Authors: JOHN YORVIK
“Do they light it up like that every night? It must cost a fortune,” I said to Dani, as she joined me on the cushions. Then I reached into my haversack and pulled out the binoculars, and fished out a bottle of wine and a packet of Marlboro Red.
“So what do we do now?” said Dani.
“Wait. And hope something happens. Some kind of transportation.”
“How can we be sure that it’s looted art?” said Dani.
“We can’t.”
Dani opened up her side bag and pulled out a flask and poured herself a coffee.
“Have you got doughnuts?” I asked.
“Breakfast bars.”
“Dani, could you go find me a glass for this wine? I would go myself, but you’ll be much quieter.”
Dani sighed, but dutifully crept off downstairs with her torch pointing towards the floor. When I heard that she’d reached the ground floor and was checking in cupboards, I went over to her backpack and started pulling out the contents. Reaching down the spine of her bag, I came across something heavy and metal. I pulled it out of the bag. It was the gun and ammunition from Erika and Pippa’s flat. Earlier, she hadn’t gone to warn them, but to fetch their weapon. I heard Dani coming back up the stairs so returned everything to the bag apart from the ammunition, which I hid in the bottom of my bag.
“Everything okay?” she said, handing me a child’s scratched and dirty beaker.
“Yeah, not a sound. The dog’s stopped barking. No activity at AmizFire.”
It was eight o’clock. An hour had passed by without anybody entering or exiting the AmizFire gates. Lots of people had walked by on their way to a night out in Camden.
I told Dani, we should take turns sleeping, so we could keep watch all night. Dani volunteered to take the first shift. I turned on my side and tried to shut down my mind.
* * *
“Wake up!” said Dani nudging me in the ribs.
“Wa!”
“There are a lot of cars. Limousines.”
“What time is it?”
“Eight-thirty.”
I raised my head and saw that there was a whole load of activity taking place.
“It must be an exhibition opening,” said Dani, excitedly.
“Of course, the Diane Thompson exhibition is opening tonight. April 16
th
. We published the article last week to promote it.”
“Tommy Burns near the obelisk, welcoming guests,” said Dani, handing me the binoculars.
And then, seeing Tommy Burns and the swarms of people entering the building, it all seemed to make sense.
“Dani, the mystery caller asked about April 16
th
. ‘What did Marty say about April 16
th
?’ she said. Do you think Marty and Natasha Rok planned to be there tonight? With all the people attending the party, and Natasha working there, Marty could have hidden in the building till everyone left. Perhaps Natasha had identified a location.”
“There must be much safer places in London to stash art. Why would they risk keeping it here?” asked Dani.
“Hubris?” I said.
As we looked on, I thought about Rilke’s revelation that occult organisations tend to follow a code of ethics that involves informing the public about their activities. I assumed it was to give them the moral high ground regarding disclosure. But was it also a method of building their brand? Pay writers to produce books and articles implying they have a hand in everything from the Russian Revolution to the death of Pope John Paul I, then let the conspiracy theorists do the work of declaring them omnipotent and omnipresent. In turn, increasing their dominion until a mere mention of their name conjures up so much fear that it reduces the man on the street to a gibbering wreck. But with that, there would be a danger of hubris. The mistake of tyrants and criminal organisations throughout history, from Hitler to the Krays. The question was, thinking about the ‘Organisation’, was it merely a successful East London crime gang that had synergised with a group of aristocrats? Or were they, as the mystery caller had suggested, ‘dangerous’ and ‘everywhere’?
We watched people coming and going for hours in cars, taxis and vans. Anyone of which may have been transporting looted art. We had no way of knowing.
Several hours later when all the party guests were long gone, I’d drifted off to sleep again, the empty bottle of wine on the windowsill beside my head.
“Lishman!” Dani called quietly, poking my ear with her finger.
“Eh?”
“A police car.”
“Oh.”
I used my elbows to lever myself off the ground and took the binoculars off Dani. Sure enough, there was a panda car parked up outside the AmizFire gates. Nobody got out of the car. We watched it with baited breath hoping that something, anything, would give us a clue as to whether something was going on with the missing art. Half an hour later, the panda car drove off. Then there was nothing. Only it wasn’t completely quiet.
“Do you hear that?” I said.
“What?”
“Like a thud. A repetitive thud. Like the city’s heartbeat.”
I leant forward and lifted the latch on the dormer window and cracked it open. Sure enough there was a thud, some kind of bass line.
“I hear it,” said Dani. “Do you think there’s an after-party rave?”
“Sounds like they’re recreating Eyes Wide Shut down there.”
We thought it better to leave the house while the neighbours were still sleeping. So at about five-thirty, leaving our bags hidden in the attic, Dani and I exited by the backdoor just as the morning light started to spread across the sky. We decided that we had to find a way of getting inside AmizFire. Dani had the idea of enlisting the street raptors over at Natasha’s block. I thought a break in to a building of that scale would be way out of their league. We also had to find someone that could translate Natasha’s notes. None of this could be done from the attic of an empty house.
We trekked back across the park and climbed Primrose Hill. Then we walked across Primrose Hill Bridge and down Camden Road to the station. At the station kiosk I grabbed a newspaper. The headline on the billboard said:
Pentonville Strangler Fire
Sitting in a greasy spoon, Dani and I read through the front page story. I couldn’t really take it in. The phrases were jumbled up in my mind, but I’d seen enough to make sense of the story: Martin Stewart dead, fire, incinerated, cottage, Scotland, confession, letter, Scotland Yard, Natasha Rokitzky.
“Scotch mist?” asked Dani.
I couldn’t answer. My mind was a broken toy.
Marty’s fickle fate.
Just as night drew in, my mobile phone, which was lying on the wooden floorboards beside me, started vibrating. I made a grab for it and clicked answer. I heard Mickey Riley’s Newcastle accent.
“...Despite what I thought of him. Despite what he did,” said Riley, after an awkward preamble. “I’m sorry for your loss.”
“Understood, Mickey. Is that why you called?”
I knew the guilt over Marty’s death was coming. It was in the post. And I didn’t want to talk about it.
“There’ll be a small service in Newcastle tomorrow. The press don’t know about it. But invite anyone you think ought to be there.”
That would take me away from my quarry. It would be dangerous too. I wondered could I trust Mickey Riley? Could I trust anyone?
“How did you find out about the service?” I asked.
“I... I...” he stuttered. “I arranged it on Lillian’s behalf, through my contacts in the force. This kind of invite-only funeral happens a lot with murderers, especially when...”
If I had to trust anyone, I decided, it would be Riley. I’d never known him to lie, even when it meant needlessly upsetting someone, usually his latest girlfriend fishing for a compliment and instead getting the unmitigated bluntness of a Geordie man.
“Is there a body?” I asked.
“There are ashes. Part furniture, part house, part body. Marty’s in there somewhere.”
“Have you made any progress since the last time I saw you?”
“Nothing I’ve found out will make any of this look any better,” said Riley, with uncharacteristic reticence.
* * *
One of the articles, a double-page spread about the Pentonville Strangler, contained a map. The headline was ‘A Killer on the Road’ taken from The Doors’
Riders on the Storm.
The next line, ‘his brain is squirming like a toad’ was written in a caption under a photo of Marty. The map showed Marty’s trajectory from London to Scotland. There were flags along the way detailing the various sightings of the ‘killer’ as he cut his swath across the UK, staying in B&Bs and small hotels. Some of the flags were linked to bubbles in which witness anecdotes were quoted. Marty’s final destination was a small village in the north west of Scotland, ironically or not, named Killin. According to the story, Marty had hired a small cottage on the hill overlooking the village. He’d spent two days and two nights there. On the third morning, he’d written a confession to the murder of Natasha Rokitzky and made allusions to having committed other murders. He’d walked down into the village and bought an envelope and a stamp and sent the letter to Scotland Yard. After that, he’d gone to the local supermarket and bought some camping gas, some petrol and a bottle of whisky. Back at the cottage, he’d soaked the furniture in petrol. It is supposed that he drank the whisky first. He’d then set fire to the furniture causing the cottage to go up in flames. The camping gas caused a huge explosion alerting people down in the village. By the time the emergency services arrived, nothing was left of Marty but tiny remnants of charred flesh and bone. Tests were done of hair samples found on a plastic brush that the explosion had thrown into the garden. The result was affirmative. It was Marty.
I read three or four more articles before I’d had my fill. The newspapers wove stories around the few facts that the police must have given the journalists. They’d also managed to get some information by doorstepping his colleagues and the people he’d come across while on the run. But the real source of the story was gone. Marty was ashes. Natasha was dead. Whatever the police said now was gospel. There was no-one to challenge it. Correction. Only the real murderer could challenge the police version of events.
I folded up the papers and went along to the refreshments carriage to top up my caffeine levels. On my return I fished around in my bag and pulled out another of Rilke’s books. I spent the next two hours of the train journey to Newcastle trying to read between the lines of his dramatically written landscape of Britain ruled by an occult mafia with links to aristocracy and the highest offices of the land. I was sure there would be some element of truth among the red herrings, exaggerations and obfuscation and I wanted to root it out.
It is Darwinistic but it is neither cult, club nor secret society. It is rather an ideology. And everyone espoused to this set of ideas belongs to it. Cells can appear anywhere and they represent evil in its most meritocratic form. It is easily absorbed by other structures, be they political parties, government institutions or mercantile corporations. It is blind to creed, class and colour in its search for synergy.
Synergy, there was that word again. It was an organisation that kept adding to itself to grow in power and influence. The way Rilke described it was similar to how terror ‘experts’ were describing Al Qaeda on the news. It did not exist as an organisation with central command. The figurehead existed. Its ideas existed. And, unlike myself and Dani, ideas were bulletproof.
And then I was hit by a sudden compulsion to find something in the newspaper I’d seen out of the corner of my eye, but not bothered to read. I opened the newspaper and spread it out across the table. Sure enough, there it was on the sixth page in a one column news roundup: a small twenty word article that told me, in case there was any doubt, just how dangerous this organisation was. The text bore the headline:
Hackney House Firebombed.
There had been no casualties. I grabbed my phone and began writing a message to Dani. She would have to resist the urge to look for Pippa and Erika. She had to stay hidden. Her life depended on it.
* * *
The other guests were Amy and Mickey Riley, so I sat on the bench next to them. There we were in a church in Jesmond, one of the more well-heeled neighbourhoods of Newcastle, where neither Marty nor I ever ventured when we lived in the city. But this was the nature of a secret funeral: the dead are displaced from their origins and the service is quick.
There was no eulogy but the vicar stressed that we were all God’s children. And all deserved forgiveness. And made some mileage out of the fact that Marty had written a confession asking for such forgiveness from Natasha’s family and thus ending their torment of not knowing what had happened to her. The vicar seemed to know more about the letter than the newspapers had. Or had he been inventive in looking for redeeming qualities? Would
I
get to see that letter?
After the service, I thanked the vicar as he waited by the door and fell into step with Riley. He guided me over towards some trees behind the church. There, he lit two cigarettes and passed one to me.
“How long you up for?” he asked.
“Going back tonight.”
“Look, I did some digging around like you asked.”
“Yes?”
“Jarpy, Jim Sharpel, two months before he died, was cautioned for breaking into Lillian Stewart’s house. Neighbours say him and his gang had been taunting Lillian in the shopping centre. They’d never forgiven Marty for what he did to Jarpy. But I guess you know more about that than I do.”
“Yes. We were only kids really. Teenagers,” I said. “Jarpy’s gang jumped the two of us and I ended up in hospital with broken ribs and ankle. Marty wanted to warn Jarpy off trying it again, so broke into his house and woke him up with a knife to his throat.”
“That’s Marty,” said Riley, nodding.
“Around about the time of the fire at the Jazz Club – Amy couldn’t give me an exact date – Marty returned to London from seeing his mother in Newcastle. He had burns on his torso and hands. He claimed he’d stopped on the road to pull someone out of a burning car,” I said.
“You mentioned that before. Well, I checked and there’s no police record of Marty’s involvement in a car fire. Spoke to some of Jarpy’s gang, too. They say Marty had been round to Jarpy’s house to warn him off bothering Lillian a few weeks before his death,” said Riley.
“In the Jazz Club fire, did the police think Jarpy was working for someone or acting alone?”
“Old Jim, the owner of the Jazz Club, he was accused of paying Jarpy to start the fire. No charges stuck, but soon after, Old Jim was investigated by Inland Revenue, some irregularity in his accounts. They accused him of arranging the fire to cover up a decade’s worth of tax fraud. You see, all his accounts were on paper. They were destroyed in the fire. Old Jim still maintains that he has no idea what they were talking about. I looked into it. The whole thing stank of a frame up. Anyway, when it all died down, Ransom Amusements moved in and bought what was left of the Jazz Club at a snip.”
“But what do your instincts tell you? Was Marty involved or not?”
“Obviously, most of the evidence has been destroyed, so it’s hard to prove anything either way. And there are a lot of unanswered questions: if Marty was involved, how did he get Jarpy into the Jazz Club? Did Marty have connections to Ransom? Or was it all just a coincidence: he had threatened Jarpy to protect his mother, and he ended up with burns from a car fire, as you said?”
“I need you to look into the Ransom company. I can pay you whatever you usually charge plus expenses. I’m going to send you a list of names of people and companies I’ve had dealings with recently. I need to know if they are connected to Ransom.”
“If it’s important to you, I can do this one pro bono. For old time’s sake,” said Riley.
“May I join you?” said a cut glass voice.
We both turned round to see Amy standing there. I don’t know how much she heard.
“Riley, Amy. Amy, Riley,” I said to introduce them.
Riley offered Amy a cigarette and she took one and allowed Riley to light it.
“Lillian’s left already. I suppose it was all too much for her,” said Amy, although her show of concern for Lillian lacked sincerity.
We stood in silence in the beautiful English church gardens at St George. For a moment none of us had anything to say so we said nothing and spent a few minutes thinking about Marty as the sun came out behind the clouds and warmed up the day. Finally, Riley checked his watch.
“Drink?”
We all nodded, walked on to Osborne Road and flagged down a taxi. Riley instructed the taxi driver to take us to the Cluny Pub.
* * *
None of us wanted to talk about Marty, but he was very much the fourth presence at our table. Riley had never got on with Marty and, with what he had told me about the fire at the Jazz Club and Jarpy’s untimely death, I could tell he was fairly convinced Marty was the Pentonville Strangler. And who could blame him? Marty had written a letter of confession after all.
Riley had only attended the funeral out of loyalty. The kind of loyalty we would show to any deceased member of our old Newcastle gang whether we had liked them or not. They would always be one of us. I guessed Amy was here because on some level under the surface she felt a little bit guilty about our affair and how it might have set in action a chain of events leading to Marty’s death. But this was only my guess. The chances of her ever admitting to the fragile humanity I assumed she had were very slim indeed. And how had she found out about the funeral? Connections at Scotland Yard, I imagined. But I wasn’t going to give her the satisfaction of saying as much.
“Absent friends!” she toasted.
Riley and I joined in, because that toast could be about anybody who was not there.
“At least he did the honourable thing and confessed,” said Amy, finally breaking the Marty taboo. “Got you off the hook, didn’t it, Lishman?”
“What do you mean?” asked Riley, his curiosity awakened.