‘Thank you very much.’
After several minutes she found the pub, which had no sign. Dozens of people had overflowed into the street outside, and she endured several wolf-whistles and a pinch on the bottom as she made her way through; then, inside, there was no space to move, and a belligerent song was being sung in an interestingly atonal mode, so she had no choice but to stand where she was and shout at the top of her voice, ‘Does anyone know Seth Roach?’ After she’d shouted it three times the song diminished a little, and suddenly she felt as if every single person in the pub were staring at her. (She’d never been anywhere like this before, and as tremulous as she did feel, there was something exhilarating and libidinous about the crowdedness of the place, the sweat and beer and unforced jubilation all sloshing around under its low wooden ceiling. She thought of how commonplace her summer adventure with Sinner would probably seem to any of these men and women. And the bold, unruly, port-swilling boys her friends gossiped about at balls, the Wykehamists and Etonians who were ‘really wild, really
too
wild’: here, they wouldn’t last long enough to recite their middle names.) ‘Does anyone know Seth Roach?’ she said again, trying to keep her voice
steady. Several people shouted back what she took to be some unintelligible expletive and all her confidence fled her, until she realised with relief that it was not an expletive but a name. ‘Frink? Frink?’ they were saying.
At last, Frink was produced from the back of the pub.
‘Yes, miss?’ He held a pint of beer in each hand.
‘You know Seth Roach.’
‘I knew him, indeed. But I ain’t seen him in over a year. You a friend of his?’
Evelyn was deeply grateful to this kind-looking man for asking that question without a hint of sarcasm or incredulity. ‘He’s dead,’ she said.
Frink’s face fell, but he didn’t look very surprised by the news. ‘Well. That’s a sorry thing to hear. I do thank you for coming to tell me.’
‘How old was he?’
‘Would have been eighteen, if I remember right. Does his mother know?’
Evelyn had never thought about Sinner having parents, any more than one thinks about a thunderstorm having parents. ‘No. But I need your help.’
‘With the funeral? I’ll put in what I can,’ said Frink, but a bit sceptically this time – Evelyn didn’t look poor.
‘It’s not that,’ said Evelyn, and she did her best to explain about Sinner’s terrible debt to her brother. He listened with a frown. ‘Is there anything you can do to help us?’ she finished. ‘To help him?’
‘You mean, bury a body so no one can find it?’ said Frink. ‘That’s not my line of work, miss. Never has been. I’m sorry.’
‘You must know somebody.’
‘It’s a dirty business.’
‘He hasn’t been murdered or anything like that.’ She recalled with shock that the word ‘murdered’ referred to something that was now actually within the range of her experience.
‘Still, it’s not just a matter of—’
‘Listen to me. I have him in a taxi at the end of the road.’
‘You what?’
‘If you don’t help us, then my friend and I will have to do it ourselves. And something will go wrong, and someone will find out, and I don’t know what will happen to the two of us, but more importantly my brother will get Sinner, and if only you knew how desperately Sinner didn’t want that to happen. …’
Frink stopped her. ‘All right. All right. I do know someone. And as luck would have it – pretty bad luck, I’d say – he’s here. But he’s not a bloke you want to get involved with. You understand me?’
‘Yes.’
‘It’s on your own head.’
‘Yes.’
‘Come on, then.’
Frink led her through the crowd to the back room of the pub, which, having no bar of its own, was not quite as crowded. Inside, a buxom girl in a torn dress giggled as she danced a parody of a waltz with a stocky man in a suit. Frink tapped the man on the shoulder.
‘All right, Albert. There’s a lady here for you to meet.’
‘Happier words were never spoken,’ said Kölmel. After apologising with exaggerated politeness to the buxom girl, he turned to Evelyn. ‘What’s your name, precious?’ he said.
‘Evelyn Erskine.’ His gaze alone was ten times worse than the pinch on the bottom outside the pub. Even the most loathsome boys at Lady Molly’s dances merely looked at her as if they wanted her, but Kölmel looked at her as if she already belonged to him and he was proud of it. She imagined it must work on quite a lot of women.
‘Erskine?’ he repeated.
‘Yes.’
Kölmel smiled and started to say something, but then stopped, as if he’d decided to hold that particular information
in reserve for the moment. Instead he said, ‘What can I do for you?’
Three hours later, she was climbing up the treacherous slope of the rubbish dump on Back Church Lane. Darkness had fallen, with not much of a moon, and she was almost glad that she couldn’t see where she was putting her feet. She carried a spade, and beside her, carrying a mallet, was Tara, and behind them, bearing Sinner’s body rolled up in a blanket, were Frink and Kölmel.
‘You serious about this place?’ said Frink, who had a scar, Evelyn had noticed earlier, on the palm of his right hand. ‘I thought we’d go out somewhere in the middle of nowhere. This is in the middle of … everything.’
‘Yes, I’m fucking serious,’ said Kölmel. ‘Don’t mean to be indiscreet, but I used to use this place all the time in the old days. You go out in the middle of nowhere, you usually get nicked on the way.’
‘Kids play here, you know.’
‘Don’t worry, I bury ’em deep. Kids shouldn’t be here, anyway. Unhygienic.’
Earlier, a handful of cash from Evelyn and a quiet word from Kölmel had been enough to make sure that the taxi driver wouldn’t tell anyone about the drunkard in his car who never seemed to snore or sober up. Now, with a combination of mallet and spade, Frink and Kölmel began to gouge a space out of the festering debris. Occasionally there would be a clang as they hit a bed frame or a bicycle or some other big skein of rusty metal, and they would have to put down their tools to haul it out of the way. The two men kept digging in this strange soil until their heads were level with Evelyn and Tara’s feet, and then for quite a while afterwards. Finally, when Kölmel was satisfied that the hole was deep enough, they climbed up out of it, panting with exertion, and got ready to hoist Sinner’s body down into the stinking entropic unconscious of the city. Their trousers were splattered with some sort of poisonous black ichor.
‘No, please, wait,’ said Evelyn.
‘What’s the matter, precious?’ said Kölmel. ‘No use blubbing. You know the old Yid curse? “
Vi tsu derleb ikh im shoyn tsu bagrobn
.” “I hope I outlive you long enough to bury you.” That’s good sense.’
‘I just want to. …’ Evelyn knelt down beside Sinner and pulled the blanket aside. She checked his fingers for rings and his chest for a locket or a good-luck charm, but there was nothing, so she went through his pockets, praying for even the most trivial souvenir. All she found was a crumpled-up piece of paper, and it was too dark to make out what was written on it, so she stuffed it into her purse. If she could have taken a lock of hair without the others seeing, she thought, she would have. But then she felt pathetic, because the urge reminded her of Morton, who had saved a ribbon that had fallen from her hair the very first time they met, and had often reminisced about how it was obvious even then that they would fall in love, when in fact she knew perfectly well he had only started talking to her because he’d just been humiliated by a prettier girl whose name she couldn’t now remember, and had only picked up the lost ribbon because it was an easy way to start flirting. Suddenly, Evelyn felt desperate that her memories of Sinner should never get a squirt of disinfectant or a coat of paint; that in ten years’ time she should not think of their time together as any less trivial, their conversations any less stilted, their coupling any less clumsy, his sentiments any less obscure, his death any less contemptible, than they really were; that all those fascinating dissonances not be transmuted into bland harmonies; that she should never give in to time, which was not the great healer, as everyone said, but the great bowdleriser; that as one of only four people in the world who knew where Sinner would rest, she should not betray the jagged truth of his life by writing herself into a beautiful tragic romance.
But perhaps there was no danger of that. ‘Anyone want
to say anything soppy about him, then, before he goes?’ said Kölmel. He looked around for a moment, snorted, and spat on the ground. ‘Thought not. The boy always was a bit of a putz.’
Back Church Lane was a curved street of ugly brown-brick offices and warehouses. ‘I just don’t see the point,’ I said to the Welshman as we drove down it, looking for the address. The dusk was seamed with glowing aeroplane contrails, and, to the west, skyscrapers blocked out most of the soft band between the upper blue and the lower gold that is the closest the sky ever comes to evading the notion of determinate hue. ‘It’s been seventy years,’ I went on, as we passed an incongruously grand wooden doorway flanked by ornamental marble columns and, above, the inscription BROWNE & EAGLE LIM.D, which I recognised as an old wool company. ‘There won’t still be a rubbish dump there. There’ll be flats or a car park or something. We can’t just demolish whatever’s there.’
But when we got there, we didn’t find flats or a car park. Nor did we find the old rubbish dump. Instead, there was a building site. And attached to the wooden fencing around the site, next to the usual warnings about hard hats being worn and children not playing nearby, was a familiar placard:
GRUBLOCK HOMES
It is our tomorrow that commands our today
The slogan was an unattributed quotation from the preface of Nietzsche’s
Human, All Too Human
. Grublock’s marketing department had loved it. I recalled, now, seeing a computer mock-up of this project on Grublock’s desk: it was to be a block of luxury flats with a rippling turquoise façade and a vegetable garden on the roof, full of young bankers who didn’t mind living in a grotty bit of Whitechapel if it meant they were only fifteen minutes’ walk from work.
‘This is extremely convenient,’ said the Welshman. He took my mobile phone out of his pocket.
‘Have you had that the whole time?’
‘Yes, I took it from your flat. You are going to telephone someone in Grublock’s organisation who will be able to disable the alarm systems on this building site. I presume you can do that?’
I nodded and he handed me the phone.
I knew this was my last chance. Whether we found Sinner’s body or not, my usefulness to the Welshman would have run out. To my enormous relief, he’d left Tara alive when we politely departed her house in Roachmorton, but I had seen far too much. He would definitely kill me. The fact was, I had nothing to lose. So instead of calling Grublock’s head of security systems I called Stuart.
‘Kevin?’ he said.
‘Hello, is that Teymur?’
‘Are you still in trouble?’
‘Yes, this is Kevin Broom. I’m at the Grublock Homes site on Back Church Lane, and I need you to – hello?’ I’d discreetly pressed the button to end the call. I looked at my phone in fake puzzlement and then dialled again, this time the real number.
‘Teymur here.’
‘Hi, yes, this is Kevin Broom again. We must have got disconnected.’
‘Pardon?’
‘As I was saying, I’m at the Grublock Homes site on Back Church Lane, and I need to gain access. Will you turn off the alarms, please? I’m sorry to call you so late.’
‘What’s this about?’
‘I’ve got a job to do for Horace.’
‘Oh, are you in touch with Mr Grublock? None of us can get hold of him. I’ve been wondering about sending somebody up to check in person, but after what happened last time I did that. …’
‘No, there’s really no need. I’d just be grateful if you could sort out this alarm.’
‘But you’ll need the keys to get on to the site, anyway.’
‘We’ve got them.’
‘You’ve got them? From where?’
‘I’m in a bit of a hurry, Teymur.’
‘Right, sorry. Just give me five minutes and it’ll be done.’
I relayed this to the Welshman. We waited fifteen minutes, to be sure, then we got out of the car and the Welshman picked the padlock on the gate to the site.
Inside, we saw that they were only just beginning to lay the foundations after clearing away the remains of whatever building had stood here before. ‘We’ll use that,’ said the Welshman, pointing to a big yellow digger. Its claw looked like a coffin ripped in half. ‘The rubbish will have been compressed over time, so we shouldn’t need to dig down more than ten or fifteen feet.’
‘You’ll need the key to start it.’
‘No, I won’t. Now, the old woman told us they dug the grave in the middle of the far end of the dump. And if she’s right, the gangster wasn’t using this place so often by the time they buried the boxer, so it should be the first skeleton we find, or at least one of the first. When we think we’re getting close, you can go in with a spade.’
‘It’ll take us for ever.’
‘No, it’ll just take us all night. And we’ve got all night. I needn’t tell you that if you try to run I shall bite your head off with the digger. Remember, we’re looking for a foot with four toes.’
So we began. After two hours the Welshman had excavated a crater of almost lunar magnitude, and there was an ammoniac gnawing at our sinuses that told us we’d reached the upper strata of the old rubbish dump. Standing at the edge of the hole, I watched closely for fragments of bone. Another hour later, my ears aching from the thumps and snarls of the
digger, I saw one. It turned out to be part of the spongy pelvis of a dog or cat. Not long after that, the bones of a human foot fell from the claws of the machine. I yelled to the Welshman and he got out to look at it. But it was a right foot with five toes: spooky, but not Sinner’s. We seemed as likely, I thought to myself, to find a hoard of gold coins or the lost manuscript of Archimedes’
On Sphere-Making
, but we carried on; and then, finally, as midnight was nearing and I was beginning to lose concentration, the digger ripped away a twisted old bicycle and beneath it, cracked and brown but still unmistakeable, was part of a human ribcage. Again I shouted to the Welshman to stop; then, carefully, I scraped away some more rubble with the spade. From what was left of the skeleton, I could see that it was a great deal shorter than my own. That didn’t mean it wasn’t just a woman’s or a child’s, of course; but a few minutes later I found the detached right foot. Four toes, like a cartoon character. Seth Roach.