Sonata of the Dead (16 page)

‘Fuck off,’ Underdog said, but I could see the cogs turning behind his eyes.

‘We’ll leave a warning, at the drop,’ Treacle said.

‘But what if—’

‘Nobody knows where anybody lives,’ Underdog said, as if he was spelling it out to a dim child.

‘This isn’t right,’ I said.

Odessa shrugged. ‘There’s nothing we can do.’

They left then, wordlessly, as if they were part of a play they’d rehearsed but neglected to give me my lines. I watched them go, dispersing along separate streets, moving like dead leaves in a gusting breeze. Hesitant. On the edge of frantic movement.

I was clenching and unclenching my hands. I don’t think I’ve ever felt so frustrated. But it wasn’t so much their intention to bow out of public life, or their resistance to my probing about Solo. I realised I’d come here wanting to taste some more of the danger they’d tested me with at Marble Arch. I felt like the child who has been promised the moon on a stick only to end up with a pre-sucked lollipop.

I started after Underdog, but he was casting nervous glances over his shoulder every few steps. I wouldn’t stand a chance. As soon as he hit the King’s Road he was going to hop on a night bus or hail a cab. Or maybe they’d reconvene to discuss how likely it was that I was their stalker.

I thought about Odessa. Maybe she was going home with Treacle. Back to her place. Back to his place… She’d probably catch a bus again, wherever she was going. Which meant she’d not get back for quite some time.

I got in the car and tore off towards Tufnell Park.

* * *

Half an hour later I was on Laurier Road. I’d parked the car around the corner in Dartmouth Park Road, closing the door as softly as possible. This was London, a city that never sleeps, but someone had obviously forgotten to tell the residents of NW5. Curtains closed. Lights off. Do not disturb.

I found Odessa’s house and studied it for a while but there were no obvious signs of anybody being at home. Conscious of spending too much time standing on the pavement, no matter how sleepy the rest of the street seemed, I pushed through the gate and walked up to the front door. One bell, which seemed to confirm my earlier suspicion that this place hadn’t been carved into flats. I tested the door but it was rock solid. Around the back was a garden with stone steps down to a patio and French windows. I peered through the glass into this basement level and saw the gleaming curves of accoutrements on a shelf, suggesting it was a kitchen. What looked like bi-fold doors separated the space from a front room. I put my ear to the glass for a while and heard voices. But they were space-filling voices. There were no lulls. These were voices being paid to talk.

I broke in, tensing myself for an alarm that never came. The kitchen was immaculate. Nothing had been cooked here for some time. I moved through to the front room to find an impeccably made bed and a small TV. It had the feel of a spare room. The whole basement, in fact – there was a shower under the stairs – was a self-contained living area. Maybe Odessa kept it for guests.

I ascended, wary of the voices, but suspecting that they belonged to a radio somewhere, the kind of low-level security effort that people made who didn’t have fancy motion-detecting alarm systems installed. Yet she did: I saw them tucked into the corners, flashing red whenever I moved. So they had been deliberately switched off. I paused on the stairs, wondering if my incredible proclivity for shit timing had struck again. Wouldn’t it just be sod’s law to be in this building at the exact same time that Gower’s killer had decided to bone up on his slashing technique?

The hallway gave on to a larger kitchen and here there were ghosts of what Odessa had eaten this evening. Something spicy, apparently. Smoked paprika was in that, and something meaty, a garlicky sausage maybe.
Gutsy Dinners
, by Odessa Scribbles. Lived experience. Write what you know. More separating doors and a big living room with scuffed old leather furniture. Dimmed lighting picked out the spot varnish on the spines in a bookcase. A vase of tulips past their best. No notebook. No diary. No laptop.

More stairs. A master bedroom containing a huge bed that was topped with a mess of blankets and pyjamas. Wardrobe with opaque glass doors. I stared at that for a while until I saw faces in the sweep of clothing that hung within. Spooked, I checked the bedside table but there was just a fat novel on top filled with dog-ear folds, perhaps to remind her of choice phrasing she could steal.

Next door I found her study, and the radio (one voice saying ‘…this day and age it’s not videogames and TV that’s distracting our children, it’s social media…’ and another saying ‘…but there’s no evidence to show that children can’t multitask…’), and the reason why the alarm system was disconnected: an old cat sitting in a basket. This raggedy chap wasn’t up to any more outdoor adventures. Odessa couldn’t put the alarm on because it would go off every time Tiddles decided to plant his face in a bowl of chow.

He only reacted when I was within stroking distance. No twitch of the ears. No inscrutable stare. Deaf and blind. I scratched his ears and as he began to purr, his whole body shook. He was drooling like a dental patient pumped with novocaine. A tag on his collar told me his name was Gatsby. Fuck’s sake. What a great name for a cat.

I poked around Odessa’s things, expecting to find something with her name on it, but her anonymity extended to her own four walls, it seemed. I couldn’t find an envelope, passport or cheque book to illuminate me. More books, all of them research volumes:
A Dictionary of Surnames, A Dictionary of Architecture
, Joachim Berendt’s
The Jazz Book
, Lawrence Block’s
Writing the Novel: From Plot to Print
. I saw a piece of paper sticking out of that. Not a bookmark. A list of names. At the top it said
Acc. Wannabes Thru the Ages
. The first of the names – Rory Melling – was next to a date three years back. There were half a dozen other names yoked to dates that drew closer to the present day: Yvonne Gibson, Scott Dennis, Veronica Lake, Ben George, Barbara Parker. All of them had been marked with a red cross. And then, suddenly, from about eighteen months ago, presumably the change to anonymity had been made, because the list progressed with code names: Indigo, Renfield, Hawksmoor, Ransom, Odessa, Treacle, President, Underdog, Solo.

I copied the names into my notebook and returned the paper to the Block. I resisted the strong temptation to stick around with Gatsby until Odessa returned, convinced we could thrash out the whole mystery if she could give me the addresses of the people on that list. But I knew that was unlikely. This was London and people don’t necessarily stay in one place for long. And just because she had a bunch of names didn’t automatically mean she had a bunch of addresses. Instead I gave the old soldier another chuck under the chin and wished him well. Then I was out and in the car and driving fast, the smell of garlic and paprika in my clothes.

* * *

I got home and slung a few back and went to bed with a buzz on and a rage on. Somehow I fell into a shallow sleep and Becs was there, as beautiful as the day I met her and the wind was in her hair and she wore that maddening half smile and a long, cement-coloured knitted dress that clung everywhere. She gently picked the strands of hair from her green-brown eyes and I reached out for her. As soon as my fingers touched her she exploded into the red jigsaw puzzle I’d discovered in my house that night. I tried touching her again, craving some dream logic that might reverse her disablement, but my fingers only made tracks through the blood filming what remained of her face.

The sun was beating in the sky behind me, casting hot, pulsing shadows over the woman I loved. But that can’t have been right because I found her in raining dark. I cast a glance over my shoulder and the sun was in the room, fierce and red and small. And it beat like a heart, burning, hotter than the breath of the devil.

I woke up in the airless stove of my bedroom and all I could smell was the bitter, spiced fug of cheap Nicaraguan cigars. I opened the windows and leaned out. Close your eyes and – early morning W1H – you could taste a sweetness in the London air… although at that moment I’d have tasted sweetness with my face inches above the quivering meringues of filth found in Delhi’s most virulent hovels.

I swilled down a couple of painkillers and wrote my mother a postcard. She’d love it: I hadn’t sent her a handwritten note since I was a homesick school kid on a weekend trip to Shropshire. She’d hate it: I only had one postcard in the flat, an H.R. Giger of a creature with a drainpipe for a penis blowing mucus-covered deformities out of the end. I think that one must have been from Giger’s rose period.

I flipped open the laptop and went hunting for new names. Ben George: nothing useful. Rory Melling. Used to live in Camden Town. Long gone. Yvonne Gibson. I found a dead one, zonked by an aortic dissection. Same person? Who knows? Scott Dennis. Thousands of the fuckers. North, east, south, west. Veronica Lake. Dead Hollywood actress. Barbara Parker. By then I’d lost the will to live. London. I remembered the first time I’d arrived here. I thought the city was laid out for me. I thought I
was
the city. You’ve not seen my like before.
I’ll tame you. I’ll change you
. Yeah, right. You’re a temporary skidmark. You’re an immediate ghost. At best. Everyone drifts through this place, this eternal processing zone, this grand old charnel house. Fast turnover. This place ate you up and spat you out. Moorgate. Isle of Dogs. Strand. Weialala leia, Wallala leialala.

Madness descending. I had to talk to someone. I pulled my phone out and quick-dialled.

His voice, thick with sleep. ‘Sorrell.’

‘I’ve got a favour to ask,’ I said.

I heard the flapping of duvet as he failed to maintain any vestiges of calm. Feet thumping on floor. Magazine pages sliding off the bed. I shuddered to think what he’d been reading.

‘Favour my bollocks,’ he snarled. ‘Do
me
a favour. Get yourself down to the copshop so we can put some irons on you.’

‘I’ve done nothing wrong, Mawker. Come on. If you were that serious, you’d have put a foot through my door.’

‘You need to wind your neck in, Sorrell. Let us do our job. You’re muddying waters.’

‘What
is
your job?’ I asked. ‘I don’t remember “being a cunt” on the list the careers advisor brought to school. I’d love to know what you’ve been up to since Martin Gower was found.’

‘Ditto,’ Mawker said. Now I could hear his feet on the stairs, slapping on lino in his Ealing misery hole. The tinkle of cornflakes in a bowl. A radio snapping into life: Deacon Blue.

‘You know what depresses me?’ I said.

‘Loyalty?’ Mawker suggested. ‘Honest work? Human decency?’

‘When DJs refer to the music of my youth as Golden Oldies,’ I said. ‘I mean, I use the stairs whenever there’s a lift option. If I kick a football, it stays kicked, and I remain upright. I don’t have any problem pulling my socks on. I don’t have any grey pubes.’

‘Thanks for sharing,’ he said. I heard a kettle whistling. I heard something launch itself from a toaster. It all sounded like domestic bliss but I couldn’t shake the image of him sitting in his own filth in a rat-infested dump playing breakfast SFX through a tape recorder. We all have our favourite fantasies.

‘Do you know what you and Deacon Blue have in common?’ I said.

‘Well now,’ he said, equably. Track six: butter scraped across a pikelet. ‘I’m not Scottish. I don’t play any musical instruments. So I can only offer conjecture that you believe we share some level of cuntdom as yet unattainable by the common man.’

‘You seem unusually relaxed,’ I said. ‘What happened last night? Did you fuck something living for a change?’

‘What do you want, Sorrell? Some of us have got real lives to lead. People will start to talk. You can’t stay off the phone to me. People will think you’ve got a crush on me.’

‘I’d love to have a literal crush on you,’ I said. ‘Don’t forget to pilot your ship called
Dignity
into the nearest harbour of shit.’

‘I’m putting the phone down.’

‘I want to see Graeme Tann.’

‘Oh, fuck off. You are kidding me.’

‘I was offered the chance to see him once, remember? To spend some quality time with him, when you brought him in. And I couldn’t. I couldn’t do it.’

‘Well you won’t get any quality time with him now,’ Mawker said. ‘That horse has bolted.’

‘This is my daughter we’re talking about, Ian,’ I said.

‘No it’s not. And it never was. Do you understand? Your daughter is incidental to all of this. As is Graeme Tann. She knew Martin Gower, a guy who was murdered. That’s it. I told you because I wanted to help. To give you a lead. It was a favour. It was not a fucking invitation. Not to have you impersonate the police. Not to have you disappear and walk your muddy footprints all over my fucking case.’

‘If my daughter is involved in all this… If my daughter dies—’

‘We’ll end up picking up the pieces. We’ll be the ones who catch her killer. You’d better hope you don’t get in the way any more. You don’t want this on your hands. You don’t want to fuck up, here, Sorrell.’

‘I just want to talk to him.’

‘Walk away from it, Sorrell. Forget about him. He’s rotting in a cell.’

‘I need it.’

‘Why?’

I started laughing. It was hard, spiky laughter, razoring through my throat as if I was pulling out yard after yard of barbed wire. I didn’t think I could stop. In the end I was able to put a cap on it. A headache was caroming around my head; I wasn’t even sure if Mawker was on the line any more.

I said: ‘For the experience.’

Alexander Fox: ‘Ali’

Brian Grey: ‘Moon’

Gordon Thomas: ‘Thommo’

Stephen Spence: ‘Croc’

Joanna Gifford

Henry Shetton

Robert Fox

Part One – Rumours