by David Mark
Karol stares at the end of his cigarette for a time. ‘Sorted it?’
‘Whoever did this …’ Molly hisses, and she realizes how many questions she has been asking in her head without finding a way to articulate. She is suddenly aware of the decisions she has unconsciously made. Suddenly aware what she knows Karol to be. ‘Are they dead? Have you hurt them? What else did they do? How many people?’
Karol looks at Molly with something like sadness in his eyes. ‘What you think of me, Molly? You think I’m like Google? Think I know it all and that you just ask and I tell? You know nothing about my life. About the paths we all choose. You think because we shared some times that I’m going to tell a fucking ex-cop all the truths that Steppen is paying money to hide? Why I do that?’
Molly wants to shake him. Wants to grind her fist into his face and force him to stop seeing her the wrong way.
‘Check me,’ says Molly, gesturing at herself. ‘You think I’m wearing a wire, is that it? Or maybe my phone’s transmitting right now. Maybe some of the old colleagues from the good old days have brought me in to get a confession from the big bad gangster about all the terrible things that he and Uncle Steppen have been getting up to. Yeah? Well, how about if I say some things for the benefit of the tape? Things to show you that I’m past fucking caring about all the rights and wrongs and cops and robbers shit? How about if I tell anybody listening that I fucked the suspect in the mud three nights ago and we both came so hard I thought my bones were going to shatter? How about that? Or how about I tell them that I saw the suspect torturing the little wanker who tried to profit from Meda’s disappearance and that instead of phoning the police I felt glad to my soul? That help you feel better?’
Karol is pushing his tongue against his lower teeth. Molly’s voice has risen as she speaks and two young men who are hurrying by turn to look at the angry exchange. Karol blows them a kiss and they continue on their way. Karol gives Molly a hard glare, and then purses his lips into an approximation of something softer. ‘Came so hard your bones were going to shatter? You write that down for me? Put on my CV?’
Molly reaches over and back-hands him on the chest. ‘Wanker!’
Karol pushes himself forward in his seat. He tilts his head and his manner becomes gentle. ‘I believe you, Molly. I believe you are all that you say. You got involved in something you were not meant to. You continued to nose around because it mattered and because you wanted answers for your daughter. I admire you. I like you. But I am here at the request of a powerful man, and that man does not know you, or care about you. He has already done what he must. The family will not remain here for long. Meda may wake, she may not, but I promise you that her parents and her siblings and her uncle will soon be somewhere else. There will be no publicity. No arrest. No trial. Things will be done as they have always been done and you will never hear the outcome. I do not say this to distress you or to make you feel unimportant. I say this because you have waded out far enough. We are beyond the shallows. Any deeper and you will be swimming in the kind of waters where it is all blood and sharks and I cannot protect you from them all.’
‘Protect me? I don’t need protecting!’
Karol sighs, as if tired to his bones. ‘We all need protecting. You do. I do. Your friend does. Steppen is vor y zakone and his niece was stolen by a madman. Those men I hurt? They thought they were strong and powerful and then I made them bleed. I know that when the end comes for me I will not think myself at risk. That is what it is to be human. We all believe ourselves somehow immortal. We all believe we will be the one to escape. None of us will. Nobody gets out alive.’
Molly feels as though she is running out of whatever has been powering her. The headache is becoming more intense. She turns to stare into the rain and for an instant it feels as though everything is dissolving and fragmenting. Each drop of rain is a pixel of the picture before her and each is being blown away by the gale from the river.
‘Who took her?’ she asks, weakly. ‘Hilda is with Lottie. I’ll go straight there. I won’t go into the hospital. I just want to have an answer for her when she asks if everything is OK.’
Karol rubs his eyebrows with his forefinger and thumb. The action causes his jacket to open slightly at the chest and Molly glimpses a yellow document, rolled into a tube. Karol sees the direction of her gaze and sits back.
‘That’s Metropolitan,’ says Molly, quietly. ‘Case files. Not a photocopy. An original …’
‘Do not ask any more,’ says Karol, urgently. ‘Stop.’
‘Karol, please …’
Karol curses, biting down on his lower lip. Slowly, he reaches into his coat and removes the sheaf of papers. He closes his eyes and unrolls the top page. It shows a series of stills from CCTV footage, dated and marked with the time. Molly looks at the page. The images were all taken on different cameras. The earliest is dated almost four years ago. The most recent was the night of Meda’s disappearance.
‘This man,’ says Karol, quietly. ‘This is who did it.’
Molly looks at a shape that seems more shadow than anything else. She blinks several times, trying to make sense of the pictures. Each is of a quiet street. Each is taken in darkness. The only light is from a solitary streetlamp. Each shows a figure in a cloak and hat, a cut-out of absolute black.
‘Are you taking the piss?’ asks Molly, recoiling. ‘That’s a Ripper actor. Somebody from a Whitechapel tour. It’s a silhouette, at best. Where were they taken? Are you serious? Karol, I don’t …’
‘The girls I told you about,’ he says, and his voice is not more than a whisper. ‘Steppen has been asking questions. People have been very helpful. We know times and dates and places. We know more than the police. We know that this man, this thing, was nearby each time a child was taken.’
‘How …?’
‘We know, Molly,’ says Karol, as if explaining to a child. ‘Not who he is, but what he has done. The police have done their tests. There was dead skin on her face, as if she had worn a mask made of skin. Those skin cells are being tested for DNA at a private facility at this moment. Those results will come to us, Molly. We will take vengeance. This man took Meda’s blood. He pumped her full of his own. Her body is rejecting it. She is dying. The quills that punctured her skin – they were needles. Syringes. They were used for this man’s madness. We will find him, Molly. But you will never hear of it. And I ask you to settle for this.’
Molly’s hand is on her mouth. She can feel her heart beating hard. She does not know whether she wants to know more or to cleanse her mind of the ugly thoughts with which it is full to bursting.
‘You can’t know all this,’ says Molly, desperately. ‘Not for certain. Not some old Russian gangster in a little flat in Stepney. It’s guesswork. It’s insane …’
‘Ask no more,’ says Karol, and he reaches forward to put his hand on Molly’s. ‘Please, wade no deeper.’
Molly yanks her hand away and knocks the glass, which topples from the table and splashes her front. She curses and jumps back and as she does so her mobile phone falls from her jacket pocket and clatters on to the table. Raindrops immediately pattern the surface and the feather-light touch causes the screen to illuminate.
Molly stops still as she looks at the image. Feels the ground tilt as she looks at the photograph of her daughter. Tall. Long-limbed and clumsy. Bushy-haired and red-faced. Beautiful and ungainly. She scrabbles with the display and starts pawing at the screen. She reaches out and closes her fist around Karol’s arm. She suddenly knows, to her bones, that her child needs her. It is as though her blood has found its voice and is screaming her name. She feels it in the centre of her bones; the utter certainty that her little girl, the girl who could serve as a mask for Meda, is in danger.
‘The other children,’ says Molly, urgently. ‘Did they look like her? The mask, you see. The dead skin on Meda’s face …’
Karol looks down at the table. ‘I can tell you no more.’
‘Karol! Did they look like he
r? Did they look like this?’
Karol glances at Molly’s phone as she shoves it in his face. He gives the slightest of nods.
‘Fuck. Fuck!’
The chair clatters to the ground as she pushes away from the table and sprints through the rain, feet thudding on the wet road like the heart that hammers in her chest.
HILDA
Lottie was drumming her fingers on her teeth and pulling faces; sighs and raspberries and all sorts of expressions that made her look as though she was battling with something difficult. It was getting on my nerves a bit. She’d been jittery all night. I understood what she was going through but I thought she was being a bit selfish. After all, Meda was my friend, not hers. I was the one who had got people asking questions and got Mum and Karol involved in looking for her. It was probably because of their digging around that the bad man let her go. That meant I was the one who had saved her, in a way. But Lottie was acting like it was her best friend who was in the hospital bed, not mine. She’d given me her phone to play with but she had no decent games and her music was all gloomy and whenever I tried to talk to her she told me to just give her a moment. She was bashing away at her laptop as if it was a piano and she was trying to see how loud she could play. She’d been like this ever since she arrived. Tara was working the bar and she had always been nice to me, so if Lottie had better things to do she could get off and do them. I was on the verge of telling her so. It wasn’t my fault that Mum had gone to the hospital without her. I was as angry about it as Lottie was. I should have been there. Should have been kneeling at the hospital bed and holding Meda’s hand and getting thank yous from her family. I should have been the first thing she saw when she woke up.
‘That’s kind of annoying,’ I said, nodding at Lottie’s hands as she lifted them from the keyboard to rap out a rhythm on her front teeth.
‘Sorry?’ she asked, not looking up.
‘The teeth thing.’
‘Oh, right,’ said Lottie, and glared at the computer screen. ‘Soz.’
We sat side by side at the bar. My glass of lemonade was half full on the bar top. Lottie was sampling the new cocktail that Mum had chalked up on the specials board this morning. The Whore’s Drawers. It smelled of geraniums and the glass it was served in was bound with a lacy garter. It looked pretty.
‘What is it you’re doing?’ I asked, properly bored with myself. I was dipping my fingers in my lemonade to draw stick men on the bar and couldn’t even be bothered to give them all heads. I just wanted Mum to ring. Wanted her to get in touch and say it was all fine and that I was going to see my friend again soon. I wanted Lottie to hug me and say something daft. It was all too serious. There weren’t even any other customers to entertain me.
‘Sorry?’ asked Lottie, and she gave me a look like she was cross with me, then went back to her computer. She didn’t even look like herself. Her hair was flat and she had less make-up on than I’d seen her wear before.
‘I’m bored, Lottie. Could we play?’
‘Can’t you play something on my phone?’ she asked, seemingly exasperated.
‘Like what? I don’t know your account password so I can’t buy new games.’
‘There’s books on there. Read a book. Or ask Tara for some paper or something. Do a drawing for your mum …’ She stopped, halfway through a word. Read something on the screen. Looked up with big, wet eyes. ‘I’m so sorry, Hilda …’
My friend was dead. They’d managed to restart her heart but it had given out again. The emergency transfusion had come too late.
Lottie moved a little closer and I got that smell of her. Hospitals and perfume, cigarettes and fried onions. I put my head on her shoulder and she angled the screen of the laptop towards me. She was on her own website, rattling about some posting under the headline ‘Bad Blood’.
‘What’s that all about?’ I asked, and as I looked at her it felt like I was looking at the world through a porthole on an old steamship, the horizon shifting up and down as the waves rolled beneath and around me.
Lottie looked as though I had caught her doing something naughty. She gave me this tight little grin, then hunched her shoulders like she was doing an impression of a miser and put her arms around the laptop. ‘Mine,’ she said. ‘All mine.’
‘What is? What’s the blood stuff?’
Lottie sipped her drink and checked around behind us. The bar was still empty. Tara was busy loading glasses into the dishwasher. I think they’d already been through twice but she didn’t have anything else to do.
‘The blood stuff, as you put it, is a webisode you’re going to love. I sometimes think I have the luck of the Irish.’
‘You’re Irish?’ I asked, unsure what she was so giddy about.
‘No, you turnip, I mean sometimes good fortune just comes along. Like, who would have thought Brendan, with his horrible pony tail and all that mad talk – who’d have thought he would give me something useful. And Christine! Who’d have thought that the mousy little thing would actually have something up her sleeve that could really get the serious telly bods taking notice?’
I didn’t have a clue what she was talking about. I think she realized, because she started talking in a baby voice, as if I was an idiot. She didn’t seem to know how to talk to me about Meda. She dealt with death all her life but she couldn’t communicate any of it to me. I’d have been happy if she’d lied. I’d have settled for a cuddle and a promise that I would see my friend again, one day, in whatever passed for an afterlife. She couldn’t bring herself to do it. Just tried to make things normal between us. To talk like she always had done. I wanted Mum. Wanted her so much it was like a toothache all over my body and the air around it.
‘You know Brendan?’ she asked, and I tried to focus on what Lottie was saying.
‘Of course. He collects stuff. He puts eyeballs on the bar and wants to buy the scarificator.’
‘Yes – and congratulations on your pronunciation, by the way,’ Lottie remarked.
‘What about him?’ I asked.
‘He goes to auctions to buy weird stuff. Medical implements. Collectors’ items.’
‘Like you do,’ I said, nodding.
‘I’m a medical professional,’ she said, bristling. ‘I’m not a collector. I’m a curator of a museum and a clinical pathologist.’
I had nothing to offer in response so just let her get back on track without any nudging.
‘Anyway, Brendan is always getting beaten at auction by a collector who goes by the name of Autolycus. That’s what the auctioneers call him. Do you read Shakespeare?’
‘I’ve seen some films,’ I shrugged, remembering an evening watching Mum cry in front of Romeo and Juliet. It all seemed a little far-fetched to me.
‘There’s a character in The Winter’s Tale called Autolycus. He’s a pickpocket. He snaps up unconsidered trifles. It’s a very scholarly joke.’
‘Oh,’ I said, shrugging. ‘I don’t get it.’
‘No, neither did I,’ admitted Lottie. ‘But Christine …’
‘The fat one?’
‘She’s not fat, that’s mean. But yeah, the little odd one who gets nervous when somebody sneezes. Well, she’s a bit of a collector too. She’s really into this transfusionist from the seventeenth century. She wrote papers on him and has mentioned him in blogs and stuff. He put animal blood into humans and vice versa and nearly got executed for murder when one of his patients died. It’s really interesting.’
‘Right. Well, what?’
‘Christine did some digging about for me so Brendan would stop bugging me and she rang one of the auction houses. Spun some yarn about Dr Lottie being desperate to speak to the buyer with a view to using him on my web show. Auction house couldn’t give any details about him but they took her number and promised to pass it on to the buyer.’
‘And he rang?’ I asked, trying to work out when this would get interesting.
‘No,’ said Lottie, sighing. ‘But, when she spoke to the auctioneer again she as
ked if Autolycus had bought any other items of interest and he was happy to give her a full list from the recent catalogues of all the things he had been after.’
I waited, hoping more would be forthcoming. Lottie made fists with her hands and gave a big smile.
‘Christine recognized one of the pieces he had bought. So did Brendan when I showed him. A Lister spray. Beautiful thing. Brass and wood. It puffed out the carbolic spray that was introduced by the great Lister in 1870 to purify the atmosphere during surgery. Amazing piece, owned by Lister himself and still in working order. Brendan had tried to buy it a few years earlier when it was being sold as part of a private collection. It had belonged to a specialist dealer that Brendan knew pretty well. It had sold to an anonymous buyer. Brendan called the dealer and asked if he knew who had bought it, or whether the piece was back on the market. He told Brendan that he had been contacted three or four years back by somebody trying to track it down. Said he wanted to own it and didn’t mind the cost. Brendan hadn’t been able to persuade the new owner to sell but he had taken the potential buyer’s name and details. Turns out he was under Brendan’s nose. A writer and teacher by the name of Farkas or Firkas. Had written books on philosophy and science and taught at half a dozen universities.’
I looked at her and realized she wanted me to show some excitement. I gave her a thumbs-up. ‘OK. And?’
‘And he just lives ten minutes from here. Somebody with the biggest collection of medical curiosities you can imagine is just a few streets away. I went to see him the other night and there was no answer but he contacted me by letter this morning. Can you believe that? By letter?’
‘That’s nice,’ I said, and felt my attention starting to drift.
‘He said he would be interested to talk with me and even said he was a fan of my show. I’ve Googled him and he’s quite important. Real expert in his field though no shortage of sadness and drama by the looks of things. He said he was watching when you were on!’
‘Me?’ I asked, embarrassed.
