Mammoth Book of Best British Crime 11

by Maxim Jakubowski

  Billy went to the cemetery because the vents from the crematorium gave off heat long into the night, and so if you slept on the vents you could curl up warm as toast. See, said Billy, burning bodies wasn’t like burning wood or coal. No, burned bodies were like a kind of atomic power station. Even when the ashes were cold they gave off an invisible heat that you couldn’t feel with your hands but which warmed your bones to the core. It was the spirits, see, fighting to escape from the earth. At this point – as if those very spirits were even now dancing in front of him – Billy’s eyes would strain out from their sockets with a terror more pure and true than any I would ever see again. For, he explained, some of the spirits never did escape. They were trapped, for all eternity, in the Southern Cemetery. And later, towards dawn, when the warmth from the vents had faded, their ghosts would wake Billy from his sleep and torment him with their anguish.

  The ghosts were real, he swore to God. He could see them as plain as he could see me. And solid flesh and blood they were too, not wispy and faint like they always were in the films. They were of all sizes and all ages – from withered old ladies who’d died alone, and big strong lads with their bodies smashed by cars, to a tiny little toddler boy scarred with pox. And they came from all times past, too – maybe fresh from just last week, or maybe from a hundred years ago or more. Billy’s eyes would roll with an awful pity and his hands would flutter like broken wings. Because the most horrible thing of all was that none of them knew why they’d been left behind. They weren’t bad people – and there’d been plenty of them put under out there, you could mark Billy’s word; people who’d done all manner of terrible things. But how bad could a little toddler be? No, they were just people, that’s all, who didn’t know why they couldn’t get out, nor why out of all the living there was only Billy Micklehurst to stand up in the dark and witness their suffering.

  You see, they were counting on Billy Micklehurst to set them all free. And the source of Billy’s torment was this: he did not know how this might ever be done.

  To look at, Billy could have been ten years either side of fifty. Decades on the road, and unquantified gallons of Mann’s brown, Yates’s blobs and methylated spirits had forged his bone, skin and inner organs into an indestructible wreck. His face was remarkable for its eyes and its teeth. The eyes managed to be simultaneously both deep-set and ferociously protuberant; and whilst his lower jaw boasted a full set of yellowing stumps, his upper, scurvy-ravaged, gums could only field two – one canine and one incisor – which wobbled precariously and stuck out over his lip when he closed his mouth. Despite these handicaps he was quite a dapper fellow, in his way: his hair was still as black as oil and always slicked back in a greasy skein from his wide, scar-speckled brow. He always wore a suit – usually grey and double-breasted – its subtle pinstripe blotched with multicoloured stains of obscure and unsavoury origin. His shoes were rarely laced, as laces always broke and cost a fortune; and in summer – and many years before this habit became de rigueur amongst the self-consciously fashionable – he often appeared without socks to reveal feet as white as bathroom china and threaded with delicate threads of blue. His shirts tended to the threadbare and filthy, but were invariably brightened by a scarlet silk scarf with a gold-tasselled fringe, which he wore cravat-style around his throat.

  He said – on several occasions; and always with some considerable pride – that the scarf had been given to him in 1963 by “a woman of means in Leicestershire”, who herself claimed to have once slept with David Niven, during the war.

  The first time I met Billy, in July 1976, he was perched like a vigilant gargoyle on a bench in St Ann’s churchyard, elbows on his knees, fingers laced together, brooding on the time-polished paving stones at his feet and occasionally glancing up to sneer at the pedestrians emerging from the King Street passageway. I was seventeen years old and looking for somewhere to eat my dinner, and thought the little yard an exotic place to do so. It did cross my mind not to sit down beside the gargoyle and to find somewhere else to eat, but since this idea seemed both discourteous and cowardly I took my place on the bench a couple of feet distant from him. At this point – in this holy spot, and instilled as I was with the strictures, good and bad, of Roman Catholicism – the paper bag in my hand which contained a cheese-and-tomato sandwich and some salt-and-vinegar crisps suddenly seemed like an instrument of torture. The man had to be starving. He smelled like he was starving. Yet at the same time I didn’t want to impugn his dignity by effectively saying: “Here, have a sandwich, you poor old bleeder.” So I didn’t open the bag. As I sat staring into space, pondering this unexpected moral conundrum, the gargoyle – elbows on his knees and fingers laced together – slowly rotated his head and looked up at me.

  I looked back at him, into the deep-set yet protuberant eyes that had beheld a universe I would never know. I couldn’t think of anything to say. He was lived life incarnate; and all I’d done was go to school and take exams. I just looked at him.

  He said, “I’m Billy Micklehurst. And I don’t give a fuck.”

  I raised my paper bag, as if it were an offering to a pagan idol, and said, “Do you fancy a sandwich?”

  Billy squinted dubiously at the bag and said, of the sandwich within, “What’s on it?”

  I said, “Cheese and tomato. I’ve got some crisps too if you like. Salt and vinegar.”

  Billy said, “Go on, then.” I produced the sandwich and Billy took it. When I offered him the crisps he shook his head. “Crisps give me wind.”

  He necked the sandwich down in huge bites that left strips of crust sticking out from between his gums and which he shoved home with the back of his hand, whilst proclaiming, with grateful references to Christ, just how good a sandwich it was. In seconds it was gone, and it seemed to me that because it had found its perfect resting place inside Billy’s gut it was possibly the most perfect sandwich ever made. Billy pulled out a soiled rag and wiped butter, tomato seeds and slaver from his chin. With a magician’s flourish, he snapped the rag free of debris and replaced it in his breast pocket.

  “God bless you, Ginger,” said Billy. He made a gesture with his hand that appeared to take in the whole world. “They’re all over the place,” he warned. “So don’t you let ’em get their bloody hands on you.”

  “Who?” I said.

  “Them as’ll try to drag you down, and all manner of other things better left unmentioned,” said Billy. He added: “You take my word for it.”

  And with that Billy got up from the bench and walked away.

  That summer I seemed to run into Billy all the time. Sometimes he would be engaged in ferocious arguments with a ragged gathering of his brethren, waving his arms and shaking his fists and turning to spit in the gutter with disgust. On one occasion, this time in St Ann’s Square proper, I saw him waltzing – with a surprising elegance and perfection of form – up and down the pavement outside Sherratt and Hughes with a can of Hofmeister held in either hand and a beatific grin on his face. On another I saw him standing rigid and mute at the exit to Victoria railway station. I smiled and said hello and asked how he was keeping, but Billy stared at me with a lack of recognition so complete that I might have been a creature from a distant galaxy. The very next morning he hailed me from the churchyard bench like an old friend, and offered me a drink of what smelled like Domestos, without the slightest memory of our encounter of the previous day.

  Sometimes I’d walk round Ancoats with him and he’d show me the gutted factories and warehouses where a man without ties to bind him down might fashion himself a lair. On Sundays, sometimes, I’d go with him to the Mass organized by the St Vincent de Paul Society, in an abandoned church in the blitzlands east of the Erwell, where scores of men like Billy, and a handful of women too, would gather to hear readings from the Gospels and take communion in order to pay for the hot tea and sandwiches that followed hard on the last “Amen”. You see, Manchester was “a good town for dossers”, said Billy. A good town. Much better than most. Occa
sionally Billy left for weeks at a time and headed south, “on matters of some importance best left unmentioned, now that they’ve been settled”; but he always came back, because Manchester was his town, and a good one. Why, Billy used to say, even the coppers were a soft lot in Manchester.

  And so, in my imagination, and by way of Billy’s tales and guided tours, another town arose more concrete and vivid than the one I thought I knew: a dark city. A ghost city. A city of outcasts stacked tall with broken majesty: an architecture of loss more monumental by far than the teeming triangle of shops and offices staked out by the train stations and unknowingly invested by the grandeur of its forgotten past. Billy’s dark city was an epic whose purpose, conception and construction were far beyond the means – or dreams – of modern men, and had been built by a race whose like would never be seen again: vast and blackened red-brick hulks where generations uncelebrated and unnamed had toiled their lives away; crumbling Florentine confections which boasted of a long-vanished wealth both vainglorious and austere; wind- and weed-blown docks stacked from stones so large they might have graced the tombs of Memphian kings; vacant temples to insurance and exchange, storage and manufacture, exploitation and greed; scum-festooned canals, rusting incinerators, factory pulleys weather-welded to their chains; the silent geometry of railway arches and cobbles where feet no longer stepped; the Sharp Street Ragged School with its red and faded sign; and the chimneys slender and impossibly tall that would never smoke again. And all of it empty, vanquished, derelict, redundant and despised – by all except Billy, whose heart ached for its beauty and who knew that, like himself, this dark city’s glory would soon be done and gone.

  It was winter, February-winter, and bitter, and I hadn’t seen Billy for months, when one evening I ran into him in Shudehill. He was matted and unshaven, sockless for all that the night was cold, and trembling from head to toe as he clung to a lamppost in a pool of yellow light and wept. He saw me approach and wrenched one hand free in a desperate invitation.

  “Ginger,” Billy cried. “Ginger! The game’s up for Billy! The word’s out! They’re after me!” He paused and hissed and slaver spilled from his lips: “They’re on my back!”

  I took him in the Turk’s Head and bought him whisky and beer, and Billy’s trembles abated, though not the anguish and terror in his eyes. He stared into his glass, a man beset with demons in a world only he could see, and which he inhabited alone.

  “I will tell you,” said Billy, “they’re never going to let me get away. Not this time. This time I’ll swing, and that’s a fact. You mark my words.”

  The tears returned to his eyes and Billy swabbed his face with the red silk scarf, whose gold-tasselled fringe was grey with dirt. He seemed shattered with confusion and grief. “And there’s nowt that anyone can do,” Billy whispered, as if even he who could believe in ghosts could hardly believe this. “Nowt at all.”

  At that time I had little idea what alcohol could do to the brain, nor any concept of the blind horror of psychosis. I didn’t know that Billy’s mind was the neurological equivalent of the derelict landscape he inhabited. The streets of his memory and hallucinated perceptions were randomly gutted and crumbling, bombed down and burnt out, shrouded in darkness, filled with rubble and infested with starving rats. The contents of his skull were like the scrambled fragments of innumerable jigsaw puzzles – soaked in meths, blowtorched by hardship, ravaged by malnutrition and disease – and assembled and constantly reassembled with shaking hands into fantastic pictures, distorted and yet punishingly real. Amidst those bits of puzzle forged from delusion, psychosis and a brain-damaged imagination propelled into dominions awful and unknown, there were without doubt great slabs of real memory, real events, real crime, atrocity and suffering. Yet which was which – which was real, which imagined and which the malformed offspring of the two – no one would ever know, least of all Billy himself. For Billy, all these things were as concrete as the table he sat at.

  The game was up for Billy. They were after him. And he would swing.

  Despite my ignorance, I did know that Billy was ill – very ill – and offered to get him up to the Royal Infirmary for a check-up and a rest; some clean sheets; a quick wash and brush-up, that’s all. Billy lurched to his feet with alarm. He stared at me as if I were suddenly revealed to be one of “They”. Then he turned, abruptly, and stalked off through the door.

  I caught up with him outside, but Billy would have none of it. If he went to the Royal he was dead. The word was out for Billy Micklehurst. They were already on his back. The minute he lay down in that hospital bed “they’d ’ave me like that” – he snapped his fingers – and the next I’d hear of Billy his bones would be floating in the Bridgewater. No. It was now or never. He had to make his run while he still had the chance.

  I didn’t know what to do, and for all I knew Billy experienced these episodes all the time and always managed to escape their clutches, so I shoved a five-pound note in his pocket, which Billy seemed not to register at all, and told him to take care of himself.

  “God bless you, Ginger,” said Billy. And with that he disappeared into the night.

  Standing there, I wished I had the guts to go with him. But it was dark and cold, and I was too sensible or scared or both. I didn’t know if I would’ve lasted the night, even if he did. I assured myself that Billy’s indestructibility would see him through to dance another day with a beatific smile on his face. But this wasn’t to be the case.

  Three days later, in St Ann’s churchyard, one of Billy’s fellow travellers, who introduced himself as “Brady”, and whom I recognized and who knew me to be of Billy’s acquaintance, collared me at the passageway to King Street.

  “Billy’s dead,” said Brady. “I thought you’d want to know. He strung himself up from a cross in Southern Cemetery, with that fancy red scarf he always wore. You know.”

  Billy Micklehurst – the indestructible man – had killed himself. It seemed impossible and yet inevitable. Had he made his run to the graveyard with that bleak purpose in mind? Or had the ghosts of anguish woken him from his sleep and driven him to die alone in a vortex of isolation and fear? Whatever the sequence or intent, impenetrable despair had made hanging himself from a tombstone a more alluring prospect than the pain of the next day’s dawning.

  I told Brady I was sorry.

  Brady nodded, and agreed that it was a right shame. But Brady walked the hard road too and he pointed out that these things happened, and that, after all, Billy Micklehurst had lasted a lot longer than most. And so we parted in the churchyard and left it at that.

  I found out from the police that it was true. Billy had hung himself from a cross; no foul play was suspected. No one claimed his body and they buried him in a pauper’s grave in Longsight, which in the end is as good a resting place as any other. Billy had lived his life the way he’d wanted to and the city – like all cities – had much darker tales than Billy’s to tell. Yet I thought of him: every time I strolled through St Ann’s Square, or up Shudehill, or passed through Ancoats on the 236. I couldn’t get him out of my mind. So one night the following summer, after I’d been out late in Chorlton, I walked through Southern Cemetery to see if Billy’s ghosts were still around.

  They weren’t, as far as I could see, though it was an eerie spot to be sure. I thought of Billy, encircled by the ghosts he could not free, and wished for some supernatural event or revelation of the kind I never believed in. No such event took place. So I imagined it instead. I imagined Billy’s spirit arising – indestructible – from his pauper’s grave in Longsight, and swooping down from the heavens like a raggedy Pied Piper to rally the earthbound dead who’d never done wrong. They all saw him coming and they cried out his name – “Billy!” they cried, “We’re ’ere! We’re ’ere!” – and Billy laughed and rolled his eyes and brandished the scarlet scarf from Leicestershire in his fist. And this time – now that he too was free, and had made good his run – the ghosts were able to cast off their bonds and follo
w him. They circled the necropolis once, with Billy laughing in the van, then he led them into infinity and they were gone.

  No such exodus happened – or, at any rate, I wasn’t there to see it – but it cheered me to think that it did; and it still does. So to this day, when I’m blue – when the game is up, and the word is out, and they’re on my back – then I think of Billy Micklehurst, and the last run he made, and Billy helps free me from torment too.

  Vertigo

  Maxim Jakubowski

  I kill people. That’s my job.

  I get paid for it. Well, I try not to worry about the moral implications of my trade, and I know that in the majority of cases the people I am eliminating are bad people if only because my employers are bad people themselves. Makes sense, no? Although I have actually never met the people who settle my bills. For security reasons, it’s all done at one step removed, through the phone, the internet or by coded messages and left-luggage lockers in train stations or other places which attract discretion.

  The little I see of my victims, whether on the photographs in the dossiers I am supplied with beforehand, or in the flesh, when I first track them down, observe their goings-on and plan the hit, normally confirms my assumptions: they look shifty, dishonest, dangerous and tick all the wrong points. And in some cases, they just look perfectly normal. It doesn’t bother me either.