Fabian sped along Acre Lane. On his left he passed an extraordinary white building, a mass of grubby turrets and shabby Art Deco windows. It looked long deserted. On the step sat two boys, dwarfed by jackets declaring allegiance to American Football teams neither had ever seen play. They were oblivious to the faded grandeur of their bench. One had his eyes closed, was leaning back against the door like Mexican cannon-fodder in a spaghetti Western. His friend spoke animatedly into his hand, his tiny mobile phone hidden within the voluminous folds of his sleeve, Fabian felt the thrill of materialist envy, but battened it down. This was one impulse he resisted.
Not me, he thought, as he always did. I’ll hold out a bit longer. I won’t be another black man with a mobile, another troublemaker with ‘Drug Dealer’ written on his forehead in script only the police can read.
He stood up out of his seat, kicked down and sped off towards Clapham.
Fabian knew Saul hated his father’s disappointment. Fabian knew Saul and his father could not speak together. Fabian had been the only one of Saul’s friends who had seen him turn that volume by Lenin over and over in his hands, open it and close it, read the inscription again and again. His father’s writing was tight and controlled, as if trying not to break the pen. Saul had put the book in Fabian’s lap, had waited while his friend read.
To Saul, This always made sense to me. Love from the Old Leftie.
Fabian remembered looking up into Saul’s face. His mouth was sealed, his eyes looked tired. He took the book off Fabian’s lap and closed it, stroked the cover, put it on his shelf. Fabian knew Saul had not killed his father.
He crossed Clapham High Street, a concourse of restaurants and charity shops, and slid into the back streets, wiggling through the parked cars to emerge on Silverthorne Road. He started down the long incline towards the river.
He knew that Natasha would be working. He knew he would turn into Bassett Road and hear the faint boom of Drum and Bass. She would be hunched over her keyboard, twiddling dials and pressing keys with the concentration of an alchemist, juggling long sequences of zeros and ones and transforming them into music. Listening and creating. That was what Natasha spent all her time doing. When she was not
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concentrating on source material behind the till of friends’ record shops, serving customers in an efficient autopilot mode, she was reconstituting it into the tracks she christened with spiky one-word titles: Arrival; Rebellion; Maelstrom.
Fabian believed it was Natasha’s concentration which made her so asexual to him. She was attractive in a fierce way, and was never short of offers, especially at clubs, especially when word got around that the music playing was hers; but Fabian had never known her seem very interested, even when she took someone home. He felt blasphemous even thinking of her in a sexual context. Fabian was alone in his opinion, he was assured by his friend Kay, a cheerful dope-raddled clown who drooled lasciviously after Natasha whenever he saw her. The music was the thing, Kay said, and the intensity was the thing, and the carelessness was the thing. Just like a nun, it was the promise of what was under the habit.
But Fabian could only grin sheepishly at Kay, absurdly embarrassed. Amateur psychologists around London, Saul included, had wasted no time deciding he was in love with Natasha; but Fabian did not think that was the case. She infuriated him with her style fascism and her solipsism, but he supposed he loved her. Just not in the way Saul meant it.
He twisted under the filthy railway bridge on Queenstown Road now, fast approaching Battersea Park.
He was riding an incline, racing towards Chelsea Bridge. He took the roundabout with casual arrogance, put his head down and climbed towards the river. On Fabian’s right, the four chimneys of Battersea Power Station loomed into view. Its roof was long gone, it looked like a bombed-out relic, a blitz survivor. It was a great upturned plug straining to suck voltage out of the clouds, a monument to energy.
Fabian burst free of South London. He slowed and looked into the Thames, past the towers and railings of steel that surrounded him, keeping him snug on Chelsea Bridge. The river sent shards of cold sunlight in all directions.
He scudded over the face of the water like a pond skater, dwarfed by the girders and bolts ostentatiously holding the bridge together. He hung poised for a moment between the South Bank and the North Bank, his head high to see over the sides into the water, to see the black barges that never moved, waiting to ferry cargo long forgotten, his legs still, freewheeling his way towards Ladbroke Grove.
The route to Natasha’s house took Fabian past the Albert Hall and through Kensington, which he hated.
It was a soulless place, a purgatory filled only with rich transients drifting pointlessly through Nicole Farhi and Red or Dead. He sped up Kensington Church Street towards Netting Hill and on through to Portobello Road.
It was a market day, the second in the week, designed to wrest money from tourists. Merchandise that had cost five pounds on Friday was now offered for ten. The air was thick with garish cagoules and backpacks and French and Italian. Fabian cussed quietly and inched through the throng. He ducked left down Elgin Crescent and then right, bearing down on the Bassett Road flat.
A gust of wind stained the air brown with leaves. Fabian swung into the street. The leaves boiled around him, stuck to his jacket. Pared-down trees lined the tarmac. Fabian dismounted while still in motion, walked towards Natasha’s flat.
He could hear her working. The faint thumping of Drum and Bass was audible from the end of the street.
As he walked, wheeling his bike beside him, Fabian heard the sound of wings. Natasha’s house teemed with pigeons. Every protuberance and ledge was grey with plump, stirring bodies. A few were in the air, hovering nervously around the windows and gables, settling, dislodging their peers. They shifted and shat a little as Fabian stopped at the door directly below them.
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Natasha’s rhythm was loud now, and Fabian could hear something unusual, a clear sound like pipes, a recorder or a flute, bursting with energy and exuberance, shadowing the bass. He stood still and listened.
The quality of this sound was different from that of samples, and it was not trapped in any loops. Fabian suspected it was being played live. And by something of a virtuoso.
He rang the bell. The electronic boom of the bass stopped cold. The flute faltered on for a second or two. As silence fell, the company of pigeons rose en masse into the air with the abruptness of panic, circled once like a school of fish and disappeared into the north. Fabian heard footsteps on the stairs.
Natasha opened the door to him and smiled.
‘Alright, Fabe,’ she said, reaching up to touch her clenched right fist to his. He did so, at the same time bending down to put an arm around her and kiss her cheek. She responded, though her surprise was evident.
‘Tash,’ he whispered, in greeting and in warning. She heard it in his voice, pulled back holding his shoulders in her hands. Her face sharpened in concern.
‘What? What’s happened?’
‘Tash, it’s Saul.’ He’d told the story so often today he’d become an automaton, just mouthing the words, but this time it was difficult all over again. He licked his lips.
Natasha started. ‘What is it, Fabe?’ Her voice cracked.
‘No no,’ he said hurriedly. ‘Saul’s fine. Well, I guess ... He’s in with the pigs.’
She shook her head in confusion.
‘Listen, Tash . .. Saul’s dad ... he died.’ He rushed on before she could misunderstand. ‘He was killed.
He was lobbed out of a window two nights back. J I think... I think the police reckon Saul did it.’ He reached into his pocket and brought out the scrunched-up news story. Natasha read it.
‘No,’ she said.
‘I know, I know. But I suppose they heard about him and the old man having arguments and that, and ...
I dunno.’
‘No,’ said Natasha again. The two of them stood quite still, staring at each other. Eventually Natasha moved. ‘Look,’ she said, ‘come in. We’d better talk. There’s this bloke here ...”
‘The one playing the flute?’
She smiled slightly. ‘Yeah. He’s good, isn’t he? I’ll get rid of him.’
Fabian closed the door behind him and followed her up the stairs. She was some way ahead of him and, as he approached her inner door, he heard voices.
‘What’s happening?’ It was a man’s voice, muffled and anxious.
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‘A friend’s in a bit of bother,’ Natasha was saying. Fabian entered the sparse bedroom, nodded in greeting at the tall blond man he saw over Natasha’s shoulder. The man had his mouth slightly open, was fingering his ponytail nervously. In his right hand was a silver flute. He looked up and down at the two in the doorway.
‘Pete, Fabian.’ Natasha waved her hand vaguely between the two in a cursory introduction. ‘Sorry, Pete, but you’re going to have to split. I have to talk to Fabe. Something’s come up.’
The blond man nodded and hurriedly gathered his things together.
As he did so, he spoke rapidly.
‘Natasha, do you want to do this again? I felt like we were ... really getting into it.’
Fabian raised his eyebrows.
The tall man squeezed past Fabian without taking his eyes off Natasha. She was clearly distracted, but she smiled and nodded.
‘Yeah. For sure. Do you want to leave me your number or something?’
‘No, I’ll come by again.’
‘Do you want my number, then?’
‘No. I’ll just come by, and if you’re not in, I’ll come by again.’ Pete stopped in front of the stairs and turned back. ‘Hope I see you again, Fabian,’ he said.
Fabian nodded abstractedly, then looked into Pete’s eyes. The tall man was gazing at him with a peculiar intensity, demanding a response. The two were locked for a moment, until Fabian acquiesced and nodded more pointedly. Only then did Pete seem satisfied. He descended the stairs, followed by Natasha.
The two were speaking, but Fabian could not make out any words. He frowned. The front door slammed shut and Natasha returned to the room.
‘He’s a bit of a weirdo, isn’t he?’ Fabian asked.
Natasha nodded vehemently. “Strue, man, do you know what I mean? I threw him out at first, he was kind of getting leery.’
‘Trying it on?’
‘Kind of. But he was going on and on about wanting to play with me, and I was intrigued, and he started playing outside. He was good so I let him back in.’
‘Suitably humbled, yeah?’ Fabian grinned briefly.
‘Damn right. But he plays ... he plays like a fucking angel, Fabe.’ She was excited. ‘He’s the original nutter, you’re right, I know, but there’s something very right about his playing.’
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There was a short silence. Natasha tugged at Fabian’s jacket and pulled him into the kitchen. ‘I need a coffee, man. You need a coffee. And I need to know about Saul.’
In the street stood the tall man. He stared up at the window, the flute limp in his hand. His clothes twisted in the wind. He was even paler in the cold, in front of the dark trees. He was quite motionless. He watched the tiny variations of light as bodies moved in and out of the sitting-room. He cocked his ear slightly, pulled his fringe out of his eyes, twisted a lock of hair in his fingers. His eyes were the colour of the clouds. He raised the flute slowly to his lips, played a brief refrain. A little group of sparrows wheeled out from the branches of a tree, circled him. The man lowered his flute and watched as the birds disappeared.
Two eyes stained yellow by death gaped stupidly. All the imperfections of the human body were magnified by utter stillness. Crowley ran his eyes over the face, took note of the wide pores, the pockmarks, the hairs sprouting from nostrils, the patch of stubble under the Adam’s apple that the razor had missed.
The skin folded up under the chin and became a tightly wound coil, a skein of flesh wrung out to dry.
The body was chest-down, limbs uncomfortable, and the head was facing the ceiling, twisted round nearly 180 degrees. Crowley stood and pushed his hands into his pockets to disguise their trembling. He turned and faced his entourage, two burly officers whose faces were identical portraits of disbelieving revulsion, scarcely more mobile than their fallen comrade’s.
Crowley paced through the small hall to the bedroom. The flat was full of busy people, photographers, pathologists. Fingerprint dust sat in the air in flat layers, like geological strata.
He peered round the frame of the bedroom door. A suited man crouched on the floor before a figure sitting with splayed legs, leaning against a wall. Crowley looked at the seated man and made a small disgusted noise, as if at rotten food. He stared into the ruinous mess of the other’s face. Blood was smeared across the wall. The dead man’s uniform was saturated with it, stiff like an oilskin coat.
The suited doctor removed his tentative fingers from the bloody mess, and glanced behind him at Crowley. ‘You are...?’
‘DI Crowley. Doctor, what happened here?’
The doctor gestured at the slumped figure. His voice was utterly detached, exhibiting the defensive professionalism Crowley had seen before at unpleasant deaths.
‘Ah, this chap, Constable Barker, yes? Well... he’s been hit in the face, basically, very fast and very hard.’ He stood, ran his hands through his hair. ‘I think he’s come here to the front of the room, opened the door and been walloped with a... a bloody piledriver which sent him into the wall and onto the floor, at which point our assailant has borne down on him and cracked him a few more times. Once or twice with his fists, I think, then with a stick or a club or something, lots of long thin bruises across the
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shoulders and neck. And the line of damage here ...’ He indicated a particular trough in the bone-flecked pulp of the face.
‘And the other?’
The doctor shook his head, and blinked several times. ‘Never seen that before, to be honest. He’s had his neck broken, which sounds straightforward enough, but... well, my God, you’ve seen him, yes?’