The Keys to the Street (34 page)

Sweat was pouring off him. The medical book he’d been reading told him your sweat didn’t smell so much when you got older, but Bean wasn’t taking any chances. He’d had a horror of it all his life, but his repugnance had increased after those beating sessions and the house was filled with the meaty, oniony stench, the result of wildly expended energy.

He had a shower, his second of the day, sprayed himself with deodorant, and put on clean clothes, nicely pressed jeans, the elephant T-shirt, and his red baseball cap. The T-shirt he’d give a quick rinse to when he got back and it would be dry by the morning, ready for the train.

They closed the park at nine in August. That would just about allow him to walk to the top of Gloucester Place by way of the lake and the Kent Gate. He left home at eight-thirty. It was as warm and as humid as Florida, thought Bean, who had never been there.

The other route would have been shorter but there would have been all those roads to cross and all that traffic. The park was peaceful and quiet, the lake glassy and the air thickening. When he looked up, the darkening blue of the sky was fading under a veil of mist. A
moon had risen, a pale oval, blurred and fuzzy, like the corpse of something that had long lain in muddy water.

All the birds had gone to roost. From a distance a black swan, sleeping on one leg with the other and its neck tucked into the plumage of its back, looked like a monstrous mushroom. Green- and chestnut-feathered ducks curled themselves up into silk cushions at the water’s edge. But the coming dusk was robbing everything of color, the grass turning gray, the water like black glass, the trees shapes and shadows rather than living things.

A beggar wandered toward him. He fancied it was the one who had asked him for money the day before, but now that there was no one else about, they were alone, passing each other on the lake path, Bean looked the other way, pretending not to see him. You could never tell these days who would turn out violent. Most vehicles were banned from the park, but a Royal Parks Constabulary police car went slowly past, the kind they called a lettuce sandwich because it was white with a dark green and light green stripe along its side.

To the left of him the Turkish domes of Sussex Place gleamed like an encampment of tents at dawn. The boats were all tied up to the island in the middle of the Hanover pond, bobbing gently on the water. He glanced up that way because he could never pass it without remembering Mussolini, so when he turned back and began to cross the grass toward the gate and saw Mussolini approaching him under the trees, he refused to believe his eyes. He actually rubbed his eyes, as if stimulating them to see straight.

It was as if Mussolini had been waiting for him. He wasn’t going anywhere, he’d just been standing there, what the police called loitering. Bean could see the street lamps in the Outer Circle. There were people walking up there, traffic heading up to the Macclesfield Bridge. He turned his eyes on Mussolini, making out his pudgy features, skinny body, and filthy old clothes in the warm gloom.

“You took your time,” Bean said.

Mussolini was wrapped up for such a hot night, wearing the sort
of layers, dark matted rags, favored by the beggars. He was chewing something and Bean didn’t think it was gum.

Whatever it was, he eased it into the corner of his mouth, pushing it with his tongue.

“You was late,” he said. “You dropped me in the shit.”

“That may be, but it’s you that’s too late now. The job I wanted, someone else did it. And a bit more thoroughly than what I bargained for.”

“Could be another job,” said Mussolini. “There’s always jobs folks want doing.”

Bean shrugged. He had lingered for a moment, but now he began walking on toward the gate, a wide gate with maybe twenty-five spikes on its railings. Mussolini had got into step beside him and Bean was quickly aware of his smell. Not the cooking smell of fresh sweat but of dirt ingrained, unwashed clothes, the excrement of vermin, the acrid coldness of chemicals. He tried to draw himself aside, but Mussolini was close now, his head bent down to Bean’s lesser height, peering at Bean’s chest.

“Dig your elephants,” he said, and then he said, “Jumbo, jumbo,” and started laughing. “Jumbo, jumbo.”

His laughter made an eerie manic sound in the silence of the park.

23

P
ark Road runs northward on the western side of the park from the top of Baker Street to the junction of St. John’s Wood Road and Prince Albert Road and communicates with the Outer Circle by means of the Hanover Gate and Kent Passage. The London Mosque is in Park Road. So are the Rudolph Steiner House, a defunct pub called the Windsor Castle, Dillon’s Business Bookshop, and a number of Indian restaurants. There are sandwich bars and a wine bar and a fur shop where no one ever seems to buy anything.

The bookshop is so situated for its proximity to the London School of Business Studies, a graduate school housed in Decimus Burton’s most spectacular of all the park terraces, at Sussex Place. This is on the Outer Circle, an amazing range of Corinthian columns, polygonal bays, and cuboid domes, so light and airy that they might be tents of silk rather than towers of stone. Graduate students in need of books need not walk all the way down to Baker Street and up Park Road to reach the shop but may turn left out of the terrace and find the opening to an alley called Kent Passage.

The passage is narrow and long and absolutely straight, tree-shaded and confined by high hedges behind chain-link fencing, not railings. On the southern side it is overshadowed by the pale brick walls of the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists. The trees and shrubs that grow along its length are planes and sumacs, snowberries and the rose of Sharon. Near the Park Road end the passage opens out into an oval shape, closes again, and the pavement
of the wider thoroughfare is reached. The bookshop is a few paces to the left while on the right lies the Kent Terrace.

This is the only terrace not to face onto the Outer Circle, a plain range of buildings with Ionic columns. Anthony Maddox once told Bean that the terrace had been built in 1827 and named for George IV’s brother, the Duke of Kent, but the duke, as well as being the parent of the heir presumptive to the throne, was long dead by then, so there was no need for too much grandeur or originality. Bean thought this was said spitefully, for his resemblance to the duke’s statue had already been pointed out, but he never passed the terrace without thinking of what had been said and wondering if malice was intended.

Kent Terrace, however, has one peculiarity. As well as the usual black iron railings, a feature of the place is the spikes adorning the top of the pillars in its grounds.

A pair of these pillars flanks the gate that leads into Kent Passage and the steps down into Kent Passage. These are man-height, cuboid and very solid, and from the tops of both sprout five iron branches in a cluster, each one terminating in five spikes. They look rather like bunches of thorn twigs, but ugly and menacing too, and it would be hard to say what purpose they were intended for or what was in the designer’s mind.

A man’s body was impaled on these iron thorns.

It was so arranged as to be invisible from Kent Passage unless you happened to be looking at the sky, and visible from the terrace only if you peered behind the pillar. Besides, a heavy mist had hung over the park and its environs since dawn, obscuring even those objects that were near at hand in swathes of white vapor.

The body was supported in its position by the splayed spikes penetrating its chest, head lolling forward, arms dangling, legs hanging. Barefoot, dressed in jeans with ragged hems and missing knees, torn gray T-shirt with washed-out black logo and a dark red cardigan that was stiff with foodstains and blood, it had once been a smallish
man. The legs and arms were thin, the white feet pathetic. No doubt its total weight amounted to no more than 130 pounds. Even so, to lift it up so high must have taken considerable strength.

A great many people passed it during the morning. None of them looked up to the height of the pillar. Even after the mist had gone and the sun came out, the body was not discovered until noon. A police officer on the beat entered the passage from the Outer Circle. First he had walked round the pond where the pleasure boats were moored, crossed the yellowing balding grass, and had left the park by the Hanover Gate. His eye had been on a dosser in camouflage pants and gray vest who was fumbling in a litter bin suspiciously close to a parked car whose windows had been left open.

The policeman lingered, watching until the dosser, having found the remains of a take-away in the bin, shambled off northward toward the Macclesfield Bridge. Then he stepped into the passage and strolled slowly along it. Someone shook a duster out of one of the high windows in the building on the left. The passage was in deep shade for three-quarters of its length and there the sun came through the leaves, making a dappled pattern, before there were no more leaves but only a sunlit space.

Onto this space fell a shadow.

It was like a crab or part of a crab or perhaps it was like a paw, the extended limb of a frog. He looked up. The body hung like a sack in clothes or a guy, limp and slack, and its hanging hand had a trail of blood dried between the fingers.

24

D
ill and the beagle were sitting on one of the seats on the southwest side of the lake, watching an old woman in a tracksuit feeding the geese. There were not so many geese as a year ago and the story was that the street sleepers were catching them to kill and roast over fires on the canal bank. Dill always talked to the beagle as if it were a person. He said that much as he’d like to taste roast goose, for he never had tasted it, he wouldn’t know how to go about catching a goose, let alone killing it. And how would you get the feathers out? And the innards? He was talking like this about a goose to stop himself shaking with fear about the dead man.

The beagle’s tail started to wag, thumping on the slats of the seat. Roman patted its head, stroked it, sat down next to Dill and Dill told him the goose story just as he had told it to the beagle a moment before. But it no longer had the power to stop Dill shivering.

“What’s wrong?” Roman said. “There’s been another, hasn’t there? Is that it?”

“The fuzz had me in, mate. They had me look at him.”

“To identify him?”

Dill nodded. He held on to the beagle’s collar to steady his hands. “They said they’d seen me with him but they never had.” He looked up, turning his head in a crooked cautious way. His Oriental eyes were puffy as if he had been crying.

“They was okay,” he said. “They didn’t hurt me.”

“What happened?”

“I went in this place.” He wrinkled up his nose. “There was this
geezer lifted up a sheet and showed me what was under. It was just a dead face, mate, you couldn’t see no cuts. I didn’t know him, I’d never seen him before. They said was I sure and then the geezer put the sheet back. They was okay. There was one geezer give the beagle a bun.”

“Maybe it was one of the jacks men,” said Roman.

“I don’t reckon. I don’t know what to think, mate. I reckoned I knew every geezer up here. You ever seen a dead person, Rome?”

“My mother.” Sally and his children, but he didn’t mention them. Daniel’s face had been cut to pieces. “I saw my mother.”

“Do they always look like they’re made of wax? Like they’ve never been alive?”

“I don’t know. You’re sleeping at St. Anthony’s, aren’t you, Dill?”

“They won’t let me take the beagle. What am I supposed to do about the beagle?”

Roman walked on toward the Clarence Gate. The flowerbeds and the grass here were covered in a soft gray quilt of goose down. Goose feathers floated onto the petals of flowers. He bought a paper at a newsagent’s at the top of Baker Street. The front page and four inside pages were devoted to the murder and the two previous murders. On the front page was a four-column-spread photograph of a stretch of railings, purporting to be but perhaps not those on which the body had been found, black spiked railings with grass behind and trees shapeless in the thinning mist. Inside were more photographs, Cahill’s and Clancy’s, more pictures of park railings, and one of a group of jacks men sitting or standing about on the canal bank.