Sonata of the Dead

by Conrad Williams

  The guitar was positioned above a coffee table. Upon it was a photograph album. There was blood on that too. I turned pages. Taft performing at a gig. Taft showing off his guitars. Taft in Townshend mode, arm windmilling.

  And then pictures I recognised. But these were clipped from a newspaper. Jeering figures at a stand-off between demonstrators and police in an Archway street. A photographer friend of mine, Neville Whitby, had taken them last year. I had prints of some of them on my wall: the ones containing Sarah. Why did Taft have them? And then the penny dropped. Sarah had been there of course. Taft had them as a gesture of solidarity. One of us gave it to Them.

  I felt a bizarre kind of pride. See, guys, that’s how you do it. Yes, you could walk around the roof of a high rise or play chicken with the rush hour traffic. Or you could do what my girl did: take on the boys in blue.

  But then so, probably, had the others. This hadn’t been any kind of political posturing. This was Accelerant experience gathering. I shuffled through the other clippings. Despite the scarves around noses and mouths, I thought I recognised Niker and Dawe and Pallant. And here was one picture that was different. A picture of a protester whose face was gleaming with reflected light from a Molotov cocktail, muscles bunched, coiled, right at the critical point when he was going to launch it at the line of police. Was that Craig Taft? I think, perhaps, it was. They’d all been at it.

  There was someone else in the same shot that was new to me. None of the photographs I owned contained any pictures of this policeman. Most of the officers on duty that night were part of a blurred, black mass in the background. Batons raised, visors lowered, shields up. Those frames that did contain an identifiable face I had tracked down and talked to. Except this one on the Taft clipping.

  I slipped the page into my pocket and continued looking around, but there was nothing else of note.

  Mawker turned up and he flapped and swore and gesticulated and threatened and I sucked it all up and swallowed it all down and I waited until he had spent himself and then I leaned into him and told him that his mother confessed to me that his moods would improve if only he’d do her up the arse from time to time.

  21

  I called Romy. She was flat/cat-sitting for a friend in Islington and was about to settle down with a bottle of red and a box set.

  ‘Why don’t you come over?’ she said. ‘I’ll cook us something.’

  I made it to Angel within the hour and picked up a bottle of fizz from an off-licence on Upper Street. The flat was in a pretty square near a church off Liverpool Road. She answered wearing a bathrobe and a towel turban. Her face was a little flushed.

  ‘I didn’t think you were going to get here so quickly,’ she said.

  ‘At least you didn’t fob me off with some excuse about washing your hair,’ I said, and handed her the bottle.

  ‘Your face,’ she said.

  ‘I punched myself shaving,’ I said. ‘Forget it. It’s nothing.’

  She led me through to the kitchen. A brindle cat was sitting on a stool next to the breakfast bar. It looked me up and down as if I was something often found on the sole of a cheap shoe.

  ‘Something smells good,’ I said. ‘Dinner smells good too.’

  ‘Hmm,’ she said, and raised her eyebrow at me. ‘Someone is in a cocky mood.’

  ‘I’m just feeling better about everything,’ I said. ‘I see light at the end of the tunnel.’

  ‘I see a knife at the end of your forearm,’ she said, and handed me a large santoku blade. Light caught in the undulations of the steel and played in her eyes. ‘You’re on salad duty.’

  ‘What’s the cat’s name?’ I asked.

  ‘Freckle.’ She went off vigorously rubbing at her hair. I found a steel bucket and loaded it with ice from the freezer. I placed the bottle of fizz inside and got to work on the tomatoes and cucumbers and little gem lettuces. I heard the drone of a hairdryer. By the time she got back, little beads of condensation clung to the bucket and there was a bowl of beautifully sliced greens, though I do say so myself. Freckle, I thought. Great name for a cat. Why couldn’t I have come up with a name like that? Fucking Freckle.

  ‘I’m impressed,’ she said. She was wearing a thin woollen cardigan over a strapless dress. Her wrists were obscured by thick metal bangles and a lump of polished steel hung on a leather thong around her neck. She was barefoot. I liked that she didn’t wear nail polish on her toes.

  ‘So am I,’ I said. ‘I managed to do that without adding one or two knuckles to the bowl. That’s got to be the sharpest knife I have ever used.’

  ‘My girlfriend, the one who owns this flat, she’s training to be a chef. Her dad bought her a set of kitchen knives when she graduated. Serious money.’

  She took me on a tour. The cat chaperoned us. It was a nice flat, but it had the air of someone trying too hard to display a level of taste that didn’t quite come off. There were lots of clean surfaces broken by the occasional piece of glass or ceramic, or a subtle candle in a subtle holder. But then that would all be ruined because the sofa cushions didn’t quite go with the colour scheme, or there was a framed ‘Keep Calm’ picture on a wall. Or there was just too much neutral going on, and you knew the names of the paint would make your teeth itch. Something like ‘rolling fog’ or ‘latte’ or ‘damp mushroom’. We ended up in the living room. Flat-screen TV, but nothing too ostentatious. A mini stereo system. There were a few CDs on display – Mezzanine, Maxinquaye, Trailer Park – suggesting the owner was stuck in a trendy nineties trip-hop rut. Romy sat on the sofa and the cat curled up next to her. ‘How do you say it in England? I could murder a drink?’

  ‘I’ll find you a suitable victim,’ I said, and then wished I hadn’t. The pages in my pocket burned as if invigorated by the joke.

  I got to the kitchen and took the folder from my jacket pocket. Nowhere seemed like a suitable place to put them. The room seemed to darken with them here. Through the pale blue plastic I could see the blood stains. Some of the words were smudged where liquid – tears? Lymph? Piss? God knows – had spotted the paper. In the end I put it back in my pocket. I hunted down two champagne flutes and popped the cork.

  ‘How’s everything going?’ she asked when I got back.

  ‘All fine. I’ll whip up some dressing if you li—’

  ‘I meant with the killer,’ she said. I sat down next to her. She stretched out a leg and rested it on my knee. Europeans, I thought. The cat widened its eyes as if to say, The brass neck of some people.

  ‘We’ve got something to work with,’ I said. ‘The killer made a mistake. He exposed himself. Vanity.’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘He sent a manuscript to a London agent,’ I said. ‘Possibly… actually, probably before he started killing. The agent tried to row back on his earlier dismissal of it – the guy is shitting himself that his rejection means he’s on the killer’s grudge list – and now he reckons he can sell it for pots of cash. Blood money.’

  ‘Ah, what a pleasant man.’

  ‘Exactly. But I managed to squirrel away a bunch of pages. It’s a pretty thick manuscript.’

  ‘Tell me you brought it with you,’ she said.

  ‘Maybe we should eat first,’ I said.

  We returned to the kitchen where she lifted the lid off a pot of boiling water and expertly twisted a large handful of spaghetti into it. My stomach gurgled. The sauce she stirred was dark, reddish brown, glistening and unctuous, the kind of sauce that only comes about after very long cooking at a very low heat.

  She poured more Prosecco, and spilled a little on her hand. She smiled at me and licked the fizz off her skin with a surprisingly long pink tongue. Something else gurgled and rumbled but it wasn’t my stomach this time. Appetites were opening up all over me.

  We ate and it was good and she put on a little music, some John Coltrane she had brought with her. We sat under a light and I took the folder out of my pocket and placed it on the table. The blood looked like old tea under the har
sh kitchen bulbs.

  ‘This your wallet? Or his?’

  ‘I don’t know if it’s his,’ I said. ‘It might have been the agent’s. Why?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I’m nervous. I’m just filling silences.’

  ‘You don’t have to do this. I’m not sure how—’

  ‘How helpful it might be? There is that, I suppose. Some see it as a parlour game. A silly trick. But there are consistencies. It has been proved. And it’s only a small step, isn’t it, to psychological profiling. It’s all guesswork, in the end.’

  ‘I believe you,’ I said. We were sitting very close to each other. I could feel her shoulder against mine, and smell the ghost of soap on her skin.

  ‘What does this get us?’ she asked. Our voices had lowered almost to whispers. I felt like a kid on a first date. Heart tripping; cotton in the gaps of my head.

  ‘It gets us under his skin, maybe,’ I said. ‘We’ve got enough ammunition to put holes in him on his writing alone, but I don’t think that’s enough. I don’t think that matters to him any more. He’s come this far; he’s either developed a thick hide to the extent that he doesn’t feel the slings and arrows, or he’s toppled over into no-man’s land. It’s no longer about the writing, if it ever was.’

  ‘So this is to attack his personality?’

  ‘If we can.’

  ‘Why not make it up? Why not just wade in with accusations that he’s a paedophile, that he blows goats, that he likes to wear women’s knickers and wank in public places?’

  ‘For authenticity’s sake,’ I said.

  ‘You wanted to see me,’ she said.

  ‘I wanted to see you.’

  ‘You don’t need an excuse.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘But you felt the need to offer one. Why is that?’

  ‘Because I’m not sure I should be doing this.’ I felt responses being drawn out of me like hooks from a fish gullet. It was difficult – the words were halting, uncertain – but it felt good.

  ‘Why not? You like me.’

  ‘Yes, God, yes I like you. You’re funny and intelligent and beautiful.’

  ‘You are married?’

  ‘I am. I was.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘She died.’

  Romy lowered her foot and sat closer. She took my hand in hers. Her hands were tiny. Her fingers were slender and smooth. I felt her breath against my throat as she spoke.

  ‘I’m sorry to hear that,’ she said. ‘Recent?’

  ‘Six years ago.’

  ‘It is still painful,’ she said. ‘It never stops. But maybe the pain becomes less sharp. Becomes more like an ache. With time.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I don’t want the pain to go away.’

  ‘And you feel what? Unfaithful, coming to me?’

  ‘No, not really. We have not… we’re not…’

  ‘We are not lovers,’ she said.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Not yet.’

  ‘Romy.’

  ‘Shhh. It’s okay. But it’s not just about that, is it?’

  ‘You see so much in my handwriting.’

  She laughed, but it did not reach her eyes. They remained intent, serious.

  ‘No,’ I admitted. ‘It’s not just about that. There was another woman, last year. Someone I felt good about. She was kind. Innocent.’

  ‘Innocent?’

  ‘Yes.’ I couldn’t keep my voice from cracking.

  Her fingers went to the blue folder and traced words through the plastic. ‘Something happened to her?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You feel you put her in danger?’

  ‘I did. She became a target. She was a way for someone bad to get to me. And she never did anything to harm anyone. She was gentle. She was so caring.’

  ‘And you worry that the same thing will happen again. That if I help you, it makes me visible?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But this means your life is on hold,’ she said. ‘You cannot live fully while you think this way. It’s not your choice. It’s not your responsibility.’

  ‘But I can control it,’ I said. ‘I can stand down, step away.’

  ‘I have worked with the police before,’ she said. ‘Seconded for studies of manuscripts. This is not new to me.’

  ‘It doesn’t make it any easier,’ I said. ‘It doesn’t make you safe.’

  She sat up and removed her cardigan. A crackle of static electricity. I felt the hair on my arms rise. Her breasts moved beneath the sheer cotton of her dress. She placed a hand on my chest and one of her fingers slipped inside my shirt. I felt her nail dimpling my chest. My clothes, my skin, felt too tight for my body.

  I was thinking of how I could explain how I felt, how I might put into words the exquisite dread she inspired in me. How things might be able to work if only I could find Sarah first and put away this psychopath. How—

  She kissed me.

  And the words were scattered and floating around my mind like summer butterflies. I persuaded myself that everything would be fine, especially when she touched me there, like that. And bent to kiss me there, like that. And everything of hers that slid across my body, or curved into my hands, felt right and true. She tasted sweet and sour and I couldn’t get enough of her on to my tongue. The textures and colours of our skin blended or contrasted, but eventually became seamless, united by a wrapping of sweat.

  Later I heard her heart beating like that of a startled animal, and her breathing softened and she retreated into sleep and I watched her for an hour or so until the light in the room was so poor that she became indistinguishable from the grains of night.

  22

  I must have slept too, because the smell of coffee awoke me. Romy was sitting at the end of the bed. She was naked, dawn light tigering her body through the Venetian blinds. Her breasts were full and caramel-coloured; paler skin delineated the shape where a bikini had once been. I wondered which beach she had been lying upon, and with whom. But who cared? She was here, she was naked with me.

  She was leafing through the manuscript pages, gingerly holding each piece of paper by the corner, possibly so she didn’t corrupt the evidence with her fingerprints, but probably more so that she didn’t have to touch too much of the disgusting thing. I felt bad then for bringing it at all. She was right. We should just make something up, but give it enough of a subtle spin to make it sound believable. What if she read this and concluded that it was a guy who bought chocolates for his grandmother at the weekends, fed stray dogs and gave regularly to children’s charities?

  ‘This stuff…’ I said. ‘It’s typed. You said you were a graphologist.’

  ‘That didn’t bother you when you came over last night.’

  ‘I came for you last night.’

  ‘You gain some insight, staring at paper all day, handwritten, typed… scattered with ideograms or hieroglyphics. You develop… I don’t know the word.’

  ‘Empathy?’

  ‘Empathy, yes. You see patterns and shapes. It doesn’t matter, sometimes, how they were introduced to the page.’

  ‘It’s all just a kind of reading,’ I said.

  She nodded. And then: ‘He’s a loner,’ she said.

  ‘That makes sense,’ I said. ‘There can’t be many serial killers who get away with this kind of thing with wives and children in tow.’

  ‘He likes his work.’

  Too much, I thought. He doesn’t even consider it work. Not any more.

  ‘He showed great promise as a youngster.’

  ‘A youngster?’

  ‘I’m guessing… look at the dates. 1988. Nearly thirty years ago.’

  I took one of the pages from her. If she was right it meant that whoever had written them might be any age now between forty-five and sixty. ‘“Their teeth shone dully, mist filming their vision. Teeth long and wolfish, flashed in the light.” It’s got some rhythm to it, I’ll give him that.’

  ‘The sentences, though typed scr
uffily on a failing machine, are, if not grammatically correct, then trying their best. The spelling is not great. The punctuation is all over the place, but that might be because his typewriter doesn’t work properly. Or it could be a stylistic choice. He feels as if he deserves some success, but it never came. The dog that never had its day. And like you point out, the sentences contain patterns, rhythms. Sometimes they’re long and meandering; sometimes staccato, very short. I’d be willing to bet they follow his moods. I imagine he is a moody person, prone to swift changes in his emotional state. And I think… I think he stands up to write.’

  ‘Stands up? How do you work that out?’

  ‘Look at how hard these keys have punched into the paper. You can feel them on the back, like Braille. And this is good-quality paper. I don’t think you get that kind of leverage sitting down. Not consistently, anyway.’

  ‘Anything else? Anything we might damage him with?’

  ‘I don’t know. There’s some stuff… like this, at the beginning of “Bluebottle Jam”: “I lie asleep in bed, but only sometimes. Mostly I’m awake, struggling with my fear of the dark, conscious of the sweat on my forehead. Conscious of the cruel silence. After ten years the dreams still bother me. Ten years.”’

  ‘You think, what? He goes walkies with the black dog?’

  ‘Well, I wonder if he might play host to suicidal tendencies. These handwritten notes in the margin… you didn’t add these, did you?’

  ‘No,’ I said.

  ‘No, of course… but the way the line rises and falls here, where he’s written “Shit… it’s all shit”. I don’t know, it’s difficult to say as there are no lines on the paper, but it’s indicative. Perhaps it’s nothing. But also… the stroke pressure is quite high. Like the type, you can feel the words through the page. This suggests a strong libido. Not quite the kind of thing we can bait him on. Although these smears, these blotches… you could point to a kind of sensual indecency, depravity even, a lack of control where indulgence is concerned. Appetites, you know.’

  ‘That’s better,’ I said. ‘I like it. Maybe we can build him up with that, and then pull the rug out. This guy is a sex god… oh no, hang on, I mean he’s a pervert.’