Sonata of the Dead

by Conrad Williams

  Figurado…

  Tabacalera Oliva SA

  ‘Joel… how have you been keeping?’

  Esteli, Nicaragua

  ‘Are those for me, Joel?’

  I lifted my head and my first thought was, How could someone so small do what he did?

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘They’re for your jailers. I bought them for you, but, you know. Rules.’ It was puerile. I wish I’d never picked them up in the first place. It was an expensive way to try to hurt him, but all I’d done was make myself look a dick.

  ‘Pity.’

  ‘Yeah, after all, these could have been the cigars to finally give you cancer.’ Keep it up, dick. Keep it up with the petty jibes.

  ‘One of the things about not being able to smoke in here… at least it’s meant I’ve become fitter now, Joel.’

  His words came at me as if from far away, from a dream zone I was unable to access; something remembered, or a hit of telepathy from a distant mind. The shape of his head was curiously beautiful now that it was shorn back to stubble: petite, fragile, all neat angles and planes and blue shadow. He barely blinked those ash-grey eyes of his. He barely moved his mouth when he spoke but he licked his lips a lot. His tongue was broad and thick and purple; it was crimped white at the edges like the top of a pie. I imagined it clamped between his teeth as he masturbated on to the dead body of my wife. I hated how he kept using my name.

  My stomach performed an oily roll.

  ‘Are you okay, Joel?’

  ‘What do you fucking think?’

  ‘Joel, I think you need help.’

  ‘I need help? I’m not the one who killed in cold blood. I’m not the one who took photographs of naked women in changing rooms and then tossed off over them back in his sad pad.’

  ‘No. But it’s a sunny day. And you chose to come and sit in a cold room in a prison miles away from where you live. Shepherd’s Bush, isn’t it? Or did you move? I’m guessing you would have moved. Somewhere smaller. You’d have been rattling around that old place, wouldn’t you, Joel? You and perky tits… what was her name?’

  I’d stood up without realising it. The guards in the room stepped closer. One of them rested his hand on the Taser in his belt. I’d come in here determined to control myself, to control him, to control the situation, and within seconds he had the upper hand. He was playing me like a knackered trombone.

  ‘What did you think you could do, Joel? Why did you even come here?’

  I was shaking my head. I was digging my nails into my palms. I could feel the adrenaline from my kidneys, a hot liquor that was slowly poaching me from the inside out.

  ‘May I offer a hypothesis?’

  A peeping Tom. A guy who scraped shit off toilet bowls. A coward. A thief. I remember word for word how the judge had referred to him just before passing sentence: a pathetic, tragic alien living among us, the antithesis of everything good in his victim.

  ‘I think you came here because you consider me the strop that keeps your edge keen. You came to see me because you’re losing your grip on who you are and what you feel your point in life is. Rebecca was your anchor. She kept you grounded. And now you’ve been cut adrift, there’s nobody to steer you into safe waters, is there?’

  He licked his lips. His face hosted boles of deep shadow, like the cross-hatchings in a bleak political cartoon. His eyes were pale crucibles of cold flame. In the dock he had stood bowed, like an S, like something defeated, burdened with a weight only he could feel. A grey man, his hair thinning, apparently being eaten away by something more deleterious than the most aggressive of cancers. Now he was loose-limbed and lissom. Muscles shifted like oiled rats against each other under his clothing. His skin was pink. He gleamed.

  He rubbed his hand over his mouth. His nostrils flared. His fingernails were like polished slivers of almond.

  ‘So Joel, how’s the search for your daughter going?’

  The guards picked me off the floor thirty seconds later. My nose was bleeding heavily – I think it was broken – and my eyes wouldn’t stop watering. Pain strummed rhythmically across my face. A guard was standing over Tann, his Taser drawn. Tann himself was sitting upright, his chained hands as far above his head as he could raise them, and he was slowly, calmly talking the guard down.

  ‘It was self-defence… He attacked me… You saw it…’

  One of the guards leaned in and suggested it was time to leave. I nodded. I apologised.

  ‘Apology accepted.’

  Now the thought was in my head, I couldn’t wait to get outside. I felt stifled. I felt, in a sudden blaze of panic, that I was the prisoner, and Tann was free to go.

  The buzz of the door. As it swung open, he slid his stiletto in, between the ribs: ‘She offered to fuck me, if it would save her. And later, she begged for her life, at the last… when most of it had ebbed from her anyway. She—’

  But I couldn’t hear any more because I was screaming. I was trying to tear my ears from the side of my head.

  15

  At first I drove in search of a drink, but getting pissed out here meant staying in my car overnight and I didn’t fancy that, comfy though the back seat of the Saab was. Furniss was all for getting the Cold Quay medic out to have a look at my face – he was worried that I had suffered a concussion and was in no fit state to control a vehicle – but I shrugged him off. He seemed happy enough with his £200 box of cigars.

  I drove until I found myself on a narrow road called Cobbler’s Lane. It took me through a tunnel under the M1. Out of the other side I parked on the grass verge by a pylon in a field of cut logs awaiting collection. I could smell hot tarmac and petrol fumes, scorched wood where blades had slid through boughs, willow herb and dried haycocks sealed in hot black plastic.

  Big rabbits around here, I used to say, on family days out, whenever there was a field full of those large packages. That always used to tickle Sarah. Becs would tut in disgust—

  No I didn’t.

  Yeah, you did. Whenever I came out with that joke.

  Mock disgust.

  It’s still disgust. Seeded with real disgust. At least twenty-five per cent.

  It’s a relief, I have to say, not to have to listen to your shit jokes any more.

  Don’t. Please.

  What are you doing out here? In the middle of nowhere?

  I need some peace and quiet.

  What the fuck happened to your nose?

  I was defending your honour.

  You should have tried defending your nose.

  Who’s coming out with shit jokes now?

  Where’s Sarah?

  You know I haven’t found her yet. Nor her me. Not that she’s looking.

  She’s old enough to look after herself now. Maybe it’s time to back off.

  Five years, Becs. Five years without you. Without her. I can measure that five years in nothing but vodka and blood.

  And cat food.

  Becs. Five fucking years.

  We talked about when Sarah had been conceived. Well, I wanted to talk about that. She didn’t. She never did. Sex was something you did. Not talked about. But I persisted.

  I remember it was – at the risk of sounding like some Hollywood ponce – perfect. You were warm and soft and it was as if you’d been overtaken by your hormones. It was the optimum moment and that shone in you. Your skin was golden. You engulfed me.

  Oh, Christ. That’s not how I remember it.

  We were on the living room floor. Joni was on the stereo. Your hair. Your eyes. There was no awkwardness, remember. Everything fell into place. Everything was so soft, so perfect. There were no missteps. No pratfalls. No elbows in the guts. No trapped hairs. No cramps.

  Didn’t you fart?

  No.

  I’m pretty sure you farted.

  No. I didn’t. And when we spoke—

  Oh yeah, I remember saying: is it in yet?

  That’s not what happened. You’re thinking of your ex.

  Which one?

  How
many were there?

  Hundreds. And they were all hung like blue whales.

  When we spoke—

  It was the tremulous voices of a choir of heavenly angels.

  Something like that.

  You Hollywood ponce.

  Why are you being so disruptive?

  This is an imagined conversation, you fanny. If you can’t even control a conversation in your own head, you should get help. Get help anyway.

  I could never have controlled you. Nobody could.

  First sensible thing you’ve said all day. Now move, otherwise we’ll be having the rest of this sparkling exchange in person. You don’t want to check out under the wheels of a fucking Nissan Micra, do you? And a lime green one at that. Not a great way to die.

  She had come to me at times before, when I was at a low ebb, when I really needed her, but now it didn’t seem right. I panicked; it felt as though I was forgetting her. I couldn’t remember her voice, or the way she laughed. I couldn’t remember the smell of her skin or the way her hand felt under my fingers. The rhythm of her speech was too much like mine. I reached out to the seat next to me, convinced she was there in the corner of my eye, but I touched nothing but leather. She was nowhere now. I had failed to keep her alive in my mind where I thought she could exist, untouched, unspoilt, for as long as I drew breath. But visiting Tann had tarnished that, put a maggot in the fruit. I could feel her shrinking inside, and Tann, with his lizard-lick mouth, was filling in the spaces she vacated. I clenched my eyes shut and tried to recall those days that had really mattered. The blue riband memories.

  Rebecca’s face, the first time we made love, in a bedroom drenched with spring sunshine, her body above mine, hair across her face, breathing ragged, my hands full of her breasts. Her pale skin sprayed with freckles like a shake of cocoa over a milky drink.

  Tann raised his head and ash fell from the sockets of his eyes.

  Our wedding day on an August day of apocalyptic rain. We’d raced out of Westminster Register Office to our hired Rolls – no umbrellas – and laughed and kissed and fussed at each other, damp in the back seat, muddy water up the back of Rebecca’s beautiful mermaid wedding dress. Her hair soaked, limp.

  Tann in the driver’s seat, wreathed in smoke, taking us somewhere we’d never be found.

  Sarah’s birth. Rebecca implausibly beautiful on all fours, snarling at me, whimpering. Tensed. Animalistic. Me feeling like a spare part. Blood and shit everywhere. A high beast scent of distress. A mealy reek of butchery. Classical music playing like some ineffective, inappropriate soundtrack. The speed of Sarah’s arrival. Her utter silence. Her utter stillness. Enough time to register her sex. Enough time to register the cord wrapped around her neck.

  Tann carrying her out of the room. A nod. A wink. Back in a jiffy.

  He was as invasive and pervasive as the smoke he held in his lungs.

  I’ve become fitter now, Joel.

  The way he’d moved. The speed of him. His body was like a taut ship’s cable. He hadn’t broken a sweat. He’d hardly made his chains jangle. But he’d decked me with an efficiency and ruthlessness that wasn’t in him at the time of his trial.

  Tann had controlled her. Tann had controlled me.

  Christ. This was fear.

  I was shaking in my seat as if someone had suddenly run a high voltage through it. I needed Becs but she wasn’t here. She wouldn’t respond.

  What was happening to me? I had to get a grip. Sarah needed me. The Accelerants needed me; they just didn’t know it yet. Romy. Mawker. I had responsibilities.

  I got out of the Saab. The sound of car engines up on the M1 dopplered north and south. I walked to the embankment fence and climbed over it. I moved up through the plastic drinks bottles and silver birch trees to the top of the rise where the motorway stretched towards the horizon. I stood behind the crash barrier and watched the weaving tons of metal as they came and went. It was busy. The road created its own micro-climate: warm air buffeted me at each passing car and lorry. It reminded me of my fear of train platforms when I was a child; the way the fast locomotives would come barrelling through the station at first pushing the air before them like a wall, and then sucking it away. I’d had to hide behind my parents, or cling to the drainpipes, convinced that I’d be whipped into the air by the vortex it created.

  Now I was excited by it. A black Audi flashed past in the outside lane, doing at least ninety. A horn sounded. In the distance lights flashed as an HGV indicated to a van that had overtaken it that it was now safe to merge with the inside lane. Sun beamed on the cellulose roofs like the shining crests of waves on a fitful sea.

  I climbed over the barrier and moved on to the hard shoulder. The hum of tyres on tarmac. The brief snatch of a song from a convertible. I was six feet away from certain death. I had seen footage of people hit by cars travelling slower than this: a catastrophic dismantlement, as if they were waxwork dummies. The tarmac bore a petrol-blue sheen. I thought of the motorway at night, with the intermittent explosions of sodium orange.

  I waited for a lull and then I closed my eyes. Van Gogh would be painting motorways if he was around today, I thought, and stepped out into the road. I was not nervous. I did not hurry. I heard horns blaring on the opposite side of the motorway. I could hear traffic rushing towards me on this, and it sounded like the skirl of loose grains over a beach of impacted sand. More horns. I reached the central divide and waited. Traffic blasted past me, rifling my jacket. I did not open my eyes. The horns stopped.

  I walked back.

  A foot away from the hard shoulder I heard the deep groan of an articulated lorry. It missed me by inches, but its wake floored me. I rolled over and over, thankfully away from the lanes. I heard someone raging through an open window:

  ‘Stupid bastard!’

  And then I was on my feet again and Tann was vanquished; there was clean air in my lungs and a tart clarity in my head and Becs was in my periphery once more and she said, Get a grip you idiot. What are you playing at? I’ll ask you again. What are you doing out here?

  I told her it didn’t matter, and I was smiling, laughing as I cantered down the embankment, past the used condoms and bottles of piss. I got to the car and vomit fountained from me in a sudden, unexpected arc. I felt my legs give way and I sat down in my own waste until the shudders left my body. Cleaning myself up as best I could, I got back in the car, gunned the engine and drove to the junction. Once I’d got up to eighty and saw the roadside verges blurring to fast green, I felt my hackles rise and my mouth turn bone dry. I don’t remember anything else about the drive back to London but I know she was with me every mile that slipped beneath the wheels.

  16

  The answerphone was flashing like a Christmas tree. I listened to them all, tensed for bad news, but it didn’t come. Unless you were related to Treacle, whose real name (I learned in a tip-off from Clarkey, who had been summoned to deal with another piece of wet work) was Malachi Dawe. He lived in a house on Ellerslie Road. I knew Ellerslie Road. I’d lived near it once upon a time. According to Clarke, he’d been found in his bath, as dead as yesterday. Not only that, but there was a photograph of Sarah in his possession. No, nothing quite so gnarly as the packet that had been found with Martin Gower. This was the kind of snap that a dad would be proud of. He told me to stay put, that he’d arrange to get a facsimile of the picture to me. That there was nothing I could add to proceedings and that my physical involvement was not required; more: actively dissuaded. That Mawker would have both his and my bollocks on a cake stand under a glass-domed lid if I didn’t do as he asked.

  Fuck that.

  Fifteen minutes and I was on Bloemfontein Road, slowing for the turn, right on the doorstep of QPR’s football ground. It turned out he lived right opposite Turnstile Block 1. Mawker was meant to be there to greet me, much as he had been when I’d gone up to Enfield. I was surprised to find a PC in his stead. Perhaps Mawker had called in sick. Perhaps he’d handed in his resignation and gone off to comm
une with aliens. I wondered if he actually did any proper police work or just stood around in his mac looking like a shifty wank-addict all the time.

  I pulled up and got out. I recognised the uniformed constable standing by the door in his hi-vis gilet. He’d been with Mawker up in Enfield. I stepped past the flowers that had been stacked on the pavement outside and went up the steps towards him.

  ‘Nice motor,’ he said.

  ‘You can take her for a spin if you like,’ I said.

  ‘Nice try,’ he said.

  I nodded at the flowers. ‘Popular guy.’

  ‘Actually, those are for an old woman who died in the house next door a few days ago. A pillar of the community, apparently. Charity volunteer. Rescued dogs. That sort of thing.’

  ‘He who must be obeyed. Is he inside?’

  ‘Chief Superintendent Mawker? He isn’t here yet. We sent a squad car but there’s been a bad accident at Hanger Lane. He was snarled up in it.’

  ‘Could be his monumentally distracting shitstache caused it.’

  No sign of a smile from PC Suckup. ‘He’ll be here in ten minutes,’ he said.

  ‘I talked to him this morning.’ Truth. ‘He told me to go on ahead; there might be some more photos of Sarah. I was to help myself. They weren’t a part of his investigation.’ Lie.

  ‘Before forensics get here? I don’t think so.’

  ‘Come on,’ I said. ‘I know the ropes. I won’t touch anything and I’ll put a good word in for you at the promotions circus.’

  He looked up the street and licked his lips. He seemed to be willing Mawker to appear, to absolve himself of having to make any decisions. But then he said: ‘He warned me about you. That you might turn up. You’re Joel Sorrell. Oh, he told me all about you. Who told you about this?’

  ‘I couldn’t possibly betray my sources,’ I said.

  ‘You really ought to scarper.’

  ‘You got kids?’ I asked.

  ‘A boy.’

  ‘Lovely,’ I said. I wanted to whip the kid gloves off and choke him with the iron gauntlet – Mawker would be here soon, he hated being the last one to a butcher’s scene – but I clearly had to play the long game with this one. He went home at night and polished his pips, probably while reading Police magazine from cover to cover. He wrote letters to Police magazine. He filled in all the quizzes: Are you police enough? Which Z Cars character are you? ‘How old?’