Sonata of the Dead (31 page)

‘Wanker, surely,’ said passenger seat, a virulent-looking streak of dung with his hair styled in what we used to call a fanny fringe back in junior school.

‘Shut it, Pascoe,’ said Mawker.

‘Ian,’ I said. ‘Let me in on this.’

‘No. Fucking. Chance.’ He folded his
Daily Mail
and slipped it into his inner pocket. ‘But I’ll cut you a deal. You give us this address, we collar the bastard, you walk. No arrest. No charges. You’re free to go back to missing the urinals at your favourite watering holes. You can go home to your psycho cat and frot yourself off against him some more.’

I stared at him. He was serious. He wore that goading expression of his, a look that said:
Go on, test me, see what happens.
He wanted me to push my luck. He wanted me in a cell.

I decided to push anyway, one last little go. ‘This is my daughter, you fuckhead. If she dies because you go in there with a hard-on—’

‘We’ll play it by the book, I promise.’

‘I don’t trust you to piss through the right hole,’ I said.

‘You know, you never say anything nice to me,’ he said. ‘I’m not sure you ever have, even when we were cadets. And I’m not too bothered about that. That ship has sailed the fuck off. If you said something nice to me now it wouldn’t sound right. It doesn’t sit nicely with you, saying nice things. I imagine it tastes bad on your tongue. It wouldn’t surprise me if you called your mother Old Vinegar Tits. And the so-called women you spend your nights with, I bet they don’t hang around too long because of it.’

My hands were white fists on my thighs. If I punched him now then that would be it, no matter if I gave him the address and offered him a massage and breakfast in bed.

‘If I walk away and you find Sarah, you bring me back. You let me see her straight away, no matter what state she’s in.’

‘You have my word.’

I gave him the address in Waltham Cross and stepped out of the car.

* * *

There was a coffee shop. There was a bar. I wanted coffee. So I chose the bar, because (I kidded myself) I could always order my coffee there. Booze was a backup, if I really needed it. I’d never be able to order a cocktail from a bean-dedicated barista. Not that I was going to sink a hard one at this time of the day. Haha. No way.

I resisted the urge to hop in a cab and welly it up the road to Waltham Cross. I’d only muddy the waters and distract Mawker from fucking everything up in his own special way. Better to wait and listen for the fallout.

I took my cucumber martini to a dark corner; fatigue followed me. I sat and traced the frosted sides of the glass with a finger and felt the strain of the week hunker down on my eyelids. The pale green drink reminded me of the colour of the eyes of a cat that once used to visit us in the garden of our house in Lime Grove. It was a pretty cat, ash grey, with beautiful eyes. It walked with a pronounced limp. One of its rear legs was stiff from an accident or some congenital condition, and it hobbled around, but without any apparent discomfort.

In that room of hot, hard camera lights.

Sarah made friends with the cat. If I got close it would give me the slow blink and the question mark tail but any attempt to pat it would be met with claws and teeth. But not for her. It would roll on its belly and allow her to tickle its chest and throat.

The click of mechanical pencils and digital recorders. Pages flipped in reporters’ notebooks.

Alien colours roamed around the back of my eyelids. I wasn’t going to sleep. What was it my nana used to say when she sat back in her armchair? When I was a kid, visiting with Mum and Adam. ‘I’m not having a nap, I’m resting my eyes.’

I thought of Martin Gower in a seedy little room of urban heat and fashionable decay. The soft, buttery light from a flash. Sarah parading in front of an arctic-white photographic background. Fan on. Catch lights in her eyes. A light coating of Vaseline on the slender muscles of her calves.

Journalists in here too, somehow, scribbling descriptions into their pads, leaning in close to ask questions.
How long do you think you’ve got, Miss Sorrell?

It’s Peart. And it’s Ms.

P-E-R-T…

P-E-A-R-T, you perve. Don’t they teach you how to spell in journalism school?

Journalism school. The Teeline shorthand book in Gower’s room.

I flew out of sleep and knocked the martini to the floor. The glass smashed, and faces at the bar whipped my way. I was thinking of skltns.

SLX Sesh
.

SLX had nothing to do with camera models or photographic studios. It was a street name that Gower had written down, but minus the vowels, which is what journalists do with words before they turn them into shorthand squiggles.

I asked the guy at the bar if he had a
London A–Z
map, and he handed one over after he’d underlined the seriousness of my crime by noisily emptying the dustpan of broken glass into the bin.

I flipped to the index and ran my finger down the S columns. Nothing under ‘Sa’ or ‘Se’. But here:
Silex Street, SE1
.

I checked my watch. Twenty minutes since I’d been planted on the street by Mawker. They probably wouldn’t even be in Waltham Cross yet. Southwark wasn’t a million miles away. It was something to do. I might at least find some evidence of where Sarah was staying, if it wasn’t Silex Street itself. She might even be there now.

I called Jimmy Two and told him where the car was and asked him to pick it up for me at a time suitable to his schedule within the next half hour thanks very much. Then I caught the London Overground from Haggerston down to Canada Water where I nipped on to the Jubilee Line. I was in Southwark within forty minutes. No calls or texts from Mawker. They must be there now. I closed my eyes against the suggestion that there must be a stand-off between police and villain. The Hack firing pot shots at them from a bedroom window, or worse, holding Sarah hostage while Mawker utterly fucked up the negotiations.

I checked my phone again. No headlines. Nothing happening. Not yet.

Silex Street was around a five-minute walk south of the Tube. It was a nondescript street of mainly purpose-built flats. None of the windows suggested the airy room in which Sarah had been photographed by Martin Gower, but at the north end there was a substantial building largely boarded up, with some of the higher windows smashed. At some point in its history it had been known as Newspaper House, but that sign over the main door was now little more than a series of ghosted letters, chipped off by vandals or weather and time.

I tried the door but it was locked. I had to climb over a concrete wall at the end to access the rear of the building. Locked containers rusted on a wasteland of aggregate and plastic. A chain-link leash was attached to a metal post driven into the ground, but whatever dog had been tied to it was no longer around.

There was a metal door at the back with a corner eaten through by rust. There was enough space to crawl in. Someone else was doing so on a regular basis: you could tell from the tracks in the dirt. I got on my belly and wriggled under. I could smell dead candles and hot grease in Styrofoam containers – somebody was inhabiting this space. I was in some kind of antechamber; not quite warehouse, not quite loading bay. A place where minions stacked and unstacked. A forklift zone. A huge roll of paper turned to pulp, bruised with mould, stood like a monument to the age of hot metal. There was a stack of trade magazines shrink-wrapped in plastic and lengths of nylon binding. Rats had chewed this protective coating away and shredded the innards for nests.

I listened to the air circulating through the chambers and channels of the building for a few moments. I tried to detect some current warmth within it; the flavours of chewing gum and coffee. The surfacing of lipstick and leather. But it was all just stale and sour and old.

I pushed on, trying to avoid the feeling that I was being consumed.

The way was partially blocked by a water-bloated door that sagged on its hinges. Someone had laid a mat inside, the kind you use to wipe off your wellies before setting foot in a house. The words
GO AWAY
were branded into the centre.

I went through the doorway and into an area where once had existed some kind of machinery; printing presses perhaps, although all of it was gone now. There were only a series of grooves in the cement floor, and a variety of bolts and brackets and sockets. A folder, swollen with moisture, containing old copies of the
Southwark Advertiser
had been left in a corner. A calendar girl from 1989 wore a cherry-coloured bikini and hair so back-combed it was porcupinian. Someone had scrawled fresh marker pen over her breasts and pudenda, given her a moustache and googly eyes. I had to stifle a breath because I thought I knew who had done it.

SLX sesh. Silex session.

This was some squat, some roughly photogenic make-do urban studio blessed with the kind of scarred brickwork and large arched windows that a cameraman likes to use to create a mood. It was a cliché mood, but it never seemed to go out of fashion. Grunge was popular, whether off the back of a musical legacy twenty years old, or linked to policies of austerity. It spoke of us against them. It gave those lacking privilege and entitlement something of an edge.

Now under the scorched smell of wax and stale reefer I could detect other notes, notes closer to home. White Musk, a scent Sarah always liked; cheap but distinct. Perhaps a little too cloying, but a kid’s scent; a young woman’s scent. The hot, vinegary smell of takeaway Chinese.
Dad, can I have sweet and sour pork?
A bottle of Strongbow cider.

Jesus Christ, Mawker, get on the blower and tell me you’ve nailed the swine. How much time do you need?

But he wouldn’t, would he? He wouldn’t be able to bring himself to contact you. If. You know
, if.

Stone steps. One became two became many as the acoustics created greedy echoes, as if the building was revelling in a noise it had not known for many years. It gave the impression of pursuit, and it took me a while to relax and understand that I was alone. But that wasn’t true. Somebody was living here. A person was making a small corner of this old newspaper factory into their home. I came upon a den of sorts, off a corridor on the third floor. Patterned throws bulldog-clipped to cracked windows. A sleeping bag. A nest of make-up. Newspapers stacked haphazardly:
The Independent. The Guardian.
A headstrong daughter. A dad who failed.

Books lined a wall, their pages bloated with damp. Caitlin Moran. Joan Didion. Siri Hustvedt. Clothes strewn around the lip of a gaping suitcase. I checked them. T-shirts and leggings and jeans in the main. Size ten. Doc Martens. Converse. Size five. Nothing else in the case beyond a few hotel soaps in their wrappers. A few free Barclays biros. Some forced experience this was. I hoped there might be a diary. Something to make concrete this suspicion that I was in the midst of my daughter’s life.

In a zip-up pocket of the suitcase there was an envelope of photographs. Sarah with Mum. I felt the breath punched from me. I hadn’t seen these pictures in years. Clowning for the camera. Dancing. Funny faces –
you’ll stick like that if the wind changes
– and exaggerated hugs. There were no pictures of me, which pierced me a little, but it didn’t matter. It was okay. I was the one holding the camera ninety-nine per cent of the time anyway. It was either that or lopped heads, inaccurate focus, fingers in front of the lens; Rebecca never tried to hide the fact she was a dreadful photographer. That was my reasoning, anyway. I clung to it.

I sat down on the sleeping bag and closed my eyes. The fan of photographs in one hand. Swatches of the bag in the other. As if I was trying to commune with the dead by holding physical links to her.
Stop that. Stop that.

I hunted for warmth in the sleeping bag but I was so psyched up by my discovery that I couldn’t tell if the heat beneath my fingers was evidence of recent occupancy or the mischief of my tommy gun heart.

Be here soon. Be anywhere other than that monster’s lair in Waltham Cross.

I pulled out my phone, but before I could hit some numbers it leapt in my hand. It was Mawker. His call almost triggered an anatomical first for the human race: a man shitting out his own skeleton.

‘Ian,’ I said. My voice was flat and cold against the lonely stone. ‘Tell me you’ve got him.’

‘We’ve got him,’ he said. But his voice was all wrong. There was none of the tart triumph I recognised in him whenever he had some high-level intelligence he wanted to use to lord it over me. All the moisture fled from my mouth. I had to work to unstick the strip of jerky tongue from the roof.

‘Sarah,’ I managed, little more than a puff of air.

‘No. Joel. No, it’s okay. I’m sorry. Sarah… she’s not here.’

‘Then what’s up with you? You sound as if you’ve stumbled upon the grim truth behind your species’ relatives.’

‘This guy we’ve got. I know him.’

‘You know him? What? He’s someone on a wanted list? Ex-con?’

‘No. He’s ex-service. Name’s Nyx. Scott Nyx. When I say I know him, I mean he was one of us. But he was only in the force six months. He left just last year. Post-traumatic stress disorder.’

‘Because?’ I was getting narked. Mawker was withholding something, worming around the truth. He wouldn’t talk to me. And I was cheesed off that he was the one feeling this bastard’s collar when it was me that had found him.

‘That Archway fracas. You know. The one Sarah was involved in. According to the PSU roster he was on duty that night.’

He said it as if she was responsible for the whole thing. And for this guy Nyx’s PTSD too.

‘What, he couldn’t cope with a bunch of shouty kids?’

‘It was more than that. Bricks and bottles. Nyx was hit. But I don’t… I don’t get it.’

‘What don’t you get?’

There was some commotion going on in the background and I heard Mawker cover the phone while he yelled instructions. I felt an old twinge of excitement. The police raid. The battering ram. Entries and exits. Chasing down those chancers who make a break for it out of a rear window. I craved that for a moment. I itched to be back in the saddle with the others.