by Ned Beauman
But perhaps there was no danger of that. ‘Anyone want to say anything soppy about him, then, before he goes?’ said Kölmel. He looked around for a moment, snorted, and spat on the ground. ‘Thought not. The boy always was a bit of a putz.’
19
Back Church Lane was a curved street of ugly brown-brick offices and warehouses. ‘I just don’t see the point,’ I said to the Welshman as we drove down it, looking for the address. The dusk was seamed with glowing aeroplane contrails, and, to the west, skyscrapers blocked out most of the soft band between the upper blue and the lower gold that is the closest the sky ever comes to evading the notion of determinate hue. ‘It’s been seventy years,’ I went on, as we passed an incongruously grand wooden doorway flanked by ornamental marble columns and, above, the inscription BROWNE & EAGLE LIM.D, which I recognised as an old wool company. ‘There won’t still be a rubbish dump there. There’ll be flats or a car park or something. We can’t just demolish whatever’s there.’
But when we got there, we didn’t find flats or a car park. Nor did we find the old rubbish dump. Instead, there was a building site. And attached to the wooden fencing around the site, next to the usual warnings about hard hats being worn and children not playing nearby, was a familiar placard:
GRUBLOCK HOMES
It is our tomorrow that commands our today
The slogan was an unattributed quotation from the preface of Nietzsche’s Human, All Too Human. Grublock’s marketing department had loved it. I recalled, now, seeing a computer mock-up of this project on Grublock’s desk: it was to be a block of luxury flats with a rippling turquoise façade and a vegetable garden on the roof, full of young bankers who didn’t mind living in a grotty bit of Whitechapel if it meant they were only fifteen minutes’ walk from work.
‘This is extremely convenient,’ said the Welshman. He took my mobile phone out of his pocket.
‘Have you had that the whole time?’
‘Yes, I took it from your flat. You are going to telephone someone in Grublock’s organisation who will be able to disable the alarm systems on this building site. I presume you can do that?’
I nodded and he handed me the phone.
I knew this was my last chance. Whether we found Sinner’s body or not, my usefulness to the Welshman would have run out. To my enormous relief, he’d left Tara alive when we politely departed her house in Roachmorton, but I had seen far too much. He would definitely kill me. The fact was, I had nothing to lose. So instead of calling Grublock’s head of security systems I called Stuart.
‘Kevin?’ he said.
‘Hello, is that Teymur?’
‘Are you still in trouble?’
‘Yes, this is Kevin Broom. I’m at the Grublock Homes site on Back Church Lane, and I need you to – hello?’ I’d discreetly pressed the button to end the call. I looked at my phone in fake puzzlement and then dialled again, this time the real number.
‘Teymur here.’
‘Hi, yes, this is Kevin Broom again. We must have got disconnected.’
‘Pardon?’
‘As I was saying, I’m at the Grublock Homes site on Back Church Lane, and I need to gain access. Will you turn off the alarms, please? I’m sorry to call you so late.’
‘What’s this about?’
‘I’ve got a job to do for Horace.’
‘Oh, are you in touch with Mr Grublock? None of us can get hold of him. I’ve been wondering about sending somebody up to check in person, but after what happened last time I did that. …’
‘No, there’s really no need. I’d just be grateful if you could sort out this alarm.’
‘But you’ll need the keys to get on to the site, anyway.’
‘We’ve got them.’
‘You’ve got them? From where?’
‘I’m in a bit of a hurry, Teymur.’
‘Right, sorry. Just give me five minutes and it’ll be done.’
I relayed this to the Welshman. We waited fifteen minutes, to be sure, then we got out of the car and the Welshman picked the padlock on the gate to the site.
Inside, we saw that they were only just beginning to lay the foundations after clearing away the remains of whatever building had stood here before. ‘We’ll use that,’ said the Welshman, pointing to a big yellow digger. Its claw looked like a coffin ripped in half. ‘The rubbish will have been compressed over time, so we shouldn’t need to dig down more than ten or fifteen feet.’
‘You’ll need the key to start it.’
‘No, I won’t. Now, the old woman told us they dug the grave in the middle of the far end of the dump. And if she’s right, the gangster wasn’t using this place so often by the time they buried the boxer, so it should be the first skeleton we find, or at least one of the first. When we think we’re getting close, you can go in with a spade.’
‘It’ll take us for ever.’
‘No, it’ll just take us all night. And we’ve got all night. I needn’t tell you that if you try to run I shall bite your head off with the digger. Remember, we’re looking for a foot with four toes.’
So we began. After two hours the Welshman had excavated a crater of almost lunar magnitude, and there was an ammoniac gnawing at our sinuses that told us we’d reached the upper strata of the old rubbish dump. Standing at the edge of the hole, I watched closely for fragments of bone. Another hour later, my ears aching from the thumps and snarls of the digger, I saw one. It turned out to be part of the spongy pelvis of a dog or cat. Not long after that, the bones of a human foot fell from the claws of the machine. I yelled to the Welshman and he got out to look at it. But it was a right foot with five toes: spooky, but not Sinner’s. We seemed as likely, I thought to myself, to find a hoard of gold coins or the lost manuscript of Archimedes’ On Sphere-Making, but we carried on; and then, finally, as midnight was nearing and I was beginning to lose concentration, the digger ripped away a twisted old bicycle and beneath it, cracked and brown but still unmistakeable, was part of a human ribcage. Again I shouted to the Welshman to stop; then, carefully, I scraped away some more rubble with the spade. From what was left of the skeleton, I could see that it was a great deal shorter than my own. That didn’t mean it wasn’t just a woman’s or a child’s, of course; but a few minutes later I found the detached right foot. Four toes, like a cartoon character. Seth Roach.
The Welshman made me sit down on the ground beside the skeleton and and then briskly handcuffed my hands behind my back.
‘I still don’t understand what you’re looking for,’ I said. ‘Is this what Hitler was talking about in the letter?’
‘No.’
‘What, then?’
‘The beetle.’
So Grublock had been telling the truth! ‘What beetle?’
‘Anophthalmus hitleri.’
I had no idea what that was. ‘What makes you think it’s here?’ I said.
‘Be quiet, please.’
‘Look, I know you’re probably going to kill me after this, whether you find it or not.’
‘That’s correct.’
‘I just want to know what all this has been about.’
The Welshman looked at me and sighed, then he said, ‘Two weeks ago, the individual who is now my employer became aware that a private detective was making enquiries about Anophthalmus hitleri. For a long time the consensus has been that there is not a single specimen of the organism, alive or dead, anywhere in the world – but if a serious collector like Horace Grublock believed that somehow, somewhere, some examples might really have been preserved, then that in itself seemed a good enough reason to pursue the possibility. So the aforementioned individual contracted me to find the beetle before Grublock did. Unfortunately, Zroszak had already made excellent progress.’
‘So you killed him and searched his flat.’
‘Yes. It seemed simplest to pick up where he left off, rather than start from the beginning.’
‘But you didn’t find much. Then you saw me go inside. And you thought I might have found som
ething you missed. But actually the letter from Hitler didn’t tell you anything you didn’t already know.’
‘No.’
‘And I wasn’t much help either.’
‘No. Except perhaps at Claramore, and with the spinster.’
‘So why were you looking for Seth Roach’s body?’
‘Zroszak seemed convinced that two of the beetles had been buried along with the boxer. That was in his notes. He didn’t really explain his reasoning. I believe he had access to some notebooks of Philip Erskine’s and some letters of Evelyn Erskine’s which I was not able to find.’
‘And you thought Seth Roach must have died at Claramore.’
‘It seemed likeliest. I was wrong.’
‘Do you really think the beetles will still be here? With him? After all this time?’
‘We shall see,’ said the Welshman. ‘The chemical and microbiological conditions in a place like this are unpredictable. The beetles were bred to be hardy. It’s just possible that they may never have decomposed. They may even have been fossilised in some way.’ Finishing his explanation, he knelt down beside the skeleton. He brushed some filth away from the skull. And then Seth Roach vomited on him.
Black and flickering, the vomit raced up the Welshman’s arm, spread across his chest and swirled up to his chin. He tried to scream and straight away it filled his mouth. Falling on his back, he clawed clumsily at himself, but could barely tear open a gap in the flow, and soon every inch of him was tarred. I heard a sound like thousands of tongues clicking in quiet disapproval; I could see flashes of red and then, worse, flashes of white beneath the boiling slick of black. At first, his whole body thrashed back and forth, but then it was only his hands and feet that shook, and before long even those went limp. Within seconds there was almost nothing left of him but bones, hair, clothes and shoes. Then the beetles came for me.
They shot across the ground, jumped on to my feet and carried on up each of my legs. There was something not quite right about the way they moved, like a cheap animated film. I clamped my mouth shut so they couldn’t get down my throat. I wished the Welshman had already shot me so I didn’t have to die like this.
But then the beetles stopped.
Some had got as far as my groin, which was drenched, of course, in urine. Others had got as far as my armpits, which were almost as damp. There was something almost nervous in the way they milled around the fetid arches of my body, pricking my skin through my clothes with their tiny needle legs – this, I thought, must be what the angels feel like to the pin. One or two detached from the mass, spread their swastika wings, fluttered up in front of my face, gave me an eyeless glare and descended to rejoin their fellows. Then, all at once, in an instant, like a black tablecloth being whipped from a table, they withdrew. I watched the last few hop back into Sinner’s eye sockets. There was silence. Steam, just visible in the dim light from the streetlamps on Back Church Lane, rose from the Welshman’s hollow carcass. I fainted.
At about five in the morning, I was awoken by something licking my face. I opened my eyes. A fox. I jerked my head away, and, startled, it trotted a few steps back. Mangy and thin, it had sinews like twisted telephone wires, a stink like a petrol station forecourt, and a coat the colour of a traffic cone left in a skip full of rainwater. It was – if I’m not making myself clear – impossibly beautiful. For perhaps a full minute, the animal stared at me with a strange scepticism and a boy’s eyes. Then it darted away and up over the fence. I breathed out, and so did the dawn.
A couple of hours later the first yawning Grublock Homes workmen arrived at the site. When they saw the skeletons they wanted to call the police, but I managed to talk them into calling Teymur first. With the mobile phone held to my ear, I explained everything. I don’t think Teymur believed me when I told him that Grublock was dead, but he still gave the order to the workmen to let me go. (One little-discussed advantage of building sites is the fantastic selection of ways to break a pair of handcuffs.) Before I left, I borrowed some gloves and searched through the clothes that still clung raggedly to the Welshman’s remains. In his left inside jacket pocket was the letter from Hitler.
It wasn’t until much later – after all the research and investigation and speculation that has gone into writing this story – that I understood what must have happened. Deep in Sinner’s throat, almost dead, those final two specimens of Anophthalmus hitleri, bred to be indomitable, had managed one last desperate, damaged, awkward fuck; and Millicent Bruiseland, luckily, wasn’t there to interrupt them. Buried ten feet beneath the surface of the rubbish dump, the resulting larvae thrived on the boxer’s flesh. And after those ferocious offspring had reduced Sinner to a skeleton and gnawed the marrow from his femurs, they made do with the toxic borscht of cooking oil and mushy vegetables and bacon fat that pooled in every cranny. Occasionally, they might feast on a dead dog or cat or pigeon, and perhaps, when they were really lucky, one of Albert Kölmel’s younger, more reckless rivals might decide to bury another human body. Later, in Whitechapel’s rather more prosperous years, when a warehouse was built on top of the old site of the dump, they tunnelled up through the floorboards and punctured the tins of baked beans. Weeks or months might go by without food, but – thanks, again, to Erskine – they were resilient enough to survive. Often, they would simply cannibalise each other. Eighty years later, although these grandchildren of Fluek had spread throughout the dump and into the foundations of the adjacent buildings, a miniature London Underground, Seth Roach’s skull was still the epicentre of their colony, so when the Welshman exposed it to the light for the first time since its original interment they devoured him. And the same thing would have happened to me – if not for my trimethylaminuria. Even beetles have standards.
When I got home, the first thing I did was wake up my computer. Stuart was online, and immediately he popped up on my chat program.
STUART: omfg are you ok?
KEVIN: yeah
STUART: did the police come?
KEVIN: no
STUART: what? why not? what happened, then?
I told him, from the beginning. Once or twice I broke off, because there were certain details I wanted to check on the Nazi memorabilia collectors’ forums. When I was finished, he said:
STUART: that’s insane
KEVIN: i know
STUART: so did you ever find out who hired him?
KEVIN: no
at first i believed grublock that it was the japanese
then i sort of believed him when he said it was him, anonymously
then i thought maybe old man erskine
for a minute i even wondered if it might be tara southall
but none of those theories stood up
in a way, the biggest mystery is his thule society tattoo
i’d sort of forgotten about it until just now, but i think, by the end, it had actually begun to smudge
STUART: so it wasn’t a real tattoo?
KEVIN: no
but that’s not such a surprise – it was pretty obvious he wasn’t really from the thule society
STUART: why?
KEVIN: come on, stuart
it’s unrealistic
whatever all those websites might say, they disbanded in the 1920s
STUART: that’s what they want you to think
KEVIN: no, stuart, they did
what’s weird is, why would you even pretend to be from the thule society? what’s the point? who is it going to work on? because there must be only about a dozen people in london who might recognise that symbol
even grublock probably wouldn’t
of course, i would
but why would anyone make such a big effort to fool me, specifically, into thinking the ariosophists were involved?
STUART: yeah i see what you mean
KEVIN: but that’s a bit of a dead end
we can’t ask him
he got eaten by beetles
STUART: which is pretty awesome btw
you have t
o tell me more about that at some point
KEVIN: yeah i will
anyway, so i was thinking about the other thing i didn’t really understand
it was only two nights ago but it seems like ages
when i posted on the forum about philip erskine, and someone replied asking me about seth roach
‘nbeauman’
who was that?
they never replied again
in retrospect it was less like they wanted to help and more like they wanted to see how much i already knew
bit creepy
STUART: we should hack into the account
KEVIN: yeah, could do
but there’s not really any need
i had another look at his previous posts
i think he’s just a sockpuppet
STUART: whose?
Everyone on the forum, including me, had at least one ‘sock-puppet’ account – some probably had five or six. If you were losing an argument badly and needed reinforcements you would log out of your real account, log into your sockpuppet account, and post something like ‘yeah kevin’s right, any fuckwit knows that.’ It didn’t really help, but sometimes there was nothing else to be done.
