The Keys to the Street (23 page)

I
n a cold winter, on a Saturday, when Daniel was five and Elizabeth twelve, he had taken them to the Planetarium, for which his son was a little too young but which his daughter had enjoyed. Afterward, after lunch at a place in Baker Street, the sun had come out and they had walked to St. John’s Wood tube station through the park. Frost still lingered on the grass and there were patches of snow in shady places.

The lake was frozen over. Elizabeth, who was a skater, who had had a new pair of skates for Christmas, wanted to know why no one was on the ice, and Roman had told them, not going into too many details because Daniel was so young, of the disaster on the ice of February 1867, since which time no one had been allowed to skate there. Several hundred people had been on the ice when it began to break, for they had persisted in spite of warnings from the man from the Humane Society who cried to them, “For God’s sake get off, or there will be a great calamity!”

“Were they drowned?” Daniel asked.

“Some were.” Roman didn’t say how many, he didn’t say forty. He didn’t say that a hundred and fifty people went into the water and forty died. “The lake was deeper then, it was twelve feet deep between the islands, and the ice was never thick enough. The Tyburn River flowed through it and a fast current stops thick ice forming.”

The children had looked across the lake to the great house called The Holme and at the islands lying below it. Swans and geese and
ducks congregated on their banks. Elizabeth wanted to know how the people were got out of the water.

“They sent down divers. Afterward the lake was drained and remade and now it’s no more than four feet deep anywhere.”

“Are there ghosts?” said Daniel. “In the night do the ghosts of drowned people come out of the water?”

“Ghosts don’t exist, Daniel,” said Roman.

But now he wondered, for in his winter dreams, he had sometimes seen the people from the ice disaster rising from the black water and the ice floes, as in that Pre-Raphaelite painting of the sea giving up its dead, and once among the faces had been his children’s, wan in death, and his wife’s.

Often, while the children were still alive, he had regretted even the expurgated version of events he had given Daniel, for the boy would revert to it in cold weather and Roman thought he too had dreamed about it. The bombing of the bandstand, another horror, had taken place within Elizabeth’s lifetime, though she had been only about three and had known nothing of the IRA bomb that killed and injured so many bandsmen. At least he had never told them that, they had never in their park walks passed the spot where the bandstand stood on the northern bank of the lake, flanked now by memorial willows.

Was this, what was happening now, another park tragedy? Yet he had noticed, and wondered if others had, that the two murders, very obviously linked, had both taken place outside the park, if on its perimeter.

It was on a newsboard opposite Baker Street station and outside the Globe that he first read of the second one. Typically, the news on it was couched in ambiguous terms. You had to buy the paper to know the true facts. “Second Homeless Man Horror,” said the newsboard. “Horror” could mean many things. The ice disaster and the bandstand bombing were both horrors.

Roman should have bought the paper but he didn’t, not then. He
was on his way to the launderette in Paddington Street to wash his clothes, after which he would return to the men’s toilets just off the Broad Walk, wash himself all over, and put on clean T-shirt, denims, and sweater. Forty minutes in front of the rotating machines, another ten in the secondhand bookshop swapping
Dead Souls
for
Kim
, and he was resolved on buying the
Standard
on his way back.

It was on sale outside the station. Roman bought a copy and sat down on the low wall to read it. The dead man had not yet been named. His body, like John Dominic Cahill’s, was found impaled on railings near Regent’s Park, but as in Decker’s case, death was not thought to be due to impalement. He had been stabbed first by a knife with a six-inch-long blade. He was found in the early hours of the morning by a man returning to his home in Primrose Hill from an eighteenth birthday party. This man wasn’t named either.

Roman hoped the body wasn’t Dill’s. He folded up the paper, put it in his pocket, and walked up past Madame Tussaud’s under the scaffolding. They had been refurbishing, decorating, renovating the building for months. He found he had been holding his breath and now he expelled it thankfully.

Dill was sitting on the pavement with his beagle beside him and a paper bag of dog biscuits that the animal was busily eating. Roman sat beside him and showed him the
Standard
. Dill said he’d seen it on the telly. They had an old black and white television set in the hostel where he sometimes slept.

“They never said railings,” Dill said. “They said broken glass on top of a wall.”

“Where was it?”

“Primrose Hill somewhere. They never said. It scared me.”

Dill had a thin pale face and eyes whose swollen lids seemed pulled down by the epicanthic fold, but he was too white and his sparse hair too fair to be Oriental. Roman had never known him to drink. He often seemed afraid and now his fear had intensified to
the point of straining and shriveling the skin of his face. His age, Roman thought, was probably no more than twenty-five.

“I don’t like the sound of that glass,” he said. “Glass going into you, lace—, lacer—, lacernating you. That’s what they said.”

A woman dropped a fifty pee coin into the hat on the pavement. “Thank you very much,” Dill said. The dog sniffed the coin and wagged his tail. “It’s us he’s after,” said Dill. “Our sort.”

He offered no definition, used none of the many descriptive words, but Roman understood. The newspaper had said much the same and as cagily. The two men, murdered within a month of each other, had both been homeless.…

“You go to St. Anthony’s, don’t you?” St. Anthony’s was the hostel in Lisson Grove. “Better stay there every night. You’ll be safe then. Till he’s been caught.”

Roman could see in Dill’s wistful look that in the summer he preferred the open air. If it wasn’t wet or too cold he would rather sleep under the stars, or what passed for them, the reddish milky way of reflected light. But he nodded, somewhat comforted, and he put out his arms to pull the dog onto his lap.

Making his way into the park by the York Gate, Roman turned to follow the southern shore of the lake. An old woman in a tracksuit was feeding a black swan and her cygnets with broken biscuits. A heron took flight from a tree on the island and flew westward, its wings wide, its neck in an S-bend. The sun had brought the people out. They strolled desultorily along the lakeshore or sat on the seats. No fear showed in faces. There was nothing to indicate the violent death that had taken place half a mile from here the night before.

It was warmer, hotter even, than it had been all year. Real summer had come, you would say if you were a visitor or a tourist and unaware that real summer may never come, nor real winter for that matter, and that the weather is fickle, arbitrary, hot today and cold tomorrow, dry now and wet later. The park was a pattern of green light and shade, not much other color. Men and women wear bright
colors in hot climates, but blue and gray here, brown and black and gravel beige. The water of the lake was a gleaming gray, glassy and calm.

Roman asked himself if he shared Dill’s fear. As vulnerable as Dill (or Pharaoh or Effie or the jacks men), was he afraid to die, stabbed through the heart and the lungs and the great vessels round the heart, then impaled on a fence? He found himself unable to answer. Once he could have answered, once he would have welcomed death meted out by someone else. Was he afraid to die? It frightened him that he had changed, that he could no longer give an unqualified no, that he must give half a yes.

Because surely the opposite of saying no was, “I want to live.…”

In the men’s toilets he washed himself all over. He waited until the sun was setting and most of the visitors had gone and then he washed himself at a basin, the top half first, then, discreetly, the lower half, with his towel clean from the launderette wrapped round his waist. Two men came in but he knew from experience they would ignore him, they would
fear
him. He was a dosser who might beg from them, gibber and wave his arms or shout imprecations. When they had gone he washed his hair and part-dried it under the hand dryer.

Being clean brought an unprecedented sense of well-being. He emerged, dirty clothes rolled up in his barrow, and sat on a seat at the top of the Broad Walk by the Parsi’s fountain, looking at the weathered carvings of birds and animals and at the worn pink marble pillars. He drank the pint of milk he had bought, wished it were wine, and read
Kim
.

The police came round and shooed him out at nine-thirty, by which time it was too dark to read. He had no idea where to sleep the night; he thought of but rejected the Irene Adler’s porch as being too near the site of the first murder, and Regent’s Park Road as being too near (presumably) the second. Leaving the park by the Gloucester Gate and the deserted children’s playground, he paused as he
always did on this spot to look at Joseph Durham’s figure in bronze of a pretty young girl, winsome, sweet-faced, standing on an artistic arrangement of rocks. Shading her eyes with one hand, she seemed to be gazing at Gloucester Terrace. Hers was precisely the face of a girlfriend he had once had, long before he met Sally. To look at this girl, set upon her rocky perch a hundred and twenty years ago, was to see his girlfriend again, to remember and feel a trace of nostalgia. Once or twice, while looking, he had wondered what his reaction would have been if that were Sally’s face or Elizabeth’s. Would he linger in front of the statue or shun it, dreading to look it full in the eye?

He crossed the road and peered down into the leafy dale, once perhaps an ornamental garden, known as the Grotto. The low wall of the bridge over a defunct arm of the canal bore a bas-relief commemorating the martyrdom of St. Pancras, the saint with uplifted radiant face attacked by a lioness that looked mild and friendly and jumped up at him like a dog.

There were rocks down there and a stone-coped pool, figure-eight-shaped, its water brown and coated with a network of scum. Among the laurels and rhododendrons, litter lay or was caught on branches—shreds of plastic, newspaper soaked and dried and soaked again, beer bottles, torn dark rags. Tangles of barbed wire and chain-link fencing muddled together seemed to serve no purpose.

Roman looked about for a way in. He walked along past the fresco and turned a little way into Park Village East, where a big Victorian villa was in the process of renovation.

Builders’ skips, ladders, a concrete mixer, and timber stood about. He pushed open a gate in the wall and made his way into the derelict garden that overlooked the Grotto.

From this direction it was possible to avoid most of the wire entanglements. He had long since discovered that barbed wire does a poor job of keeping out intruders if the intruders don’t mind getting
their clothes torn. It was a neglected, decaying, private place that he found himself in. He plucked a couple of drinking straws, or a drinking straw unaccountably cut in half, from between the leaves of a bush. His groundsheet spread out on leaf mold, he prepared his bed, sheltered from the bridge by rhododendrons and from the night sky by the branches of a taller tree. In the damp leafy shade it was cold and he pulled on a sweater before he climbed into his sleeping bag.

At this time of the year the dawn came before 4:30. He saw the brilliance of a sunrise between leaves, a white dazzlement behind a tracery of black, but the first thing he thought of was the death of one of “our sort,” and it surprised him that he had been able to sleep so peacefully. It was as if he had only just lain down, had this minute closed his eyes, and the whole night had passed in seconds.

Often he had no morning meal, but today he went into one of the early-opening cafés in Camden Town and, like the condemned man he was, ate a hearty breakfast, eggs and bacon, sausages, and fried bread. A glass of something bitter and thin he had learned to call orange juice came with it, and strong henna-colored tea. He would have felt self-conscious in there once, but no longer. Most of the customers looked like him. At least he had had a wash and changed his clothes the afternoon before.

At the Talisman Press they had published a book about the old farmlands of North London. He remembered it now as he walked along Albert Road, recalling the engravings of Chalk Farm and Primrose Hill. The only thing that looked remotely the same was the hill itself, rising out of the level ground more like a man-made tumulus than a natural formation. Once he had looked up there and seen a figure standing on the summit, his hands upraised to the sky. Suddenly the figure flung itself down, waving its arms and kicking its legs, before rising again and once more seeming to implore help from heaven. Roman had guessed it was Pharaoh, but he was too far away to see the blue on his hair or the glint of his keys.

The old farmland trees must have gone sometime in the nineteenth century. It was all planes now and a few hornbeams, ornamental trees that looked incongruous to him with lush tall grass growing close to their trunks. He took the paths along the eastern side, recalling the account of a murder from that same book. Sir Edmund Godfrey’s body had been found in a ditch on the south side of Primrose Hill one day at the end of the seventeenth century. Though his sword was thrust through his body, strangulation had caused his death. Nothing had been taken from him, his money was in his pocket, but he was all over bruises and his neck was broken. Medals were struck to commemorate his death, on one of which he was shown as walking with a broken neck and a sword running him through.

Roman thought he remembered reading of several people being executed for the murder, and reading too of duels fought on the hill. He told himself he had come in there to find somewhere pleasant and peaceful to sit and read his Kipling, but he knew he had another reason. That accounted for his dwelling on the violent deaths of the past.