by Mark A. King
Metropolitan Dreams
Mark A. King
Contents
First Map of London
Map of London Underground
Day | break
Untitled
Day | light
Untitled
Charlie
Iona
Cal
Jimmy
Charlie
Iona
Cal
Jimmy
Charlie
Iona
Cal
Jimmy
Charlie
Iona
Cal
Jimmy
Charlie
Iona
Cal
Jimmy
Charlie
Iona
Cal
Night | rise
Untitled
Night | time
Untitled
Robbie
Maria
Cal
Iona
Robbie
Maria
Cal
Iona
Robbie
Maria
Cal
Iona
Robbie
Maria
Cal
Iona
Robbie
Maria
Cal
Iona
Charlie and Robbie
Maria
Iona
Cal
Maria
Cal
Dawn
Untitled
Acknowledgments
About the Author
… And those whose business is theology have pointed out that the wickedness of those times surpassed understanding, and that a change and sweeping away of the human evil that had accumulated was necessary, and was effected by supernatural means.
AFTER LONDON by Richard Jefferies
Dedicated to the beautiful spirit of Margaret Galvin (1953-2012)
Day | break
The night is hers. It always has been.
She watches from the lost rivers and abandoned Underground platforms. She tugs the dark heart of the city’s inhabitants and observes this space where almost nine million dots coalesce.
Like the cells of a body, they pass each other invisibly—their movements and actions seemingly unrelated. For the city, a day is the life-affirming pump of blood through veins. The night is a pent-up exhalation of toxins. The space between is…
…the place we make choices we regret in daylight.
The two men at the counter of the newsagents’ are skittish, their movements as erratic and desperate as upturned beetles.
One of them extends a jittery hand, gesturing a knife at the convenience store manager like an unwelcome handshake.
Are they jacked-up? High on smack? Charlie wonders.
Though her shift at the nightclub is finished, she still wears her bouncer’s uniform. While walking home, she realised her boy, Noah, needed milk for his breakfast.
As Charlie reaches for the milk, the skin below her black jacket dimples from a flow of frigid air.
Across the newsagents’ a girl—no, a young woman—stands motionless with an older woman who looks like she could be her mum.
Charlie creeps toward a counter littered with bundles of freshly delivered newspapers.
The man-boy with scribble for hair jabs the knife nearer to the shopkeeper, shouting, his voice supercharged and venomous. “Give me the money you—”
“I’d do as he says, old man. We need money. We have commitments.” The youth’s more experienced partner is placid and measured. He sounds like he’s savouring the experience, licking his lips.
Charlie realises that Noah won’t be getting his breakfast today.
The old man behind the counter is rigid.
Charlie moves behind the armed robbers. They haven’t heard her approach; people rarely do. She’s one of the best bouncers at the night club.
The shopkeeper looks at her, his eyes pleading for her to retreat. He moves—a small shake of his head, but the robbers see it. A mistake.
No time for assessing options now.
They swivel.
Charlie pounces. She has the older robber in a stranglehold. He is thrashing. Gasping. All good. From her training and experience, she knows this is wasting his energy. She is outnumbered, and his imminent fatigue levels the odds.
The knife-wielding kid juggles his blade, threatening Charlie, the shopkeeper, the other customers.
“Let him go,” the younger man shouts in the deep bass obtained just after boy turns man. “You’re messing with people you don’t understand. You think this is just some petty random robbery?”
“I can’t do that,” Charlie replies. She applies more pressure to his partner, who tries to extract himself from her crushing force. His feet are twitching and scraping the freshly mopped floor. “I don’t care why you are robbing this place. I don’t care about excuses or threats. Put down the knife. Do it quickly, or he’ll be unconscious and you’ll have to drag him out or leave him behind. Neither option is good for you.”
She can’t read the teenager with the knife. His gecko eyes dart between targets. His mouth, a gaping tunnel, sucks in gulps of musty London air.
He lunges for the shopkeeper. Charlie closes the gap, edging his weakening accomplice forward.
The scribbled-haired teenager spins and shifts the knife between eager hands. He springs at her without warning.
He slashes, narrowly missing his friend, and thrusts the knife deep into Charlie’s ribcage. A millisecond later he yanks the knife out.
Charlie’s reflexes act before she has time to stop them. She releases the older man. She touches her torso—liquid coats her fingertips, she knows her fingers are red without needing to look. The pain is needle-sharp and amplifies with each laboured intake of breath.
Charlie’s legs buckle. Her vision blurs.
The older criminal shakes himself off and heads towards his accomplice. His voice is gravelled. “Westbourne has made commitments. We need the money to make it happen.”
The younger man stares at his older partner and raises an eyebrow. He turns to the trembling shopkeeper. “You heard what my friend said, old man. Give us all the money or I’ll stab another customer.”
The shopkeeper’s shaking hands fumble with the buttons to open the till.
Both thieves seem to think this is funny.
The kid with the knife heads towards the mother and child. Charlie can’t help them. She stumbles out of the newsagents’. Her instincts are to save herself, so she can look after her boy, Noah. It feels selfish, in a way.
Once out of immediate danger, she collapses a few feet from the doorway.
The street-cleaning machines are outside, whizzing and throwing their whirligig yellow beacons into the waking bustle of Green Street. The London cityscape whispers intermittent lullabies. The market traders are busy, setting up stalls of fresh fish, meat, fruit, cheap tourist merch, and general bric-a-brac. She wonders why they don’t come over, but why would they? The sight of a young woman slumped on the concrete at this hour is commonplace.
Daylight churns on the distant horizon; dark and light compete on the glass of the shop windows. Soon, the Eastern European supermarkets, the pay-day loan outlets, the pound shops, and the betting outfits will be open. People will be preparing for work. Having breakfast.
Noah.
Charlie rolls and faces the shop. Inside, the blurred shape of the mother stands protectively in front of her daughter. The mother is wrestling violently with one of the men. The other man comes up behind her and jams his knife into her back. Then he stabs again. Again.
The woman slumps heavily
to the floor. There is no further movement, apart from her black hair escaping from her headscarf and dangling loosely over her open, staring eyes.
The daughter screams. She throws herself at the nearest man. He slips in the pooling blood on the floor. Grabs and grasps for purchase on anything. He falls awkwardly, cracking the base of his skull against the corner of a metal shelf.
Now there are two unmoving bodies on the floor.
Charlie tries to shout, but only a barely-audible rasp of desiccated anguish come out.
The girl runs from the shop, her movements rough and unrefined. Charlie wonders if she has been injured or if she has always moved in this way.
The older man approaches, scans for the girl, and sees Charlie on the ground. He deliberates, looking first at Charlie and then at the girl.
Air is weak, and each inhale feels like a rapier in Charlie’s lungs.
Will Robbie look after Noah? She’s not sure what’s happened between her and Robbie—he was once a decent man, but she isn’t certain she can rely on him anymore.
Milk is expensive these days.
Charlie hears approaching sirens.
Blue lights replace yellow.
The space between is
…a chance to make a difference.
Iona watches the events from the alleyway across the market square. Her unused warrant card weighs heavily in the pocket of her fleeced hoodie.
Her instincts are screaming, telling her to intervene, but her reason argues back.
Operation Scythe has taken two years. Two years of endless hours filled with syrupy coffee, migraines, and mistakes. Of chasing shadows on-line, only to find them, always, one step ahead of us. Hacking criminal networks, tracking the movements of traffickers, dealers, slave-masters. Intervening in this debacle at the newsagents’ would mean suspension from duties, operational failure, and everything that came with it—especially the continued abuse and degradation of innocent people. Iona has sacrificed more than she wants to acknowledge.
Leo Jeffers, one of the robbers, is under her surveillance and has been for some time. He’s with a twitchy, messy-haired teenager she doesn’t recognise. Leo is just a dogsbody—expendable infantry—but he’s moved on from the street trading, Class A dealing. He’s now looking for money to pay for a human trafficking exchange. Some of the recent trafficking has been into the sex trade, some into other avenues in the murky world of modern slavery. Every time she moves a step forward in this case, the trail goes dead. If she can catch him in the act of paying for people, she’ll have him caught, and perhaps he’ll roll-over and she’ll get the breakthrough she desperately needs to break into the bigger players, the ones running this show. If she can stop the crimes from the top, she’ll avoid further victims. She was hours too late for Sophia, a victim she couldn’t save. Iona carries the image of Sophia on her phone. When she blinks, she can see the brutality of Sophia’s death.
Iona fiddles with the frayed strings on her hoodie. You’ve come this far. Broken the rules. If you’re not going to act, then you might as well be behind the widescreen monitor in the police IT unit.
There is movement in the shop.
A struggle. A woman stumbles out and collapses.
Shit.
Iona needs to do something. Yet… she’s been specifically warned by her director to avoid active policing. She screwed up the case last time, and people she cared about were put in danger. She could lose her job—but worse than that—everything she worked so hard to achieve could be gone in an instant.
More disturbance in the shop. A body slumps on the floor. Then another.
Double shit.
Iona’s legs jitter.
She watches a teenage girl run from the shop.
Shortly after Leo Jeffers appears. He looks at the woman on the ground. Looks at the disappearing girl. Then he runs the other way.
Iona tugs her hood over her head and runs towards the newsagents’ shop entrance. She stops about a dozen feet away. The bodies inside are slumped in pools of blood that suggest she is too late to help. The woman on the floor outside is twenty-something, not far off Iona’s age, but it’s hard to tell with her pallid face contorted in pain.
Iona takes off her hoodie despite the biting chill of the morning air. She reaches down, balls the fabric, and tells the woman to place it against the wound and apply pressure. Iona angles the woman’s body to reduce blood loss.
The detective has done too much already; she needs to leave here before the emergency services arrive. Not long now; sirens are wailing and increasing in volume.
Yet Iona is compelled to run after the teenage girl—as a witness to this horrific event, she is not safe out alone in the city.
The girl is a few minutes ahead of her, but she’s uneven in her gait and not running as fast as Iona would have expected. Perhaps she’s injured?
Iona gains on the girl and dares to glance back; she sees the ambulance pull up to the shop. Iona releases the breath she didn’t know she was holding.
The girl’s posture is heavy on one side.
“Stop! Police!” Iona shouts, wrinkling her nose at how corny this sounds.
The girl is maybe ten, maybe twelve, Iona isn’t sure. The girl stops. Nobody else is around, just the two of them on the approach to the Upton Park Tube station.
The girl turns to Iona. “If you are police… then why did you let that happen back there? Why aren’t you with Am’ma? Why don’t you chase the man who did this?” The girl’s chin shakes. Beneath the emotion, Iona can hear a heavy Indian accent.
Iona looks away from the girl’s waterlogged eyes. What can she say? She cannot fix this. Iona wants to grab the girl, tell her that she’s sorry, that it’ll be okay. But these words, any words, are pointless. To the grieving, promises of tomorrow are nothing more than hollow words.
The girl clasps something tightly in one of her hands. It looks like a mobile phone. The girl tucks it swiftly into her pocket when she realises Iona’s looking at it.
Iona needs to escape. She should have listened. People have been hurt before because of her insubordination. Now this. Further intervention will only make it worse.
The girl backs away from Iona and turns. She walks towards the Underground station and descends the stairs.
Iona hesitates. She moves a few steps towards the station and then settles back.
As the girl disappears Iona’s mind races: I could have saved her. This was preventable. I am responsible. I need to fix this. But… cracking the case could save more people and make all the sacrifices I’ve gone through worth it.
The truth: Iona wasn’t supposed to be here. She’d be disciplined, perhaps suspended if it was discovered that she had come out. Where would that leave the case? The smuggling, the trafficking, the dealing—it would all continue, when she might have stopped it with a bit more patience and discretion.
Sometimes life is about making tough choices.
Was there a worse choice she could face?
Iona’s insides shrink like the receding shadow of the girl as she disappears.
Iona does not chase her. She does not go back to the scene of the violence.
She walks away.
The space between is
…the echo of a death rattle in a hospital ward.
Jimmy Kinsella wakes to the familiar sounds of the patient next to him. The nameless tosser is restless; this only aggravates the sloshing of the old bloke’s yellowy bag of piss. It’s enough to put anyone off their hospital sleeping routine.
Jimmy hasn’t slept much recently. The medication is supposed to be helping with that. It controls the pain from the tumours, but the hallucinations and nightmares have increased. Besides, Jimmy has plenty to occupy his final few days.
Josh, one of his employees, said that there were rumblings of a human trafficking deal happening later in the day today. His other employee, Ryan, dismissed it.
Jimmy can’t stand the new generation of criminals. They’re all about obscene amoun
ts of money, no activities off-limits. They’re scum. Dirty toe-rags. What else can you say about low life like that? They have no respect for the city or the people in it. Jimmy feels a touch hypocritical to think these things—his lifetime activities of extortion, protection, arson, and robbery have hardly been taking the moral high ground, but he’s always known the limits. He draws the line at hard drugs, people-smuggling, and modern slavery. These new gangs turn his stomach and make him want to spew.
The hospital should be a place of tranquillity, but Jimmy hates the early mornings on the ward. In the stillness of the night-time, his CPAP machine breezes gentle oxygen into his nose, producing a white noise as soothing as a mother breastfeeding her suckling child. In the mornings, the noise becomes incessant: the cleaners with their buffing machines, the constant requests for food or drinks, and the laughing and joking of staff changing shifts.
Jimmy’s muscles ache with atrophy. The cramps come more often, and the pain is as debilitating as any beating he can remember. It would be another few hours before visiting time. He can’t wait that long. Jimmy scratches the flaking skin on his arm. His burn-wounds were once tight and constricting. Now, like the rest of him, they are sagging and wrinkled.
His phone vibrates. Who would be sending him message at this time? Jimmy roots around in his bedside cabinet and eventually finds his old Nokia. He shields the screen so the ectoplasm colours don’t fill the side room.
The message is from Josh:
[Sorry, boss. It’s urgent]
[What’s wrong?]
[Can’t say on txt. Need to talk. Ryan screwed up. Big time!]
[Be here as soon as visiting times start. Bring Ryan with you.]
Jimmy’s mind races. What’s happened? How has Ryan screwed up? Surely Ryan isn’t involved in Westbourne’s crimes. Ryan knows to stay clear. At least while I’m still alive.
Pain pierces Jimmy’s kidneys like a high-speed sewing machine needle. He slumps back. He will have to wait for help—something that Jimmy has always found weak and unsettling. I don’t have long left, I’m worried what will happen after I go. I have information to surrender.
