Sonata of the Dead (8 page)

‘Professor? The bistro is this way.’

‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘Force of habit. My, uh, club is in that direction.’

Bistro. Who went to a bistro on a Monday? If it was the one I was thinking of on Montague Street, then you were looking at a bill of at least fifty pounds and that was before you took a sip of wine.

She slid an arm through mine. I smelled the faint trace of her warm skin come at me from beneath that thick woollen barrier. Would she do that to a complete stranger? I thought perhaps she might. I’d heard enough of her voice to discern a faint accent – maybe French – to suggest a warmth and a boldness with strangers that doesn’t seem to be shared by us diffident islanders.

‘Was there anything in particular you wanted to see me about?’ I asked, wondering if that warmth would go south should I come clean about my imposture.

‘You asked me,’ she said, and gave me a conspiratorial wink.

‘How are things in your department?’ I asked. The game was up. I could only hope she was stringing me along because she fancied lunching with me anyway.

‘All good,’ she said, ‘considering I’ve been in that department for a grand total of—’ she consulted her bare wrist, ‘—three and a half hours.’

‘Ah,’ I said, thinking,
first day
. Maybe she didn’t know what the professor looked like after all. ‘I knew that. Just wondered how you’re settling in.’

A slight squeeze of my arm. ‘I’m settling in just fine,’ she said. ‘Thank you for asking.’

The midday light was brittle, as if the fledgling spring days were having trouble leaving winter behind. Exhaust vapours lingered in the street. I watched a man carrying shrink-wrapped boxes from a van to a printer’s shop door. He wore gloves of such an acid red it looked as if he had scalded himself.

We arrived at the bistro and I held the door open for her. Inside we were greeted by a tall, immaculate waiter who showed us to a table by the window.

‘Could we perhaps take a table towards the back?’ I asked. I blamed the cold, but really, I didn’t want to risk being recognised by some off-duty plod, or any of the lowlifes I tended to find stealing oxygen from my personal space. I’d had a stomach full of innocent people suffering for the crime of knowing me, and being my friend.

I ordered a bottle of Sancerre and asked for bread and olives. Suddenly I was hungry. I hadn’t eaten properly all weekend.

‘It’s good that we should have a little get-together like this,’ I said. ‘What with work and my involvement with the writers’ group, I get precious little time for any kind of relaxation. Any kind of “me” time. Do you know what I mean?’

‘I might, if I knew who you were,’ she said, smearing a pat of cold butter on to her rustically sliced multi-seed snob cob.

‘Ah,’ I said again.

‘Mm,’ she said, and widened her eyes.

‘When did you see through my cunning ruse?’ I asked.

At that moment, Louis Ferguson came through the door. The woman stood up. ‘Daddy!’ she called out.

Right
, I thought.
Immediately
.

Ferguson seemed perplexed to see me. His confusion turned to glee when his daughter filled him in on my stupidity. I told him I wanted to just borrow some books and I seemed incapable of acting like a normal human being and I was ever so sorry, no damage done, lunch is on me and then—

Tears hit me. Hard as an April squall. I felt myself bow under the weight of them. I felt Ferguson’s hand on my shoulder, lighter than air. There was only the mass of this sudden misery, sucking me down under the weight of its own gravitational force.

I calmed down after a while. There was a brandy on the table in front of me though I had not ordered it. Possibly it was meant for Ferguson. I downed it anyway.

‘Are you all right?’ she asked.

‘I don’t know your name,’ I said.

‘That’s nothing to get upset about,’ she said.

I laughed. I liked that. I liked her.

‘It’s Romy, Romy Toussaint,’ she said. She gave me her business card. I gave her one of mine.

‘Snap,’ she said, perusing the text. ‘Private investigations? How exciting.’

‘Toussaint?’

‘It’s my mother’s maiden name. I think it’s a better fit than Ferguson.’

‘Ferguson is a strong name,’ said the professor, but there was a twinkle in his eye. They’d already had this argument long ago, you could tell.

‘Romy. Like in the book,’ I said.

She seemed confused.

‘
For Romy. Daddy’s sweetheart for ever.
’

‘Ah yes. It doesn’t take much to make you cry, does it?’

‘That wasn’t it,’ I said. ‘Although yes, I suppose it was, in a way. I have a daughter I haven’t seen in a while and watching you and your father together…’

‘It’s a scene you’ve yet to have,’ she said, her fingers fluttering near her mouth in dismay. ‘Unless you’re lying to me again and it’s really because your pants are too tight.’

I shook my head. ‘I won’t lie to you again,’ I said.

Ferguson leaned towards me. ‘I took the liberty of hailing you a taxi,’ he said. ‘I hope you don’t mind.’

I thanked him and apologised again and said goodbye. I got in the cab and thought for a moment. I said to the driver: ‘New Scotland Yard.’

I hung around outside, drinking overpriced coffee-flavoured piss. This was one of the downsides of no longer being on the inside. Half my time was spent skulking in the shadows waiting for someone, or for something to happen. The coffee seemed to be lasting longer than it ought but that was because the bucketing rain kept topping it up. My gaze darted around the windows where I knew Mawker had his office. If I was caught out here it would only give him license to tongue-lash me, the by-the-numbers prick.

A flash of colour on Broadway: Phil Clarke, aka The Kingfisher, cut across to where I was moping outside St Ermin’s Hotel on Caxton Street, keeping the lion statues company. As I said, the pathologist had a bit of a thing for braces. I say ‘bit of a thing’ but it was more like an obsession. Or maybe even a fetish. I could well believe he’d wear them along with a leather thong and nothing else when he was back home in South Ken. These were emerald green, shining like wet electricity, beneath a two-thousand-pound Tom Ford suit.

‘What are you doing standing in the rain?’ he bellowed. He gripped my elbow and led me into the hotel foyer. ‘It’s drink o’clock. And I don’t mean that Styrofoam nightmare of yours. Lose the fucker. That’s an order.’

He guided me into the bar, darkly lit with open fires and walls papered crimson. We sat opposite each other on expansive sofas. The cushions were patterned with little elephants.

‘Thanks for agreeing to meet me,’ I told him.

‘Pleasure’s all mine,’ he said absently, trying to catch the barman’s eye.

He ordered cocktails for the both of us – whisky-based, unfortunately – and he tucked into his lustily while I held mine at arm’s length and eyed it suspiciously.

‘What’s this again?’ I asked.

‘Manhattan,’ he said. ‘Best cocktail there is.’

‘I’ll take your word for it,’ I said, and slid it over to him. ‘Too complex for me,’ I explained. ‘Too… brown.’

‘Racist,’ he spat, and gladly received it.

Good barman alert: he’d spotted this drinks awkwardness and stepped over to ask if I’d prefer something else.

‘I’ll have a Vesper Martini,’ I said.

‘Christ,’ said Clarke. ‘No matter how much you try, the call won’t come.’

‘What call? I’d accept any at the moment, to get away from you, the mood you’re in.’

‘Barbara Broccoli. Drink your fanboy drink. Bloody amateur.’

I looked at Clarke’s hands while he drank. They were small and neat and very pink, like boiled crab claws peeled back to the meat. I wondered if he smelled of anything under that bourbon – of his latex gloves, perhaps, or the juices that invariably coated them.

‘Shaken?’ the barman asked.

‘Stirred, actually,’ I said, pointedly.

‘Let’s get to it then, Double-O Seven,’ he said. ‘I’m having one more of these then I’m catching a cab home for lamb chops and a blow job.’

‘You know why I’m bugging you,’ I said. ‘Martin Gower. Anything you can tell me about him?’

‘Well, should I tell you anything, of course,’ he said, spearing olives on a plastic skewer, ‘upstairs would carpet me so fast I’d have rug burns bone deep.’

‘I know,’ I said. The same old game. The ego massage. The long, slow waltz towards a back-scratch promise. We did all that, but the theatre wasn’t over. He flourished a napkin and wiped his mouth with it, his eyes never leaving mine. He had slightly protuberant eyes that made him look perpetually surprised. He folded the napkin and placed it on the table. One more sip of his cough syrup cocktail and:

‘Calling card. That’s what you’re after, isn’t it?’

‘Not necessarily. Just anything out of the ordinary. You know, anything exotic, anything that might give me some direction.’

‘Guy gets carved like a Sunday roast and you want exotic.’

‘You know what I mean. Why dismantle someone like that? It takes time. It takes effort. Was it done to disguise something? Conceal something? Or is the butchery its own message? A clue in itself?’

‘A come on? You’re assuming this guy wants to be caught?’

‘Not at all. But it crosses your mind from time to time.’

‘There’s been nothing like this. This is a first. It won’t be the last.’

‘No,’ I said, feeling a shudder work its way through my legs. ‘I know that.’

I wondered if the business of the suits and the pricey drinks and the bluster and blague were part of an act. I thought Clarke one of those people who had to inhabit a character. If he’d been a reporter he’d have met me in a boozer wearing a raincoat. Maybe he was lonely. He never volunteered anything about his private life, beyond the broadest of brush strokes. Neither did I, and I didn’t because I didn’t want people to know how utterly desolate my life was. My grim little cycle of vodka and cat food and photographs of ghosts. Maybe lamb chops and a blow job was code for Pot Noodle and a wank. Maybe he was really, really good at yoga.

‘It’s interesting what you said about disguise. Concealment.’

I narrowed my eyes at him. ‘Why?’

‘I found a puncture wound. Very small. Back of the neck.’

I had a vision of a body on a meat hook, and gave voice to it.

‘No,’ Clarke said. ‘Nothing like that. This is smaller. Clean too. A meat hook would show tearing where the weight of the body has worked against it.’

‘Fatal wound?’ I suggested.

‘Again, no. This was designed to incapacitate. Not to kill.’

‘Incapacitate? How?’

‘It’s what’s called a C2 complete. By which I mean the spinal cord was damaged at the second cervical vertebra.’ He stuck two fingers against the skin on the back of my neck. ‘Right there. Total paralysis.’

‘Why not just knock them out? Use a cosh?’

Clarke drained his glass and stared at it as if wishing it was self-replenishing. ‘My guess is that would have been too risky. You bash someone over the head and you could kill them. And this guy obviously—’

‘Wanted to keep him alive.’

‘For a while at least, yes. It would seem.’

He left then, but not before warning me again that this was strictly off the record and that if it should get back to his bosses that he’d been sharing delicate information I’d wake up short of a kidney or two.

* * *

Still no word from Craig Taft. I had to be patient. This was no ordinary writing group. This wasn’t ‘What I Did in My Holidays’ or ‘Tonight, boys and girls, we’re going to write a poem about autumn’. Nobody in this group was over thirty-five, which meant it wasn’t a thinly veiled lonely hearts club, or a support network for the romantically crippled. If you belonged to a gang of any sort at that age you were committed. There was a camaraderie, and a sense of competition; I remembered as much from my days playing Sunday League football as a teenager in the north-west. It was a savage kind of loyalty, a dangerous sort of love, even, existing for as long as the match lasted, or the training session. You felt, in moments of extremis – a goal down; the loss of a teammate to a dirty foul; a sending off – a kinship that went deeper than what it meant to be friends. You felt you might die for these people. You felt you might kill for them.

I felt an old, ill-defined rage come over me. It was too wayward to be part of what I had experienced after the death of my wife. That was tied up in complex emotions connected to frustration and impotence. This was connected – I was sure – to those trench warfare brothers of mine. I had not enjoyed that level of intimacy or involvement any time since; certainly nothing like it had existed at Bruche when I was undergoing police training, or at Walton Lane nick, my first and last posting after I’d passed out. Family engendered it – to some extent – but at a level of reserve. I missed it; pure and simple. I missed having someone in my life who meant something.

It was getting late; all day, for one reason or another, I’d been a coil of nervous tension. I needed to relax. Too often these days, no matter if I went to bed early, or – miracle of miracles! – without a drink in me, I’d wake up the next day feeling as though I’d been ploughing a field with a bent fork. I ached everywhere. My teeth ached. Once I’d decided it couldn’t be Mengele beating the shit out of me with the cricket bat in the night, I realised it must be stress. I was going to bed with more knots in me than a sailor’s practice rope. Sleep was failing to unpick any of them. Wake, angst, repeat. It didn’t help, I suppose, that I had the posture of a wanking monkey.

I’d meant to walk home, but it was another beautiful London evening, so I strolled north-east, enjoying the warmth in the air, and the purpling sky. I wondered what Romy Toussaint was doing, and with whom she might be doing it. And a tender thought turned to a sour one and I remembered how it had gone with Melanie Henriksen.

Don’t do that again
, I thought.
You can’t do that again
.

I was on the Strand, heading towards Aldgate. The sound of traffic had reduced to a murmur so I was able to hear the call of birds roosting in the buildings above me. Melanie had done nothing to deserve what had happened to her. Her only crime had been to be receptive to my overtures. She had become a target, a fulcrum for a bad person to lean on in order to get to me, because I cared about her. The monsters in this city are not stupid. They know the best way to harm you, or stop you from getting to them, is to find out who you love. Love is a killer, in this business.