Awake In The Dark Read online

  something new is

  breaking through

  www.t21media.uk

  Awake

  In

  The Dark

  Paul Laville

  @PaulLaville

  Text Copyright © 2014 Paul Laville

  All Rights Reserved

  Cover Design by Ed Thomas, Doubleshot.tv

  Cover Image ‘Dark Mask 03’ by Tanja Hehn

  The moral right of the author has been asserted

  All characters and events in this novel, other than those clearly in the public domain, are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Published by T21Media

  [email protected]

  No part of this novel may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing by the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  All quoted extracts within the novel remain the property of their respective authors and/ or publishers.

  Used here by kind permission.

  Dedication

  To all the special people in my life: past, present and future.

  CONTENTS

  Opening

  Impressionism

  The Scream

  Voyeurism

  The Persistence of Memory

  Symbolism

  The Cottage

  Deconstructivism

  The L-Shaped Ballroom

  Nihilism

  J?

  Primitivism

  The Broken Woman

  Solipsism

  Time

  Escapism

  Closure

  Opening

  They pulled the corpse from the Thames when London was still dark and frozen around me.

  I was standing on the mudflats at low tide. Standing amongst all the shit washed up by the river, my shoes sinking into the filth.

  Watching. Waiting.

  Along the bank a mobile spotlight was mounted onto a tripod. Next to it stood a brooding silhouette: Detective Inspector Hershey, hands in the pockets of her long coat, face forward, her breath forming wispy shapes in the harsh light. A diesel generator rumbled and whined nearby, powering the spotlight.

  Out on the river a police boat ghosted on the low tide, its engine idling in counterpoint to the generator. Onboard, two police angled spotlights down at the water.

  It seemed an age was passing. Maybe they wouldn’t –

  The water bubbled and broke where the beams of light converged. A radio crackled and there was motion suddenly.

  Hershey jerked into life. She lifted a radio to her mouth and barked into it. “Just bring it up the south bank if you can. We’ve got about ten minutes left on the tide.”

  My breathing stopped for a second, then quickened as the monstrous shapes of two divers – rubber suits, tanks and pipes rising like a pair of Giger’s demons – emerged from the river with the corpse between them.

  With a slow, methodical calm and ease, they pulled the dead thing from the river, across the mud and up the bank. Then they carefully laid it to rest like a tribute to the tripod, in front of which an open bodybag had now been spread.

  Hershey beckoned me over with a flick of her head and I walked forward, struggling to breathe. The spotlight on the tripod buzzed and sang with energy, and the light was so bright it bleached the shadows away.

  I looked down.

  Caught my breath.

  The corpse seemed over-exposed as the forensics guys carefully, delicately, pulled weeds and silt away from its mouth and eyes to reveal a fish-bitten face.

  “Oh God...”

  It hurt, it physically hurt to look.

  The face of the body was pale, spoiled by blue veins fat with river-water. Hair shaved right down. A face I knew well.

  Looked just like me, as though it was my own face I was looking at.

  Hershey glanced at me for confirmation but I don’t think she needed it. I nodded, and then my legs just gave way.

  Hands caught me, just about keeping me upright, and two uniformed police steered me away. I didn’t resist as they walked me towards the ladders they’d set down over the wharf.

  “Hey. Take a breather,” said one of the coppers.

  I climbed up. Didn’t need him telling me what to do.

  The motion was purely mechanical. One hand over the other, hauling myself back into the world. There was a policeman behind me, making sure my feet didn’t slip.

  “She shouldn’t have taken him down there,” a policewoman was saying when I came up. She stopped when she saw me, and then she and a colleague helped me up the last few steps.

  “I’m OK,” I said.

  But I wasn’t.

  I’d thought I could handle this, I mean you saw it on the TV enough times, right? Body dragged up from the river? No big deal. And it wasn’t like I wasn’t expecting it.

  But still… When it happened and your worst fears were confirmed…

  Someone threw a blanket or a coat or something over my shoulders.

  “Come on. Sit in the car. Stay warm.”

  It was the policewoman.

  “I don’t want to sit in the car,” I told her.

  “Jason,” she said. “You’ve had a shock. You need to –”

  I pushed her away. “Get off me!” I shouted.

  And now her male colleague stepped forward. “Hey!” he barked.

  I backed away from them, blood pounding in my ears, adrenaline burning me up. I had to get out of here. I couldn’t be with these people. They couldn’t help me because they wouldn’t understand.

  A moment … then I made my decision. I turned, I threw off the blanket and I ran.

  The police called after me. “JJ! Jason!”

  I heard footsteps chasing but I didn’t turn back.

  On the opposite bank of the river I wouldn’t have stood a chance of getting away so easily. Canary Wharf was lit up like Vegas and it was full of security guards and CCTV. The roads were wide and there was nowhere to run. But on this side of the river it was Deptford, and Deptford was old and dark, a place of rundown flats, wire fences guarding suspended renovations and narrow, high-walled alleyways. The subways were badly-lit, and I ran into one of them as fast as I could. All the cameras were broken and no one stopped me. There was no one around apart from a few guys sitting on cardboard mattresses who laughed at the police chasing me down. “Go on, mate!” one of them shouted. Pig noises and manic laughter echoed behind me.

  It was a warren of weird light and shadow down there but I kept on running, turning left, then right, right again, looking for an exit.

  I emerged cold and shivering in the middle of a silent, sudden canyon where towering, derelict warehouses rose on both sides of me. Contractor notices were everywhere, hanging off broken metal fencing.

  Where to now? Had to hurry. The police couldn’t be far behind.

  I wiped my eyes and ran on, finding a gap in the fence that I could squeeze through. Once on the other side I stumbled across a wasteland of rubble, then into a towering derelict of dark concrete and scaffold, a warehouse which could have been slated for demolition as easily as renovation.

  Inside there were rows of archways on my left. I plunged into one at random and Christ it was dark.

  Stumbling, breathing hard, almost blind even, I picked my way through the warehouse and I buried myself deep inside, finding a stairway going down down down.

  I stumbled into a room within a room, with what felt like old bricks piled up inside it. I folded myself into the darkness, knees up to my chin, head in my hands, and then I cried for the first time in such a long, long time.

  That was this morning.

  Now I just feel numb.

  DI Hershey won’t find me in here and she knows it. I heard them earlier, clattering around elsewhere in the building, their radios crackling while I slunk into a corner and held my breath. But it’s dark and it’s dangerous in here. It stinks of piss, it’s full of old shit and there are a dozen other ramshackle buildings I could have dropped into; so now, if she’s looking at all, she’s looking somewhere else.

  Who am I kidding? Hershey is relentless and she hates me. She’ll hunt me down and dig me out. Eventually. Maybe I’ll even let her. But not yet, not just yet. There are some things I have to do first.

  Tonight, on New Year’s Eve, I’ll slip out into the streets, just one more face in the dark, and then I’ll bring this thing to a close. But first I need to get my head into gear. I need to pull myself together and figure out how I came to be in this mess. How I came to stand on the bank of the Thames like a ghost to watch someone who looked like me being hauled from the river; how I became a man with no friends, no home, no identity. Hunted by a murderer.

  Someone made this happen and I think I know who and I think I know why. But I have to be certain before I set out to find him and do what has to be done. I just need some time alone to think things through.

  Trouble is that time is one thing I don’t have. The clock is ticking down to midnight and he’s still out there. My enemy.

  So I ask myself, where might it all have started? Two bony boys? No, not quite so far back as that. Sometime, not so long ago. A day at the market perhaps, a day which began just like any other.

  My memories focus on the day…

  1

  Impressionism
br />   The life of our city is rich in romantic and beautiful subjects. We are enveloped and saturated, as though in an atmosphere of the marvellous; but we do not see it.

  The Salon of 1846: On the Heroism of Modern Life.

  Charles Baudelaire 13 May 1846.

  1.1

  Camden Market, North London. A freezing, grey afternoon the middle of October.

  Place was packed.

  I remember I was standing in the queue at Stan’s burger van on the edge of the market, reading up on the scores inside the back pages of The Mirror. Most times I was oblivious to the racket all around me but today it seemed busier than usual, like something was going on and I hadn’t been told about it.

  So many people.

  They were crowding the stalls, moving like pigs snuffling for truffles, paying well over the odds for any pretentious old tat they could lay hands on. Visitors all wanted something they could say they bought at Camden Market, while the locals, few and far between in a place like this, might have just popped over to rifle through the second-hand books and DVDs or say hello to a mate.

  They used to buy paintings and prints off me but I’d packed up my stall for the last time a while ago. Crunch came when a bunch of kids dived into the stall and threw ink at the paintings, spoiling them all. So I sold my pitch to Harriet and helped her out instead.

  Anyway I paid Stan his four-quid for the burger, then shoved the newspaper under an armpit while I loaded up with ketchup. Once that was all done I made my way round the back of the stalls munching down on the hot, greasy mass between my fingertips.

  Pretty soon I found myself up against a wall of sound: the bouncy beat of Meghan Trainor’s ridiculously catchy All About That Bass booming out the back of a white Transit. The van’s doors were open to show crates full of cheap CDs flanked by two monstrous speakers jumping in time to the bone-shaking bass line. Jhavesh Patel, wearing a Superdry jacket and NY baseball cap, stood outside the van swapping CDs for cash. Flicking away his cigarette he waved me over while his cousin, a silhouette in a hoody, carried on taking the money. “JJ, man. How you been? Did you find him?” he shouted.

  “Who?”

  It was a struggle to chat with all the noise.

  “Your mate.”

  “Huh?” No idea what he was talking about.

  “…wiv a skinhead,” he elaborated, then turned away to argue with someone.

  “Stephen?”

  Jhavesh looked up and shouted something else but I’d no idea what it was. Didn’t matter. I turned to leave then, remembering something, I bellowed at him: “Don’t forget tonight!”

  He cupped a hand to his ear. “Huh?”

  “Harriet’s stuff?”

  “Huh?”

  “Later!”

  “Huh?”

  He was grinning when I showed him the finger and walked away.

  “Your horse-burger stinks,” Harriet said when I reached her stall. “Go away.” She was wearing a red, woolly scarf which matched her gloves and a black duffel coat buttoned right up to her chin. I didn’t think it was that cold but she was sniffling.

  “That’s no way to talk to a mate,” I said to her, mouth full of burger and bread.

  “You’re scruffy and you smell.”

  “It’s the bohemian look.”

  “It’s the twenty-first century,” she reminded me, “even for ‘artists’?”

  Hated the way she did that, with the fingers either side of her head and ending with an inflection that turned her statement into a question. Arnold, my agent, did the same thing. Very Annoying.

  “You want something from me though, right?” I said, sucking ketchup off my fingers.

  Harriet looked at me, puzzled for a minute, long black lashes over her bright, green cat’s eyes. Then they opened wide. So did her mouth: a perfect smile.

  “Please let me borrow your lock up to dump all my shit in tonight? Pretty please?”

  She fluttered her lashes jokingly. She had amazing eyes.

  Harriet Brisley was a twenty-seven year-old vegetarian who wished she was still nineteen. She hated ‘getting old’ and the closer she got to thirty the more uptight and worried about it she became. Thirty was history for me, though. I’d passed that milestone years back and was half way from there to forty.

  “It’s all sorted, H,” I told her. “Jhavesh said he’d give us a lift so we can pack up all this crap in his van later and – What’s this?” I asked, dumping the newspaper to pick up a silver pendant and chain with my greasy fingers. It was a tiny silver snake curling round to eat its own tail. She sold all kinds of crap like this – and she hated it when I called it that, but it was. She used to work the stall with a pagan-chick friend of hers who had vanished into the city a few months ago, so now the stall and its eclectic mix of jewellery, crystals, scented candles, birth-charts, whale-music and Tarot cards was hers alone.

  Still, people seemed to buy it so what did I know?

  “Are you buying?” she asked.

  I shook my head and tossed it back. “No.”

  Finishing off my burger I leant against one of the poles holding up the stall. Harriet didn’t like this either so she grabbed the newspaper I’d dumped on her counter and threw it at me. “Thought I told you to go away?” she said.

  I caught the paper and tried to straighten it out, trouble was the grease from the burger made the headline ink smudge and spread. So I wiped my fingers on my coat. The dainty little napkin I’d been given by Stan had died in a gory mess on the way over.

  “You didn’t mean that.”

  “How do you know what I meant?” Harriet said. “What are you reading anyway? The Mirror? Jesus. I thought you creative types all read The Guardian?”

  “It’s teachers wot read the Guardian,” I told her, slightly mockingly. “We ‘artists’…” I did the thing with the fingers, at least with one hand, “… are far more low-brow.”

  She grabbed the paper off me, scanned the headline and threw it back.

  “Trash,” she said. “You know all this plays into the hands of this lunatic?” she said.

  “What?”

  She flicked the newspaper with her hand. “This. It’s just a – a publicity platform for the Camden Killer. All the newspapers. They’re all the fucking same.”

  Must be bad if she swore.

  I shook out the front page. Alongside images of bikini-clad celebs and something about the EuroMillions, the smudged headline for the lead story claimed ‘Camden Killer Victim Four’.

  Then she looked at me properly, by which I mean that her eyes narrowed and her brain started ticking.

  “That’s why you bought the paper.”

  “What?”

  “You! You’re obsessed with him!”

  “There’s a double-page spread inside,” I told her. “It shows all the locations where the bodies were found.”

  “You’re sick.”

  “I’m not the Camden Killer.”

  “The guy’s a murderer.”

  “And a celebrity. Big on Twitter right now.” I said. “And not always in the way that you think.”

  “You’re sick.”

  “Check it out.” I shoved the paper into my armpit and dug out my phone. I tapped up Twitter and pointed the screen at her face. “See. Trending at number three. Was number one this morning…” I scrolled through the newsfeed. “It’s like there’s a whole online community that’s built up around him. Have you seen the way Sky News introduce their Camden Killer features? They’ve given him his own theme tune.”

  She wasn’t listening. A young girl covered in piercings and tattoos had drifted over to her stall and so Harriet moved towards her.

  As she served her customer I had a quick scan through the keywords on the news feeds scrolling up my phone:

  Police confirm serial killer in North London…

  Fourth victim…

  Female, undisclosed age…

  Extravagent deathmask …

  Found in a locked room in a North London church…

  The phone rang. Incoming call replacing the text.

  It was Jenny’s hospital. They’d been trying to call me for a while but it wasn’t the kind of conversation I wanted to have right here so I rejected it. Got grease on the LCD so I scraped it down my coat, which probably just made it worse. I guess I’d need to wash my hands at some point. Maybe treat the phone to a screen cleaner as well.