Sonata of the Dead (2 page)

So I sat on my own on the train, snoozing, and not one person bothered me. At Euston I picked up a bottle of William Fevre 2011 Chablis, a pack of smoked salmon, a bag of salad, a pot of double cream and some tagliatelle. I jumped in a cab to King’s Cross. Within five minutes I had the bottle in Tokuzo’s fridge. She was on the balcony in a pair of bikini bottoms, reading one of her fat novels, snapping gum and listening to old Bowie on the iPod dock.

I gritted my teeth at the sight of her curves – we’d had something going a while ago, until I ruined it – and concentrated on getting some food going. Her flat, her rules. Not that I was living here, but I was a little more sociable than I had been, and I wanted to make it up to some of the people I hadn’t treated so well over the years. It’s quite a list; maybe it’s a subconscious rehearsal for the most important person on it.

‘Where’s the wine?’ Lorraine asked, coming back from her sunbathing session. She’d pulled a light jumper around her shoulders at least, sparing my blushes and bulges.

‘I couldn’t find any,’ I said, ‘so I got you some Tennant’s Extra, which we all know is your day-to-day tipple of choice.’ I caught a glimpse of my face as I reached for the polished glass of the cupboard where Tokuzo kept her wine goblets. The scar has calmed down a lot since I received it (why do news items always talk about victims ‘receiving’ stab wounds, as if it’s some sort of gift?) but it’s still angry, still red. The surgeon who treated me (‘treated’ – that’s more like it) reassured me that the colour would fade in time, and that plastic surgery might be something to think about ‘going forward’, once everything had calmed down.

‘If you’re not joking I’ll give you a matching one of those on the other side,’ she said, tactfully. ‘Make you look like a pair of brackets.’

We’ve always had what you might call a spicy, spiky relationship. She was a rebound job after my wife’s death and she’s never let me off for that. But I count her as one among maybe three people I can trust implicitly. She helped me when I needed her, when I was at a low ebb, and I would do the same for her.

We ate, and I stole glances at the tanned slivers of flesh in the scoops and scallops of the thing she was almost not wearing. We were on to our second glass of wine – she was impressed by my selection – when my phone rang. I almost left it. A beautiful summer evening in London with some decent plonk and a gorgeous, engaging woman. Why would you allow anything to get in the way of that? But, well, I couldn’t not answer. I can never switch it off. What if, this time, it was
her
?

It wasn’t. Of course it wasn’t. It never is. It’s unlikely ever to be. It was Mawker. ‘Bête noire’ is too elegant a phrase to describe this guy. ‘Cunt’ works better. He sounded far away. Lost. He sounded kind of broken. Maybe it was the job. He’d been a copper too long. I couldn’t hack it – I was out within six months – but Ian Mawker was a career plod. You could see it in his grey, crumpled report-paper face. He was in it till the bourbon or a bullet put him in a box.

‘I’m up Enfield way,’ he said. ‘I’m in a cul-de-sac—’

‘Just for a change?’

‘How soon can you get over?’ he asked. ‘Corner of Cheyne Walk and Uplands Way.’

My watch-it gland went into full spaz. Mawker was using his friendly voice, reserved only for higher rank and women. He wasn’t biting at my lures. Not a good sign.

‘What is it, Ian?’

‘It’s a body,’ he said. And then he was saying something else but the world had gone grey and uncertain and I could feel my heart congealing in its cage.
Sarah
, I thought.
Here it comes. Sarah.

But instead he said: ‘It’s easier if you just come over. Give us twenty minutes and we can have a squad car pick you up.’

Lorraine didn’t utter a word, and that’s another reason why I like her. Sometimes you need your best friends to zip it, not proffer any advice. Sometimes they just know when you need some space to breathe. She sipped her wine and fiddled with the spacers between her toes as her plum-painted nails dried.

‘You can use my car,’ she said.

* * *

I parked the car where I could on Uplands Way – there were squad cars and forensic vans blocking any further progress – and walked to the top of the street where it is taken over by waste land. People were standing in doorways with their arms folded, wearing sucked-lemon expressions. Mawker was waiting for me at a barrier with a duty officer so keen you could have served up dollops of him on rare roast beef sandwiches.

‘Mawker.’

‘Sorrell.’

Mawker was wearing his trademark shit clothes ensemble. More shit, even, than mine and believe me, that’s saying something. At least I put my best bit of gear – my nubuck leather jacket – away for the summer. Mawker is one of those freaks who wears his cement-grey raincoat on days when even a mankini seems too much. His frayed shirt was infecting his skin. He and a duty officer traded looks and then Ian gazed back at me. I knew that look. I had worn it a few times when I was on the beat. It was the face you put on when you visited a house to convey bad news.

You might want to sit down…

I’m terribly sorry to inform you…

‘Sarah?’ I said, and my voice was Sahara-dry.

Ian held his hand up. He was shaking his head. ‘It’s a body. Male. As yet unidentified.’

‘Why all the deep and meaningfuls, you and your glove puppet there? Why am I here?’

‘Shall we?’ Mawker said.

I followed him and his excitable uniformed puppy under the barrier into an ecstasy of white tents and SOCOs wearing protective suits. Every so often I heard the crunch of a camera shutter and the whine of a recharging flashgun.

‘I’m a big crack and you’re Polyfilla,’ I said. ‘Fill me in.’

‘Got a call this morning, about ten a.m. Kid on a bike rode over what he thought was a big pork chop. Only a big pork chop doesn’t have fingers. Thankfully he didn’t go mooching about by himself otherwise he would have found what looks like an explosion in an abattoir.’

We were nearing the first of the tents. I rubbed my nose and smelled smoked salmon on my fingers. I felt my stomach arch and flop like a dying fish. To our left I watched as three guys in daft clothes stalked Enfield golf course. To the right was a series of allotments. Further east was another golf course: Bush Hill Park. And there was the railway too, bisecting these expanses of green. Plenty of escape potential in all directions. I thought of the PCs going door to door. I bet nobody saw a thing.

Mawker pulled open the tent’s entrance and we stepped into a theatre of red. ‘We have reason to believe this person knew Sarah. Probably knew her quite well too.’

I stood there making guppy faces, waiting for the next moment to arrive.

There were body parts strewn around the ground, only partially hidden by clumps of nettles and dock. Whoever sliced this poor guy like an Iberico ham half-arsed it when it came to concealing his crime. I was getting tired of Mawker and his slowly, slowly approach. I didn’t know what I was going to do, but it seemed to involve a variant of grabbing him by the lapels and screaming at him until the skin of his face boiled off.

‘Do you know him?’ Mawker asked.

‘Difficult to say,’ I said, marshalling all my self-control. ‘He seems to have gone to pieces. Why not just tell me why you think he knew Sarah and remove the possibility of me punching you until your head is less offensively potato-shaped?’

‘
His
head’s over there.’ Uttered with all the tenderness of a man referencing a bowl of cold porridge.

I went over and had a look, if only to stop myself adding to the confusion with some of Mawker’s own limbs. A SOCO very kindly tipped the head to one side so I could get a better view. It was gritty and blood-spattered, and slashes made it look as though he’d evolved gills, but I knew the guy. I just couldn’t put a name to what remained of the face. He’d been at school with Sarah, I knew that much. He was a couple of years older than her. He used to walk her to the Tube stop. Protective. Very sweet. His parents lived around here; I remembered taking Sarah to his birthday party once.

‘Never seen him before in my life,’ I said to Mawker.

Now his face hardened as he scrutinised me. He was hoping for an in. He’d get it, but not yet.

‘Your turn,’ I said.

Mawker put his hand in his deep raincoat pocket. ‘We found these in a rucksack he was carrying,’ he said, and pulled out a glassine bag.

Photographs. I received them with a hand that did not seem like mine, as if I’d picked up one of the strays from the ground. I teased open the lips of the bag and peeked inside. It took a moment to recognise her, but there was Sarah, doing some teasing of her own. All I could think of was how much she’d grown up, how much like her mother she was.

‘Anything else? Anything with an address for her? A phone number?’

I needed to keep talking. Rage was filling up the gaps inside me. I was thinking of Sarah on her back on a threadbare carpet, smiling for some wet-nosed chancer, falling for the spiel and the promises. I stared at the guy’s severed head and tried to understand how the boy who held an umbrella over Sarah while he got wet could turn into someone who took advantage of women. A little voice kept piping up, telling me that might not have been how it played out, but I stared it down.

Mawker shook his head. ‘We’re still doing a forensic sweep,’ he said. ‘I shouldn’t really have taken these, but, well… There was a book too. Collection of short stories. Anthology jobby. You get me. What’s the title?
Something Something Dying Planet
. We don’t know if it’s relevant. The victim could have been carrying it.’

I nodded and thanked him through gritted teeth. My desire to visit terrible violence upon his tuber had retreated, but only a tad.

‘You sure you don’t know him?’ Mawker asked, and a name rose up out of the murk. Martin Gower.

‘Nope. Maybe if you can find out why he had these photographs we can ask Sarah.’

‘We’ll work on it,’ he said. ‘While we try to find the killer, if that’s all right with you?’

‘Mind if I have a look around?’ I asked, knowing full well the answer.

‘It’s a crime scene, Sorrell,’ he said. ‘Suspicious death, believe it or not. If there’s anything else here that can help lead us to Sarah, I’ll let you know.’

I nodded, feeling impotent. I couldn’t help but think Mawker was making some kind of point; lording the privilege he had worked for and I had voluntarily given up.

‘I’ll need those photographs back,’ he said.

‘Come on, Ian,’ I said. ‘It’s my daughter. I don’t want every plod in north London drooling over them.’

‘They’re evidence.’

‘Let me keep the more… salacious ones then. Please.’

Mawker sighed and stared out over the fairways and rough. ‘Pick ’em out,’ he said. ‘But get a move on. If anybody asks, I didn’t see a thing, right?’

Clutching half a dozen photographs I turned my back on them and trudged to Tokuzo’s Honda. I felt protected once I’d got my shoulders against the soft, scuffed leather of the driver’s seat, heard the reassuring chunk of the door as it shut out the shit of the suburbs. The glassine bag felt slippery under my hot fingers. I wanted to open it again and see my daughter, see more evidence that she was alive. But I didn’t want to acknowledge, in the arch of her body and the cat-sleaze eyes and the just-fucked hair, how alive she had become. She was a woman now, without my knowledge or understanding. She had become an adult, as bizarrely as it sounds, without my having any say in the matter.

I felt myself wishing this Gower character had survived just so I could kill him.

Love the camera, baby. Oh yes, show me all you’ve got. Your figure and my lens? We’ll make a fortune.

But I knew that was wide of the mark. I hadn’t seen Sarah for five years, and I couldn’t remember what her voice was like, but I know that even at the age of thirteen she was a feisty fucker and wouldn’t put up with even a speck of shit from anybody. She’d have seen some shyster with a camera and a come-on from a mile away and she’d have sent him packing with the business end of it hanging out of his arse. So no, it was nothing to do with model work – for which she only ever had withering contempt. Which meant that she had disrobed and positioned herself like that because they were involved. She got her tits out because she wanted to. And if she’d done
that
; if she could do
that
, then…

I threw the photographs to the floor and put my hands on the wheel before my nails started gouging holes in the palms of my hands. I wanted to go back and punch Mawker so hard that his inbred cretin ancestors, lying in their pauper graves, felt it. I wanted to glue together all the pieces of Martin Gower they’d found so far, shake him alive and then strangle him. Instead I gunned the engine, wound down the window, turned on the CD player and whacked up the volume until my ribs were shaking. I was so wound up I couldn’t tell you what was playing, but by the end of the first track the red had vanished from the edges of my eyes and I could no longer hear my breath snagging against my teeth.

I’d driven less than a mile. Somewhere very nearby was the house where Gower had lived with his parents. I tried to remember the name of the street, but it had been ten years or so since I’d last been here. An unusual name, I remembered that much. The something… And then I turned left and I was there. The Chine.

This bit of north London is particularly leafy, and the residents seemed to be competing for the title of most verdant foliage. Hostas in ostentatious plant pots, rude bursts of flower on a magnolia tree, the barely controlled froth of wisteria. I fully expected to see Treebeard or a couple of Ewoks come bumbling out of the undergrowth. I parked in front of Gower’s parents’ house – I vaguely remembered the panelled front door with the bullion pane – and waited. There was a metallic blue Jaguar XE in the drive. I saw a shadow pass across the window.
Christ.
It hit me what I was about to do, but if I hung around any longer Mawker would turn up and that would be that.

It was with him in mind that I drove up the road a bit, and parked near the junction with Old Park Ridings. I got out, walked back to the Gowers’. I leaned on the doorbell. I heard a woman’s voice inside –
I’ll get it!
– and then a smiling face, a cream-coloured blouse and red fingernails.