High John the Conqueror, page 21
‘Then we’re not going to bring Max in?’ I cry out.
‘Thank you, Balance. Thank you for at last demonstrating to me that you have actually been paying attention, and that I have not been dancing with myself.’
‘What about all that leave no stone unturned stuff this morning? I heard you say that people will see this as our fault, when we had the opportunity to stop it and didn’t.’ I am talking too quickly now. ‘We’re as close to them as anyone is likely to be, and now you are saying that we should back off…’
‘Your way isn’t the right way to make this right, Balance.’
I say something I should not. ‘Why don’t you want to solve this case, sir?’
‘Don’t be such an arrogant bastard, Terry,’ he retorts. ‘If you want to overplay our hand, you can fuck off to America and join a SWAT team. The way we keep the pressure up isn’t through dawn raids and closing down our options but by doing just enough to make them testy, and make no mistake, you’ve already done that. Then we watch them like hawks to see what they’ll do next. That way we actually have something on them when it comes to making arrests. It’s bodies versus connections at this stage, and the connections are, as you know, circumstantial as they relate to circumstances that have very little to do with the particulars of this case, which are missing bodies.’
‘So what are you suggesting?’
‘A more moderate version of what you want, that will probably still be enough for me to be shitcanned, which I don’t think any of us can realistically discount. You’ve already asked for tails on Swillcut and Fallgrief, am I right?’
I nod. ‘Yes, because both of them are implicated to their eyeballs.’
‘Right, and what about The Well and the landlady of the Hearse.’
‘Small fry, without a doubt. They’re so scared that I can’t see them leading us anywhere or to anything.’
‘Agreed. In which case we keep Swillcut and Fallgrief under twenty-four-hour surveillance, bugger the cost, and Masters too, but from a very tactful distance, as I’ll never be able to justify it, none of it, especially with the Queen coming, if we don’t catch them at anything. I’m not going with the other big names because at this stage I’ve no reason to suspect that anyone else is involved in whatever is going on here; conspiracies work when they don’t involve numbers, simply a few well-placed people of influence.’ Grace pauses to catch his breath. ‘There may be more involved, but for now, God help us if you’re wrong about those you have already fingered, as we need our three suspects to commit crimes in the next four days to remain this side of dog food. Once her Royal Highness has come and gone, people will start asking questions again. Until then, I could pretend that this has something to do with Her Majesty’s visit if asked, and of course, we keep Max right out of the loop but observed.’ Grace backs up and lands heavily on one of the plastic chairs provided for diners.
‘Christopherson should do it. He’ll look the most innocuous if Max should catch him at it. If he is linked to those others, then the last thing we need is to alert him to the possibility that we suspect him of anything, as we’ll need him to go to them — or them to him, if you see what I mean. So if things start to get difficult,’ Grace tells Christopherson, who has approached us with a sausage roll and a banana, ‘let him get away from you rather than challenge or chase him. I know he doesn’t like using phones so keeping an eye on him without going the full AC-12 shouldn’t be too hard. And then, and only then, if we can see the unbreakable link that leads us to the mispers, along with some plausible narrative that can actually explain what is happening to them, we can start issuing warrants.’ He takes the banana from Christopherson and stuffs it in his pocket. ‘Here, you can eat that other thing.’
‘Thank you, sir.’
‘Don’t thank me. For the moment you’ve put the cart several fucking miles in front of the horse, Balance. So please accept that I am doing far more for you than you deserve, and that I wouldn’t even be doing this if my career wasn’t so close to the finishing line as for me to see the cream teas waiting for me at my retirement home. And if I lose the police pension, well, I’ll still have the army one to visit Poundland with.’
‘I appreciate that you are trying to meet me halfway on this…’ I begin.
‘I am doing much more than that, believe me, so don’t you dare ask me to do any more.’ Grace glares at me. ‘I’m not saying at this stage that if you went to the press you wouldn’t succeed in blackening Masters’ name a little, showing us up to be ineffectual lickspittles to power and the rest, but we’d never find these kids and this mystery would become your whole life. Sky Crime might want you as a talking head and their resident misper expert — chuntering on about his greatest unresolved regret, the case he could never crack, the mystery that remained unsolved, because he wasn’t allowed to lock up the real villains by shadowy forces — that would be you, Balance. A bit of consultancy work on the side to top up your record collection, maybe even a private investigator, given your waywardness, but you would be finished here, knowing deep down you lacked the self-discipline and humility to do anything of consequence as a policeman…’
‘Harsh, sir.’
‘Everyone has a limited amount they can do in their lives, Terry, but you want to be the one that finds that out for himself, and not have it said about you by others.’
‘But what about the drug angle, the stuff I found at Pertwee’s and the reaction it got at the Hearse? There is something new on the market and it is linked to this, sir,’ I say, woefully aware that it is not a connection I am in any position to explain.
‘It may be. The same rules apply.’ He looks up at me, waiting for some sign of assent. I nod.
‘Good. Wait for Porton Down to find out what it is and what it does. But until you can prove it has anything to with any of the above, keep it to yourself, as while I am sure Masters snorts coke out of his personal trainer’s rectum, the idea of him as drug kingpin will only help further discredit you and make this thing look like a bullshit tabloid headline, lacking only Barbara Windsor claiming to have taken Prince Edward’s virginity in a caravan to elevate it into a great British farce. I repeat, we watch them and we wait for them to link up. But we do nothing to them directly, and don’t even think of getting clever with some kind of entrapment caper, or I will actually kill you.’
Tamla touches my wrist, almost tenderly. ‘If they are making moves that implicate them, they’re bound to use the Queen’s visit as cover — why wouldn’t they? But we won’t be watching her; we’ll be watching them.’
‘Exactly,’ concludes Grace. ‘And then we can finally shed some light on this godawful business. She’ll be surrounded by her minders and uniforms, the perfect opportunity for the creatures of the night to think they can go about their business unobserved and plainclothes to observe them. Put our heads to this, and we could yet land the plane in the right place.’
The Waterloo train pulls in and the trickle of commuters leaving the station turns into a human wave, the speed and haste with which they charge towards their parked cars, taxis and waiting children, like the survivors of a great daily disaster, the relief with which they can resume their actual lives a more damning indictment of work than absenteeism ever could be. A smaller flow move the other way to the departing train, none of whom look like Lockheart, Nana Pertwee or any of our other mispers.
‘That crack in the world is just getting deeper and deeper,’ I mutter, looking at them. ‘These are all zombies. Our mispers aren’t vanishing by public transport today.’
‘Zombies? What a morbid way of describing the foot soldiers of our economy, Balance! I don’t see that at all. I see hard-working men and woman keeping this country alive,’ objects Grace.
‘Ha! We’re being softened up for the killing blow,’ Tamla snorts. ‘And who knows in what form it will come? The Martian invasion, nuclear war, a global pandemic or asteroid from above? One thing Terry’s right about is the size of the crack. This lot are exhausted. None of them will cram onto the shame train to defend the existing order when the time comes…’
‘Nonsense. Dystopian dreamtime,’ chuckles Grace. ‘They all make decent livings and know who pays their wages.’
‘You think any one of them would lift a finger to save the system, sir?’ Tamla asks. ‘Think again, they reckon that’s our job. The wage slaves will disappear into their boltholes the first chance they get and stay there until they believe it is safe to come out, which will be never…’ Tamla makes a falling motion with both hands, the light catching the indented cracks on her nail varnish. ‘And then we’ll have even more people to look for, won’t we?’
‘I can’t wait,’ says Grace. ‘Come on. Let the uniforms pick up the nightshift. There’s nothing more for us to see here.’
*
Coming home is no longer a metaphysical adventure for me, simply a practical event, which at least puts me on a more even footing with my neighbours, who if bothered by such category distinctions, have yet to mention anything to me. Since the building I grew up in was knocked down and rebuilt as someone else’s house, I no longer regard ‘home’ as a physical place but as an idea that will materialise again if I experience a necessary connection with my surroundings. Until then I live in a converted Methodist chapel on one of the four hills that surround the cathedral city, tacked to the edge of a village-town that has only nearly avoided, by half a mile of woodland, being absorbed into the creeping conurbation that sucks the new developments outwards. The chapel is at the end of a row of subsiding, sloping and formerly swanky cod-Regency terraces, broken up into apartments, all in disrepair, populated by exiles fresh from the economic cleansing of Stoke Newington and Dalston, instigating a further domino run of local banishment as ageing townspeople are driven further west, into NHS funded care-homes or the graveyard of the C of E church opposite.
From my place, the main thoroughfare ambles quaintly past a pub that is so like the living rooms of the houses adjoining that punters assume they have stumbled into a private dwelling, a closed library, shut post office, abandoned pet shop and two other boarded-up pubs, ending up at a rickety bridge where an empty gallery occupies the former tannery that once ensured leather was the town’s most famous manufacturing export, before quiet neglect and substance abuse took its place, the odiferous tang of animal skins and urine still present in its walls. I enjoy wandering about the parish and surrounding water meadows, which, without a dog, would mark me as either mad or a criminal were I not a policeman and from London: the locals ready to make allowances for key workers and geographical outcasts.
Inside the chapel the structure of the building is the same as it was when the three rooms were a lively house of prayer. The congregation that shared a wholesome and dignified existence when Methodism was in fashion nearly a century ago, living, singing and believing together, are no longer with us, their observance failing to entice their children and grandchildren, which with rumours the place is haunted, allow me to enjoy an open-plan room with a very high ceiling, a pretty stained-glass window, kitchen and lavatory, at an indifferent rent. As I have never had a religious experience in church or been scared of ghosts, whom I find strangely comforting, there are no unfortunate connotations for me here. And since I could not believe in my own importance if I did not already believe in the existence of God, who provides neither consolation or certainty, simply the best explanation for my meaning-giving tendencies, I have nothing to fear as the nights darken and shadows cluster.
Closing the door behind me, and with my usual complacency failing to lock it, I turn on one of the half-dozen side lamps that I prefer to the industrial-strength floodlights on the ceiling, which illuminate too boldly, and ask myself what did I expect to see, other than a space with no one in it? It is a default setting that will not change by itself, despite my bed being so large as to appear to be waiting for someone else to come into the room to make my arrangements less bereft. Living alone is a kind of act, without a partner to reveal your hidden self, who at least knows who you are most of the time, you are free to project an unchallenged performance, as no one cares enough about you to correct you or set you straight. But after a day in lively company, the emptiness of it can hit me with the force of one year turning into the next too quickly, the usual vision of acute loneliness, built into my natural appreciation of things, impossible to pass off as the ennui common to professionals who live too much in their heads. What I feel at this moment as I survey every empty corner of the room goes impolitely beyond that. Tonight I believe in untidy Platonism; I register it in the hunger of my poor bloody heart: all of this has fallen so far from the idea I had of my life that it is incumbent upon me to do something at once, to cease living in my nightly speculations and change course, so that all this consciousness is not wasted.
Pathetically, I peer into the hollow reflection of my outline in the larger of the two playschool windows that are the eyes of the house, the stained-glass star between them depicting the Lamb of God, and wonder where the lessons of my father and his friends have got me, when the country is quite possibly run by demonic fornicators and agents of the Devil. Despair as an impetus towards action is always followed by the even firmer resolution that I have what I deserve and I am fortunate to have even that. It is a pattern I have been trapped in the negative feedback loop of for years, triggered increasingly by the realisation of how poorly I have fared next to less talented, generous and public-spirited individuals, who bathe in rose water whilst I make do with the soap suds from last night’s washing up.
I groan loudly, daring anything to hear me.
What a predictable catalyst visiting Masters’ lair turned out to be, opening up too many unfortunate and glaring points of comparison: we are both preposterous egotists who live in elegantly under-furnished monasteries, my own version thereof a squat next to his fully realised ideal; the Linn turntable, my dad’s old Heals furniture, a silver-mounted photograph of my parents in their prime, the model soldiers and Penguin classics stacked along the pew, all supposed to cover my nakedness before creation, and usually do, are basically the cut-price take on Masters’ grand aesthetic. The pitiful pride I try not to take in them emphasises how unlikely I am to travel as far as he has in life, whatever good I might try and do or code I uphold, and that my hating the bastard will not make this knowledge any easier to bear over the coming decades. Slowly, I take off my jacket and undo my tie, the conceit that saves me from jealousy unable to take the sting out of the chasmic distance between this rented God-shack and the pagan ebullience of Sebastopol House.
‘Tumphhh, tumphhh…’
There is something at the window: a scratching sound. I am so used to noises here, the grinding of pipes and cawing of crows that fly in by mistake, that I would normally wait for an explosion before worrying, yet as I have not exactly been forging powerful new alliances today, caution kicks in. I wait for it to happen again, which it does: possibly stones, several small ones, being scattered lightly against my windowpane, the intention not to break the glass but to unnerve. I pull out my cricket bat, an old SS Jumbo, which lives under the bed, and edge towards the window the noise has come from. Its edifice protrudes over the street, a couple of feet above a diminutive stone staircase that rises from the pavement to the two interlocking blue doors that kept the eager faithful at bay every Sunday, sat like nostrils on a punchable face. The other window rests over the street on the other side of the entrance and is just as exposed to passing interest. If whoever out there has come mob-handed, and decides to take both windows at once, I am done for, and that is before they discover they can simply walk through the front door. I look to the back entrance in the kitchen, which leads straight into the garden, stretching out unfenced into a large moat with public access. Should my assailants know anything of the terrain, I cannot look to escape that way either…
Recognising that I am running away with myself and creating The Long Good Friday out there, I clear my throat and cautiously peel back the thin net curtain. Standing under the mottled glow of the old street lamp… is Eileen Pertwee, only her face visible, her sleek running gear blending predatorily into the night. Seeing that she has got my attention, Eileen rolls back her shoulders and pulls up her top.
‘I bet you’ve been thinking about these all day, you fucking pervert!’
Unfortunately, they have not been the only things I have been thinking about. A car that I thought was empty turns its lights on and quickly pulls away from the curb, leaving Eileen in a cloak of exhaust, and me with the near certainty that every move I now make is being watched.
*
He lives in real time and treats everything as important, despite knowing none of it is serious. Here in his bath, ‘The HMS Invincible’, a battleship worthy of inclusion in Jellicoe’s fleet at Jutland, Masters has attained the serenity it would take most tyrants a lifetime of global decapitation to even approach the sublime heights of. From the mentholated depths of his steel tub, he glares up through the conically aligned glass ceiling, allowing the weather, surrounding planets and cosmos into the room, without the inconvenience of two-way exposure to the elements and nature protruding beyond her station. This observatory and chamber of contemplation are Sebastopol House’s crowning achievement, and when he is anywhere else, this is where he yearns to return to. The Takahashi TOA-150B F/7.3 Triplet Ortho Apochromat Refractor Telescope, his current favourite for spying on Saturn’s rings and Jupiter’s moons, lies jettisoned by a pile of towels, a metal penis which having achieved perfectly realised thing-hood through the performance of the duties it was designed for, is satiated and entitled to rest. He cannot believe he only paid £2,000 for it, or would have, had he not been gifted it for a load of balls he spouted at a charity lunch about a space programme he has no intention of ever launching unless matters really get too hot for him down here. If only everything could be so easy to get away with. At this he gurgles playfully and wipes the bubbles off his chin, a baby-man free from the reach of the adults, because truth be told, he would find life even more prosaic than he does if things really were that simple.
