by JOHN YORVIK
Dani had been against me coming to the flat. She said it was a trap.
“Expect the police to swoop as soon as you get in there,” she’d said.
“I can’t just sit around doing nothing. I want to take an active part in my own downfall,” I told her, after the benefit of a few beers. So here I was.
Crouched down in the hallway, I opened my backpack and took out a torch and a small digital camera. As the curtains were already drawn, I switched the torch on and looked around the living room. There was no mess, no broken glass or upset furniture. As far as I could tell, everything had been put back to normal. Was it police policy to allow a clean up so quickly after a murder? And where were the evidence tags? I walked over to the sideboard where I’d picked up Natasha’s contact card a week earlier and saw that it was clean. I lay on the floor and checked under the sideboard. I crawled around the floor looking under the rest of the furniture. Nothing. I heard the thud of the lift shaft engine up on the roof. It meant someone was on their way up. My heart thumped against my rib cage. I checked my mobile for a warning text message from Dani. Nothing. Was she even watching? Maybe she was still at the skate park photographing the raptors. But we’d made it clear: no text meant no trouble.
After two minutes of lying still, I resumed the search. There was a large bookshelf hung on the wall above the sofa. I started to take out the books one by one and flick through them to see if there was anything hidden between their pages. Most of the books were about art. Some of them were in Polish. I pulled out the last book on the shelf, which had a swastika on the cover. The title was Szukaj Sztuki Zagrabionych. I took a photo of the cover and of some of the inside pages, which seemed to catalogue paintings and sculptures. Next to various artworks there were notes scribbled in a language I found indecipherable. I took photos of every page with notes. I placed the book back on the shelf then took photos of all the book spines.
I peered through the living room curtains and saw a small balcony full of the usual things that people living in small flats usually keep outside: mops, buckets, empty plant pots and rusty bicycles. I tried the sliding door but couldn’t open it. It needed a key. I looked around on the floor and on top of a picture frame and in the drawer but couldn’t find one.
Moving on I tried the door of the first room in the corridor, which I assumed was a cupboard and found a utility room with a washing machine and drier. There was a long plank of wood, laid over the top of the machines. On top of it were three or four plastic trays about four inches deep stacked on top of each other. At the far end of the room, beside the drier was a book shelf. On the top shelf was a stack of paper. On the next shelf down was a small basket full of clothes pegs and on the bottom shelf, which had the height of two normal shelves, were various bottles of detergent. I was about to leave the room, but my mind couldn’t get over the out-of-place stack of paper so I returned to look at it. There were about fifty square sheets of thick paper. It didn’t make any sense. Then I had an idea. I pulled down the blind above the thin slat window and switched on the light, bathing the room in a soft red haze.
The utility room doubled as a dark room. The paper must be photographic. I switched the light off and pulled up the blind. I crouched down to look at the bottles on the shelf and found two bottles of developing fluid in among the detergent. I also found a small plastic cylinder about the size of a roll of film. I pocketed the cylinder with a few sheets of photographic paper.
I heard shouting and froze. Two men. They were either in the flat below or outside on the landing. It was impossible to tell. Then I heard some mood music. It was just a TV movie turned up loud. I put my hand to my chest and felt my heart pounding away inside.
I crept along to the bathroom. As I entered the first thing I noticed was the smell of plaster and sealant. The old bath had been removed and a brand new one put in its place. I checked the mirror. It was also new. All traces of the swastikas had been removed. I was about to open the medicine cabinet when I felt my mobile vibrate. I checked the message: ‘caru chi’. Someone was on their way. I quickly checked that I’d left nothing behind. Then I put on the gorilla mask, the last thing I wanted was for a neighbour to recognise me. I was just about to leave the flat when I heard voices approaching and the sound of a police radio coming from the other side of the door. Then there was the familiar clicking sound of a key being inserted into a lock.
I ran through into the bathroom, slid open the glazed window and stepped up on to the toilet seat and out onto the windowsill. I crouched sideways and slid the window shut behind me. The sill was a good foot in size and felt safe but I didn’t dare look down. It was a fourteen-floor drop to the ground and the wind was whipping across from the west. I leant into the window as much as possible. Out of the corner of my eye I saw the lights go on in the living room, which was the next window along. I prayed they wouldn’t manage to get out onto the balcony.
I had to do something before they entered the bathroom and saw my silhouette through the window. I looked around. Above me was a ledge that jutted out and seemed to run around the outside of the building. Beside the window were various drainpipes. If I could use the drainpipes, I might be able to reach the ledge and then haul myself up onto the roof.
I heard the talking get louder from within the flat. They were coming my way. Without another thought, I moved to the edge of the windowsill and took hold of a drainpipe, which was cold and enamelled. I placed my left foot on the u-bend that entered the flat and then hoisted myself up and took hold of the overhanging ledge with my right hand. My right foot searched frantically for a foothold and managed to reach the copper stopcock coming through the wall at mid height of the bathroom window. I used that to push me high enough up to get first my left then my right arm over the ledge and hold on to the lip at the other side, my legs swinging below me. I hung there for about twenty seconds unable to do anything. Then I tried to pull myself up onto the ledge but couldn’t summon the strength, fear was sapping my energy. All I could manage to do was edge along until I was directly above the balcony and there I stayed, aware that my legs were dangling down in front of the living room window like fish bait.
After two minutes, I allowed myself to drop and I crashed down onto the balcony, my fall broken by a bag of compost and some plastic plant pots. The living room curtains were still closed and there were no lights on. Lying on the floor of the balcony, experiencing the adrenalin high of a lifetime, I pulled up the gorilla mask onto the top of my head and looked down through the balcony railings to see the panda car below.
Two minutes later, my phone vibrated in my pocket. I took it out and read the message: ‘ddiogel.’
This was the safe word. I peered over the edge again and saw that the panda car had gone. I opened my backpack and found the toolkit I’d rolled up inside a blanket earlier. I took out a hammer and a screwdriver and placed the point of the screwdriver in the centre of the glass pane and struck it hard with the hammer. The glass door shattered without breaking. I quickly hammered a hole in it big enough to squeeze through and hurried out of the flat and down the fire stairs.
Before entering the lobby, I pulled down the gorilla mask to cover my face. It was just as well, because leaving the lobby I ran into the four street raptors, who on seeing me spread out across the pavement to block my way.
“Hey, it’s a fucking gorilla,” said one of the raptors, causing an eruption of monkey noises and curses from the others.
Playing their game, I beat my chest, gave out a roar and then ran straight into the middle of them. To my surprise they dispersed laughing, so I doubled back and chased them again.
“I think the gorilla fancies me,” said one.
“It’s a gay-rilla,” shouted another.
I did one more run through and then continued out onto the walkway between the lock-ups and the tower and didn’t stop running till I was out of their sight, then I removed the gorilla mask and looked for the nearest Underground station.
* * *
I was back in Hackney. Dani had convinced me that, as crazy as it sounded, we were now safer in Hackney Central than in my Camden residence. And judging by the state of the flat after the break in, she was probably right.
She had blacked out the window of the basement flat and screwed in a red light bulb. She was developing the roll of film I’d found in Natasha’s flat. There were already twenty photos pegged onto a string line drying from her previous shoot. On them were assorted photos of the raptors in urban action shots.
“Those raptors make for very striking models,” I said, admiring Dani’s handiwork.
“They’re good kids when you give them a chance,” said Dani, picking up on my use of the word ‘raptor’. “A lot of what you see is just an act to ward off danger.”
After an hour, Dani called me over to look at the photos from Natasha’s flat. The first five showed pictures of a man in various poses in someone’s apartment, perhaps his own. But you never saw his face. It was always in silhouette or from behind. The style was artistic black and white. He was wearing his dressing gown. It looked like a typical hungover Sunday spent reading the newspaper. The next shots were of Primrose Hill and Regent’s Park. Shots catching shadows and trees. Shots of squirrels and ducks. The last photo was what Dani called a double exposure: Natasha’s face on the left side of the photo. Marty’s on the right.
Chapter Nine
I picked up a newspaper on Fleet Street and walked until I was in sight of the Royal Courts of Justice. I stopped and bought a coffee from a vendor, who’d set up a machine in the back of his car, then sat down on a bench to read the paper. An accordion player stood on the corner playing La Mer, a strangely carefree sound to hear in view of the sober greyness of England’s highest court.
Spending two days lying low and getting my strength back in the Hackney hideout, I’d been able to do a lot of thinking. I decided if I was going to find Marty, there was one obvious place to start, and that was with Amy, the source of all our problems. The challenge would be to get to her without drawing the unwanted attention of the police, the press and the Polish.
On Dani’s advice I’d completely altered my look. I’d exchanged the hoodie and jeans for a sharp cut brown blazer and a trilby hat, which allowed me to arrange my hair so it covered up most of the scratches. The finishing touch was a pair of aviator glasses. Looking in the mirror before I left the house, I in no way resembled the photofit in the paper I was reading. The headline read: Has the Pentonville Strangler Killed Again?
And underneath that were the details of how brave Polish have-a-go hero Anton Podrasjki fell onto the Victoria line at Euston station as he pursued the Strangler down the tunnel. The question is: was he pushed? Afterwards, the Strangler, like some phantom from the deep, disappeared without a trace.
It was clear that the newspapers were intent on creating a mythical figure in the mould of Jack the Ripper to spread fear for the sake of spreading fear. The Pentonville Strangler was being tried in absentia and was already being ushered into the serial killers’ hall of infamy.
I looked up from the paper and took a sip of coffee. I checked my watch. It was one o’clock. Time the court was in recess. Fifteen minutes later cameramen and press photographers began to congregate on the steps. The doors of the court were opened and a tall Arab man dressed in a pinstripe suit emerged accompanied by his female lawyer. They approached the press. The Arab held his clasped hands in the air and shook them in triumph. This ignited a frenzy of flash photography. I folded my newspaper, slipped it into my blazer pocket and stood up.
I worked my way through the crowd of photographers who were rowdy and jostling for a better position. A limousine pulled up at the bottom of the steps. A security guard was now leading the Arab and the lawyer down to the car. I stood in front of one of the paparazzi and let myself be pushed along towards the lawyer as the crowd closed the gap behind them. Pretending to aid their passage down to the car by holding out a protective arm, I managed to drop something into the lawyer’s coat pocket without drawing attention to myself.
* * *
I’d got an ordinance survey map and looked for buildings which a member of the public could enter and leave through a different exit without causing much fuss. This was my new strategy to shake off any unwanted followers. Between the Royal Courts and Bethnal Green, I’d slipped into two libraries, a museum and a shopping centre and left by back ways. I was quite sure by now I wasn’t being followed. But then I’d been quite sure in the past too.
Because it was cheap and anonymous, I took a room in my old haunt, the Arcadian Guest House. This time on the top floor. The same guy was on reception reading his book as I paid and picked up the key. When I got to the top floor, I sent a message to the phone I’d dropped in the lawyer’s pocket saying it was imperative she met me at the hotel to discuss an urgent legal matter. I’d signed it ‘Marty Stewart’. I got a quick response saying she’d be there soon. I closed the curtains and opened the bottle of whisky I’d picked up on the way to the hotel and poured out a shot. I watered it down with tonic from the minibar and sat next to the window with the blinds cracked open. It had been five years since I’d seen her. Five years out in the cold.
It was winter 1996, on a dark, snowy afternoon in London. Only an hour earlier, I’d arrived from Madrid, where I’d spent the best part of the year working in bars and clubs in the heat of the Spanish night. Now, I stood shivering under Crouch End’s famous clock tower, pinching together the lapels of my overcoat, as I tried to make sense of the directions I’d scribbled down in haste a day earlier.
“Excuse me,” I said to a girl in a maroon hat. “Do you know the way to...?” and I showed her the paper with the map and the address.
She squinted affably at the paper and smiled to herself, then she looked at me and said in a cut-glass accent, “I don’t, but ask in that bar over there, they’re sure to have an A–Z”.
“Which? That one over there?” I said pointing to a wine bar with a grand Art Deco façade.
“Tell you what, I could do with a glass of wine. Why don’t you follow me and I’ll show you?”
“Follow you? Sounds good.”
I picked up my duffle bag and followed her over the road into the wine bar, which was festooned with tinsel and had large oak tables and real fires.
“Jay.”
“Elisabeth,” she said, holding out her hand to be shaken.
I went to the bar and ordered two glasses of Rioja and asked if I could borrow an A–Z.
When I sat down, Elisabeth showed me on the map, where I would be staying and I took out my notebook and drew a quick street diagram. She leant over the book and noticed a list of Spanish verbs I’d written down at the top of the page.
“Interesting,” she said. “¿Habla Usted Español?”
“Solo las palabrotas,” I said.
As we drank, I told her the story of my time in Spain, working in bars and freelancing as a journalist. Tall tales of how I’d pitched a story of flamenco junkies to a music mag and got mixed up with cut-throats and gypsy girls in the back streets of Madrid. Every time I told it, it grew more outlandish, more distant from the truth, but still, people seemed to eat up that kind of stuff.
While I tried to get the waiter’s attention to order another bottle, she teased me about my journalistic ambitions. To her, the young English writer abroad was a tired cliché. And although I liked her honesty, I feigned being offended for a while.
“Tread carefully...” I warned, but was interrupted.
“Yes, I know how it goes. You lay them down before me, and I’ll walk on them. That you can depend on.”
“Any dreams of your own?”
“It’s always been a dream of mine to spend the night with someone... working class. You know, fuck the poor.”
“Admirable. Charitable even.”
“But...?”
“But a little too easy for you. And very much a cliché, too, after Lady Chatterley.”
“Well, there
aren’t many outlets left for upper class angst. Just what can one do to escape the monotony of shooting parties and society weddings?”
A few lost hours later, we trod drunkenly through freshly fallen snow to where my digs were to be for the next few months. I stood awkwardly outside the door. Elisabeth did the same. Was I supposed to kiss her now? No, I thought. I was playing a longer game.
“I suppose now that I know where it is I’m staying, I should walk you home,” I said
“But you just have,” she said.
I just had. Elisabeth turned out to be Amy, Marty’s mischievous other half. And when she opened the door with her key, Marty was waiting in the hallway.
Amy told Marty I’d been lost and had asked her for directions around the corner from the flat.
“When I saw the address, I couldn’t believe it,” she said.
Nothing was said about our time in the wine bar, so my loyalty to Marty was already compromised. And as Marty poured out the wine, I knew he’d already picked up on our lingering eye contact. But I couldn’t help myself with Amy. She was just the kind of daring troublemaker I could never say no to. And with Marty away on business most of the time, we were able to carry on our affair for weeks before Marty found out, which he eventually did, which is when he gave me that line:
“Not now, but sometime when you think that all this is forgotten. I’ll crawl into your room as you sleep and slit your throat.”
This was followed by the all too ambiguous retraction a few minutes later. The next morning I’d packed before either of them were awake and hit the road with my duffle bag over my shoulder and my head bowed in shame.
I checked my watch. I was about to give up when there was a knock at the door. I stubbed out my cigarette in the ashtray and walked across the room. I paused with my hand on the door handle and waited until there was another knock. This time it was louder. I flung open the door, took her by the shoulders and pulled her inside the room. I pressed my lips on hers. Then as if remembering her anger, she pushed me away and slapped my face.
