London Noir

by Cathi Unsworth

  The stallholder was arrested.

  Heldon’s team had kept the details from the press, but Aniweta had known. As a sangoma, a witch, he knew many things. Heldon knew very little about him, however, except that he had emigrated to London from Nigeria in the 1970s, had a UK passport, and no criminal record. He had always proved a reliable source of local and traditional knowledge, and his calm manner, coupled with a dark sense of humor, had commanded Heldon’s respect and, on occasion, fear.

  At first Heldon had assumed the parts were imported. That was until September 21, 2001, the autumn equinox, when a boy was fished from the Thames outside the Globe Theatre. The five-year-old’s body was naked, apart from a pair of orange shorts, put on him, it turned out, after he had been bled to death. Then his head and limbs had been severed by someone who knew precisely what they were doing.

  They named him Adam. It was sickening to keep referring to him as “the corpse” or “the torso.” They initially thought he was South African, but an autopsy revealed otherwise—inside the boy’s stomach was a stew of clay, bone, gold, and the remains of a single kidney-shaped calabar bean. The calabar bean was like a neon sign to the investigation. The plant grows in West Africa, where it’s known as the “doomsday plant” because of the number of accidental deaths it causes. It’s also used to draw out witches and negate their power—once a bean is eaten, only the innocent survive. The shorts were another clue. Bought in a German Woolworth’s, they were coral orange for the orisha spirit Ochun, the river queen of the Yoruba religion: the great diviner who knows the future and the mysteries of women.

  The calabar would have caused his blood pressure to rise painfully, followed by convulsions and conscious paralysis; his screams imbuing the magic with a rare and terrible strength. Then his throat was slit and his torment ended by a final blow to the back of the head. Once dead, the butchery began. The blood was drained from his body and preserved; his head and limbs removed, along with what is known in muti as the atlas bone: the vertebra connecting his neck to his spine, where the nerves and blood vessels meet.

  The boy’s genitals, still intact, suggested that it wasn’t his body parts the killer was after. It was his blood, drained slowly and carefully from his hanging corpse. Adam died to bring somebody money, power, or luck. Perhaps the slave traffickers who brought him to London. His journey probably began when he was snatched or sold in Benin, and continued through Germany before reaching these shores, his final destination.

  Somebody had cared for Adam before he died—there were traces of cough medicine in his system. Who knows whether he was brought here with sacrifice in mind, but had he not been marked for death, he might have ended up working as a slave, or as a prostitute. At least then he’d have had a chance.

  Despite arrests in London, Glasgow, and Dublin, and prosecutions for human trafficking, nobody was convicted of the boy’s murder. Heldon had burned with frustration for months, but he had managed to keep it together, unlike others in the team. The three-year investigation had taken its toll on O’Brien, the detective in charge. He’d quit the force a nervous wreck at what should have been the peak of his career. Heldon had been his deputy on the Adam case; he’d seen the strain, the shards of paranoia puncture O’Brien’s hardman armor.

  And now there was another corpse.

  Aniweta was right. They had called her Eve.

  The girl had been mutilated like Adam, her torso wrapped in a child’s cotton dress; white with red edging. Dustmen had tipped her out of a wheelie bin on December 5, four days ago, outside a dry cleaners on White Horse Street, near St. James’s. She was probably six years old.

  “What can you tell me, Ani?” Heldon asked the san-goma.

  “I can tell you that this one is different.”

  “So far, forensics suggest that she was killed the same way as Adam.”

  “Yes, but she is different. Powerful.” Ani nodded his head, impressed. “The red and the white on the dress are for Ayaguna. He is a young orisha, a fighter. You know him as St. James, and when he comes, he rides a white horse. Now she rides with him. He likes the girls, you see, he likes them young like this. Their blood is clean. This is strong juju. You’ll find things inside her: clay, gunpowder, silver, maybe copper.”

  “Anything else?”

  Ani, who had been staring at the stains on his tabletop, turned to look directly at Heldon.

  “Yes, my friend, I can tell that you’re not sleeping well.”

  Heldon was caught off guard. “Well, you might say I’m taking my work home with me.”

  “Like O’Brien?”

  “No. And I don’t intend to end up like him. But yes, this has shaken me up. I didn’t expect another one so soon. And then I suppose there’s the war.”

  “There is always war, that is Ayaguna’s business. But there will be no war where this girl came from. She is one of their own. A peace offering.”

  “I was talking about Iran, but yes, we think the girl was another Nigerian.”

  “No, she is not one of ours. She is from the Congo,” replied Ani, with a certainty that Heldon could not question. “That’s where the trouble is. But for now there will be no war. She died to end the fighting. She will keep Ayaguna happy for a while. How long depends how well the sangomas know him. If they know him well, she will have died with six fingers and six toes. Her skin cut six times with a blade and burned six times with a flame.”

  “If she died to prevent a war, why was she killed here and not in her home country?”

  “The sangomas don’t like war. It upsets the balance. So much death creates problems for everybody. Now the smart ones are over here.”

  “Makes sense. I don’t like war either. Okay, thanks, Ani. We’ll be in touch.”

  Heldon returned to the night. The cats were gone.

  Forensics showed that Ani was right. Mineral analysis of her bones revealed that she was indeed Congolese. The girl had swallowed, or been forced to swallow, a mix of gunpowder, silver, copper, and clay. She had been bound and stabbed several times, then scorched with a burning twig from the iroko tree. They had not found her limbs, so they couldn’t count her fingers and toes; but Heldon suspected that if they ever found them, there would be six of each.

  African newspapers revealed that the Congo had been on the brink of another bout of bloodshed, but in the past few days an agreement was reached between the warring factions. With over three million already dead, you would think they were tired of killing.

  The story hardly made the UK nationals; the situation in Iran was worsening, despite the fact that things in Iraq had hardly improved since the Allied pullout eighteen months earlier. And now they were regrouping, preparing to flex their muscle against a defiantly hostile Iranian leadership. The mid-term government disingenuously declaring that the opportunity for peace lay in the hands of the Iranians, not the combined forces amassing at the nation’s borders.

  More dead children.

  Rather than desensitizing him to death, Heldon’s work had revealed to him its full horror. He knew what a bullet meant: the torn, seared flesh; the shattered bone; the screaming; the smell of blood. He had no children of his own, but he knew that the statistics of war weren’t just numbers. They were a thousand Adams, a thousand Eves. Blasted, mutilated, lying in rivers, in puddles, in the arms of their parents; caught in the camera’s lens, denied over breakfast, ignored on the train.

  As an inevitable war loomed once again, the antiwar protests had grown incandescent, seething with fury and frustration. Heldon took part as often as he could. He didn’t tell his colleagues, just as he didn’t tell them everything that Ani had told him. It was easier that way.

  He didn’t tell them about his other research either. There was no need. And he hadn’t told Ani. Again, why bother? He probably already knew all about the killings anyway. They had occurred throughout Europe and Africa over the years. Many, like Adam, were for power. Terrible as they were, they no longer interested Heldon. He was only interested in the
others; the others like Eve. They were different. And they had worked. The evidence was there on the record—brief respites in long histories of warfare. Powerful juju.

  She is one of their own … different … powerful.

  Ani’s words drove Heldon onward as he strode through the car park behind Kingsland Shopping Centre. Smooth, smothered by concrete, a no-man’s-land between road and rail. Few people entered the mall through this back way. Once past the main entrance to Sainsbury’s, the shops tail off into a mirror of what’s available outside on Kingsland High Street.

  A gray mid-morning on a school day. Any kids around now are avoiding something.

  Now she rides with him.

  He found her under the outdoor metal stairwell. Hood up. Not doing anything.

  She was one of our own.

  He had thought about this moment over and over again. Can a death ever be justified? Is one unpromising life worth ten thousand others? If it works, then yes, it is. Suddenly, Heldon knew exactly what he was doing.

  “Hi. Shouldn’t you be in school?”

  “What’s it to you? You a teacher?”

  A flash of his card. “No, I’m a policeman. And I think you should come with me. Don’t worry, you’re not in trouble. I have a very important job to do, and I need your help. How would you like to ride a white horse?”

  Without protest, the girl left with him.

  SOUTH

  BY JOE MCNALLY

  Elephant & Castle

  As an incomer to London, I have—almost inevitably—found myself enchanted with the city, in more than one sense of the word. I have enthusiastically thrown my hat in with those who purport to read the city; I have picked and hunted for the obscure volumes which I hope will allow me to enter their hallowed halls through recitation of the Sacred Names of the Lost Rivers, and gestured endlessly toward the notions which underpin their fictions.

  For the most part, my own experiments in drift have been confined to the northern shores and, due to a specific confluence of geographical happenstance and the practicalities of car-engine maintenance, to the mysterious islets of the dead between Maida Vale and Ladbroke Grove; ghost country, the lands of the west. Too dead even for Ballard.

  Think London as Mappa Mundi: wealth and comfort in the west, wealth and sterility in the far north, squalor and industry in the east (less of the latter these days—heritage docks, churches turned Starbucks), and in the south, a cliché Heart of Darkness. Incongruous strips of pristine brickwork along the river, a seething, churning mess we’d rather not think about.

  It’s uncharted territory, our own little Third World, just a little too feral for the tame psychogeographer. Not the heritage poverty of the East End, this is the real thing, waving a shattered bottle in your face and ranting a cloud of whiskey fumes before smacking you down and stripping you to your frame. There’s a reason sorcerers don’t cross running water; down here, they’d be trading your scrying glass for rocks within the hour.

  But then it hits me, walking from tube to Thameslink at the Elephant, the peak of the delta—Old Kent Road another Nile, tarmac khem, its length vanishing off toward an unknown source in the mythic lands supposed to exist outside the M25. And here at the peak of the delta are the tunnels.

  This could have been built for us, the self-styled cultists of the city still reeling from our frantic initiations of acid-fueled underground trips, coke-blasted long marches across the city trailed by gibbering crackheads waiting to fire up the crystal snot on our cast-off tissues, graduation only by turning up some new obscurity to which the metropolisomanc-ers can nail a thousand mad-eyed theses. Here, a series of far-sighted planners, true inheritors of the Dionysiac mantle, conspired or were somehow moved by unseen forces to create a playground for those unable to travel through an underpass without pausing to attempt to decode the hidden patterns brought to half-life by every patch of crumbling concrete and piss stain.

  It starts as soon as you vanish back underground after emerging from the tube. (No, it starts with the name: Elephant & Castle. Gnomic, at first quaint, then taking on sinister overtones. The Guild of Cutlers, ivory and steel. Bone and knife blade, a union still celebrated here more nights than not.) The subterranean walkways, with their vandalized or opaque signs, are an immediate hook, an obvious nod to Crete—passages which seem carefully planned to evoke the dread that some bellowing theriomorph might lurk behind each blind turn, pure panic.

  At some point, in a misguided attempt to defuse these chthonic terrors, murals have been added showing imagined scenes from some non-history of South London, jungle scenes, subaquatic fantasies. Sharks patrol these walls. But the genius loci won’t be denied. It rots the cheer, warps it over time into mania. Each grin now takes on a sinister aspect, the jolly street traders and their well-fed horses projecting an air of vague unease, like nursery drawings on the walls of a burned-out house. Crumbling and fading, they have become a desperate illustration of something that can only be hinted at in the most oblique symbolism, a private, autistic blend of Hoffman and Ryder-Waite.

  Between the two stations, I stop to talk to a homeless woman sitting cross-legged with her back to one of the walls. She could be five or six years younger than me, but looks ten older. She has an immense paperback open in front of her, and I ask what she’s reading, steeling myself to be polite about Tolkien or worse. Instead, it’s an anthology of classic detective stories—Chandler, Willeford, Himes—with the words Pulp Fiction blazing across the cover. She explains that she bought it because she thought it was something to do with the film. She’s about halfway through it now. I give her a pound and tell her to put it toward another book.

  A pound’s the least I can do; she’s already shading into fiction, working her way into the web of metaphor, a fate not to be wished on any human or bestowed on them without recompense. It’s a kind of death, after all. There was a real woman sitting in the underpass, reading a real book, I did stop, I did speak to her, I did give her the money, but by reducing her to this incident I triumphantly deny her the rest of her life, all the while patting myself on the back for my razor-sharp literary instincts and dreaming of Mayhew.

  She was drawn into the book—her anthology, not this fiction, I’m the only one on this particular voyage just now—expecting something other than what she got, but now realizes that she’s better off with what she did get. Enter the labyrinth and confront … The pat answer is usually some reassuringly bleak psychobabble borrowed from half-heard, never-read Freud or, worse, George Lucas—yourself, your parents, your dark side. The truth is that you’re confronting the labyrinth itself, the ultimate manifestation of the journey that becomes its own destination. Anything you may find is a function of the maze.

  An information bauble surfaces from the Fortean Times days. A piece by Paul Devereux on a South American temple which was designed as a shaman machine. The initiate would be fed hallucinogenic cactus, then sent into the temple. Each part was set up to accentuate some aspect of the psychedelic experience—walls that went from echoing to acoustically dead, water channels designed to create apparently source-less sounds, weird lights.

  The cactus they used, San Pedro, is now widely available in Camden and Portobello Road. But bang a couple of slices of that and venture in here, and I don’t like to think what you’d get. Certainly not the sort of mantic howler in the outer darkness who lands regular spots in the LRB. Any signs one could read here would sear the brain with revelation, a freebase hit of pure kabbalah, rebridging the divisions between left and right cerebral hemispheres and turning the reader into an ambulatory conduit for the voice of the labyrinth.

  It continues. I stride edgily through the shopping center to the Thameslink. The whitewashed concrete hallway feels like an abandoned bunker somewhere deep in Eastern Europe. The floor is inches deep in rainwater, with helpful yellow signs to point out this fact. Nobody is there. The nearest thing to human contact comes from the monitors, relaying information keyed in hours ago in some other location, a ca
thode ray phantom, news from nowhere. I have an hour to wait for the next train. I’ve missed its predecessor by seconds as a consequence of my chat with the homeless woman. (See: She doesn’t even get a name, but the entire narrative really hangs on her; without her, you would not be reading this, or at least not in this form.)

  I make for the bus stop, where the bus I need appears within seconds of my discovering that I need it. Another omen, another metaphor. This is a fertile zone; tiny possibility bombs detonating and sending ripples through the various levels of my mind. The people milling around the shopping center (the pink shopping center, a Little England nightmare made of concrete—dusky colonials and the taint of lavender) become a personal message to me from something beyond.

  Once on board, I set my eyes on a mysteriously empty seat, one of three unoccupied places around a dozing bulk. It’s a long haul into terra australis incognita, and I’ll be needing my strength later. The instant I sit, I realize why the seats have not been taken up by any of my traveling companions. The man at the center of the exclusion zone smells. No, this barely does him justice. A truly heroic stench hangs around him, displaced each time he moves, sweeping out in almost visible curls before and behind him with every disturbance in his dream.

  I deal with it for as long as I can, but eventually change seats (being a good middle-class boy, I wait until I am absolutely sure he is asleep; there is, I reason, no possibility that he is unaware of his miasma, and I have no desire to remind him of it again). From my new vantage point, I see that, in fact, the earlier journey through the tunnels was just a decoy, a warm-up. This, though, is the real deal. There are no signs to help me here, no friendly guides clutching books full of familiar names to ground me. I took my eye off the road and left it without even noticing.