Mum died when she gave birth to me. Her name was Julia. There’s one photograph of her and Dad (Gordon) on their wedding day. She’s leaning in to kiss him. She looks mousy. He’s a bald eagle. He’s holding an umbrella - August wedding; it pissed down - and she’s got flowers in her hair. Confetti frozen around them. He always told me I was in that shot too. She was pregnant with me six months when they had the ceremony. I keep it, carefully folded, in my wallet. I don’t take it out that often any more. It’s been unfolded so often it’s beginning to separate along the pleats.
When Dad died he left me the house. I say “house”. It’s more like a couple of connecting sheds at the edge of a long, thin field that ends at the motorway, which is like a thick, black underscore. Dad lived here rent-free, employed as a handyman by the farmer who owned the land. The farmer died about five years ago when the farm caught fire. There were rumours that it was a botched insurance scam, or that he’d committed suicide. Nobody came to demolish what was left of the building. You can still smell the smoke soaked into the walls of the place. Every so often, especially during nights when the storms come, you can hear bits of it collapsing. The main roof is gone now. Vandals have done for all the windows. Sometimes there is torchlight. Kids mucking about, scaring each other, drinking, taking drugs, having sex. I go in after them in the mornings to see if they left anything valuable behind, wallets, iPhones, but there’s never anything worth having.
You’ll not see me in town, much. I’m not a people person. I’m a book person. I read a lot, although I never enjoyed my school days and I left as soon as I was able, failing every exam they threw at me, if I was even around to take them. Like Dad, I thought I’d end up labouring around the farm: what’s the point of knowing about isosceles triangles when you’re knee-deep in pig shit? The farmer was a decent guy to us, even if he did resemble a sad bloodhound, and I was sorry about what happened to him.
I never thought about taking my own life. But I wonder about it. Everybody does, I reckon. People who commit suicide - is it on their minds from an early age, or is it something that creeps up on you? You think about how it might go, how you’d decide to do it, and what would be the least horrible way. Could I take a bottle full of painkillers? Could I jump from a skyscraper? Could I step out in front of a lorry on the motorway? I’d be more scared of getting it wrong than right. And what if I changed my mind?
I spend a lot of time in the woods here. Food is a problem. I don’t have any money to buy stuff from the shops, and I’m a good lad. I promised I’d never thieve, so I’m out harvesting whenever I can. Nuts, berries, fruit, mushrooms. I lay traps and catch rabbits. By the pond I can sometimes collect a frog or two. I check the motorway every morning for fresh road-kill and it’s here that I find the bulk of my meals. I’ve bagged magpies, rats, pheasants, squirrels, badgers, foxes, hedgehogs, a swan and, one time, in winter, a deer. I had to borrow a book from the library on how to skin and gut it. I portioned it and kept it in plastic bags outside in the cold, in a tin bath covered with tarp. It kept me going till spring. Sometimes I wish I’d been born in Canada, or Australia. I’ve never tried crocodile, or bear, or ostrich. Exotica, I think they call it.
I don’t eat anything if it looks as though it died from something other than a car’s bumper. If it’s fresh and not flat, it goes in the pan. The only downside is that you’ve got to cook it pretty well - no pink meat here - because of the likelihood of trichinosis. Fox is probably my favourite. It’s not very fatty, so you need to cook it quick on a barbecue. It’s dense meat, but pretty soft, with a salty, kind of earthy taste. Rat is a bit like pork in flavour, but I only tried it once because there’s the risk of Weil’s disease. Owl’s okay, badger’s bad and hedgehog’s horrid, but you can use their spines as toothpicks. I’ll try anything. I had dog once. A Golden Retriever. I think it was an unwanted pet dumped in the countryside that wandered on to the road. I had it in a stew with some beans and potatoes. It tasted like lamb.
I’m not sure how I made the leap to eating what I was studying, but it seemed the natural progression. Granted, it sounds a bit grim, but it’s the ultimate free-range, organic diet. It won’t be pumped full of hormones, or tense and knotty because it’s been trapped in a pen. My way, you can taste the surroundings in what’s on your plate. You can taste the good soil and the moist fields and the fresh air. You can detect the night on your palate. I’d rather have a toad stir-fry than a chicken injected with steroids to the point of deformity, crushed up against hundreds of others in a shit-spattered battery farm.
When it’s dark, because I don’t have any electricity, I sit and read by candlelight while a failing wind-up radio plays old American songs from the wartime years; the only station I can find. I like listening to that stuff. I imagine my mother might have enjoyed it as well. She looks like someone who would sway to Johnny Mercer or The Ink Spots or Irving Berlin, her voice fading in and out as she sang a bar or two. “Be Careful, It’s My Heart”. The news comes on and I fade out. Never anything good. Never something I want to hear.
I continue to draw the animals I’ve eaten. I’m decent at drawing, somehow, despite Dad never having any talent in that area. Maybe Mum had a knack. Or maybe it skipped a generation. I often think about who my forebears were; I never knew my grandparents, but I know their names were Bert and Olive on my mum’s side and Norman and Iris on my dad’s side. There are four names you don’t hear much nowadays. Everybody dies and sometimes their names die with them. Could Norman ever be a popular name again? Was it ever?
~ * ~
I get down to the road around five in the morning and climb over the fence. I wait on my side of the crash barrier, listening for traffic. There are no motorway lights on this stretch. It’s usually quiet for another half-hour bar the odd car, or an HGV. Now’s the time to go looking for road-kill; most of the animals I’ve found are nocturnal and it’s usually too early in the day, or too cold, for them to have been worried by rats or birds or for the flies to have filled their moistest parts with eggs.
I find a jay, which is interesting; I’ve never had one of those before. And a pheasant with just its head crushed. That’s promising because sometimes, if they’ve been run over, you can taste the rubber off the tyres. I put what’s edible in a bag. About half-a-mile further south, I see something that gives me pause, something grey near the middle of the road, moving slightly. I hurry along the hard shoulder. Sometimes you can miss out on a decent dinner because the animal is merely stunned. One time, about three years ago, I saw a foal lying still at the side of the road with a broken jaw, its tongue hanging from between its teeth, fat and purple like a partially inflated balloon. When I was about ten feet away, it jerked upright and escaped. It must have starved. Had I been a bit quicker I could have saved it some agony and made my belly a happy place for weeks.
It’s a wolf.
I stand over it. This one won’t be running away. It’s been hit so hard that the flesh has been substantially parted; most of its insides are now outside. I can’t quite understand how it can still be moving, but it is, and it is obviously in considerable pain. Its eyes bulge, its jaws stretch in either a scream that is silent or beyond the frequency human ears can detect. I can’t pick it up like this. There’s nothing to bludgeon it with, so I pull my knife from my back pocket and kneel down alongside. Where the legs meet the body I sever an artery and wait for it to bleed out. It’s frustrating; usually I can get a decent boudin noir out of an animal, but I don’t want to risk distressing it further by carrying it home alive because the suffering can transfer to the meat, making it pale and sweaty. I sling it over my shoulder when the twitching has stopped and trudge back to the shed.
I put the jay and the pheasant in my makeshift pantry for later and get on with the wolf. I strip it and skin it and gut it - well, those that are left - and joint it. I get a big pot on the gas stove and add onions, wild garlic, carrots, rosemary and potatoes. I get the meat in the pot and brown it all over. I pour in plen
ty of water. My stomach is rumbling. Give it a stir. I wish I had some stock, or a drop of red wine.
I pick up my sketchbook and begin to draw the wolf. I’m wondering about the skin, whether it could be put to good use -Dad always hated waste - and wondering what its name might have been, when there’s a knock on the door of the shed. Nobody ever comes down here, not even the farmer when he was alive and it’s his gaff, really. A voice, male, deep and purposeful - like Dad’s - asking to talk to me. I open the door and there are six or seven policemen standing behind a man in plain clothes. Big eyes. He’s an owl. I remember my manners. Dad brought me up to be polite. I invite them in.
The man in plain clothes gestures at the sketchbook. “It’s a good likeness,” he says. “Just like on the posters.”
The pot has started to bubble on the stove and two of the policemen see what’s on the chopping board and leave without saying anything, which is simply rude. I start to pick up the clothes from the floor, and I ask if anybody is hungry.
<
~ * ~
CHRISTOPHER FOWLER
Bryant & May and the Seven Points
I’VE REACHED THE age,” said Arthur Bryant with the weariness of a man who has just realized that his library card’s expiry date is later than his own, “when my back has started to go out more often than I do.”
“That’s because you have no social life,” his Antiguan landlady Alma Sorrowbridge pointed out as she passed him a fresh slice of buttered lavender cake sprinkled with hemp seeds. “You spend all your time in that filthy old office of yours. And you do go out. You went to see your old friend Sidney Biddle the other day.”
“Alma, I went to his funeral,” said Bryant testily. “I don’t call that much of a day out. He was as adamantine in death as he was when he was alive.”
“I don’t know what that word means.”
“Unyielding. But the sausage rolls were better than yours. I swiped some from the wake and ran chemical tests on them. Caramelized onions, apparently. You may wish to take note.”
“Those who are taken from us don’t always leave the earthly realm,” said Alma, who had been following a more spiritual line of thought.
“You may be right,” Bryant admitted. “I imagine most of them end up working for the post office. Has this cake got nuts in it?”
“Of course not,” said Alma. “I know how they get under your dental plate.”
Bryant examined his slice with suspicion. “Everything comes with a warning about containing nuts these days. Except the general population. Do you know, there’s no common consensus on what constitutes insanity in society?”
“Really,” said Alma flatly. Bryant had been poring over a tattered volume entitled An Analysis of Uncommon Psychoses all morning. She didn’t hold with too much reading.
“Benjamin Franklin said that insanity was doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. But psychosis suggests a spectrum of behavioural patterns defined by abnormal thought processes and violations of societal norms, a flagrant disregard for accepted moral codes.”
“I’ll remember that when I’m doing your ironing. Do you always have to harp on about murderers? You know what I think about all that sort of thing - it’s unwholesome.” Alma rose and tidied away the tea things. “Why don’t you get your mind off all this morbidity? Come to church with me this evening.”
“You never give up, do you? I’m not that desperate for something to do,” Bryant replied, dusting crumbs from his stained waistcoat. “Besides, I remember what happened the last time I went. The vicar told me off for praying too loudly.”
“You made God jump,” said Alma. “And your singing nearly deafened us. It would have helped if you’d known the tune. Or the words.”
“I couldn’t read the hymn-sheet because I’d forgotten my spectacles, so I had to make up the lyrics. I think I did a better job than all that rubbish about winged chariots and spears of fire.” Bryant sighed and looked about himself impatiently. “I suppose I could make myself useful, plant the window boxes, scrape the oven out, clear the guttering, put some dubbin on my boots. It’s just that I’ve got no cases on at the moment.”
“Then Mr May is probably at a loose end, too. Why don’t you give him a call?”
As Alma rose and prepared to wrap herself up against the grim deluges of a blustery February morning, Bryant rang John May.
Don’t think too harshly of Mr Bryant; since Christmas, London had been alternately drenched and frozen by squalls heading down from Iceland, until its massed buildings looked like something one would find at the bottom of a stagnant pond. Everyone who ventured out soon became cold, wet and bad-tempered, and Arthur, who took the chill in his aged bones for a sign as ominous as the appearance of Elsinore’s ghost, suffered more than most. It is a testimony to John May’s persuasive skills that the most senior detective in London’s Peculiar Crimes Unit was soon following his partner across the rain-swept upper reaches of Charlton Park, looking for a closed funfair.
“He’s been missing for three weeks,” said May as they made their way through the wet grass. “Left work at seven p.m. on the last Friday night in January, detoured here for reasons we don’t know, and never reached home.”
“And it took him all this time to be flagged as missing?” asked Bryant, incredulous. “Slow down a bit. My walking stick’s sinking into the mud.”
“It’s a little more complicated than that. As far as we know, Michael Portheim is a GCHQ officer and mathematician specializing in codes. He was seconded to MI5 from the CIA for reasons no one will tell us, although an inside contact of mine suggested he was involved in certain aspects of counter-terrorism being jointly covered by the two agencies. As soon as he vanished, both sides began investigating.”
“How soon after?”
“He was reported missing on Friday night after failing to turn up at a Russian supper club in Mayfair. One of his colleagues made the call that night.”
“So it was a business dinner.”
“It always is with that mob. Most of them have no friends and very little social life. Confidences aren’t encouraged. MI5 sent their bods in to turn over his apartment in Muswell Hill, half expecting to find him zipped into a holdall, but they found nothing disturbed or out of the ordinary. It looks like he never reached home. They traced him here from phone records, CCTV and his travel card. There are no cameras in the park, on the common or in the woods - too many trees - but there’s footage of him entering from the street and none of him coming back out the same way.”
“So the assumption is that he was killed somewhere inside the park,” said Bryant, fighting the ground with his stick.
“It looks that way. A team went over the entire area, but short of turning over every inch of turf with a spade there’s no way of knowing what happened. The agencies’ internal investigators have no leads to speak of, but the biggest fear is that he was either murdered or kidnapped.”
“So what are we hoping to achieve in a rainy field in near-zero temperatures?” Bryant demanded to know.
“They’ve called us in. It’s rather clutching at straws, but I went through Portheim’s file this morning and found that he came from a military background. He’d been a keen sportsman at college, a free runner, hiker, canoeist, skydiver, good athletic all-rounder. He studied medicine for a while, then joined the army - straight in at officer level - but as part of his training he also learned circus skills. And the only unusual contact anyone has been able to come up with is this.”
May pointed ahead through the sleeting gloom at what appeared to be a half-built stage set. As the pair approached, Bryant saw that it was a semi-circle of boarded-up sideshows, the old fashioned kind consisting of tents fronted by tall painted flats, inset with strings of coloured light bulbs.
“Back when he was learning to tightrope walk and swing from a trapeze, Portheim knew a man called Harry Mills. The chap was his mentor in competitive at
hletics, taught him a lot about physical prowess and showmanship. There’s no evidence to suggest they had any further contact with each other after Portheim was headhunted by the CIA, or when he returned to England. But here’s the funny thing. This set-up appeared in the park the week Portheim went missing.”
He looked up at a rain-streaked board that read:
HARRY MILLS’S INCREDIBLE ARCADE
OF ABNORMALITIES!
Beneath the red-and-yellow lettering, set in a traditional circus typeface known as “Coffee Tin”, were posters painted on to linen and sealed beneath discoloured varnish, vignettes that had probably been produced in the 1930s, when such delights were popular at coastal resorts.
One painting showed a voluptuous young woman riveted into a steel bathing suit, holding a pair of terminals from which jagged streaks of blue lightning arced. Scrolled across the base of the picture was the legend:
Psychomania: Killer Stories Page 42
