Disturbia

by Christopher Fowler

  —

  While Masters was rooting about in the attic looking for his notes and clippings, the phone rang again downstairs. Maggie Armitage answered it on the second ring. She listened for a minute, then cupped her hand over the receiver and mouthed ‘Who are all these people?’ to Stanley Purbrick. This one was called Pam, and she also wanted to know where Vince was.

  ‘I wish we knew, dear,’ said Maggie, ‘but he hasn’t called us in over an hour, and we have no way of contacting him. Yes, I’ll let him know you’re safe if he rings again. Can he contact you? No, I see.’

  Maggie replaced the receiver, puzzled. ‘Sounded like she was calling from inside a cupboard,’ she said.

  The walls of the fuliginous cupboard were coated with coal dust, and once Pam started sneezing she could not stop. Barwick held the door open for her, his clumsy fantasies of seduction thwarted.

  ‘Look here,’ he began, starting towards her as she fished about in her bag for a handkerchief, ‘suppose we just left, you and I, quickly and quietly by the servants’ entrance? We could be far away from here before they find us gone.’

  ‘Okay, but won’t you get into trouble?’ she said, trying to think through this new development as she blew coal from her nose.

  ‘It’ll be a lot worse than that,’ said Barwick, grimacing. ‘You can’t leave the League, not once you know its secrets.’

  ‘Tell me, Horace, why are they making Vince do this?’ she asked. ‘It’s more than just a series of games, isn’t it?’

  ‘Oh, much more,’ he agreed. ‘You have no idea…’

  ‘If you don’t agree with what the League is doing, you should tell me. Perhaps we can do something about it.’

  ‘I agree in principle, what with the way the country is going and everything. But what he’s planning is simply too dangerous to contemplate. The WBI is a government organisation. He can’t do it without Vince, you see…’

  ‘I don’t understand,’ she persisted as they headed for the stone staircase at the rear of the building. ‘You have to tell me what he is going to do.’

  ‘I can’t do that. Too risky,’ Barwick gasped, the effort of fast movement clearly having an adverse effect on him. ‘He would have to kill me—and you. It’s better that you don’t know anything more.’

  ‘And we just sit back and let this—thing—happen? Can’t you go to the authorities? Someone with power?’

  ‘How, when our families are the authorities?’ he wheezed. The spiral staircase they had entered turned to the ground floor and a basement beyond. ‘The people with power, we’re all related one way or another.’

  ‘You’re telling me that this is about Sebastian getting back at his family?’

  ‘Well, in part. I mean, his father, but everyone knows about that. Sebastian can never forgive him for what he did.’

  The heavy oak doors to the courtyard stood no more than ten yards ahead. Pam prayed they weren’t locked. ‘Please, Horace, tell me where Vince is. It doesn’t matter if I know now.’

  ‘He should be on the seventh challenge. Xavier Stevens has gone back out there to keep an eye on him.’

  ‘Where, Horace?’ She forced her eyes to glisten. ‘I must know where. Please.’

  Finally he told her the location, proud to be the possessor of such privileged information. They had reached the bottom of the staircase. Freedom lay just a few short steps ahead.

  ‘Listen, Horace,’ she said, drawing him close, ‘you’ve been really nice to me. I want to thank you. You’re not like the others.’

  ‘I’ve been hoping you would feel that way,’ he muttered sheepishly. ‘They say hostages often fall in love with their captors, don’t they? I’ve always wanted to meet someone who likes me for who I am, not what my family represents. Money always gets in the way.’

  ‘Only if you’ve got it, sunshine,’ she said, bringing her right knee sharply up into his unprotected groin. ‘Don’t get me wrong. I still think you’re an arsehole.’

  Barwick let out a howl and tipped backwards clutching his testicles. The shock set him off-balance and he fell hard on the steps, damaging his coccyx and barrelling down to the wall below. Pam ran for the exit.

  The tradesman’s door was unlocked. As she yanked it open and dashed out into the floodlit courtyard, something whistled in the air behind her. She looked back and saw St John Warner at the open stairwell window, reloading what appeared to be a crossbow. As she ran on across the gravelled yard, she cursed her decision to wear high-heeled shoes tonight.

  —

  Sebastian rested his forehead against the cold diamond pane. He had not foreseen that Vince would draft in others to help him, and at first had felt anger towards his opponent, but now he understood the rightness of it. He was a child of the street, after all; it was fitting that other such denizens should offer him advice, just as he used his own background. The League, its followers and friends were isolated from Vince’s kind. They had underestimated the power of the nation’s grass roots. This exercise would do them all good. There was a commotion in the courtyard below, and he looked out in time to see St John Warner firing his bloody crossbow at their hostage, for God’s sake.

  Praying that no one else was looking out of their windows while this farrago was unfolding, he rose from his chair and headed downstairs to instigate some disciplinary action. He wanted everyone else cleared from Vince’s path now. If the girl or anyone else turned up again, he would have their bodies dumped in the river before dawn and low tide.

  Chapter 40

  Old Bones

  ‘What’s that game show where they had to find things like the portrait of Elizabeth the First?’ asked Stanley Purbrick. ‘They had teams, and maps, and an annoying woman who kept barging about in a jumpsuit.’

  ‘This is not a game show, Stanley,’ said Masters, clearing a patch on the table and heaving a mildewed cardboard box onto it. ‘There’s a very good reason why our help is needed. If this boy is defeated and halted in his path, just as I was four years ago, the corruption will just continue to deepen, and soon the stain will be so ingrained that it will never be removed.’ He began pulling damp cardboard files from the box and passing them to Arthur Bryant. ‘It’s not as if we have a constitution for our protection. Up until the Thatcher years we relied on a certain amount of common sense to guide us. Now the profit motive makes every action suspect.’

  ‘Harold, dear, take your medication,’ said Jane Masters. ‘You know what happens when you get overexcited.’

  ‘Well, it makes me angry,’ he countered. ‘I’m a so-called respected academic, I sit on a dozen advisory boards and yet I’m as powerless as a child dossing down in a shop doorway. What I don’t understand is why we, as a country, aren’t angrier about the erosion of our liberties. Look at the way we allow our Members of Parliament to retain positions in companies that show direct conflicts of interest. And good God, the opportunism! Shaw said that liberty means responsibility; that is why most men dread it.’

  ‘He also said that an Englishman thinks he is moral when he is only uncomfortable,’ interrupted Bryant. ‘Who exactly are Sebastian Wells’s parents?’

  ‘His father is a former darling of the far right, bring back hanging, to hell with Europe, that sort of thing. He would have made the perfect conservative MP somewhere in the shires, a nominal position, a nice safe seat. Unfortunately it was his lot to be high-born. He’s fascinated by the accumulation of corporations, and that’s where it starts to get interesting.’

  ‘Oh, why?’

  ‘One senses there are all kinds of infringements. His wife is represented in a number of companies, either as a shareholder or on the board, and when you put their joint assets together—well,’ he looked pointedly at Stanley Purbrick, ‘a true conspiracy theorist would draw conclusions from their surprisingly fortuitous connections. For example, he has a company dealing in arms, she has machine exports, he has a shipping corporation, she has a security firm. They dovetail a little too neatly, and one could say that
a pattern emerges. Old family connections aside, they seem to be part of a clique of business colleagues and friends that, if sat all together in a room, represent most of the more dubious financial fixers of the government’s outer circle.’

  ‘So we’d be stupid to mess with these people,’ said Maggie airily, waving her wineglass at arm’s length. ‘This is nothing new. By the very nature of its existence, a modern government is always tainted. How can it not be? We can’t live by Grecian ideals. This isn’t a republic. Big business is not nice. We know that, and nobody can stop it without stopping the world.’

  ‘We can stop Wells,’ said Jane Masters. ‘Can’t we?’

  Arthur Bryant looked up from the clipping he had been studying for the last few minutes. ‘I don’t know about that yet,’ he said, ‘but I rather think we have a way into the problem.’

  —

  Louie bought two doughy slices of pepperoni pizza from the Turkish vendor who was arguing in French with his Nigerian helper, and passed one to Vince. The traffic around Piccadilly Circus was pulsing slowly now, the city’s breath shallow in the deepest part of the night, but most of the billboard neon was still ablaze, reflecting a sullen glow at the clouds racing low overhead.

  ‘Thanks,’ he said, barely comprehensible through his mouthful of food. ‘I didn’t realise how hungry I was. You shouldn’t be seen around me, Louie. Everyone who comes close risks getting hurt.’

  ‘Don’t worry, mate, I’ve already given one bloke a punch up the bracket, trying to save your sodding book. I can look after myself. We’ll see who gets hurt now.’

  ‘Do you think Esther is really dead? I called her, but there was no answer.’

  ‘I don’t know. I guess you have to prepare yourself for the chance that she might be.’

  ‘He mentioned Pam. There’s no answer from her phone, either. Christ, if he’s touched—’

  ‘All right, calm down. You’re not gonna help anyone by going crazy now. Tell you what, make this call while I get us some coffees.’ Vince accepted the mobile phone from Louie. His fingers were still frozen, even though he had been holding the microwaved pizza slice. If only he hadn’t bought that damned society magazine in the first place, no one would have been hurt. There was no way of turning back the clock, but there had to be some way of making amends. He called Harold Masters.

  —

  ‘I only cut it out because there was a picture of Sebastian Wells at the top,’ said Masters. ‘He cuts a terribly dashing figure, don’t you think?’

  The article was headed:

  Mystery death at Howarth Lodge—

  Open verdict forced by inquest.

  The undergraduates who attended a post-exam house party at the country seat of Sir Nicholas Wells were expecting a weekend of fun and frivolity, but on Sunday the hijinks ended in tragedy when the body of an unconscious girl was pulled from the property’s ornamental lake. For a few brief weeks Melanie Daniels was the pretty blonde girlfriend of Nicholas Wells’s son, Sebastian. She had apparently fallen from the lake’s jetty in a state of inebriation, and died on her way to hospital.

  An inquest led by the Hon. Jasper Forthcairn, QC found no evidence of foul play, but suggested that the combination of barbiturates and alcohol found present in Daniels’s bloodstream in large amounts was a major contributing factor to her death.

  ‘Melanie was a happy girl with everything to live for,’ commented Anne Daniels, her mother. ‘She had fallen in with the wrong crowd.’

  Despite a recent public break-up with his son over issues raised by the controversial first annual conference of the Without Borders Initiative, Sir Nicholas told the press: ‘Sebastian is a clean living, decent young man. These girls are unable to resist the lure of an eligible, wealthy bachelor, and often succumb to addictive antisocial behaviour.’

  Sebastian Wells had recently been suspended from college attendance after his controversial views on racism were made known at the WBI conference.

  ‘There’s something about the man I can’t make out.’ Bryant’s eyes grew distant with thought, so that he looked more than ever like a ruminating tortoise. ‘The family certainly seems to dominate, doesn’t it? In nearly every one of these interviews the father has something strong to say about his son. Suggestive in itself.’

  Maggie couldn’t see how. She studied the photograph of Sebastian Wells on the front of a pamphlet entitled England and Her Foreign Population: Seduction of the Innocents and noted his colour combinations, unusual for an Aries. The telephone, which had now been placed in the centre of the table like an altar-piece, rang suddenly and she swept it up in a jewelled paw.

  ‘Vincent! Where are you? We’ve been so worried!’ She listened, then threw her hand over the mouthpiece. ‘He’s eating pizza in Piccadilly Circus, apparently,’ she told everyone. ‘Do you have any idea how bad that is for you? Do you have the next challenge? Then give it to us.’ She waggled her fingers in front of her. ‘Pen, pen, pen.’

  As she wrote, the others returned to the table and gathered around her. ‘Yes, go on. Nonconformity, yes, okay—let me see if I have it right—Opened after Defoe’s Year, Blake and Bunyan make a show. Paradise was founded here, Seek the Elf King, go below. Plague year, yes, I imagine that’s correct. Hang on.’ She turned to the assembled group, held up the sheet of paper on which she had scribbled the verse, gave them ten seconds to read it and asked, ‘Any ideas?’

  ‘They were all nonconformists, religiously speaking,’ said Purbrick. ‘Blake and Bunyan, what’s the connection there?’

  ‘Well, they were contemporaries,’ said Jane.

  ‘That’s right,’ agreed Masters. ‘I wonder why it’s written in rhyme. The other challenges are all prose.’

  ‘Because of Milton?’

  ‘I went to visit Blake’s grave once,’ said Maggie. ‘He was buried with Catherine, his wife. His headstone was a great disappointment, a miserable little piece of discoloured—’

  ‘Isn’t Bunyan buried in the same place?’ asked Bryant. ‘Yes, I’m sure he is. And Defoe as well. Damn, what is it called—’

  Jane Masters was already searching the shelves, and pulled down a slim volume entitled The Cemeteries of London. ‘Here you are,’ she said. ‘Bunhill Fields, a graveyard allocated to nonconformists, who were banned from burial in Church of England cemeteries for their refusal to use C of E prayer-books in their services. John Bunyan, William Blake and Daniel Defoe are all buried near each other, Milton wrote Paradise Lost on a site in Bunhill Row, overlooking the graves. Nothing about imps or elves, though.’

  ‘Any fairy-tale authors?’ asked Bryant hopefully. ‘Tolkien isn’t planted there by any chance?’

  ‘It doesn’t say. Bunhill presumably comes from “Bone-hill”, as they transferred the bones from St Paul’s charnel house there for burial. He has to get to the City Road, near Old Street station.’

  Maggie relayed the information, then covered the receiver once more. ‘He’s not thrilled about being sent to a graveyard in a storm in the middle of the night. He wants to know what he’s supposed to be looking for.’

  ‘Tell him he’ll have to look around when he gets there. Ask him if he needs anything.’

  ‘He says he’s cold and wet, but okay. He’s found that friend of his, the weird one who rang earlier.’

  ‘The one who sounded really stoned?’ complained Purbrick, sitting back and folding his arms. ‘Wonderful. That’s all we needed.’

  Chapter 41

  The Elf King

  Rain battered the tops of the great plane trees looming over Bunhill Row and bounced over the gutters as Vince and Louie left their taxi outside The Artillery Arms to approach the locked gate of the cemetery. Here, as in so many parts of the city, the landscape was divided into buildings that had survived the Blitz and those that had been utterly devastated. Renovated Peabody Estate homes shared space with the blank brick walls of post-war brutalist office blocks. Beyond them was the heavy dark foliage of the cemetery, a constant green space in a chan
ging world. Most of the tombstones within had been worn smooth with age, their epitaphs crumbling to dust in the wind and rain. Only those few carved on slate or granite remained decipherable.

  ‘I used to come here to eat my lunch when I was a motorcycle courier,’ said Louie as he clambered over the low railings. ‘Didn’t know there was anyone famous buried here, though. You don’t look around when it’s your turf, you know? Not like when you’re a visitor.’ He shook water from his jacket. ‘I once got breathalysed by the lads in Bishopsgate nick, just up the road from here. They were a nice bunch. Gave me tea, biscuits and everything. Bourbons.’

  ‘Yeah, and they took your licence away for a year.’

  ‘What are we looking for, exactly?’

  ‘I wish I knew,’ said Vince. ‘Give us a hand over.’ He hopped across onto the neatly mown grass.

  While they sheltered under a tree, considering how best to tackle their search of the cemetery, the familiar thrumming of a taxi engine grew behind them, and Vince was surprised to see his old schoolfriend paying the driver and asking for a receipt.

  ‘Pam?’ He stepped up to the railing. ‘Are you okay? How did you find us?’

  ‘Sebastian had me tied to a post but I got away,’ she said breathlessly. ‘It was like something out of a Bruce Willis film. Nothing like that has ever happened to me before. These people are really peculiar, Vince, they fired arrows at me for heaven’s sake, and they’re planning something—’

  ‘What are you talking about? Where have you been?’

  ‘There was someone watching you at Red Lion Square. I followed him back to this gothic sort of abbey near Chelsea Embankment and they tried to get me to tell them where you kept your manuscripts. I didn’t tell them the truth. They’ve destroyed your disks, though. They smashed up your flat.’

  ‘Christ, Pam, you could have been killed.’