Sonata of the Dead

by Conrad Williams

  ‘So are you going to let me in on these Crowthorne Road posers or what?’

  ‘No, I’m not. You’ve been formally cautioned. Stick your wanger through the letterbox one more time and I’ll chop it off. If anything relating to Sarah crops up, I’ll let you know.’

  ‘I’d rather there was some looking for instead of cropping up.’

  ‘Yeah, well, this is a murder inquiry, not a search for a woman who is apparently alive and well, an adult holding a grudge against her dickhead father. Butt out, Joel. You’re a very lucky boy. Tom Gower wanted to press charges. He could take legal action against you. And he’d win.’

  I bit my lip wishing I could bite his lip, drank the vodka and put down the glass and the phone. I’d got a decent buzz on, fast. I needed it. I opened the glassine bag. Versions of her slid out on to the table. My daughter. My baby. Very pink. Very shiny. Sarah Grace Sorrell. Born 6 September 1999. In one of the photographs – presumably before Gower (or she, for fuck’s sake) suggested she become fully naked – she wore a pale green T-shirt and black knickers. Her hair was swept back off her face and tied into pigtails. Her fingernails were blood red.

  In the nude photograph she had a tattoo, some cursive text I couldn’t make out, inked under her left breast. A navel piercing. Her right ear was punched through with half a dozen steel loops. No props. No clues in the backdrop: a featureless brick wall. There was nothing on the back of the photos, either. Except for one: a date three weeks ago and the words ‘SLX sesh’.

  What was SLX? A kind of camera? Sesh, presumably, was session. I found myself praying to a god I didn’t believe in that he hadn’t just misspelled SEX.

  Why did he have this set of photographs on him when he died? Was he on his way to meet Sarah, maybe, in order to show her? Or was he on his way back? Surely he would have let her keep these prints if he had the negatives. Maybe she hated them. I sure as shit did. But that would be another reason for Sarah to keep them. So if he was on his way somewhere – neatly dressed, man bag – why was he on some shitty track away from any of the conventional routes into the city centre? Which meant what? That Sarah lived nearby? Or that he was killed elsewhere and brought to this spot?

  I checked my watch. Eight o’clock. I picked up the phone. Philip Clarke answered on the first ring. Clarke was one of a number of forensic pathologists used by the Met. He was the only one I knew well enough to share an occasional bottle of wine with.

  As usual, his voice sounded brisk and bright though he’d probably been working over fourteen hours. I imagined him in his surgical gown, portly, dashing, with a nose broken and bent from a collision with an oar during a boat race when he was at university. Under his thousand-pound double-breasted sharkskin suits from Gieves & Hawkes he wore novelty braces. ‘Joel, I’m about to get very red. Can’t it wait?’

  ‘Red with whom? Not the guy who looks like he shaved on a trampoline with a samurai sword?’

  ‘He’s only just landed on my plate, J,’ he said. ‘He’s fresher than my lunchbox.’

  ‘He knows… he knew my girl, Phil. I’m just looking for an in. Anything that might lead me to her. Ian Mawker’s blocked me out of this one. I’m in the cells if I kick around in his dust any more.’

  ‘You’ll cost me my job, Sorrell.’

  ‘Well, maybe, unless they catch you at your work-time hobby, necro-boy.’

  ‘I’ll email you if I see anything unusual. It will be anon. It will be unsigned. Got it?’

  I fired up my Triassic-era laptop and stared at the winking cursor. I typed in: ‘SLX sesh’. I got a bunch of surfing references. I tried ‘SLX camera’. Bingo. There was a Rolleiflex SLX, a single lens reflex camera from the 1970s. Naturally it used film, which fit with Gower’s Luddite work ethic. I typed in ‘Martin Gower photography’.

  Gower had a Tumblr account but he hadn’t posted any candids here. Just more of what Mawker had described. Lone tree in a field. Rainy urban back street. Desolate beach. At the foot of the page was a badge with a cartoon camera lens sketched upon it and the words ‘Swain’s Lane Snappers’. I copied and pasted that into the search engine: an amateur photography group who met regularly at the Leopold Café, a little place on Swain’s Lane. I knew that café very well.

  ‘BLOODBITCH’

  12 MARCH – 15 MARCH 1985

  There weren’t many things that made him happy. Marilyn Monroe in Niagara, a full moon, the park on a freezing November morning, fish soup.

  So when he found himself smiling at the young boy on the bus home one Friday afternoon, he was surprised. And when he realised he was smiling he was a little shocked, angry, and for some as yet unknown reason, more than a bit afraid.

  His shopping list for Saturday demanded a small onion, a bottle of tomato sauce, a meringue base and a packet of rice. He came back with a kilo bag of Winalot dog food and a trowel from the market, which was strange as he despised dogs and didn’t own a garden. That was when he sat down and began to worry. And think.

  He decided that he needed a helping hand, so he padded barefoot to the drinks cabinet and liberally poured from a bottle of Teachers, watching the golden liquid swirl in hypnotic shimmers. He got back to the couch and slumped in one well used corner, glass in one hand, botle in the other, wishing he had put Mr Brahms on the stereo before he sat down.

  Too late, he thought, and sipped his whisky.

  So. What was up?

  In a word, nothing. So why was he panicking?

  It took half a bottle of TEachers before he got it. He hated children. And today he had been smiling at one of the little brats. He sighed and put his face in his hands, wincing at the raw smell of alcohol on his breath but keeping his position anyway. He had big hands that completely covered his face which suited him fine because he didn’t relish the prospect of seeing his features in a mirror at that moment.

  Now with the darkness absolute, he thought, dwelling upon his past and dreary present.

  Okay, he thought, I’m thrity-three. No, come on, tell it how it is. What’s the point of lying to yourself. Okay. Deep breath.

  I’m thirty-seven. I’m lonely and single. I’ve got a stinker of a job. I hate my boss. I hate green peppers and Sunday mornings. I hate every morning. No TV, a crackly transistor radio that only receives Radio 2 in the evenings and static every other minute of the day. No friends. Well, Stan at the Tusk and Bottle, but I only see him when I feel like having a drink. I don’t think he’s even capable of seeing me half the time. No girl. Well, once. And then he stopped thinking and sighed. The sound was like broken, dead leaves on a quiet woodland path. The clock on the mantelpiece chimed twice. It was 2 am, he was drunk as you like and utterly depressed.

  Her name had been Claire, and once, a million lifetimes ago, they had been engaged and he had been proud to take her out, his ring gleaming as big as an egg (to his eyes at least) on her finger.

  They had fallen in love at university and his first year was devoted to her, sending her roses once a month, wining and dining and pining for her, showing her affection. And everything was fine. He was happy and smiled a lot. Sometimes he smiled in lectures, for no apparent reason and he would walk through the streets to the shops with the same goofy grin on his face and the old women chatting on the poirches would smile and glance at each other, recognising his emotions and commenting on what a wonderful season summer was for love.

  And then his mother died and his world fell apart.

  It had been three years since Claire walked out of his life, four since Brenda, his mother, succumbed to the laughing black cancer in her stomach.

  Claire had been everything to him in the months after Brenda’s death. She had been a crutch and he leaned on her hard.

  It had been April when she rang at his doorbell. A slightly overcast day, similar to the moods that had been sinking on him lately. She had smiled. And he knew then that it was over. He didn’t need to look at her finger to know that the ring had been removedl didn’t have to look at the eyes to see the determinati
on in her actions. The smile said it all. A fleshy Pandora’s box about to open and spill all manner of nasty things.

  ‘Dont’t say it,’ he murmured, adn wandered off to the kitchen to make some coffee. That had been the frist time he had cried since his mother’s death.

  4

  The balcony and the bottle were hitching their skirts at me but I couldn’t relax now that I had another possible route to Sarah. I was over the limit so I trotted down to Seymour Place to hail a cab. I nodded and made affirmatory noises as the driver monged on about pit bulls and Chelsea footballers – I resisted the urge to ask what the difference was – all the while wishing I’d brought a hipflask with me. I kept my eyes on the human traffic as we swept along Marylebone Road and turned left into Albany Street, eyes boring into faces, same as always, just in case. It was a beautiful evening. People were flooding into and out of Regent’s Park. I remembered picnics at the Japanese garden in Holland Park with Becs, and Sarah when she was little. She always helped to pack the hamper. She always brought Grapes, her teddy bear with her. Proper picnics, with steel cutlery and china plates. Real glasses. We’d drink chilled rosé and listen to the radio while Sarah turned cartwheels or made giant daisy chains. One time, Rebecca, she said:

  Let’s have another.

  And I said: Maybe… we’ll see.

  I often wonder if I’d said yes we’d have moved elsewhere, and she’d have gone to a different gym. Maybe she’d still be alive.

  ‘…and as for that French prong with his anachronistic Hoxton facking fin and his pink boots, he couldn’t pass the facking parcel, the cahhhnt…’

  The driver slowed up around the gnarly bit where Camden High Street feeds into Kentish Town Road. His invective faded too, maybe because he’d run out of things to say or more likely because the noises I was making didn’t marry with his content any more. Quite possibly I’d chuckled and said ‘yes’ enthusiastically when he asked if he was boring the shit out of me. The tired, clustered Kentish Town thoroughfares became the slightly leafier, slightly more spread out streets of Gospel Oak. We hit Highgate Road and I readied my wallet. I tumbled out on to Swain’s Lane a little more refreshed than I’d thought. I gave the cabbie his fare, and a tip to show him I wasn’t the sort of cahhhnt he’d taken me for, and turned to face Leopold’s. I’d been here a few times for a morning-after-the-night-before breakfast. They did great Bloody Marys and hefty full Englishes to sponge up all the undigested alcohol and regret in your belly. Now they were open for the evening crowd they sold artisanal pies and craft ales from a nearby microbrewery. It was all wobbly old tables and mismatched wooden chairs. The walls were plastered with ancient beer mats and sealed with varnish. Newspapers and board games. Candles melted into wine bottles. They played classical music, exclusively.

  I went in and sat at the tiny corner bar. It wasn’t too busy midweek, but it picked up on a Friday. I ordered a Czech Pilsner and a black pudding and wild venison pie. The girl behind the bar was dressed in a purple vest and denim shorts. A grey beanie kept her hair out of her eyes. She smiled as I handed over the shirt from my back; one of her teeth was decorated with a twinkling red jewel and there was a little silver bolt through the flesh just below her bottom lip. Her eye snagged on my scar; maybe she thought it was skin decor. Maybe she coveted it. She was Sarah’s age. I had to restrain myself from grabbing hold of her throat and demanding she tell me where my daughter was. I wasn’t so pissed to want to risk a night on one of Mawker’s skidmarked mattresses.

  A door to the rear led through to the toilets and the stairs to the rooms upstairs, which could be hired for private parties. A magnetic board fixed to the wall was covered in fliers and adverts and offers. Among them I found reference to the photography club, held in one of the upstairs rooms. They met on Thursdays, apparently, which was today. But I was too late. Their meetings finished at seven-thirty p.m. Presumably they had relocated to Hampstead Heath and were busy taking pictures of kites, muggers and flashers.

  But no, there were a couple of women in one corner looking through a small album of black-and-white photographs. One of them clenched an ostentatious camera bag between her knees. I felt my heart smack against my ribcage at the thought that they must know Gower and, by extension, Sarah. I took my pint and sauntered over, pulled back a chair at the table next to theirs.

  They both looked up at me. I smiled and sat down. I guessed they were in their early thirties. One of them wore a dark-blue sweater dress and knee-length buckled boots. The other was more formally attired in a grey pinstripe trouser suit over a white ruffle shirt, as if she’d just come from the office. The photograph album in front of them was opened to a page on which there was glued a photograph of a brilliant white jumbo jet framed by fat, leaden clouds, its landing gear down as it made an approach.

  ‘Nice picture,’ I said. ‘Some contrast.’

  ‘Thank you,’ said Sweater Dress. Her voice carried that uniform media pitch, eager and bubbly but at the same time seen-it-all. ‘I took that at Heathrow. Last flight in before they closed the runway for an hour. Massive storm.’

  ‘Right place, right time,’ I said.

  ‘That’s what photography’s all about.’

  Trouser Suit demurred. ‘Well, you say that, but you have to make your own luck too,’ she said. Her voice was tartan-edged. Glasgow, I reckoned. She picked up her glass of Prosecco. The blood-red ghost of her lips grinned on its rim.

  ‘I suppose it depends what kind of photography you go in for,’ I said. ‘I don’t suppose there’s much luck in following a starving African kid around while a vulture waits for it to die, but Kevin Carter won a Pulitzer, didn’t he?’

  ‘You know he killed himself because he was haunted by his work?’

  I thought of the bodies I’d seen over the past few years. I could buy that. ‘There’s a photography club here,’ I said.

  ‘Yes,’ said Trouser Suit. ‘We’ve just been. You a photographer?’

  ‘Not to any great standard,’ I said. ‘Not to any standard, I should clarify. Is it good fun?’

  ‘It’s all right, isn’t it, Cass?’ Trouser Suit said.

  Cass nodded. Her hand was rotating her half of black lager. ‘There’s a good mix of ability levels. People who just want to take better holiday snaps and those who know all about f-stops and white balance. A couple of semi-pros. Everyone chips in with feedback. There are no prima donnas.’

  ‘Is there a Sarah that goes along?’ It was hard to keep the desperation from my voice.

  ‘Not that I know of,’ Cass said. ‘But I’ve only been three or four times. Loz?’

  Loz was looking at me as if I might not be as random a stranger as they’d thought. Guardedly she said: ‘There’s a girl who turns up occasionally, but only to give one of the others a lift home. She’s not a member or anything. Why?’

  I couldn’t make anything up. And I realised I didn’t have to. Sometimes it was okay to just tell it straight.

  ‘She’s my daughter,’ I said. ‘I’ve been trying to find her for years.’

  Loz and Cass traded looks. Cass said: ‘I thought you reminded me of someone.’

  I could hardly breathe. ‘Thanks, but she resembles her mother more than me. Was she here tonight?’

  ‘No,’ said Loz. ‘But then neither was Martin. That’s her… well, I think he’s her…’

  ‘Squeeze? It’s okay. I guessed that might be the case. I know Martin Gower.’

  ‘Martin’s always here,’ said Loz. ‘I’ve been coming for a year and he never misses a session.’

  ‘Martin’s dead,’ I said.

  I was getting used to being the bearer of bad news. It was becoming a doddle. Loz and Cass traded looks again, this time with larger eyes and paler skin.

  ‘You’re police,’ Loz said.

  ‘No, but sometimes my work sails me close to what they do.’

  ‘And what? You think your daughter’s involved?’

  The question took me aback. ‘No,’ I said. ‘I don’t t
hink so. I haven’t thought about it.’ I felt sullied, as if someone had offered me a box of chocolates that had turned out to be frosted cat turds. ‘I just want to find her.’

  ‘Why did you lose contact?’ Cass asked.

  ‘Problems at home,’ I said, and then, to cut off any more prying, I did some of my own. ‘These photography classes… anything else go on there, other than feedback?’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘I mean, like artists sometimes do life drawings…’

  ‘There’s no mucky stuff goes on here,’ Loz said. Her body language had all changed. Where previously she had been open, now she was half-turned away, her legs locked against each other, her arms folded across her chest. Her mouth had shrivelled like a salted slug.

  ‘That you know about?’ I asked.

  ‘At all,’ said Cass. ‘If we do any photography here, it’s portraiture, to demonstrate lighting with flash.’

  ‘What about outside this venue? Did Martin ever invite you to pose for him at his house?’

  Both women said no as if I’d invited them to paint my kitchen with their armpit hair. Cass narrowed her eyes. ‘How about your daughter?’ she said. ‘Something happened to open this line of enquiry, didn’t it? Something you didn’t like seeing?’

  At that moment Grey Beanie slipped my supper in front of me. I stared at the pie. I’d never felt so lacking in appetite. I asked if she wouldn’t mind putting it in a bag to take away and she wordlessly removed it, but I heard her lip bolt clacking against her teeth. The modern-day tut.

  ‘I have some photographs of her, yes,’ I admitted. ‘Candid shots. I believe Martin took them. I came here to find out if this was where the shoot occurred.’

  ‘Do you have them with you?’ Loz said.

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘I was hoping to just take a look upstairs.’

  ‘We can do that,’ Cass said, after a couple of shared meaningful looks.

  ‘We have the key,’ Loz explained. ‘Whoever’s last to leave gets to lock up.’