Downriver (28 page)

Then the roof fell in; they were rumbled by accountants, denied, cut off without even a fire-damaged copy of Kenneth Baker's
Little Britain
anthology. Their prelapsarian tip of a stall was glimpsed in the corner of the frame during one of Prince Charles's documentary attempts to announce Himself as the latest Martian poet. He was drifting downstream, confidently stacking the similes, ready to dive out of the sun and strafe this architectural abomination (carbuncle/ashtray/training centre for thought-police), when the transfixed management noticed a troop of scarf-dangling renegades touting for trade – like refugees from some unsponsored touring version of the
Marat-Sade
. They screamed for ‘Security', and bulldozed what was left into a skip. The contract for ‘unofficial remainders' passed on to a discreet and respectable dealer – Henry Milditch – who marketed his salvaged pulp with such skill that he was soon able to retire, as something resembling a gentleman, to the Suffolk littoral. And the Publishers were free to trawl once more for designer casualties from the rock industry, Irish poets whose rhetorical flourishes could be tamed to suit the requirements of English examination boards, and ‘one-off' vagrants with a story to tell.

Crushed, spurned, spiritually overdrawn, the OPs didn't have the bottle for another assault on the frontline jumbles; which were now, in any case, the territory of much friskier locusts. They simply vanished, gave up the ghost, blankly wandered the precincts, skate tracks, and concrete walkways. Lepers, bell ringers: they hid themselves behind sob-story placards. They were culled. One of them was fished from the river, swollen and
unidentified; the others were beyond tracing. Old enemies might recognize them by an ineradicable vacancy, a born-again naïveté that was almost criminal.

The train had, randomly, stopped and started a dozen times; obedient to the stutter of the Docklands Lightrailway force-field. (Lightrailway or Railway of Light? The only illuminated path over the Plains of Outer Darkness.) While Dryfeld was preoccupied with the arrangement of buttons on his waistcoat, I released the blind and leant from the window to look at the lumpy and shimmering moonscape. We had halted on an embankment that afforded an unrestricted vision of a graveyard, or untended corner of parkland. The branches of deformed trees brushed the damp ground, living ghosts ready to move in greeting towards the stalled carriages of the dead. (I remembered Joblard's tales of the white ‘mourning' train shuttling the stiffs to Nunhead: white curtains, white upholstery, white-suited conductors carrying white toppers. The train must have slid silently through suburban halts, like an avatar of death itself.)

The railway had casually amputated a dream site (caterpillar dreaming), encroached on gardens I now recognized as the burial place of the Aboriginal cricketer, King Cole. The dream was maimed, but not destroyed: disregarded. Inside our padded compartment the restored gaslight hissed and spat: we were trapped in a blasphemous parody of the confessional. Dryfeld was a mad, potato-picking axeman, ready to dribble out some tale of mutilation and necrophilia. The great wheels of his bicycle stood between us like a cage, webbing his raw-skinned face in faults and veins. I began to understand something of the terrible conspiracy between victim and murderer.

Through the square of open window, the night – salted with corruptions – pressed on our thoughts, dictating all the lies buried beneath us: forcing
us
to speak. I was overwhelmed by a sense of the Lombard Street clerk's hysterical conformity. His life was as bizarre and desperate as that of the unemployed German gunsmith. His fancy took him inwards, tighter and tighter,
soliciting
the blow that would set him free. The decoration of gold chains was an invitation: he wanted a postal suicide. But Müller's will was weaker: he was seduced by movement, America, diamond hills, rings, hats, walking sticks. He would be kneeling in scarlet restaurants before women, the wives of merchants – who would, without breaking off their brittle playhouse conversations, lift up their heavy skirts to allow him passage. The scent, the slithering silks, the tan of laced hides! They would roll, laughing, on to their strong bellies; while their complacent husbands, licking on sea-green Havanas, initiated him into the cabala of the stock market. Measure wealth in squares on a map of the city. Herds of red beef, defecating, slid towards the primed bolts; drift on an escalator of hooks, like levitating cardinals. Buy them! Buy them all!

The box shrank on us, sweating out the uncensored instincts. It was unreal: the train was somebody else's nightmare. The station announcer did not name the proposed destinations. It was necessary at peak hours to discourage passengers: villages went into limbo, were struck from the charts. But for Thomas Briggs the train is a clock. The structure of his life is regular. He has only his possessions to protect him. He demands, in his terror of loss, the death-blow that Müller is forced to deliver: an act so abrupt and unconsidered as to appear a preliminary to self-murder. The nerves of this mirror-divided couple could not survive the artificial confrontation.

Our train has been released, is moving; jerks, shudders. The rails glisten in the night, a frosty ladder. Dryfeld closes the window.

‘An alky before I was sixteen, I was arrested twice on suspicion of being a child molester. Lies! But they believed them. Did time on the liquid cosh for GBH. “Yours or mine?” I shouted. They hacked out a piece of my brain without local anaesthetic. “Make your own, smart ass, out of fear-secretions.” I use the truth as a last resort.'

Was that his voice – or something squeezed from the headrest?
His lips were trapped in a sullen pout: photographed for the files of Special Branch. I wanted to drive my face against his fist. To throw open the door: snap it like the spine of a book. Plunge into the air. How could Briggs have been discovered so carefully positioned
between the lines
– like a bog sacrifice, cut from the peat, placed on a hurdle to be carried to the village? Why didn't he bounce, skid, tear – a parcel of meat – tumble down the embankment?

I could feel the blood running from my ear. Tongue thickening in my mouth. Eyes milking to pebbles. Briggs's hand flinched from the first rung on the ladder of steel. Cinders frayed the lacquer from his scrabbling boots. He climbed through the dirt, face down, towards Hackney and the stars: this wild, inhuman persistence of the victim, the dead man.

No prisoner of the past, Dryfeld noticed nothing. His case-hardened ego saved us. To him, this day was already scrubbed from the record. He began to hum, tuning himself to ravish the most recent of Hackney's ‘early-retirement-from-secondary-education' bookshops. It was cruel to watch. They always opened in a frenzy of unjustified optimism: fresh paint, cut flowers, and lovingly hung prints of ‘Defoe's House', or ‘The Country Residence of the Prior St John of Jerusalem in Well-Street'. Nothing could be less like the classroom: to be surrounded by books, with no grubby kids allowed over the threshold. First-day visitations from Dryfeld and Milditch, and a couple of tentative raids by the Stoke Newington scufflers, stripped the few genuine assets. Then the interminable, dreary years of nerve-strung boredom – with nothing to look forward to but another collection tin dangled by rampant gangs of ethnic ‘steamers': the revenge of the pupils.

Franz Müller was confessed, hooded, taken out to meet his public. He had been seduced, as Mr Baron Martin remarked in passing sentence, ‘by the devil in the shape of Mr Briggs's watch and albert chain'. Like Dryfeld he could not give himself over to ‘railway time'. His madness was firmly anchored in the realities
of movement, dealing, seizing, holding: intelligence without imagination. All transactions with fate were politely declined.

III

Another victim had been found: in the scrub woods near the Springfield Park Marina – by a party of nature ramblers. The trademark that allowed the police to identify the killings as being ‘the work of one man' had not been made public (not yet invented?). The bodies had all been discovered within half a mile of a railway station. Which didn't mean much: after the ‘privatization' that description covered most of London. The same could be said of burger bars, mini-cab firms, video-rental libraries, and (at least three) estate agents. But the presumption remained: the killer used the railway as a means of prospecting for victims, then vanished down the line into some rival system. These tributaries were often absorbed, or adapted to another leisure pursuit, before they were even listed. The tabloids were on heat; dusting off the usual rumours of martial-arts loners, civil servants steeped in the black arts, ‘butchers, Yids, and foreign skippers'. They purchased dubious polaroids that seemed – from the moral high ground – to rebuke the victims for levity in the face of death. They were unworthy of the circulation-boosting role for which they had been definitively nominated. The dead girls laughed over wine glasses, or wrinkled their noses on sun-blasted poolsides:
PARTY GIRL SHOCK. THE PURSER'S STORY. EXCLUSIVE
.

The phone rang. Davy Locke wanted to fix a meet in Well Street. He sounded flaky; speaking so slowly and deliberately that I was forced to imagine an attic of eavesdropping spooks: paranoid shadows straining, with uncertain shorthand, to transcribe every last word.

Davy was waiting outside the shell of a fire-gutted house. It was cold, a Siberian wind cutting across the marshes: he stamped,
flicking away the liquid pearls that slid from his wide nostrils like lighter fuel. He wore a docker's jacket (the docker didn't need it), and groin-enhancing ballet tights. He had his arm around the inevitable racing cycle; the best tool for a fast getaway. His tight, knotted hair and formidable beak gave him the look of an exile, a Lithuanian, or a tranquillized Marx Brother. He had made the call from the kiosk on the corner. That had taken him most of the morning. (These new vandal-proof headsets have been commandeered throughout the East End by heroin dealers. They supply the perfect excuse for hanging around, doing nothing: and nobody can put his foot against the door to trap you.) The rat-scab character in possession had the phone off the hook, and was saying nothing. He was in no state to punch the buttons. The shivering lookouts were nodding off on their feet. The tom-tom (main man) was a twenty-stone black freezer, festooned in chains like a contraband Christmas tree (nothing works like role-dressing), who sat at the open window of a paint-trashed Cortina blowing empty pink speech bubbles. Nobody cared, or gave them a second glance. We were well off limits. Davy didn't want to talk about it; he wanted to let me see for myself.

The windows of this Grade 2 ‘listed' husk (illegal post-1709 sash boxes, flush with façade) were boarded over, the door was padlocked: Davy had the key. As we passed into the hallway, he began preparing me for the room we were to visit. The smell was appalling, it met us at the foot of the stairs (painted softwood banister, whose knotty and ‘anaemic' surface was hidden beneath many layers of cheap gloss): burnt feathers in a flooded executioner's cellar. A friend of Davy's, from the obscure anarcho-libertarian group of which he was the active element, had asked him to open up this attic chamber and make a series of slides to record exactly what he found. He would learn no more of the events that created this abused environment, until the slides were safely handed over.

The room was low and dark, a loft for feral pigeons, high above the dim traces of a street market; odd shops doomed by
the changing patterns of traffic. The sort of time-lagged patch in which to consummate minor drug deals or fence stolen radios. Orange peel stuck to the windows of defunct cobblers; magazine racks stank of libidinous tom cats. There was nothing to buy except cigarettes, condensed milk, and ostracized dog food.

Davy pulled the boards from the windows and revealed the paint-covered walls. I had never seen anything quite like it. Or, rather, I
had
seen pale versions, bowdlerized segments: ink-blot tests, Pompeian bath houses, subway graffiti, Mayan codices (treated by William Burroughs). It was startling that an uninhabited room could carry such a cacophany of voices – protests, denunciations – and still stand. Every inch of the surface had been painted over, sprayed, scribbled with messages, invocations, pyramids, ankhs, oozing lingams and lightning strokes of despair. We had forcibly entered a book that now surrounded us. It was diary, shopping list, calculus, and anthology of quotations. ‘
Love and man's unconquerable mind
.' ‘
Love is the law, love under will
.' ‘
The Familiar Spirits are very prompt – it is well to occupy them
.'

Water had been flung on the walls in a crude attempt to eradicate these terrifying assertions – but they had returned, time after time; smeared, but firm in their outlines. ‘
I ACCUSE
…'.

There followed the names and telephone numbers (where applicable) of local informers, bent coppers, Fallen Angels, Vessels of Iniquity, Vessels of Wrath, Incubi and Succubi. Footpaths and broken vein-tracks jolted across the mural from childlike hospitals to sparrows crucified upon hills. There were sailing boats and steam trains. The world had been recast, populated with bears, talking fish, horned gods: a true
Mappa Mundi
. Pages from pornographic novels were collaged with the faces of musicians and terrorists. Orton and Halliwell's bedsitter in Noel Road was the
Habitat
version of this. The contents of a mind at the end of its tether had been spilled: a lurid spatter of brain grit.

The floor was clogged with mounds of damp sawdust – as if the furniture had been eaten and, conically, excreted. Bas-relief
torcs of blood were splashed over the skirting boards. ‘Dogfights,' Davy explained.

The house had been torched so many times that the landlord had given up and gone back to Ireland (where a grant had been found for him to make a start on his memoirs: fictions of the unlitigious dead, Flann O'Brien, Behan, Paddy Kavanagh, Julian Maclaren-Ross, the Two Roberts). Squatters moved in, and the girl followed them. Davy didn't know her name. But she was the tenant whose work he had catalogued. A weekend job for a friend that would last him a lifetime.