Sonata of the Dead

by Conrad Williams

  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.

  2

  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.

  ‘Mrs Gower?’ I said.

  ‘Yes.’ Her face creased with faint recognition. I felt the same way. I might have traded pleasantries with her from the car as Sarah jumped in or Martin jumped out. I might have waved once or twice.

  ‘My name’s Joel. You won’t remember but—’

  ‘Joel Sorrell! Sarah’s dad. Of course.’ />
  ‘You do remember.’

  ‘I’m good with faces,’ she said, and Martin’s own flashed horribly across my mind. ‘Come in. What can I do for you? How’s Sarah?’

  I followed her into an expansive, brightly lit tiled hallway. A staircase led off to the right, carpeted in something that looked as soft as sable. A glass-topped table was covered in framed photographs. Hello again, Martin. There was a vase of white lilies. I had to just throw it out there. Nip the chit-chat in the bud and get her life ruined right now so she could begin to recover.

  ‘Martin is dead, Mrs Gower. He was found this morning, just a short distance from here, near the golf course.’

  She was looking at me as if she’d discovered that I wasn’t Joel Sorrell after all, but an imposter who had somehow inveigled his way into her house on false pretences. She kept looking back over her shoulder at the kitchen.

  ‘Do you mind?’ she said, and her voice was thinning by the syllable. ‘Only the rhubarb will catch.’

  I followed her to the kitchen. I could see through the patio windows into the garden where a man in a pastel-pink Ralph Lauren polo shirt and steel-coloured hair – Mr Gower… Tom, as I recalled – was emptying a wheelbarrow of grass cuttings on to a compost heap. Mrs Gower – June? Joan? Joan – took a simmering pan off the hob. The hot, sweet, acidic smell of it filled the room.

  She looked at me levelly, a hard look. She reminded me of someone agonising over a tough question on Mastermind. Very carefully, she said: ‘Martin is due back any minute. He was at a friend’s house last night.’

  ‘The police will be here shortly, Joan,’ I said.

  ‘In fact, he might even have slipped in while I was outside with his dad.’

  She wasn’t listening. She wasn’t accepting it. This wasn’t going the way I’d planned, but then why would it? What did I really expect? A tear in the eye, a thank you and an invitation to have a poke through his things? At least she wasn’t screaming. At least I was still here.

  We went up the stairs to an empty bedroom. Posters on a wall: Jimi, Kurt, Eric. A stack of PlayStation games. A stack of music magazines. How old was Martin? Twenty? Twenty-one? His room was pretty sparse. Perhaps he was in the process of moving out. I spotted the kind of things that stand out: a karate kit with a purple belt, a Teeline shorthand course book, a guitar, boxes of photographs. I wondered if any more shots of Sarah resided within them. I itched to search.

  What I’d said seemed to catch up with Joan. She sagged on to the bed. A deep, agonised wail sounded from deep inside her, animalistic, ineluctable. I should not have been there. As soon as Tom came in I would be through the door, possibly before it had a chance to open. I did not have much time but I didn’t know what I meant to do. The karate gear and guitar meant contacts I could interview: presumably he trained at a local dojo; maybe he was in a band. The Teeline shorthand book suggested he was maybe training to be a journalist, presumably at a college or university nearby. There would be something I could dig into regarding his photography. There was action to be taken.

  Joan was sobbing into his pillow now. Maybe she could smell his scalp on it.

  ‘Joan,’ I said. ‘Has Sarah been in touch? Has Sarah been here?’

  But I was locked out. She was cocooned within her son. I heard the patio doors skid shut downstairs. I heard the roar of a tap.

  On top of a cupboard lay a stack of notebooks. I skimmed through them. Photography stuff in the main: film speeds, apertures, timings. A purist then. No digital exposures for Martin Gower. Maybe that extended to his appointments. And yes, here was a diary.

  Feet on the stairs. Tom calling Joan’s name.

  I riffled the pages. Nothing in the previous day’s space. No mention of Sarah. He hadn’t entered any information in the names and addresses section. There wasn’t much of anything, actually. Except, once a month, a single word: ACCELERANTS.

  ‘Who are you?’ Tom came into the bedroom, the glass of water in his fist. No recognition here. He looked from me to Joan and then back again.

  ‘Joel Sorrell,’ I said. The name seemed to make no impact on him. But he was no longer listening. His wife was crying. A stranger was standing nearby.

  ‘I’m calling the police,’ he said.

  ‘He is the police,’ Joan cried at him, lifting her head from the pillow.

  ‘Actually—’ I began, but Joan was clawing her way towards her husband, her face slicked with tears and snot.

  ‘Martin,’ she said. ‘MARTIN!’

  Tom was shaking his head. Water from the glass sloshed over the rim. He didn’t notice. ‘What about Martin?’

  ‘He’s dead,’ Joan managed, the words struggling out of her as if they were barbed wire snagging in her throat.

  Tom dropped the glass. He went to Joan and held her. He didn’t take his eyes off me.

  ‘Sarah Sorrell,’ I said. ‘Have you seen her? Did Martin—’

  ‘Get out,’ Tom said. His lips were drawn back from his teeth. He was shaking. He was shaking so hard I thought he was having convulsions.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said.

  The doorbell rang when I was halfway down the stairs. I didn’t answer it, and went out through the patio doors at the back. I hurried down the garden and skipped over the fence. I jogged along the train tracks until I hit a road and followed it round to where I’d left the car.

  I was on Spaniards Road, gunning through Hampstead Heath, when Mawker called to give me holy hell.

  3

  I picked up a litre of Grey Goose on the way home. I had maybe three inches left in the bottle in my freezer, but today was a four-inch kind of day. Mengele was laying in wait for me when I got in, pouncing on my leg like a furrier, more tuna-scented version of Cato. I let him bully me for a while until there was a real danger of him reopening some of his previously administered wounds, and poured him some Fishbitz. I carried the bottle and a shot glass and went out on to the balcony where I got on with the serious business of destroying my internal organs. The heat of the day had been captured by the floor tiles and I kicked off my shoes and enjoyed the warmth in my feet. I could hear the buzz of early evening traffic. In the windows of flats opposite I could see people sitting down for meals or TV or, like me, a restorative gill or two. I poured. I tossed it back. The vodka shot was a syrup slug of iced purity; I held it still on my tongue for a few moments and then let it roll down my throat. Cold became heat. I closed my eyes.

  We used to have a bush in the back garden at Lime Grove. Dianthus. It produced red flowers with attractive grey-blue grassy leaves. You’d smell it on summer evenings when we sat outside with a glass of something, watching the Tube trains clatter over the tracks above the roofs of Shepherd’s Bush market. It had a spicy smell about it.

  Whenever she’d been naughty Sarah would pick one of the flowers and leave it by the bedside. She never confessed to this, but I’d seen her doing it once or twice. I smelled that flower now, across the years, as if some old, dying pocket of my mind had cruelly opened up to let me in.

  I wondered how close I’d come to finding a path to Sarah. Somewhere in Gower’s house, in a notebook or on a computer file, was a phone number or an address that might lead me to her. Martin Gower. Childhood sweethearts. I’d never thought to consider childhood friends as possible sources of information. How many of us retain the relationships we built at school? I tried to think of the other kids Sarah had been friends with but couldn’t for the life of me dredge up any names. I guessed Sarah wasn’t the kind of person to use social networking sites because I’d tried any number of them without success, both with my surname and Peart, her mother’s. But that didn’t mean her old friends didn’t populate them. I made a note to ransack my brain for names, or contact the schools she’d attended.

  I tried to push her from my mind, just for a while, but it was easier said than done. She was like Long John Silver infecting the dreams of Jim Hawkins, albeit in a much less frightening way. And then I thought about Martin Gower and how his pa
rents would be plagued with thoughts of their son, and which version of events I’d rather have. I poured another shot to help blot out the vision of Gower’s face, like so many rough leaves of bacon on a slicer. Whoever had done for him was committed. He wanted to make a statement. And this was not his first. Or if it was, it would not be his last.

  Mawker’s voice drifted through my thoughts. It had been punched around and exhausted by this murder. You could hear it in the empty threats. I’d accepted the caution without argument and told him I was sorry. I wasn’t thinking straight. Sarah, and all that. He came round, a little, but only because he thought he might be able to benefit from my knowledge.

  ‘You know what I know,’ I told him.

  ‘What about this Accelerants thing?’ he asked. ‘Any ideas?’

  ‘What did Joan and Tom say?’

  ‘Not a lot. They didn’t have much to do with their son. He was out a lot. Busy, busy, busy. Click-click. Kick-kick, karate chop. Press passes and arpeggios. He was about to move. Shared flat in Crowthorne Road. Him and two other guys.’

  ‘Names?’

  ‘What have you done for me lately?’

  ‘Well I was thinking the Accelerants might be a band. Maybe he’s moving in with the bass player and drummer.’

  ‘Owning a guitar does not turn you into Bob Dylan.’

  ‘Well, he was musical when I knew him,’ I said. ‘At school, I mean. I dropped him off once after guitar practice.’

  ‘He might not have kept it up. I ditched the cornet after six weeks.’

  ‘Says the man who is so fond of blowing his own trumpet.’

  ‘Funny, Joel. You’re such a funny fellow. My ribs are on fire whenever you’re around.’

  ‘Anyway, you might want to follow that up. Local music venues. Pubs, clubs. See if they’ve done any gigs. Any more photographs I might be interested in? In those boxes of his?’

  ‘Not as yet,’ Mawker said. ‘I’ll let you know. Mainly wanky black-and-white stuff. Wet landscapes. Black crows on rotting fence posts. Woe-is-me junk.’