and put sticks in the ground and play Ashes – I would be England and she Australia and she always let me win. I must go and see her. Loz was late thirties, tall, black, rangy, cool in an exhausted way, and didn’t even look up when I introduced myself and mentioned Andy King. He slapped the flippers and the silver ball jangled and banged its course until it disappeared in a small hole.

  It was a gamble coming to see him. My talking to Jimmy had cost him his life. Did that mean Loz would be at risk too? I thought that perhaps the killer would feel he’d made his point and frightened me off. Perhaps he’d just got lucky in anticipating me going to see Jimmy. Also, what he didn’t know is that the possibility of being stalked was making me buzz. I thought Loz would be safe.

  “Yuh gat a cigarette?” he asked.

  “No, but I’ll buy you a pack if you take a stroll with me.”

  We walked along the pier, with the depressed paintwork and down at heel engineering of Adventure Island on the left – a rollercoaster covered with a tarpaulin looking like a mummified caterpillar. English seaside places at their worst are depressing and at their best have a beautiful melancholy about them. They are places for children and the elderly to live, and the rest of us to visit. Reaching the end I looked down at the wash of the Atlantic like a swirling bowl of dirty washing up water. Loz flicked his cigarette into the whorl. I knew what he was waiting for and gave him fifty pounds.

  “Andy think he a player but he jus’ a hustler. He was a OK mon and we did some bizniz togetha but then he get some offer. Bandulu bizness. All I know is it was heavy. Prob’ly whole heap drugs. Coke. Speed. H. Who knows? I jus’ know someone told mi nah to get involved.”

  “Who?”

  “Just a text. Anonymous. From some mutha call hisself Gla-di-a-tor. Y’know? Wha the fuck? I listen. Smalltime crooking nobody botha but I dohn want to mix wid bad people no more. I was in de army. I dohn want nuh mo of this.” He lifted his shirt and there was a raw looking scar where he’d taken a bullet. “Iraq. Whole place a ugly fuckup.”

  He didn’t have much else to add. We walked back down the pier and I said goodbye. I got in my car and watched him walk away, presumably to the amusement arcade. I got a text, this time from a numbered mobile: Loz’s life – the crocodile paradox. What’s your answer? No answer and he definitely dies. Try to block me and I kill you both. Gladiator. I looked up and could still see Loz. I got out of the car and ran towards him but stopped when I saw the little flickering red dot on his back. Someone had a gun trained on him with red dot sight. I looked behind me but could only see cars, houses, a bus. It could be long range. If he was a good shot he could be out of vision. If I stood to block the red dot we’d both die. A rapid fire weapon can take out a small crowd in seconds.

  The crocodile paradox is a puzzle in logic. A crocodile steals a child, and promises the father that his son will be returned only if he can correctly predict whether or not the crocodile will return the child. If the father guesses that the child will be returned and he’s right then all may be well. However, the crocodile is in a dilemma if the father guesses the child will not be returned. If the father is right then the child must be returned, but then the father’s prediction is falsified. It’s a logical maze and only has meaning if the crocodile is honest about his original intention. You get the idea? I was being asked to predict whether or not the texter was going to kill Loz. Given the killer’s previous form it seemed logical that he would kill Loz, but I gambled on the opposite because one of the things I already knew about the killer was that he had a knack for the unpredictable. I texted back: You won’t kill him because you’ve already made your point.

  I looked at the ambling unaware figure of Loz and the faint red flicker still danced on his back. If I shouted to warn him I had no doubt he’d be shot. I looked behind again, then down at my phone. Correct. This number no longer exists. Loz turned into the arcade. This person was psychotic and even had a bizarre inte
grity. What next? I tried ringing the number but it had vapoured into the ether. I wrote it in my notebook anyway.

  I drove around for half an hour but saw nothing and no one. He’d had his fun and now was gone. The killer had intensified my problem. I could only find out what had happened to Andy King by talking to people, but the mere act of talking to them put them in mortal danger. The killer could only know who I was going to see by either following me, or being frighteningly prescient. He was making me culpable, trying to force me into taking responsibility for the lives of others, and in doing this creating a bond between us. In his own mind we now shared the murders. Not killing Loz was a baroque way of telling me that he was a just god in that he kept his word. I was just about to drive off when I got another text, this time from an unknown number: Eventually everything connects. HDJMMK. I’ll call you later. Gladiator. I recognised the first phrase as something said by Charles Eames. He and his brother Ray were designers who had a powerful philosophy of design and Charles believed that people, ideas and objects all eventually connect in some elaborate pattern or configuration. The capital letters meant nothing to me. I puzzled over them as I drove back. I was excited. It was amoral now that lives were involved, but that’s also what buzzed me. I rationalised that I had taken this job and was a long way from seeing it through.

  *

  I had the damned meeting to chair at the University. When I arrived in my office Alfred was out of his cage, on a perch nibbling a piece of apple.

  “Hi Alfred. How was your day?”

  He cocked his head to one side and said, “Blimey, you’re a comedian,” in a perfect imitation of Mrs. Simpson’s voice. I sat at my desk while Alfred finished his apple, then he fluttered onto my shoulder, nibbled my ear, and watched as I switched on my PC. Five minutes later a knock at the door heralded the arrival of four dismal colleagues. Two women and two men. One of the women, dressed for a wake, was clearly looking for a fight. I asked them to sit down.

  “Why have you got a parrot on your shoulder?” asked the wake lady.

  “Because there wasn’t room on the desk,” I said.

  “They carry diseases,” she said.

  “We all do that,” I said.

  There were a few desultory jokes about Long John Silver, then I called them to order. I already had my TM plan. TM doesn’t stand for transcendental meditation but for Truncate Meeting.

  “What I’d like is for everyone to give a detailed outline for their research plans for the next year, which I will write down and log with the Head of Department. Also an off-the-top-of-your-head reading list for a new MA in Interdisciplinary Critical Thinking.”

  They all looked blank. So far so good.

  “No one? Perhaps you all need a little more time to prepare.”

  The relief was visible. You could almost smell it. They shuffled out, except Ron. I always forget about Ron. Fifty something, nondescript, a walking shadow. Someone life failed to notice, as if he slipped through the net of things, an unoccupied shell who ghosted down corridors and through rooms. I neither liked nor disliked him. He was the sort of person to excite extreme indifference. Even Alfred seemed bored and hopped off my shoulder and started cakewalking along my desk and muttering obscenities to himself.

  “What is it, Ron? I’m busy.”

  “I just thought that now you’re PD Tutor, we could have a little chat.”

  “But what could we possibly have to say to each other?”

  “It’s just, I have a few problems. Eight years in psychotherapy. There are several things about my childhood that perhaps we could tease out together. You’re a philosopher. You might have the bigger picture. Students sense my low self-worth. I’m sure that’s why they ignore everything I say. What do you think, Paul? I mean – I’d like you to be honest.”

  “No you wouldn’t, Ron.”

  Alfred shrieked with laughter.

  “I would. I admire honesty.”

  ”No, you don’t. No one does. Honesty creates chaos and heartache.”

  “Try me,” said Ron, striking a pathetically dramatic pose.

  I made a snap decision. Clearly certain unscrupulous people had been killing Ron with kindness for years. He needed an emergency infusion of reality. If he survived he might even thank me.

  “OK. I wish you could be me just for two minutes, then you’d see for yourself what a crashing bore you are. You’ve wasted years of your life and salary on a succession of witch doctor therapists who are more than happy to feed the illusion that you are a complicated man with interesting problems. You’re not. Here’s twenty quid. Just go and get drunk is my advice.”

  I left and puzzled further on the text I’d received. I had a few hours before the killer telephoned.

  Chapter VI

  ‘Nature adheres to an immutable order; humanity to an ever-increasing chaos…Don’t shrink from nature’s brutal perfection. Take joy in it. Embrace it.’

  Boyd Rice

  I called in to see Anna on the way back. She is a sometimes lover and likes it when I call in unexpectedly and we go straight to bed. She has a generous body, an open mind and a distinctive take on things. Sex is the equivalent of an adrenalin inducing run or serious retail therapy for her, a thrill among others but with no special value. She thinks herself a free spirit, but I think her attachment to freedom is itself a form of imprisonment, and her fear of not being free itself cages her. Her chains rattle even as she denies them. Her complete lack of curiosity about the lives of others is perhaps because she fears that knowledge of them will trammel her and bog down sex with baggage she spends her life fiercely resisting. I say none of this, but I asked her once if she would mind if she never saw me again. She said she would wish me well but the waters would close almost instantly, so it suits us both because my heart is always elsewhere.

  The smooth terrace of her spine, the genius of her breasts, her hungry thighs, are only reminders of another, lost body, that of my wife. My lovemaking with Anna is complicit with the death of love. The body always betrays the heart, its own rhythms and desires chirrup mockingly at the absence of the beloved. It seems to me that desire is always about what you have already lost. Anna would not mind knowing this; it would amuse her. Perhaps she too thinks of others, but for her the lovers blur into some formless dream of desire. I celebrate the apple wood smell of her hair, the voyeuristic enthusiasms of her desires, the dimples in her lower back, the clutch of her legs and arch of her spine as she climaxes, and the way she would smile at these comments I now make. In time we could become just friends and I would value her thoughts on the blurred colours of my life.

  Anna’s flat is like her life: uncluttered, no personal items proclaim a history or attachments. As if her life is full of unidentified spaces which others occupy temporarily and she acknowledges each in passing, but none with longing, regret or affinity. She is a vessel of strangers. I am amazed at the remoteness of her passion, the warm indifference of her intimacies. Erotically futureless. She is there but not present, as if we live in a mirror and her essential life is somewhere else. She does not encourage too much conversation, so I am free to have these thoughts.

  As I left her flat I felt a chill. As if I was being watched, which perhaps I was. The killer would telephone me later – I knew he would keep his word because there was something Newtonian about him. Fixed. He had a sense that with the right information and secrecy the universe would run like clockwork, but it probably doesn’t. He thinks he is in control, and the truth is – no one is.

  When I got home there was the unfamiliar sound of laughter. Cass was giggling as Symon told her a story about a former business colleague who got hiccoughs whenever he was lying during negotiations. We ate some pasta and a carrot and nut salad that Symon had prepared. It was annoyingly delicious, and Cass kept complimenting him.

  “Why don’t you learn to cook, Dad?” she asked.

  “His mind’s always on higher things,” said Symon, smiling at me.


  “Speaking of which, a puzzle,” I said.

  I wrote down the letters HDJMMK. They both looked.

  “Not an anagram. No vowels,” said Cass.

  “Some sort of code. What’s the context?” asked Symon.

  Cass looked at me. She guessed it was to do with an investigation and wondered if I would tell Symon, but I said nothing. Secrecy serves me well. I said it had been given to me by a student. We puzzled over it. An abbreviation for something, but what? Were the letters cryptically alluding to something or did they have an intrinsic meaning? We tried various cryptographic possibilities, substitution and transposition ciphers, numerical matches. Nothing came.

  I went to my bedroom, now doubling as my study, and left Cass and Symon to a game of chess. I looked at the text again: Eventually everything connects. HDJMMK. I’ll call you later. Gladiator. The letters connected, but how? The phone rang – unknown number. I answered but said nothing. Just white noise.

  “It’s you, isn’t it?” I said, pressing the record button.

  “Shut up and listen.” A digitally encrypted voice to disguise the real one. It sounded like Darth Vader with a cold. “You’ve done well, or should I say we’ve done well. The crocodile problem could have gone either way, but Loz wasn’t relevant. You want to know why I’m doing this. The answer is simple: I have to. And don’t tell me I don’t. It’s Natural Law. You want to know who’s next, but what’s in a name? I have to go. I’m about to enter a busy period. A royal goodbye to you.”

  And the call stopped. I listened to it three times. What was he telling me? This wasn’t a courtesy call. Whoever he was he had an oblique purpose because I knew by now I was dealing with a psychotic mind that always had an ulterior motive. As I’d surmised, he now saw me as an accomplice. He feels he has no choices in the path he’s following – that he is being driven by something – God, fate, his own genes. ‘What’s in a name?’ is a phrase from Romeo and Juliet – was he using the romantic tragedy to tell me something? And a royal goodbye – why royal? By mentioning his next victim it seemed he had a hit list irrespective of who I contacted. Perhaps I still put people in danger but I was the only one who could possibly prevent further carnage by finding and stopping the killer. It was a moral quagmire. I was both inside and out his web.