Sonata of the Dead

by Conrad Williams

  ‘Three. Four next month.’ He bit down on the end of each word; he knew what was coming. ‘Let’s leave it at that, shall we?’

  ‘Magical age,’ I said. ‘I remember the first time my daughter – Sarah – said the word “Daddy”. She must have been around three. You never forget a moment like that. Even when—’

  ‘I said leave it,’ he said. ‘Carry on like this and I’ll arrest you for wasting police time, aggravation, whatever I can nail you for… You are not getting in that house. Now piss off.’

  I turned my back on him immediately. Dead end. No point in trying to push on through him. He was textbook. Good thing too, really. The force needed some backbone in it. And so. Plan B.

  I got back in the car and made a play of leaving in a huff. I got to the top of the road and turned right on to Loftus Road, where I parked again outside a small block of purpose built flats. I scooted down the side of it and saw that I’d have to do some serious fence-hopping in order to get into the rear of Dawe’s property. At least it meant that the back entrance was unlikely to be guarded by another PC. I got over the walls and through the back gardens of most houses without being spotted. Well, I wish I could say that. I was spotted twice. Once by a dog lying by its kennel (reaction: tail wag) and once by an elderly woman standing at the kitchen window maybe washing pots or peeling potatoes (reaction: she waved… I kid you not). I waited for a short while at the rear of Dawe’s building, mainly because I was trying to work out that it was Dawe’s building. I slid over the wall and crept across decking to the back door. Tried the handle. Locked. I took off my jacket and wrapped my fist in it and punched the glass in. I waited for reaction from within, without. Nothing. I got myself through the door and did my job.

  Nice place. Maisonette, I think they’re called, though I didn’t know for sure. A pretty way to say ‘small place to live’. I could remember the place I lived in when I first came to London. It was punishingly small. Not so much a studio flat as a studioette. A studioette flatette. A cubbyette holette. A fucking toiletette.

  I moved through the hallway, recognising the beanie hanging from a coat peg, into a living room that was spare and neat and very white. No signs of any struggle here. I had to battle with the urge to tear through the flat until I found him. There might be footprints forensics could work with so I had to tread carefully.

  My eye was drawn towards a stack of uniform journals because they were a different colour to the room’s stark white theme (Picador spines, ivory candles, a white ceramic bowl of white ceramic apples); Moleskine cahiers with red covers lined up on a bookcase. Post-it notes stuck out from the pages. I flicked through a few using the end of a pencil, careful not to touch anything. I recognised the handwriting from one of the pages Odessa had given me on the night of my initiation. Jagged and inconsistent. Short sentences. Lots of physical words. Lots of aggression. I’d guessed it was Odessa’s handwriting, but that just goes to show what an astute judge of character I am.

  The kitchen was similarly neat and minimalist. Orange was the predominant colour here. An early hardback of Nigel Slater’s, some Penguin paperbacks, a Bugatti Diva coffee machine. A bowl of take a wild guess. No sign of forced entry here either. So what? He knew his killer. Most of us do. I went up the stairs. Treacle was in the bath. He’d been chopped up like a tree at a blind lumberjacks’ Christmas party. I put a flannel around my fingers and gently tilted his head forward. There it was: a neat little puncture on the back of his neck, just beneath the occipital bun. Cold water. Wrinkles in abundance. Limbs flexed: decorticate posturing, a sure sign of damage to the spine. He’d been in here for a number of hours, I guessed. What expression was discernible within the slashed ribbons of facial tissue reminded me of a weary traveller who’s just been told his flight has been delayed. A book on the floor. Maybe he’d been reading it while he soaked. Probably not. I didn’t want to touch it so I craned my neck to read the title: Green and Pleasant Land: Valentines to a Dying Planet. The same anthology of short stories that had been found near Martin Gower’s body. That was interesting. I’d have to do my own research into that.

  I went to Treacle’s bedroom. No signs of a burglar rifling through belongings; not that there was much to rifle. A nice bed with some comfortable bedding. A glass-fronted wardrobe. A bedside table with an iPod Touch, a book of Raymond Carver short stories, a glass of water. Nothing on the walls. No personal touches. I checked in the wardrobe. Just clothes. I checked the iPod; he wasn’t using it for email correspondence. Music. A GTD app. A golf app. I didn’t know what I was looking for. I could hardly consider him a killer – the killer now. I suppose I was hoping to find something to do with those names I’d found at Odessa’s place, or something that would incriminate Underdog; I wanted the unpleasant bastard to be true to type.

  I found a laptop and a bunch of lever arch files in a small study that was also a repository for all the junk a person sworn to a minimalist life will hide away. Boxes of envelopes, Christmas decorations, tubs of bulbs, batteries, fuses and screws. A Hoover. A deckchair and a dismantled free-standing hammock.

  I opened the laptop and saw a folder marked ‘Dosh’. The files hinted at what Treacle… what Mr Malachi Dawe did for a living. It seemed he owned a property in Nottingham, a detached house in well-to-do Amber Heights that he was letting. The folder contained correspondence with his tenants and the letting agency, invoices from plumbers, electricians, cleaners and so on. Whatever profit he was making was keeping him in spaghetti down here while he cultivated his cheeky haircut and courted Odessa.

  I went downstairs and there, framed and standing alongside a telephone on an occasional table by the door, was the photograph Mawker had been so kind to tell me about. Odessa, Taft, Gower, Dawe, Underdog and… Sarah. They all looked as if they were trying to stifle laughter. Sarah was failing, her eyes crinkled, her hand raised to her gloriously wide mouth. It was a great picture, and I wanted it, I wanted the her part of it, but I couldn’t touch it. I had to go. I opened the front door and the PC was standing in the road with his hand up. I hoped he might be hailing a taxi or trying to get the attention of the ice cream van rather than acknowledging the arrival of his superior officer.

  No such luck.

  ‘Ian,’ I said, as he peeled himself out of the squad car. The PC wheeled around, shock on his features. Ian’s face was damp and red. He hitched his trousers up and showed me his best waddling-duck-with-piles walk. I continued, enjoying everyone’s aghast expressions. ‘How utterly butterly it is to see your puce face gurning all over le fucking shop. I—’

  I said no more because he got hold of my lapels and butted me. There was no great conviction behind it though. It was the headbutt of a man who has spent more time trying to extract it from the arseholes of the people who sign his monthly pay cheques. I was more shocked by its arrival than I was hurt by it. At least he’d steered clear of my swollen, purple nose. Maybe that had influenced the severity of his attack. He wanted to talk to me; he’d get no sense out of me if he compounded my earlier injury, or knocked me out.

  He did some more hitching of trousers and straightening of shirt cuffs. His eyes were watering; there was every chance he’d hurt himself more than me. I remember at Bruche when we were doing our training we had a day of basic self-defence: pepper spray and baton use, restraint and escort techniques. Piss-poor and insufficient, but there it was; the need to balance the need to neutralise a threat with the proportional amount of force. The police were often hamstrung by this question of reasonable force and what it constituted. Mawker had been ineffective to say the least. To me, reasonable force was whatever I could do that would break the relevant bone supporting the weapon that was being pointed at me. Ian Mawker had moved like something freshly trapped in glue. He was no more able to deflect a strike to the head than he was likely to dress in a way that was appropriate to the current decade.

  I touched my nose and checked my fingers. No blood. His face was tight with rage. He was rendered inarticulate by it. He l
ooked like something pumped up beyond its natural capacity, like a bicycle tyre. He needed deflating. I didn’t have a pin on me, so I told him he was a cock, oh, and while we’re at it, a cunt.

  ‘You are shitting in my bed, Sorrell,’ he said. ‘You are causing grief. You are putting people at risk with what you’re doing.’

  ‘What am I doing, Ian?’ I said. ‘Enlighten me.’

  ‘You’re stepping on my toes. You’re impersonating a police officer, you’re causing people distress. I could arrest you. I could tuck you away in a cell for a couple of days and have you cool down.’

  ‘Do it,’ I said. ‘But I’ll be in for a hell of a lot longer after I send your head up your arse.’

  ‘You don’t scare me, Sorrell,’ he said. ‘I deal with all manner of shitizens, every day of my life. You don’t rank anywhere near the ugliest of them, unless we’re talking looks.’

  ‘Oh, I’m stung by that, Ian, I really am,’ I said, hating the wheedling, riled-up voice in me. ‘My daughter’s at the centre of this and I’m not backing down. If you arrest me and she dies, you’ll regret it, I fucking promise you that.’

  He pushed me and I skipped and tripped and skidded down the steps. He joined me on street level and I shoved him back. PC Suckup was wringing his hands by the front door, checking the road again.

  ‘The trouble with you, Ian,’ I said, digging a forefinger into his ribs, ‘is that you’re so by-the-book, you’re so chapter-and-verse that it wouldn’t surprise me if you were made from recycled paper.’

  ‘It’s called the law, you fuckwit,’ he said, grinding a fist into my shoulder. ‘You are operating outside it. I am doing you a massive favour not arresting you. But you push me too far and—’

  I got hold of his lapel tight, and then just as quickly dropped it. This was escalating. If I headbutted him I’d be locked up, despite his provocation. ‘And what? You will bring me in? I’ve got a mate on a paper. Works in Liverpool but he’s written for all the national dailies. I think he might be interested in the story of a man trying to save his daughter, and blocked at every turn from doing so by the rusty cogs of bureaucracy.’

  ‘It’s not red tape, it’s the law. How many different ways do you need that pounded through your skull?’ He thrust his thumb into my forehead. I slapped it away and steepled my fingers against his breastbone, pushed him back. His arse hit the squad car and the driver got out.

  ‘I got some heat after that business with the Four-Year-Old,’ I said. ‘Offers of interviews. TV appearances. I turned them all down. Didn’t want Sarah to see me injured, lapping up the praise. But it’s banked me some column inches, Ian. I’ll use them if I need to.’

  ‘This is your final warning,’ Mawker said. ‘Stay out of it.’

  I was walking to the Saab. ‘I can’t,’ I said. ‘You wouldn’t, if it was you.’

  ‘The difference is I’ve got the law on my side.’

  ‘I’ve got the law too,’ I snapped back, and slammed the door on him. I dragged down the sunblind; I keep a photograph of Sarah – a nice photo of her when she was eleven or twelve, before she discovered tattoos and piercings and boys and candid shots – in the little pocket up there. I took it down and stared at her pigtails, her gap-toothed smile. Rebecca shivered beneath her skin.

  I whispered to them both: ‘My law.’

  17

  That evening I drew a bath and settled into it with the book I’d bought that afternoon. I put on some music loud enough to drown out the couple next door who were either smashing their bed to bits with lump hammers or going at it like knives.

  The book was a copy of the same book I’d found planted in Treacle’s blood-spattered bathroom. The same book that had also been found at the murder site of Martin Gower, some distance away from the body. It was only now, armed with that knowledge, that I thought the book must have something to do with the killer rather than what the victim had been carrying around for his commute, or for a quiet half hour at lunchtime.

  I leafed through the book, while the water – I always made my baths way too hot – lobstered my flesh and caused sweat to prickle in my hairline. It was an anthology of speculative fiction. The cover was of wind patterns in a sun-burnt desert. Green and Pleasant Land: Valentines to a Dying Planet. The publisher was an independent company called Leopard Books based in Crouch End.

  Five of the contributors were listed on the cover: big names from the genre.

  I flipped to the contents. Over twenty stories. I wondered if one of these authors was the person responsible for the deaths of Gower and Dawe. I imagined Mawker was thinking the same thing. I found myself wishing I could ask Romy what she thought, but it seemed even less relevant since there was no handwriting to study. I read the first story, a mildly diverting tale of scavengers sifting in post-apocalyptic dust for children’s teeth; the currency of the future, according to the author.

  I got out of the bath and moved – like some pink, steaming eructation – to the living room where I flung the windows wide open and tried to cool down with a heavily iced glass of Reyka. I picked up the phone and called the offices of Leopard Books. It was just this side of six p.m. so I was hopeful a slush-pile reader was still in the building. No response, but an answering message kicked in suggesting urgent calls be made to their on-call editor, a woman called Tula Barnes.

  On-call editor… I liked that. A nice gimmick. But I bet the on-call editor didn’t like it much.

  ‘Hi,’ she said. Her voice was deep and rich and sonorous. Plummy to the extreme. It couldn’t have been plummier were she being teabagged by Christopher Plummer.

  I told her who I was. I asked her if she’d had any difficulties with the writers who had submitted to the anthology. She sounded immediately guarded.

  ‘What sort of problems?’

  ‘You know… syntax difficulties, spelling errors, grammatical bollock-dropping… psychotic tendencies. Do any of your writers hold any grudges?’

  She laughed. It sounded as though her jaw had been oiled by a few glasses of Chardonnay. She told me that there were more grudges in publishing than there were in any other profession. And probably in the criminal world too. I couldn’t get a word in.

  People wanted to be published, she went on. They saw the big deals and didn’t appreciate how rare they were, how difficult it was to make any money, even if you were a seasoned professional. They thought that you only needed a pencil and some paper: there was no high cost outlay for specialist equipment. They saw the appeal of working from home. In your pyjamas. In bed, if you wanted to. The launch parties, the five-star reviews, the adulation. All that to produce what? A new book every two years? Money for nothing.

  ‘Do—’

  ‘But it’s nothing like that,’ steamrollered the publisher. ‘Unless you’re a bestseller. There are a hundred thousand books published each year, across all genres, shared between all the publishing houses. There are probably a hundred times that number of manuscripts that land on the desks of the publishing houses. The vast majority of people will be disappointed. Most people will never be published, unless they do it themselves. And they’ll still not really be satisfied because, as pretty as you make it, it’s still DIY. It’ll cost you money. It’s vanity publishing.’

  ‘I just wanted to ask about the anthology. The Valentines to a Blah-blah Planetoid job.’

  Her voice had grown spikes. ‘The title is Green and Pleasant Land: Valentines to a Dying Planet. And I’ve already spoken to the police,’ she said. ‘I’ve helped them, fully, with their enquiries.’

  So I was on the right track. But there was a tickle in her voice – possibly that qualifier fully that seemed so eager to please – that suggested she was holding back on something.

  ‘So you know there’s a murder inquiry?’

  ‘I know that much. I don’t know any details. I don’t want to know any details.’

  ‘Did they take any materials away with them?’ I asked. ‘I’m presuming they came to see you.’

 
‘They did,’ she said. ‘They asked to see files. They wanted our computers, our hard drives. We said no. They told us they could get a warrant. Our legal team reckons that’s so much hogwash. Who are you anyway?’

  ‘Suffice to say that I’m in with the local constabulary – Ian Mawker ring a bell? The guy with the lip ferret who wears macs in the hope of a Columbo vibe but ends up looking like Frank Spencer – and they’ll not take kindly if they know you weren’t fully co-operative.’

  ‘I kept nothing from them,’ she said. ‘And you can’t prove it.’

  ‘I don’t need to. I just need to sow the seeds of doubt in Mawker’s brain. You don’t know him like I do. He’s thorough. If he thinks he’s missed something, he’ll take it as a personal affront. Do you want police cars keeping watch on you? Pulling you over half a dozen times a day for spot checks?’

  ‘He’d never dare—’

  ‘Okay. Well, my life is time sensitive even if yours isn’t, so I’ll get on the blower now and tell him you’re playing hide the evidence.’

  ‘It’s not evidence. It’s just the Valentines folder.’

  ‘Why doesn’t Mawker have the folder? What’s in it?’

  ‘Original manuscripts. Correspondence. Contracts.’

  ‘It sounds as if that’s the kind of thing they’d like to see.’

  ‘And they will. But I need to copy it first. I can’t risk it becoming lost. We’re going to sanction a second printing off the back of this.’

  ‘No such thing as bad publicity, eh?’

  She seemed stung by that. ‘It wasn’t my idea, if you want the truth.’

  ‘I don’t care whose idea it was.’

  ‘Patrick Simm,’ she said, like the kid caught red-handed in the playground, desperate to pass the buck.