The Fahrenheit Twins (13 page)

Stumbling and cursing, as if his revived consciousness were an unwieldy burden he must balance on the framework of his soul, he burst out of his own front door, immediately drenched by the rain, and confirmed that Hirsch had fled, taking the girl with him. Had this been minutes or hours ago? On no account must the blackguard be permitted to find the girl’s family, nor even wave the body under the noses of police or other meddlers. By the grace of God, no one had yet set eyes on his poor shepherdess – whose fate hung in the balance, entirely dependent on urgent rescue – except for the taxidermist and his driver, both of whom could be dispatched efficiently with the knife. The same curved, wooden-handled tanning knife with the ten-inch blade that had slid, with such buttery ease, into the soft flesh of his shepherdess, liberating her from her drab life as a tannery drudge and offering her an altogether cleaner, more cheerful future as the jewel in his grand display.

Within minutes he was seated in his carriage, rattling and skidding through the deluge towards the town, his knife nestled in his lap. He was still giddy and queasy, but the sound and the sensation of cobblestones under the wheels of his cabin gave him heart: he had reached the solid streets of Altchester already, and would surely draw abreast, any moment, with Hirsch’s much meaner and slower vehicle. What’s more, the farther he got, the less the elements seemed to resist him: the downpour thinned, the lightning ceased to flash, and the thunder kept its counsel.

Mr Clark peered out into the gloom. The streetlamps glimmered indistinct behind their veil of drizzle. A glimpse of peach-tinged light from a public house, and the sound of music, reassured Mr Clark that the world was carrying on much as usual, and that the prevailing hum of normalcy had yet to be disturbed by indignant alarms. Shabby street vendors were emerging from shelter, sniffing out customers for their squalid wares. The warmth stored within the sewers and the dark brickwork of the buildings was escaping as steam.

‘Faster!’ yelled Mr Clark – with such vehemence that the wound in his chest throbbed. Nevertheless his annoyance was justified: the advance of the carriage had, with a sudden lurch, slackened off, pitching him forward. After scrabbling in his lap to check that the knife was still there, he slid open the cabin window and poked his head out into the darkness, squinting to determine what was obstructing progress.

He peered for no longer than a few moments, however, before uneasily sliding his window closed again and retracting his head into the raised lapels of his fur coat. In his nostrils and on his lips, he could taste an odour, familiar and yet monstrously intensified: dog dung and cured meat, both in immense quantities, as if a mist of liquefied ordure was drizzling from the skies and the street was paved with butchered flesh. Such was the smell borne by those who worked in the tannery; such was the perfume of those whose daily task was to chisel maggots out of what would soon be coats and gloves; such was the pungency of those who must rub bucketloads of canine filth into the festering hides of dead cattle.

Ashton Allan Clark huddled inside the vehicle which, by now, had come to a standstill. The horse snorted impatiently, and beat its hooves against the cobbles, but succeeded only in jingling its harness and agitating the contents of the cabin – that is, Mr Clark. It seemed to him that his carriage was being stealthily enveloped in a sea of shuffling, half-human forms, a noiseless horde of the walking dead.

In that moment of reconnaissance before pulling his head in, he had seen ghastly pale faces, listless staring eyes, grey flesh showing through torn and threadbare clothing. Now he fancied he could see, every few heartbeats, a naked hand pawing at the rain-spattered windowpanes of his cabin – a different hand each time. Impossible, surely! Phantoms of an over-developed imagination. Yet wasn’t that another ghostly palm? No sooner had the five gloveless fingers loomed into his vision than they had vanished. Mr Clark nerved himself to slide open the shutter once more.

‘Can you not push through!’ he shouted up at the invisible driver. No answer came, except the murmurous hubbub of a gathering crowd. The horse had stopped snorting and jingling its harness; indeed, there was no evidence that the carriage was any longer attached to the animal; it might have been unharnessed, abandoned, marooned in a moat of human refuse. Mr Clark slammed the window shut against the stink, cautioning himself to resist the fears that might unman him.

But there! There on the window-pane! That was
without
doubt
a hand, a female hand, sliding its wet fingertips along the glass – and was that a cackle of laughter? Another hand! Another slide along the glass, another cackle! Did these women not understand that this intrusion was no joke? No wonder they could find no better work than the tannery, if their manners were as coarse as this!

Clark shut his eyes tightly, reassuring himself that the procession must be almost over; he could not believe that his employees, numerous though they were, had bred so profusely as to constitute a larger swarm than had yet passed. They were finite; they had their wretched little homes to go to and their wretched little children to feed; their work, if it was half as arduous as they were wont to plead to his foreman, ought to have given them an appetite for sleep. But no! To his horror, the cabin began to rock back and forth; the walls creaked and the floor swivelled beneath his feet. He opened his eyes, to see a face at the window: a girl’s face, pale and pretty, lips parted, breathing vapour. Her hair was plastered to her forehead with rain; her eyes were as dark as holes. For an instant only he saw her, and then she slipped below the range of his vision, as the entire carriage was lifted up like a vessel borne aloft by rising floodwaters.

‘Set me down!’ he shrieked. ‘Set me down!’ But they did not set him down.

Remembering his knife, he clutched it in his fist, swung open the door and leaned out into the gaseous, swirling dark, ready to slash without compunction at whatever flesh, bone or sinew squirmed beneath him. Before his blade could make its first incision, however, a powerful hand sprang out of the murk, pink and vicious like a stoat flayed alive, and seized hold of Mr Clark’s oily black beard. One merciless tug sent him toppling into space.

The body of Ashton Allan Clark was not found until seventy years after his disappearance, by which time the descendents of the poor girl he’d murdered had long since given up hope of bringing him to justice, and his tannery had succumbed to arson, its unpeopled contents roasted to ash and fed into the sky above.

According to the testimony of the man who drove him through Altchester on his final ride, Mr Clark had begun the journey in a state of bloodless pallor, exhaling noxious chemicals with every panting breath; the cabman had presumed his destination was a doctor’s surgery, with all possible urgency. But barely half-way, just as they were crossing the narrow bridge over the river Alt, Mr Clark flung open the door of his cabin and, evidently maddened by delusions, leapt into the inky waters.

His body (it was later determined) drifted into the mouth of a large cast-iron pipe, one of several such provided to channel effluvia from the tannery direct into the River Alt. Mr Clark’s corpulent physique allowed him to lodge as a sort of plug in the interior of the pipe, a plug which, as he swelled up in death, became unshiftably snug. The blockage was noted, but funds for public works were notoriously limited in Altchester, and it was some months before any action was taken, and this consisted merely of a man in a diving suit poking a primitive tool into the aperture, scraping and scooping out as much of the mysterious obstruction as he could before exhaustion overcame him.

Finally, in 1931, when the town of Altchester was being wholly rebuilt, renamed and refurbished, the Alt was diverted and all the land around the former tannery dug up. It was then that the cast-iron pipe was dredged up and spent some months drying in the sun. Upended by a crane, it disgorged a strange creature indeed: a perfectly cylindrical, otter-like beast, with vestigial legs and a wide-mouthed frog face, hollowed out like a lady’s hand-muff. It was kept in the Natural History Museum until 1989, when an undetected flaw in its storage conditions resulted in its becoming, at long last, irredeemably corrupted.

LESS THAN PERFECT

Lachlan was a detective. Eighteen years old, no educational qualifications, two big bony fists. He’d tried stacking pallets, but it didn’t suit his nature. So he was a detective. The pay wasn’t great, the hours could be better, but he had no dependants and a sleek new car with automatic windows and a CD player. Criminals watch out: Lachlan’s about.

Of course, criminals never suspected Lachlan was about. That was the whole point. They were always amazed when he caught them, as if they would’ve expected a detective to look like Columbo, with a raincoat and a cigarette. Which just proved how stupid they were. Smoking wasn’t allowed, for a start.

The golden rule of being a detective was: Trust No One. Criminals came in all shapes, all ages, all sizes, all sexes. Both sexes, that is.

From a distance, through a dawdling cluster of other bodies, Lachlan saw Mrs Weymouth coming towards him. She was immaculate as always, her dyed auburn hair held in place by spray and metal clips. She hadn’t seen him yet; her attention was on a sheaf of papers she held in her hands as she walked. Despite his grudge against her, he had to admire the way she could move so confidently, even on high heels, with her legs constricted in a tight knee-length skirt and a matronly bosom that made her top-heavy. Her ugly square face was uglier for frowning as she read the papers in her hands, yet she moved like a model.

When she was close enough for him not to hit any innocent bystanders, he shot her in the chest with the Magnum. The impact lifted her out of her strapless black shoes, tossing her body through the air like a string bag of fruit. She landed with a smack on the polished floor, chest pumping blood, a burst container. He shot her once more to make sure, and her flaccid body slid along the floor on its own juice.

‘I’d like a word with you, Lachlan,’ said Mrs Weymouth, drawing abreast with him near the fresh fruit and vegetables.

‘Yes?’ Lachlan responded, his voice a discreet murmur. All around them in the supermarket aisle, the mass of humanity was shambling by, in weary pursuit of all the good things in life. Reluctantly Lachlan took his eyes off them, knowing that for some, the lure of low cost was not as attractive as no cost at all.

Mrs Weymouth seemed unconcerned by what evil misdeeds might be going on behind her back. Instead, she reached down into Lachlan’s shopping trolley and fetched out a single banana, one of several he’d only just put in there. She held it up in the air between them and squeezed its yellow shaft with her hard, crimson-nailed fingertips.

‘Yes?’ he prompted her.

‘It’s soft,’ she told him, squeezing the day-glo skin over and over. ‘See? Soft inside.’

‘I don’t examine them,’ Lachlan protested mildly. ‘I just chuck ’em in.’

‘That’s exactly what I mean,’ said Mrs Weymouth, her voice tight with irritation. ‘You
throw
them into the trolley. I’ve seen you do it. Bananas. Apples. Peaches, even. Then later when you put them back, they’re bruised. Next day, they’re history.’

Lachlan wished she’d talk quieter. It would be just like her, unfair bitch, to blow his cover and then expect him to improve his detection rate.

‘Are you saying,’ he dared to challenge, ‘that all the fruit here is perfect until I touch it?’

Mrs Weymouth sighed ostentatiously, her eyes half-closed. Her eyelids had about a hundred wrinkles on them: she was as old as his foster-mum – older, even.

‘We do our best,’ she said.

‘So do I, Mrs Weymouth,’ said Lachlan, turning his face away from her, in a gesture he hoped might remind her of the unsupervised multitudes overrunning the store. ‘I’ve got to keep my eyes on everybody. Sometimes maybe I’m looking so hard, what I’m putting in the trolley gets a bit of a bump.’

But Mrs Weymouth wasn’t finished with him yet.

‘I saw a packet of chocolate rollettes you put back on the shelf yesterday,’ she said, ‘half-squashed. The damage was caused by the sharp edge of a tin or suchlike while in your trolley. No customer is going to buy those rollettes now. They’ll choose a packet that’s perfect. The damaged one will end up in the clearance racks, and we’ll lose money on it.’

Lachlan leaned on the cross-bar of his trolley and stared her straight in the eye.

‘So sue me,’ he said. Then, aloud: ‘Sorry. It won’t happen again.’

She nodded and turned on her ridiculous heels. He let her go; she wasn’t worth the ammo. He had work to do.

All day, Lachlan walked the aisles of the supermarket, taking items off the shelves, loading them into his trolley, moving on; then, one by one, he would put the items back, as if he’d changed his mind or discovered he couldn’t afford them. All day, as he played this mindless game of selection and deselection, he watched the shoppers, appraising their clothing, scrutinising their hands, reading their faces. In this fluorescent fairyland of unbeatable offers, friendly service and loyalty schemes, hordes of would-be thieves were in constant motion, sniffing for their opportunity. Lachlan couldn’t hope to catch them all, but he could catch some.