Relics

by Tim Lebbon

  Five minutes after they left, the woman returned. Angela let her in again, but she only stood in the small hallway. She told Angela that she wouldn’t plead with her, but insisted on telling her some stories that might help her make up her mind.

  “Officially we can’t tell you about these things, because none of them are proven,” the woman said. “Even by mentioning them, I’m perpetuating the myth that Meloy has been striving to build about himself, but where I work we don’t always do things the official way. So there are two stories I want to tell you. I didn’t actually tell you these, and if you claim I did, or spread them, or mention them to anyone else, I’ll deny all knowledge. Even whisper them to someone else, and you’ll be putting yourself in more danger than you’re already in.”

  “Already in?” Angela had said.

  “We’ve no concrete information,” the woman replied hastily, “but you’ve done a Google search on his name, and probed deeper.” She shrugged. “He has his ways and means.”

  “So… the stories.”

  “Yeah. There was a guy, couple of years back, went to Meloy with a plan to rob a security van. Meloy isn’t usually into stuff so crass. He makes his money through a complex network of protection rackets, drug trafficking, and… well, other stuff. Let’s call the guy John Smith. So, Smithy’s plan was good. Watertight. And it came at a time when Meloy needed an injection of cash for some other project.”

  “What project?” Angela had asked.

  “Don’t know. Wouldn’t tell you if I did. Anyway, Fat Frederick got his people to go over the plans in detail, digging for loopholes, and reporting back to him that it looked good. He gave it the go-ahead, then stepped back and had nothing more to do with it. He trusts his lieutenants, and they’re loyal to him. So the job happened. I can’t tell you details, of course, not even where this heist took place, but they got away with it. The truck and its drivers vanished and have never been seen again. Neither has the half a million quid inside.”

  “Let me guess. Neither has John Smith?”

  “Oh, no, he was seen again. They found his foot in a kebab shop in Croydon, his left hand in a dog’s mouth in Ealing, and his head stuck on the bonnet ornament of a Mercedes out in Hillingdon. No one knows why. Some slight, perhaps. Or just Meloy cleaning up.”

  “So Smithy’s not the one who called him Fat Freddie?” Angela had asked.

  “No, Smithy’s murder was planned. It was a stripper who called him Fat Freddie in one of his clubs. Probably not The Slaughterhouse, that’s his main base and it’s doubtful he’d… corrupt it. Although you just can’t tell. Maybe it was there. It was an impulsive murder, and done by his own hand. That’s unusual. She called him Fat Freddie, he had two guys hold her down while he went to work on her with a smashed vodka bottle. It’s said he sliced off the rest of her clothes, then stripped her of some of her skin. Kept going ’til she died. It took maybe two, three hours.”

  “It’s said,” Angela replied. “Rumor? Image? If you know all this, why can’t he be arrested?”

  The woman had blinked, that was all. For a long moment Angela had waited for her to say something else, but then she’d rested a hand on Angela’s shoulder.

  “We won’t warn you off him again. Still, do yourself a favor.”

  Angela had never seen the man and woman again, but she had done herself a favor, deleting her search history and trying to do the same with his name. Nevertheless, it was difficult to delete such imagery, such stories, from her mind.

  Now she had heard his name again, and this time Vince was the direct link.

  She wondered whether it had been Claudette and Harry holding that stripper down while Frederick Meloy skinned her with a shattered vodka bottle.

  “Watch out, love!”

  “Sorry,” she muttered as the man pushed past, a little girl clinging onto his left hand. She’d walked right into him. On a busy pavement it was unavoidable sometimes, but he’d made a point of commenting. Angela turned back and the kid was watching her. The guy seemed already to have forgotten the incident, thoughts of a day with his daughter, museums and ice cream on his mind.

  Really noticing where she was, the smells, sights, and sounds flooded in. A car horn blared and several more answered in an angry exchange. Someone shouted in a language she didn’t recognise. Brash pop music blasted from an open shop doorway, while three boys jigged and danced on the pavement, their baseball caps laid out for tips. Exhaust fumes mixed with the smell of fast food, the city heat cooking the atmosphere into a stew that was almost chewable. A gaggle of foreign students on the trip of a lifetime huddled along the curb like meerkats, waiting to cross.

  And someone else was watching her. The sense of being observed was one that she’d felt several times before, and one she just didn’t like. Memories flooded in. Once it had been a man staring at her through a pub window, his features distorted by stained and warped glass. Another time, lying in bed, the sense had come on strong and sudden, a startling paranoia that made her sit up and gasp. Vince had been sitting on the side of the bed, smiling down at her. Watching her sleep.

  “For how long?” she’d asked.

  “Ten minutes.” He’d shrugged.

  It had disturbed her far more than she’d ever let on.

  Now, here in one of the busiest sections of London, that feeling had struck her again. Her skin crawled. The nape of her neck bristled. Her scalp tightened, and she ran her hand through shoulder-length hair as a pretext to turn a half circle, while a drip of sweat ran down her back. Piccadilly Circus was always buzzing, a hub of London tours and the focal point of numerous streets. It was like the city’s heart from which many routes came and went and where, sometimes, people stopped to take stock or consult a map for their next destination.

  She scanned the crowd for anyone recognisable, expecting to see Claudette or Harry. No one. She moved to the curbside so she could see the other side of the road. As she stepped out a cyclist whizzed by.

  “Get the fuck outta the way!” he shouted.

  She jumped back and bumped into someone.

  Spun around, couldn’t see who it had been.

  People pressed in all around her.

  She ducked into a Japanese restaurant and moved to the back, passing chatting diners and busy waitresses, accepting a menu from one and sitting at a table at the rear. She faced the front. The sense of being watched slowly faded, but still her heart hammered and a slick sweat broke out all across her body. She ordered a beer and sat back in the chair.

  Her phone buzzed, causing her to jump.

  Lucy.

  “Oh, Lucy, I don’t think I can…” she whispered, placing the phone on the plastic tablecloth, leaving it unanswered. She started to shake again. What the fuck is happening? Am I really on the way to see Fat Frederick Meloy, the man who peeled a stripper with a smashed vodka bottle?

  “Yes,” she muttered. Someone placed a beer bottle and glass in front of her. She nodded her thanks and took a swig straight from the bottle, looking up at a display of Japanese art shelved all around the restaurant. Dragons’ heads, she thought, and the image of that shrivelled, dusty thing in the package in Vince’s bathroom jumped to mind once more. She remembered it as clearly as the photos no longer on her phone.

  Fools pay money for old things, Claudette had said. But what Angela had seen in the apartment was more than old. It was real.

  She shook her head. Couldn’t accept that, no matter how it had looked, it could have been genuine. A prop of some kind, from a film or a stage show. Or something like one of these dragon heads, made for a horror-themed pub but never used. It was easy to fool people if they were in the right state of mind. Was she in the right state of mind? Of course. Her world unsettled, discovering Vince’s secret second apartment and finding those mysterious packages in there… her love’s involvement with one of London’s worst.

  Of course she was in a susceptible state of mind.

  “Fuck it.” Angela drained the bottle and slammed it down
on the table. Whether the alcohol rush had emboldened her, or something had settled in her mind and shifted gears, she grabbed hold of the newfound determination. In one back pocket she carried the two notes Vince had sent her, telling her to be safe and not to look for him. In the other, Claudette’s card and phone number.

  It was time to ignore them both.

  7

  This is really fucking stupid.

  She was standing fifty yards from the entrance to The Slaughterhouse. It was nestled between a TV production company and a shop selling old vinyl albums. Behind her a bustling market sold fruit and vegetables, and further along the street, past the doorway, the road opened up and became home to a couple of pavement cafés.

  They were buzzing. The tables were full, and the street was alive with people going to and from work, wandering aimlessly. A few were tourists, probably come to visit the famous Soho for the first time. The district had a reputation to uphold, and there were still a couple of streets given over to strip clubs and porn shops, neon sad and wan in the daylight, but those who came expecting something sordid and dangerous usually went away disappointed.

  Usually.

  “Fucking idiot,” Angela muttered. She was eating a tray of Chinese food she’d bought from a street vendor. She wasn’t hungry, but simply standing there staring was probably a bad idea. Even though she was. The food was going cold, limp, and sad in a sea of grease.

  Maybe Fat Frederick thought it was some sort of joke calling his establishment The Slaughterhouse. After what she’d heard about him, Angela didn’t find the joke very funny, and being here wasn’t remotely sensible. She should dump the cooling food and walk in the opposite direction, jump on a bus at Oxford Circus and go home. Call Lucy. Share some wine with her while she decided just what the hell to do, who she could tell about what she knew.

  But what did she know? Her boyfriend had vanished, told her not to look for him. She’d discovered that he had a secret home. She also suspected that he was mixed up in the London underworld. No one in their right mind would tell her to keep looking for him.

  The Slaughterhouse wasn’t an imposing place. A door, a small sign, a bell. She suspected the doorway opened onto a staircase leading down to a basement club. Anyone using it must first come looking for it, because there were no signs outside inviting casual strollers to come in and have a drink, watch a stripper. Get slaughtered.

  Angela took out her phone—no new messages—and sent Lucy a quick text.

  Found some stuff out. Will call later, but now I’m at a place called The Slaughterhouse in Soho. A club. You know, just in case.

  She paused, deleted the last sentence, sent the message, and dumped the uneaten Chinese food in a bin overflowing with fast food containers. Glancing around as she crossed the street, she approached the doorway. No one seemed to be watching her, and that sense of being observed was absent. There was no sign of Claudette and Harry.

  Climbing two steps and reaching for the bell, she noticed that the dark blue door was actually open several inches. She shoved it open some more. Inside was a brightly lit hallway and, as she had surmised, a staircase leading down, also well lit. There was another door beside the head of the staircase, leading through the wall and presumably into the neighbouring record shop.

  It was closed and locked shut with a padlock.

  “Hello?” she said, wincing at how weak she sounded. The sound of gentle jazz floated up from below, accompanied by bar smells that couldn’t be mistaken—alcohol, stale sweat, and beneath them all the memory of cleaning products.

  Everything told her to turn around and go home. Instead, Angela took one more deep breath from the street outside, then started down the staircase. All the way down she imagined what she might see when she turned the corner at the bottom. She had an image of what these underground boozing joints might look like, the hard, lonely clientele they attracted, the grim histories ground into stark concrete walls and ceiling like yellowed cigarette smoke.

  Nothing could have prepared her for the reality.

  The Slaughterhouse was a modern, bright bar, suffering not at all from the fact that it was subterranean. Much larger than she’d anticipated, it must have taken up basement space beneath the production company and the record shop, as well as stretching back some way. It was well lit, modern, and about a third filled with chatty, cheerful people. They sat at tables in couples and small groups, drinking and laughing, passing the time of day with light chatter. A few solo drinkers sat on stools at the long bar that took up one entire side wall. None of them fit the profile of the lonely drunk. They worked on tablets or phones, and one or two were reading magazines or books.

  A few glanced over at Angela, then looked away again just as quickly. One guy appraised her a little longer than was comfortable, but she was used to that. She ignored him and strolled confidently across to the bar.

  “Getcha?” the barmaid said. She sounded Australian, all athleticism and healthy tan even beneath artificial lights.

  “Er… a small Merlot, please.”

  “Where ya from?”

  “Boston.”

  “Long way to come for a drink.” She grinned and turned to the counter behind the bar, reaching for an opened bottle of red.

  Angela hoped that ordering a drink would give her time to look around, take things in, and decide whether she was even at the right place.

  A small stage toward the back of the room was empty apart from a chair, a guitar stand, and a microphone. Hardly the stage for a stripper. Furniture was new and unobtrusive, a mixture of tables and chairs, and a few more comfortable leather sofas and lower tables scattered around the edges. No dance floor.

  “This is The Slaughterhouse, right?” Angela asked the barmaid when she brought her drink.

  “Yep. Check out the prints? Settle up when you’re done.” She flashed a healthy smile and walked along the bar to serve someone else.

  There were maybe a dozen framed pictures around the room, on the walls. Like the rest of the bar they were subtle, though when Angela looked closer she could hardly call them tasteful. They looked like artfully shot close-ups of raw meat, done in such a way that the stark red flesh, pink bone, and marbled fat looked like the contours and shades of fantastic landscapes. One showed a mountain range of ribs, another a red wasteland, a lonely bone tree in the middle distance.

  They were really quite remarkable.

  “Help you?”

  Angela turned on her stool. A huge black man stood behind the bar, his expression nowhere near as welcoming as the barmaid’s.

  “I’m looking for… the owner,” Angela said, realizing that she really didn’t have a clue what Fat Frederick even looked like. Was he really fat? White or black? Tall or short? This man was more than six feet tall, extremely heavily built, and of an indefinable age. He didn’t smile, nor did he frown. His face was a blank as he looked her up and down. Then he nodded toward a vacant corner sofa and started pouring himself a drink.

  “Over there?” Angela asked. She picked up her drink and walked across, weaving between tables and catching a few people’s eyes. A couple of them smiled, and she smiled back, wondering just what the fuck she was getting herself into. She slipped her phone from her pocket.

  No service.

  Perfect.

  As she turned to sit on the low L-shaped sofa, the big man was already behind her, placing a glass of white wine on the table as he dropped down into the sofa’s other arm.

  “Like the place?” he asked.

  “Yes, it’s…” She really didn’t know what to say. Charming? Interesting? Chrome and glass and raw meat on the walls. Laughing drinkers. A chirpy barmaid. Owned by a man who skinned strippers and stuck a dead man’s head on a hood ornament.

  “So?” the man said.

  “I’m looking for Mr. Meloy,” she said softly. It was easy to speak above the low music, but conversation rose and fell in volume. The man seemed to have no trouble hearing her, though. He nodded, but offered no response.
Still looking her up and down, assessing, but not in a sexual way.

  “I’m worried about my boyfriend, Vince,” she continued. “He’s gone missing and I think Mr. Meloy…”

  The man pulled out his phone and took a photo of Angela. He didn’t hide what he was doing. Then he started swiping the phone screen. He raised an eyebrow and glanced up when she stopped speaking.

  “Go on.”

  “Are you Mr. Meloy?”

  The man smiled. He was scaring her, but Angela also was quite certain that this wasn’t the man she sought. He had “henchman” written all over him. She checked his hands, forearms, and neck for tattoos, knowing that sometimes gang members carried art like a stamp of ownership. His skin was bare—as far as she could see, at least. She looked around the bar again instead, feeling his attention still upon her. It was maybe fifteen paces to the foot of the staircase. If she had to run—

  “And?” the man said. Sharper this time, as if annoyed that she’d look away from him.

  “I really need to speak to him.” Her mouth felt suddenly dry. She needed a drink, but not wine. The bar suddenly felt false, the whole thing a stage with a show put on just to fool her. The laughter was hollow, the people didn’t know each other, and no one was looking at her anymore because they’d been instructed not to look.

  She shivered and went to stand.

  She had to leave.

  “Hang on,” the man said. His phone rang and he answered calmly. “Yeah.”

  Angela took a sip of wine and swilled it around her mouth. It tasted good, but it was also early. It could be day or night down here and nothing would change, and that idea seemed to distance her even more from the world above.