King Rat (17 page)

Saul became quieter, learning more about the three creatures who constituted his circle.

He was alone on a roof, one night, sitting with his back to an air-conditioning vent, while King Rat scoured the alley below for food, when Anansi crept over the side of the building before him. Saul was still in his shadows and Anansi looked straight at him for a moment, then cast his eyes around the roof.

I’m getting better at this, thought Saul, with idle pride. Even he can’t see me now.

Anansi sneaked forward under dark red clouds which rolled around each other, belching themselves into and out of existence. They threatened rain. Anansi squatted on the roof, stripped to the waist, as always, despite the cold. He reached into his pocket and drew out a glittering handful, a shifting mass of little buzzing bodies. He smeared the insects into his mouth.

Saul’s eyes widened in fascination, even as he grimaced. He was not surprised by what he saw. He thought he could hear the humming of mother-of pearl wings obscured by Anansi’s cheeks, till those cheeks tensed and he saw Anansi suck hard, not chewing, but pursing his lips and working his mouth as if he sucked the juice from a big gobstopper.

There was the faintest of crunching sounds.

Anansi opened his mouth and poked out a tongue rolled into a tight U. He exhaled sharply, as if through a blowpipe, and a cascade of chitin shot out across the roof, scattering near Saul’s feet; the desiccated body parts of flies and woodlice and ants.

Saul rose to his feet and Anansi started a little, his eyes widening momentarily.

‘Wha’appen, pickney,’ he said evenly, gazing at Saul. The never see you there. You a quiet lickle bwoy.’

Loplop was harder to surprise. He would appear suddenly from behind chimney stacks and rubbish bins, ruffling his foppish coat behind him. His passage was always invisible. Occasionally he would look up and yell ‘Oy!’ into the firmament, and a pigeon, or a flock of starlings, or a thrush, would wheel suddenly out of the clouds, obeying his call, and perch nervously on his wrist.

He would peer at the bird, then briefly up at Saul or whoever observed him, and smile in satisfaction. He would glance back at the bird, imperious suddenly, and bark a command at it, upon which it would seem to cringe and give obeisance, bobbing its head and bowing. And then Loplop would become a good and just king all of a sudden, with no time for such puerile displays of power, and he would murmur reassuringly to his subject, and jettison it, watching it disappear with a look of noble benediction.

Saul believed that Loplop was still a little mad.

And King Rat, King Rat was the same: cantankerous and cockney and irritable and otherworldly.

Kay did not reappear with Natasha’s keys, and she was forced to wake her downstairs neighbour, with
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whom she left a spare set.

It was just like Kay to meander off and forget that he had them, and she waited for him to call with his cheerful apology. He did not call. After a couple of days she tried his number, and his flatmates said they had not seen him for ages. Natasha was heartily pissed off. After another couple of days she had a new set cut and resolved to charge him when he re-emerged.

The police did seek her out. She was taken to the station and interviewed by a quiet man named Crowley, who asked her several times in several different ways if she had seen Saul since his disappearance. He asked her if she thought Saul capable of murder. He asked her what she had thought of Saul’s father, whom she had never met, and what Saul thought of him. He asked her what Saul thought of the police. He asked what she thought of the police.

When they let her go she returned home seething, to discover a note on her door from Fabian, who was waiting for her in the pub. She fetched him back to her house where they smoked a joint and, to the sound of Fabian’s abrupt giggles, composed a Jungle track on her sequencer using loads of samples from The Bill. They christened the song Fuck You Mister Policeman Sir!.

Pete was coming around more and more. Natasha was waiting for him to make a move on her, something which seemed to happen with the majority of blokes she hung out with for any length of time.

He did not, which was a relief to her, as she was completely uninterested and did not want to have to deal with his embarrassment.

He was listening to more and more Drum and Bass, was making comments that were more and more astute. She sampled his flute and wove it into her tunes. She liked the sound it made; there was a breath of the organic about it. Normally, for the main sounds at the top end she would simply create something with her digital powers, but the soullessness those noises possessed, a quality she often revelled in, was beginning to alienate her. She enjoyed the sounds of his flute, the tiny pauses for breath, the hint of vibration when she slowed it down, the infinitesimal imperfections that were the hallmark of the human animal. She sent the bass to follow the flute track.

She was still experimenting, still laying plenty of tracks without him. After a time she focused her flute experimentation on one track. Sometimes they would play together, she snapping down a drum track, a bass line, some interjections, and he would improvise over the top. She recorded these sessions for ideas, and a notion formed in her mind of how they could play together: a session of Jazz Jungle, the newest and most controversial twist to the Drum and Bass canon.

But for now she concentrated on the track she had christened Wind City. She returned to it day on day, tweaking it, adding layers to the low end, tickling the flute, looping it back on itself.

She had a clear idea of the feeling she sought, the neurotic beats of Public Enemy, especially on Fear Of A Black Planet, the sense of a treble constantly looking over its own shoulder. She took the harmony of the flute and stretched it. Repetition makes listeners wary of a statement, and Natasha made the flute protest too much, coming back in and back in and back in on its purest note, till that purity became a testimony of paranoia, no sweet sound of innocence.

Pete loved what she was doing.

She would not let him hear the track until it was finished, but occasionally she would give in to his pesterings and play him a snippet, a fifteen-second phrase. The truth was that although she feigned exasperation, she enjoyed his rapturous reception.

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‘Oh, Natasha,’ he said as he listened, ‘you really understand me.

More than I think you think you do.”

Crowley was still haunted by the scene of the Mornington Crescent murder.

There had been something of a news blackout, a halfway house of secrecy whereby the unknown victim’s death had been reported but the intricacies withheld. There was a vain and desperate hope that by mulling over the unbelievable facts in private, by containing them, they could be understood.

Crowley did not believe it would work.

The crime was not connected to his own investigation, but Crowley had come to examine the scene. The unearthly circumstances surrounding the murder reminded him of the peculiarities of Saul’s disappearance and the murder of the two police officers.

Crowley had stood on the platform, the train still waiting there some hours after a hysterical driver had reported something which made no sense. A brief examination of the scene told the police that the driver’s ‘floating man’ had been suspended by rope to the tunnel entrance. Frayed cord dangled from the brick. The few passengers had been cleared out and the driver was with a counsellor elsewhere in the station.

The front of the train was encrusted with blood. There was very little of the body left to identify.

Dental records had been rendered useless by the crushing, inexorable onrush of metal and glass onto the victim’s face.

There was no escaping this crime, it lay all around him, on the platform, spattering the walls, carbonized on the live rail, smeared by gravity the length of the first carriage. No cameras had recorded the passing of criminal or victim. They had come and gone invisibly. It was as if the metal stakes and bloodied stubs of rope, the ruined flesh, had been conjured up spontaneously out of the dark tunnels.

Crowley exchanged words with the investigating detective, a man whose hands still shook since his first arrival at the scene an hour or more previously. Crowley had only tenuous reasons to connect the crime to his own investigations. Even the savagery was wrong. The murder of the policemen had seemed an act of huge rage, but a spontaneous act, brutally efficient. This was an imaginative piece of sadism, ritualistic, like a sacrifice to some dangerous god. It was designed to strip the victim of dignity and any vestige of power. And as he thought that, Crowley wondered if the man - they had found flesh that told them it was a man - had been awake and conscious as the train had arrived, and he screwed up his face, felt briefly sick with horror.

And yet, and yet, despite the differences, Crowley felt himself linking the crimes in his mind.

There was something in the infernal ease with which life had been taken, a sense of power which seemed to permeate the murder sites, the sure and absolute knowledge that none of these victims, for so much as one second, had the slightest chance of escape.

He asked the shaking Camden detective to contact him were there any developments at all, hinting at the connections he might be able to make.

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Now, days later, Crowley still visited Mornington Crescent when he slept, its walls chaotically re sprayed, abattoir chic, the red carpet laid down, ghastly organic decor.

He was convinced that the three (four?) murders he investigated contained secrets. There was more to the story, there was much more than they knew. The facts were damning, but still he wanted to believe that Saul had not committed the crimes. He sought refuge in a firm if nebulous belief that something big was going on, something as yet unexplained, and that whatever Saul was doing, he was not somehow responsible. Whether being absolved by the sudden onset of madness, or another’s control, or whatever, Crowley did not know.

For a long time Pete had been asking Natasha to take him to a Jungle club. She found his pesterings irritating, and asked why he could not just go by himself, but he made noises about being a newcomer, being intimidated (which was, in all fairness, entirely reasonable given the atmosphere at many clubs). His hectoring stayed just on the right side of whining.

He made one or two good excuses. He did not know where to go, and if he were to follow Time Out’s appalling recommendations, he would end up a lonely figure at a hardcore Techno evening or some such fate. Natasha, by contrast, knew the scene, and could walk into any of the choicest evenings in London without paying. Just cashing in favours, calling in accounts set up in the early days of the music, by knowing the names and the faces, talking the talk.

Something was rumbling in the Elephant and Castle. The AWOL posse were getting together with Style FM in a warehouse near the railway line.

Everyone was going to be there, she started to hear. A DJ she knew called Three Fingers phoned her and asked her to come along, bring a tune or two; he’d play them. She could spin a few if she wanted.

She wasn’t going to take him up on that, but maybe just turning up wasn’t such a bad idea. It was a month since she’d last been out on a serious.night, and Pete’s clamouring made for a decent excuse to move. Three Fingers put her ‘plus whoever’ on his guest list.

Fabian immediately said he would come. He seemed pathetically grateful for the idea. Kay remained incommunicado and, for the first time since he had disappeared a week or more previously, Natasha and Fabian felt the beginnings of trepidation. But for the moment that was forgotten as they made preparations for the foray into South London.

Pete was ecstatic.

‘Yes yes yes! Fantastic! I’ve been waiting for this forages!’

Natasha’s spirit sank as she saw herself being shoehorned into the role of Junglist Nanny.

‘Yeah, well, I don’t want to disappoint you or anything, Pete, but so long as you know I’m not looking
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after you there or anything. Alright? We get there, I listen, you dance, you leave when you want, I’m leaving when I want. I’m not there to show you around, d’you know what I’m saying?’

He looked at her strangely.

‘Of course.’ His brow furrowed. ‘You’ve got some odd ideas about me, Natasha. I don’t want to cadge off you all evening, and I’m not going to ... to leach any of your cool, OK?”

Natasha shook her head, irritated and embarrassed. She was concerned that having a pencil-necked, white bread geek padding after her was going to do her credentials as an up-and-coming Drum and Bass figure no good at all. She had only been vaguely conscious of the thought, and having it pointed out with frank good humour made her defensive and snappy.

Pete was grinning at her.

‘Natasha, I’m going because I’ve found a new kind of music I never knew existed, and it’s one which -

for all I don’t look the part - I think I can use, and I think I can probably make. And I presume so do you, because you haven’t stopped recording me yet.

‘So don’t worry about me making you look less than funky in front of your mates. I’m just going to hear the music and see the scene.’

After the last bout of arguing, Anansi had disappeared. Loplop had remained in the area for another day or two, but had ultimately followed the spider into obscurity.

King Rat had slumped into a foul mood.

Saul hauled himself into the sewers, careful not to spill the bag of food he carried. He picked his way through the tunnels. It was raining in the streets above, a steady dribble of filthy, acid-saturated water which raced into the tunnels, swirled around Saul’s legs, tried to pull him down, a stream nearly two feet high, fast-moving and dilute, the usual warm compost smell mostly dissipated.

King Rat had done nothing about finding food, and Saul, impatient with his self-pity, had left the throne room and gone scavenging. King Rat’s leash on him was loosening. The neurotic hold he had kept for so long was almost gone. As his mood grew worse, his determination to keep Saul in his sights weakened.