Sonata of the Dead (21 page)

‘What happened, Polly… may I call you Polly? What happened to get you riled up? Why did you leave work and go to your mother’s?’

She sounded guarded and scared. But also, it seemed, on the brink of gushing, as if she’d been desperate for the opportunity to divest herself of some onerous burden, or shackles that had been locked around her wrists by a
Mellivora capensis
with an overactive thyroid.

‘I open his post. All the letters and bills, and all the manuscripts too. I have to separate the material sent by clients from the hopefuls, you know…’

‘The slush pile. The chaff. Yes, I saw it. I asked Patrick if there’d been anything delivered that was out of the ordinary.’

I heard another noise now, another muffled thump, though this resolved itself into a sob. When she came back on her voice was strangled with emotion. ‘He took it off me as soon as he heard me… as soon as I opened it. He heard me. I suppose I must have sworn, or made some sort of noise. A cry of disgust.’

I rubbed my face. Polly sounded like the kind of highly strung individual who would make a noise of horror if someone opened a curtain too quickly, or overcooked a boiled egg.

‘What was it?’

‘There was blood,’ she said. ‘A manuscript. Horrible thing. Dirty. Fingerprints. Typed on the back of pre-used pages. Circulars. It was stained with coffee. Wine. Other stuff…’

‘This can’t be the first time you received anything… dodgy through the post,’ I said. ‘Don’t you have some sort of company policy?’

‘Usually we’d bin it straight away. And report it to the police. But Simm swept it all up and took it into his office.’

‘Anything with an address on it?’

‘I read some of it. The first page. I don’t usually; it’s not my job of course, but I needed to know… I needed to know what kind of mind could produce something like that.’

‘An address, Polly.’

‘It was terrible. Ugly. Inhuman. It wasn’t fiction. It was fact dressed up as fiction. But Simm was adamant. He said we needed to keep it just in case it turned out to have something to do with the murders. He said we’d all be rolling in clover if he could represent a mad man.’

‘Polly, who sent it?’

‘I don’t know – it talked about dismemberment. How difficult it is to take a body to pieces.’

‘Where is it now? Can you get it?’ I didn’t want to shout in case she dropped the phone again and the link was lost; I doubted she’d pick up again. Despite that I wanted to reach through the wires and grab her around the throat and throttle an answer out of her. I wasn’t sure she could even hear me any more.

But then: ‘It will be in his safe. In the office. Unless he took it home with him.’

Every possibility, every chance to get nearer to this killer seemed to fork into multiple options. Not for the first time I wished for access to the police’s resources.

‘Do you have the combination to his safe?’ I asked.

‘Yes. But I don’t want to have to touch it again. I washed and washed my hands…’

‘Polly, I just need to see it. Maybe just take one page. We need something to work with. Patrick might be in danger.’

‘And me too,’ she said, in a voice leaden with awful epiphany.

‘We’re all at risk,’ I said. ‘Anyone caught up in this.’

She gave me Simm’s home address and the office safe’s access code and told me again, firmly, that she would help me no further. Her tone was relaxing though, softening. I was gearing up to try to work on her to go to the office for me when she gently put the phone down.

I nipped into a bar and ordered a beer. I stared at it and wondered what to do. I could march back to the Honey Badger’s lair and force him to hand over the manuscript or I could go to his house and wait for him there; either choice, though attractive because it meant I’d get to manhandle the oily wanker, would only mean settling myself even deeper in to the trough of shit outside Mawker’s door. Simm might be seriously hindering progress on this case but I would be involved in an assault charge if I wasn’t careful.

And there was always the possibility that this grubby stack of pages might just have nothing to do with the deaths, a writer who hadn’t observed the basic list of dos and don’ts involved when submitting work for consideration. But I couldn’t entertain that possibility. I knew in my tripes that this was a bona fide lead. Simm knew it too, and wanted to get rich off the back of it. I swallowed half the pint, then the rest, trying to get the vile flavours of his intentions out of my mouth. Fuck the assault charge: I was going to pan the cunt.

I got back to his office and leaned on the buzzer. No response. I stepped back into the road and scanned his windows but there were no umbrella-eyed ghosts capering at the curtains. He’d gone out possibly to butter up some unscrupulous publisher with pound signs branded on his heart.

I buzzed the other offices but nobody was home, or they’d decided against letting in the shady character they could see on their entry cameras.

I went around the back. There was a fire escape but it looked rustier than Ian Mawker’s pick-up lines. I’d have to chance it. There was a wall topped with razor wire so I tossed my jacket over and climbed up; I left the jacket where it was in case I needed to make a quick escape, then headed up the fire escape. As soon as I planted one boot upon it I knew it was fifty-fifty as to whether it would stay attached to the wall, or me to the stairs. It was corroded right through in places. It was like trying to climb a series of wafers.

Central London. Late. Me climbing the wall of a prominent building in an affluent area. Me, not looking affluent. Me, looking effluent. I was bound to be spotted. I reckoned I had ten minutes. Which probably meant five.

I took baby steps all the way. The fire escape groaned and swayed, and dry red rain landed in my hair and on my shoulders. I could see the screws and bolts dancing in their sockets. I reached an opaque window with a crack running diagonally through it. A toilet on Simm’s floor. I placed my boot against the glass and tested it. The putty was old and crumbly. The crack spawned others. I pressed harder, trying to resist the temptation to kick the thing in as hard as possible. I didn’t want to attract any unwarranted attention, nor sever my femoral artery. A large wedge of glass came free. I was able to waggle the rest loose after that.

I slipped into a narrow WC made narrower by cairns of toilet paper rolls ranged along one wall. There was a smell of apple Glade, bleach, and something older and more acrid. Simm’s piss, most likely. Out into a gloomy corridor. There were the stairs I’d taken earlier. I went into Simm’s office, fully expecting him to be sitting behind his desk perfecting his gecko look. But the room was empty. I checked his drawers in case he’d positioned the manuscript close to hand but he kept only the usual desk accoutrements here: business cards, comp slips, notebooks and pens.

I found his safe inside an attractive oak cupboard. Once I’d dialled in the combination, I opened it and looked inside. A tin of petty cash, some signed contracts. And a buff-coloured A4 envelope inside a clear plastic bag. I took it out, holding it gingerly by the edges. There were no stamps on it, no evidence of it having been fed through a franking machine. The address itself was restricted to
SIMM. ALBEMARLE
. No return details.

I teased the lips of the envelope open and slipped the manuscript out. No covering letter. No address. A musty, dusty exhalation. I was reminded of old school libraries, mushrooms, wet, autumnal woodlands. There was dried blood on the paper, smears and flecks and droplets. It was creased and torn and aged. But it was not all here. The manuscript started at page 244. Presumably Simm had hived off the first half of it, including whatever prefatory material the writer had included, to take home to read.

There was another envelope in the safe too. Smaller. Inside this were a series of short notes to Simm, ostensibly from the killer, detailing what he’d done, where, and to whom. These were details that only the police or the killer could know. Or me.

I stood there, stomach churning, trying to process this, how Simm must have been allowing the deaths to happen knowing that each one might add a zero to any eventual confession.

I borrowed one of Simm’s envelopes and slid into it half a dozen pages from the middle of the manuscript. Then I took a selfie with the manuscript in front of his safe and emailed it to him, along with the message:
You think you’re going to get rich off the back of this wanker but you’re just as much in his sights as anybody. Maybe more so. I can help you. It’s either that or prison for you, you grievous fuckhead.

I left then, before the residents of W1S could nail me. Maybe they’d kept quiet, afraid of this leather-jacketed Spider-Man. Or more likely ashamed of the rusted fire escape.

I’d made it to Crawford Street, determined to give Mawker Simm’s head on a platter, when a bronze Audi screeched to a halt in the middle of the road and Underdog leapt out of the passenger seat.

‘Get in,’ he said.

‘Get fucked,’ I said. ‘I’m busy.’

He lifted the bottom of his hoodie and showed me the butt of a handgun sticking from his waistband – what looked like a Browning pistol; easy to get hold of, even for a tourist like this joker.

‘Oh, the experience of buying a gun. I bet you called it a “piece”, didn’t you? I bet you handed over a “ton” for it, in used twenties.’

‘Get in,’ he said again. His face was pale and greasy. His eyes, usually so scornful and languid, now could not be more agitated. The ‘little boy lost’ shimmered just beneath the skin. I got in the back of the car and Underdog slid in beside me. The Browning, like most guns bought in the city on the black market, was probably just for show. A frightener. You had to pay extra for bullets (or ‘food’ as it was known) and once fired, your gun was unlikely ever to be sold again.

Odessa was behind the steering wheel. She looked similarly pale but it was countered by the inner steel she carried, a gutsiness that Underdog could only acquire by play-acting. But I still suspected him, nonetheless. I still looked at him askance. I imagined him puncturing and hacking. I could see him happily foisting pain and suffering in some twisted, retributive act.

Underdog slammed the door and we took off. I felt myself being pressed back into the leather.

‘Nice car,’ I said. ‘What happened? Did you win first prize in a limerick competition?’

‘You know, if I ever had to use this gun on you, I’d shoot it through your cocky fucking mouth first. I mean, don’t you ever shut the fuck up?’

‘Shutting the fuck up, sir,’ I said.

He sighed and there were all kinds of defeat in it. ‘You’re a pain in the arse, Corkscrew,’ he said. And then: ‘Sorrell.’

‘Ah,’ I said. ‘You’ve done some sleuthing. How did you find out?’

‘It wasn’t hard,’ Underdog said. Triumph laced his voice. ‘I thought there was copper in you so I went and asked the coppers down at Savile Row nick. “Anyone know this gobby scarface who’s always sticking his nose in where it’s not wanted?” Turns out you’re not a copper. At least not any more. Turns out you’re not as anonymous as you’d like to think. They were queuing up to tell me who you were and what a monumental pain in the arsehole you are. One of them even told me you lived on Homer Street. Ask a policeman, they say. Too right.’

‘Well done,’ I said, making a mental note to scour the cunts at West End Central, find their snitch and perform the Riverdance on his face. ‘So why don’t we stop playing silly buggers and come clean on everybody’s name. I’m fed up of all this
Mission Impossible
shit.’

‘Fuck you,’ Underdog said. ‘I know you. You don’t need to know m—’

‘He’s Sean. Sean Niker,’ said Odessa. ‘I’m Kim Pallant.’

‘Did you have to do that?’ Sean asked. He sounded like the kid at a party whose balloon has been popped.

‘It’s over, Sean,’ Kim said. ‘The Accelerants are finished.’

‘Why are we doing this then?’ I asked. ‘Presumably you stole this car? We could have just met in the pub and chatted over nibbles.’

‘It wasn’t my idea,’ Kim said. She was pasting it along the Euston Road, weaving in between the traffic, honking the horn as she approached pedestrian crossings, giving everyone at least a fighting chance to stay alive. At any other time I’d have been happy for her to ferry me around in a flashy machine like this, but fifty miles per hour in a thirty zone was giving me sphincter twitch. And the gun that Niker had pulled from his waistband didn’t help.

‘Where are we going?’ I asked.

‘We’re going to shut the fuck up,’ Niker said. ‘I’m still in this. For the long haul, even if everyone else has wimped out.’

‘For “wimped out” read “brutally murdered”,’ I reminded him. But he was in rant mode.

‘My pursuit of experience, my euphoria, has not ended.’

A police car came howling out of Shepherdess Walk, skidding on to our tail so closely that I could see the light reflecting in the glasses of the driver.

The shock of it almost caused Kim to oversteer but she righted the car at the last moment, although I heard the kerb scrape against the expensive paintwork. Sirens wailed.

‘How’s your euphoria now?’ I shouted.

We carried on along Bethnal Green Road before turning south through Stepney.

‘You have to stop, Kim,’ I shouted. ‘You can’t win this one!’

But she was deep in concentration, or she was choosing to ignore me. She turned sharp left on to Commercial Road. People backed off, or shot footage on their smartphones. Other cars were sounding their horns, maybe in support, more probably in condemnation. Sirens looped and twisted above the din: backup for the tenacious driver sticking with us as we belted east.

Kim nicked a thin roadside tree with the front nearside wing and I saw it split in two. The shock from the collision snapped my head back and wrenched the car to the left. Kim floored the accelerator and took us up a narrow alleyway. People screamed and swore. If she hit anyone, add x number of years to the rapidly accelerating count already on the wheel of incarceration.

Bags of rubbish erupted as she hit them and flung their slimy, rotting compost over the windscreen. The wipers succeeded only in smearing it more completely across the glass. She hit a hopper and it barrelled away in front of us, but something had happened to the car. A heavy, metallic clacking that sounded terminal. Our speed dropped off.