Death & the City Book Two

by Lisa Scullard

  For some reason I feel the need to remind myself that Ian Fleming’s Bond wasn’t ginger, as if that will reassure me that Connor’s essentially different, from the cold, calculating, pulp fiction hero archetype. I smile to myself again as I pull on the crash helmet. The relationship is doomed, I think, putting a comedy Scots accent over the ‘doomed’ in a Dad’s Army style. Focusing on the worst case scenario always cheers me up. Not just because I feel in reality it’s not so bad. Mainly because I know I’m better practised and equipped to deal with that outcome over anything else.

  Yeah, I’m fucking weird, I think to myself cheerfully, as I head out to where Yuri’s already gunning his engine as a hint with the usual macho subtlety. Whoever wrote my program wasn’t exactly planning on divinely designing the perfect Samaritan of patience out of my psychological raw material. Psychotic serial whacker is about right. It’s a miracle that I can find anything to amuse myself about in my own private thoughts. I guess what I mean is, it would seem a miracle to a normal person. Not to a scientific experiment, like me.

  Positive thinking as a concept was something I grew up with, but in practice, I’ve found it merely increases the challenge level of situations in which to keep a positive outlook. Proving you’re strong, and can handle punishment, isn’t the way to show yourself at your best if what you want is an end to punishment, and a bit of peace. I guess I’m one of the lucky ones in that psychosis and alternate personalities afford me a constant stream of escapism completely unrelated to the challenges of everyday life, and the challenges set me by those in control of my personal freedom.

  Sometimes, to amuse myself, I picture the ninjas hiding in shrubs everywhere I go, waiting to pounce when I mentally crack under the pressure and show the strain on my innate humanity with a destructive cry for help. The kind of hallucinations of being watched, that would in themselves be the cause of a mental breakdown, and part of the formal diagnosis in the past. But what amuses me now, is that the concept of being watched over or spied on as a paranoia is redundant to me, because it’s actually happening, as part of my job. The worst case scenario for me would be discovering that head office existed only in my own head, and even then, most of me would respond with: ‘Whatever’. That sort of detachment from responsibility could turn out to be the ultimate in self-dissociation disorder, engineered by a society that makes delusional imagery the norm in everyday life.

  Yuri insists on checking my chin strap is done up properly, before I climb on behind him. I’ve noticed, like Connor with seatbelts, that men seem to take almost a paternal responsibility around me, in a kind of Health & Safety officer fashion. As if I can’t be trusted to have it all covered in that sense. It’s possible they’ve picked up on my practice of doing everything by halves. And all James Bond gets is Miss Moneypenny trying to get him to hang his coat up properly.

  “You can grab onto anything you like to hold on to,” Yuri says. “Don’t feel you have to be shy.”

  I wonder if he watches many Bond movies, because that would have been an almost perfect line for one. I just grin, because I don’t have a killer vixen response. Even several minutes into the journey, I still can’t think of one I could have said, so I just concentrate on doing as he says, and staying on the pillion.

  Part of my brain still has enough idleness, though, to think about Connor, and worry that I’m placing too much effort into concerns about the outcome between us. That, as usual, my sense of negativity might well be down to the physically inconclusive nature of any ‘relationships’ I’ve struggled with the concept of in the past, that never came to anything. Assumption on my part that this no different, when events and evidence so far already put it way beyond the running distance of any previous unrequitement. But I’m also struggling with the darker side of myself, that worries I might be wanting more from it than he does, and am fighting to control. That the negativity comes from my own internal saboteurs of need and desperation. Wanting to put something where the gap in my personality is, who doesn’t know who she is in an adult relationship yet. It’s not a responsibility I would wish onto anyone. Both of us finding out who I am in that situation at the same time.

  Perhaps that’s what he means about my self-control. Damage limitation, by keeping my emotions bottled up. Maybe the same goes for what he actually means about my trust issues as well. Trusting someone else to be able to deal with what I go through in my own mind, what I know of myself alongside what I don’t know yet. Which seems to be the greater part, the more I try to live and work around it and in spite of it.

  I don’t know what Yuri meant either, saying I was going to waste in a man’s job. I simply don’t know what I’m meant to be doing instead as an alternative. What he considers is being wasted. What there might be to appreciate, doing something else. Or, he meant the job is wasted on me, that I’m invading territory and taking work from others. Either way, it puts me in an existential quandary. Why am I not doing something else more appropriate, and what that something else is?

  Maybe it’s just one of those things that people tend to say, I tell myself, with no specific meaning behind it, relevant or personal. A derisive echo from misogynistic centuries past. Individuals with personality disorders have trouble with understanding those. Distinguishing what’s personal and meaningful in everyday conversation, from the embellishments, padding and clichés. Most often reversing the importance altogether, creating an entirely new reality around the subject in question. The part of me that knows this is now kicking itself, telling the rest of me that I should know better.

  City Central station is the steel and glass-shelled impersonal structure, but it’s only the cloaking device for the inside, which gives very little indication of the exterior. It’s all security doors, darker corridors, tiny rooms and boxed-in sections, giving visitors as much privacy and as little chance of bumping into one another inside as necessary. I know on U.S. television crime drama shows, a lot of glamour is projected into modern city police precincts, with open planning design, and glass partitioned offices, and anamorphic windows the size of the Starship Enterprise Holo-Deck. All very good for natural light, bulky camera rigs and track when filming, and Americanized Hollywood criminal justice atmospherics - not very good for confidentiality, and suppressing the criminal ego in real life.

  I wonder how many drug dealers get called in for questioning at the swanky-sounding City Central, expecting panoramic views across the marina, marble floors, and designer-clad detectives swanning around the place, giving them impassioned appeals to their better nature. How it feels instead to meet Officer Deadbeat in the shirt that fit him last year, and his non-stop biro and endless sheets of paper which all need a signature top and bottom, in a tiny whitewashed concrete cube-shaped room with its one Fisher-Price security camera, school-issue table and chair, and Styrofoam cup with tea not hot enough to burn yourself seriously. Wanting to know who’s cheating you out of the real arrest and statement experience that you see on the television, and when the celebrity detectives will turn up to tell you the story of your life, in a way that makes you think you’ll be played by Ewan McGregor when the movie rights are bought. The experience you prepared all your speeches and sound-bytes for. Not the one you’re currently in, where instead of saying all you want is your lawyer, you’re asking if it would be okay if you rang your mum, just to feel close to a home comfort and something familiar.

  I like it. I like Officer Deadbeat too. There’s more goes into writing up those statements than a highly-paid catwalk queen would do, by strolling in and telling Mr. Naughty she knows he committed the crime by how his watch was wound that morning, subsequently side-winding the confession and some DNA evidence out of him. They have their place, but on screen hypnotizing the viewers, not in reality, flirting with the suspects.

  Yuri drops me in the rear car-park, circles and zooms away back down London Road. I’m about to walk around to the main entrance, unbuckling my crash helmet, when W.P.C. Drury arrives on her push-bike, and waves, in a very
un-Hollywood tangerine sports hi-vis with her trousers tucked into her Adidas socks, and a little LED-flashing padlock on her rucksack for extra safety.

  “I’ll buzz you in,” she says. “Just let me lock this up first.”

  She leads the way to the staff door after stashing her bike in the security cage, removing her cycle helmet also, and presses the entry phone.

  “Who’s that with you?” the tinny voice asks.

  “Lara Leatherstone for D.C. Alby Flynn,” Drury snaps out, and the lock is disengaged. She pulls it open, and we go inside.

  I immediately experience an odd feeling, walking into the Anthill Mob’s ant-hill, with its peculiar blank walls except for Health & Safety notices, security cameras and fire alarms. It’s quiet, for one thing. Not the hustle and bustle of Hill Street Blues, or the jaunty banter of Cagney & Lacey - never mind the cosmopolitan atmosphere of any CSI. It’s like being in the basement of an inner-city school. Just corridor and slightly echoing footsteps, and awareness that somewhere through the walls are rooms with people in, most often doing administrative work. But the odd feeling for me, is related to it being Connor’s work base, and I feel as though I shouldn’t be here without his invitation. That I’m spying or stalking him in some way, visiting his workplace unaccompanied by him. I have to reassure myself that most of his work takes him elsewhere at the moment. And he knows I’m here, anyway.

  My memory of this morning, before the white van incident, already seems like a long time ago. I have a sudden wish that I was back in bed, instead of wandering around on the loose in town during the day. But I don’t know if I want it for the safety, or the company.

  The conflict of feeling is down to knowledge of the place more than anything. It feels masculine in a way that I’m not au fait with. Drury with her tomboy cropped hair, orange hi-vis jacket and no make-up, looks like she fits in by being stripped back of visible feminine frivolities. Like the bareness of the walls around us - the minimum necessity of appearance, in favour of keeping more of a presence of mental acuity. Keeping any individual creativity outside.

  While the V.I.P. section of The Plaza, The Gods, reminds me of a Harley Street surgery waiting-room in its white leather, white marble, wipe-clean macho minimalist styling, City Central station does away with style and anything interpreted as deliberate minimalism of taste, with merely structural impositions arising from the basic blueprint. Everything is a kind of grey-green, the colour of waterlogged fog on the marshes, and lit by safety lighting in the ceiling panels, no naked bulbs or fluorescent strips. It’s the type of surroundings I know Connor would be comfortable in, being able to understand the unseen within the walls, the unspoken that isn’t illustrated. The inside information that he already has giving him all the insight he needs, without visual advertisements or reminders required against the backdrop. But for myself - I tend to read places, people and things visually. Lack of visual information to me is the same as a closed book in a blank cover, which to me is the only thing about the design of the station which appears deliberate. I have to defer my working knowledge to someone who has read it.

  “Where am I going?” I ask Drury.

  “First floor,” she says. “I’ll show you up.”

  We turn left and through a fire door to a concrete stairwell, and up one double flight, emerging through a second fire door into an identical corridor to the one below.

  “Third door on the left,” she says. “Remote viewing room for the interview suite. Flynn should be in there.”

  “Cheers.”

  I glance at the first two doors in passing, and immediately pick up my first visual cues inside the station. The first is the water closet. The second says ‘Kitchen’ which basically means the room they keep the kettle and microwave in. The third door says REMOTE VIEWING SUITE. NO FOOD OR DRINKS TO BE CONSUMED IN HERE.

  I love the design irony. Having the kitchen so tantalizingly close next door. How many illegal chocolate biscuits and flapjacks have travelled between the two doors undiscovered, I wonder?

  I press the entry buzzer and wait, remembering to look up at the camera and smile. The lock disengages, and D.C. Alby Flynn opens it from the inside, before I can push it open myself.

  “Good morning, Lara,” he greets me, as I nod, and step through the doorway.

  Now my internal scanners are suddenly picking up cues incrementally. He sounds a bit less cheery than the other day. Looks as though he’s pulled a late night shift, straight through into an early morning one. His tie is loose, top button undone, and his sparse fair hair is dishevelled, and in need of a shower. His shirt collar seems to be sporting a coffee stain. Idly, I imagine his wife locking him out last night, and the possibility that he came straight back to work rather than sleep in his car.

  Now, if my senses had previously been distracted by some busy design features on my route through the building so far, or by passing more than just Drury on my way here, I’d probably have noticed none of this. But I store the assessment of Flynn up in my head anyway. Always useful to notice the cracks if they appear, as Warren said.

  “How are you getting on with Connor?” he asks, and it sounds dry, as if he’d prefer it was negative, and a bit dark, as if he’s suspicious of the personal angle things have taken. But I choose to interpret it as a work query.

  “Working fine so far,” I reply. “It’s good to have back-up, should I need it.”

  “Yeah. He seems quite happy with you, anyway,” Flynn agrees distantly, complying with the boundaries of impersonal information I’ve set. “Right. Let’s take a look at what Miss Dorothy of Kansas is up to.”

  Two other officers are in the room, and nod as we join them at the CCTV monitors. They’re like the anti-Jay and anti-Bob. Both are Oriental in descent, and have probably been looking at video images in darkened rooms since they could sit up in their cots unaided. One has a Navy SEALS jar-head flat-top haircut, while the other is wearing glasses and has more of a Yakuza Elvis-impersonator quiff and sideburns. They mutter to one another derisively over the desk, trading mild insults, and speculations about the Marmite percentage of Flynn’s shirt, in Mandarin and Japanese respectively. I try interjecting ‘Fucking grow up’ in Vietnamese, and they both grin at me, while Flynn makes a great show of yawning and coughing up phlegm, to drown out the noise of the other three of us reaching a level of mutual understanding.

  “You have to pardon the boss,” Navy SEALS tells me in Mandarin, his eyes focused on the screen. “His wife is playing away.”

  “When did he find out?” I ask, sticking with Vietnamese, knowing that both can understand me.

  “Just after midnight last night,” Yakuza Elvis replies, staying in Japanese, in turn. “She sent him a text meant for someone else.”

  “San ba,” I remark. It’s a Chinese insult, but the first that came to mind. I’m guessing head office probably picked up on it, but I’ll have to watch my step around Flynn if he can’t shower or change a shirt due to stress. If he was like me, I’d expect pyjamas, dressing gown and a sledgehammer, but he’s listed as sane. I switch to English to prevent his growing suspicion of more than just greetings being exchanged. “How long has she been in interview?”

  “Just preliminaries, confirming name and address, yada yada yada. Some joking about the cameras and being on Big Brother, saying she’s always wanted to be a TV star.” Navy SEALS speaks English with a south London accent similar to Connor’s. I wonder if they took the same voice coaching, erasing their territorial accents. “She’s under observation while waiting for a cup of tea. Has had her phone out texting Canem.”

  “She’s got her phone on her still?” I ask.

  “Yeah, well we’ve got his,” Yakuza Elvis shrugs, and throws a phone over the desk to me. I catch it and open the SMS files. “And we’ve told her she’s in police protection, not under arrest. So we can see who she tries to get hold of.”

  I skim through texts to Canem from ‘Gingham Girl’ as she’s named in his Contacts list. Where R U? being the mo
st common message in the last few days, to which someone here has obviously sent bogus replies, keeping the pimp’s spirit alive. Trying to get in confidenz wiv the fuzz 4 U xxx one day ago sounds like an empty promise, until just now when she’s texted OMG inside City Central after fight in Moon will call bk asap & Report!!! Xxx. She seems to have taken her espionage role seriously. Even though for clients, it was all just role-play, that she was merely the gullible victim of. Sounds like the plot of a porno/spoof Film Noir. Except in the Hollywood spoof, the gullible victim is the ultimate victor. In this reality, I have no idea where Dorothy is heading. In her own mind, she’s probably light-years ahead of the game anyway. Asking someone with a personality disorder to get some perspective, is merely asking them to identify with a different God. Or martyr, depending on the polarization of their distorted self-esteem. The proportionality to any reality according to the rest of the world has very little to do with it.

  “If she rings we’re just letting it go to voicemail,” says Flynn, joining in at last, when I’m guessing he’d rather be somewhere else. “She’s not said anything yet, other than she’ll call with any updates, and to call her back with any new assignments. It seems she mostly took calls from repeat clients herself, who then paid into Canem’s account, and she was paid a wage based on invoices. So fishing for new introductions from him to increase her assignments was in competition with other girls, and led to a lot of flirting with the boss, so to speak.”

  Sounds like the bar staff, I muse. Even though he’s as gay as Brighton seafront, Crypto’s Mgr Lenny still gets covered in barmaids regularly, all hoping to get promoted to V.I.P. hostess. Charmaine went through a phase of bringing him cupcakes, and then profiteroles, and then cream meringues, until Sadie upstaged her with a crackle toffee cheesecake she had got one of her housemates to make and passed off as her own, although her Twaddle updates gave the game away. Elaine decided she’d had enough, and made him Mississippi Chocolate Fudge Brownie Pie, which was so strong his taste buds didn’t work again for a week afterwards. And then only responded to chocolate cooking essence straight from the bottle, at a concentration my brother Luke reckons you could stop time with; and Absinthe, which is what fuels the TARDIS. Elaine knows things about baking that Martha knows about Black magic. It’s not just innocent cookies on Valentine’s Day.