The maisonette wasn't that large, but the windows had been boarded up throughout, and as she moved further from the front door the dubious light petered out altogether. The smell of urine, which had been strong at the door, intensified too, until by the time she reached the back of the living-room and stepped along a short corridor into another room beyond, it was cloying as incense. This room, being furthest from the front door, was also the darkest, and she had to wait a few moments in the cluttered gloom to allow her eyes to become useful. This, she guessed, had been the bedroom. What little furniture the residents had left behind them had been smashed to smithereens. Only the mattress had been left relatively untouched, dumped in the corner of the room amongst a wretched litter of blankets, newspapers, and pieces of crockery.
Outside, the sun found its way between the clouds, and two or three shafts of sunlight slipped between the boards nailed across the bedroom window and pierced the room like annunciations, scoring the opposite wall with bright lines. Here, the graffitists had been busy once more: the usual clamour of love-letters and threats. She scanned the wall quickly, and as she did so her eye was led by the beams of light across the room to the wall which contained the door she had stepped through.
Here, the artists had also been at work, but had produced an image the like of which she had not seen anywhere else. Using the door, which was centrally placed in the wall, as a mouth, the artists had sprayed a single, vast head on to the stripped plaster. The painting was more adroit than most she had seen, rife with detail that lent the image an unsettling veracity. The cheekbones jutting through skin the colour of buttermilk; the teeth – sharpened to irregular points – all converging on the door. The sitter's eyes were, owing to the room's low ceiling, set mere inches above the upper lip, but this physical adjustment only lent force to the image, giving the impression that he had thrown his head back. Knotted strands of his hair snaked from his scalp across the ceiling.
Was it a portrait? There was something naggingly specific in the details of the brows and the lines around the wide mouth; in the careful picturing of those vicious teeth. A nightmare certainly: a facsimile, perhaps, of something from a heroin fugue. Whatever its origins, it was potent. Even the illusion of door-as-mouth worked. The short passageway between living-room and bedroom offered a passable throat, with a tattered lamp in lieu of tonsils. Beyond the gullet, the day burned white in the nightmare's belly. The whole effect brought to mind a ghost train painting. The same heroic deformity, the same unashamed intention to scare. And it worked; she stood in the bedroom almost stupified by the picture, its red-rimmed eyes fixing her mercilessly. Tomorrow, she determined, she would come here again, this time with high-speed film and a flash to illuminate the masterwork. As she prepared to leave the sun went in, and the bands of light faded. She glanced over her shoulder at the boarded windows, and saw for the first time that one four-word slogan had been sprayed on the wall beneath them. "Sweets to the sweet' it read. She was familiar with the quote, but not with its source. Was it a profession of love? If so, it was an odd location for such an avowal. Despite the mattress in the corner, and the relative privacy of this room, she could not imagine the intended reader of such words ever stepping in here to receive her bouquet. No adolescent lovers, however heated, would lie down here to play at mothers and fathers; not under the gaze of the terror on the wall. She crossed to examine the writing. The paint looked to be the same shade of pink as had been used to colour the gums of the screaming man; perhaps the same hand?
Behind her, a noise. She turned so quickly she almost tripped over the blanket-strewn mattress. "Who -?"
At the other end of the gullet, in the living-room, was a scab-kneed boy of six or seven. He stared at Helen, eyes glittering in the half-light, as if waiting for a cue.
"Yes?" she said.
"Anne-Marie says do you want a cup of tea?" he declared without pause or intonation.
Her conversation with the woman seemed hours past. She was grateful for the invitation however. The damp in the maisonette had chilled her.
"Yes…" she said to the boy. "Yes please."
The child didn't move, but simply stared on at her.
"Are you going to lead the way?" she asked him.
"If you want," he replied, unable to raise a trace of enthusiasm.
"I'd like that."
"You taking photographs?" he asked.
"Yes. Yes, I am. But not in here." "Why not?"
"It's too dark," she told him.
"Don't it work in the dark?" he wanted to know.
"No."
The boy nodded at this, as if the information somehow fitted well into his scheme of things, and about turned without another word, clearly expecting Helen to follow.
If she had been taciturn in the street, Anne-Marie was anything but in the privacy of her own kitchen. Gone was the guarded curiosity, to be replaced by a stream of lively chatter and a constant scurrying between half a dozen minor domestic tasks, like a juggler keeping several plates spinning simultaneously. Helen watched this balancing act with some admiration; her own domestic skills were negligible. At last, the meandering conversation turned back to the subject that had brought Helen here.
"Them photographs," Anne-Marie said, “why'd you want to take them?"
"I'm writing about graffiti. The photos will illustrate my thesis."
"It's not very pretty."
"No, you're right, it isn't. But I find it interesting."
Anne-Marie shook her head. "I hate the whole estate," she said. "It's not safe here. People getting robbed on their own doorsteps. Kids setting fire to the rubbish day in, day out. Last summer we had the fire brigade here two, three times a day 'til they sealed them chutes off. Now people just dump the bags in the passageways, and that attracts rats."
"Do you live here alone?"
"Yes," she said, “since Davey walked out."
"That your husband?"
"He was Kerry's father, but we weren't never married. We lived together two years, you know. We had some good times. Then he just upped and went off one day when I was at me Main's with Kerry." She peered into her tea-cup. "I'm better off without him," she said. "But you get scared sometimes. Want some more tea?"
"I don't think I've got time."
"Just a cup," Anne-Marie said, already up and unplugging the electric kettle to take it across for a re-fill. As she was about to turn on the tap she saw something on the draining board, and drove her thumb down, grinding it out. "Got you, you bugger," she said, then turned to Helen: "We got these bloody ants."
"Ants?"
"Whole estate's infected. From Egypt, they are: pharoah ants, they're called. Little brown sods. They breed in the central heating ducts, you see; that way they get into all the flats. Place is plagued with them." This unlikely exoticism (ants from Egypt?) struck Helen as comical, but she said nothing. Anne-Marie was staring out of the kitchen window and into the back-yard.
"You should tell them -” she said, though Helen wasn't certain whom she was being instructed to tell, “Tell them that ordinary people can't even walk the streets any longer – "Is it really so bad?" Helen said, frankly tiring of this catalogue of misfortunes.
Anne-Marie turned from the sink and looked at her hard.
We've had murders here," she said.
"Really?"
"We had one in the summer. An old man he was, from Ruskin. That's just next door. I didn't know him, but he was a friend of the sister of the woman next door. I forget his name."
"And he was murdered?"
"Cut to ribbons in his own front room. They didn't find him for almost a week."
"What about his neighbours? Didn't they notice his absence?"
Anne-Marie shrugged, as if the most important pieces of information – the murder and the man's isolation – had been exchanged, and any further enquiries into the problem were irrelevant. But Helen pressed the point. "Seems strange to me," she said.
Anne-Marie plugged in the filled kettle. "W
ell, it happened," she replied, unmoved.
"I'm not saying it didn't, I just -”
"His eyes had been taken out," she said, before Helen could voice any further doubts.
Helen winced. "No," she said, under her breath.
"That's the truth," Anne-Marie said. "And that wasn't all'd been done to him." She paused, for effect, then went on: "You wonder what kind of person's capable of doing things like that, don't you? You wonder." Helen nodded. She was thinking precisely the same thing.
"Did they ever find the man responsible?"
Anne-Marie snorted her disparagement. "Police don't give a damn what happens here. They keep off the estate as much as possible. When they do patrol all they do is pick up kids for getting drunk and that. They're afraid, you see. That's why they keep clear."
"Of this killer?"
"Maybe," Anne-Marie replied. "Then: He had a hook."
"A hook?"
"The man what done it. He had a hook, like Jack the Ripper."
Helen was no expert on murder, but she felt certain that the Ripper hadn't boasted a hook. It seemed churlish to question the truth of Anne-Marie's story however; though she silently wondered how much of this – the eyes taken out, the body rotting in the flat, the hook – was elaboration. The most scrupulous of reporters was surely tempted to embellish a story once in a while.
Anne-Marie had poured herself another cup of tea, and was about to do the same for her guest. "No thank you," Helen said, "I really should go."
"You married?" Anne-Marie asked, out of the blue.
"Yes. To a lecturer from the University."
"What's his name?"
"Trevor."
Anne-Marie put two heaped spoonfuls of sugar into her cup of tea. "Will you be coming back?" she asked. "Yes, I hope to. Later in the week. I want to take some photographs of the pictures in the maisonette across the court."
"Well, call in.
"I shall. And thank you for your help."
"That's all right," Anne-Marie replied. "You've got to tell somebody, haven't you?"
"The man apparently had a hook instead of a hand."
Trevor looked up from his plate of tagliatelle con prosciutto.
"Beg your pardon?"
Helen had been at pains to keep her recounting of this story as uncoloured by her own response as she could. She was interested to know what Trevor would make of it, and she knew that if she once signaled her own stance he would instinctively take an opposing view out of plain bloody-mindedness.
"He had a hook," she repeated, without inflexion.
Trevor put down his fork, and plucked at his nose, sniffing. "I didn't read anything about this," he said. "You don't look at the local press," Helen returned. "Neither of us do. Maybe it never made any of the nationals." ''Geriatric Murdered By Hook-Handed Maniac'?" Trevor said, savouring the hyperbole. "I would have thought it very newsworthy. When was all of this supposed to have happened?"
"Sometime last summer. Maybe we were in Ireland."
"Maybe," said Trevor, taking up his fork again. Bending to his food, the polished lens of his spectacles reflected only the plate of pasta and chopped ham in front of him, not his eyes.
"Why do you say maybe?" Helen prodded.
"It doesn't sound quite right," he said. "In fact it sounds bloody preposterous."
"You don't believe it?" Helen said.
Trevor looked up from his food, tongue rescuing a speck of tagliatelle from the corner of his mouth. His face had relaxed into that non-committal expression of his – the same face he wore, no doubt, when listening to his students. "Do you believe it?" he asked Helen. It was a favourite time-gaining device of his, another seminar trick, to question the questioner.
"I'm not certain," Helen replied, too concerned to find some solid ground in this sea of doubts to waste energy scoring points.
"All right, forget the tale -” Trevor said, deserting his food for another glass of red wine." – What about the teller? Did you trust her?"
Helen pictured Anne-Marie's earnest expression as she told the story of the old man's murder. "Yes," she said. "Yes; I think I would have known if she'd been lying to me."
"So why's it so important, anyhow? I mean, whether she's lying or not, what the fuck does it matter?" It was a reasonable question, if irritatingly put. Why did it matter? Was it that she wanted to have her worst feelings about Spector Street proved false? That such an estate be filthy, be hopeless, be a dump where the undesirable and the disadvantaged were tucked out of public view – all that was a liberal commonplace, and she accepted it as an unpalatable social reality. But the story of the old man's murder and mutilation was something other. An image of violent death that, once with her, refused to part from her company.
She realized, to her chagrin, that this confusion was plain on her face, and that Trevor, watching her across the table, was not a little entertained by it.
"If it bothers you so much," he said, “why don't you go back there and ask around, instead of playing believe-in-it or-not over dinner?"
She couldn't help but rise to his remark. "I thought you liked guessing games," she said.
He threw her a sullen look.
"Wrong again."
The suggestion that she investigate was not a bad one, though doubtless he had ulterior motives for offering it. She viewed Trevor less charitably day by day. What she had once thought in him a fierce commitment to debate she now recognized as mere power-play. He argued, not for the thrill of dialectic, but because he was pathologically competitive. She had seen him, time and again, take up attitudes she knew he did not espouse, simply to spill blood. Nor, more's the pity, was he alone in this sport. Academe was one of the last strongholds of the professional timewaster. On occasion their circle seemed entirely dominated by educated fools, lost in a wasteland of stale rhetoric and hollow commitment.
From one wasteland to another. She returned to Spector Street the following day, armed with a flashgun in addition to her tripod and high-sensitive film. The wind was up today, and it was Arctic, more furious still for being trapped in the maze of passageways and courts. She made her way to number 14, and spent the next hour in its befouled confines, meticulously photographing both the bedroom and living-room walls. She had half expected the impact of the head in the bedroom to be dulled by re-acquaintance; it was not. Though she struggled to capture its scale and detail as best she could, she knew the photographs would be at best a dim echo of its perpetual howl. Much of its power lay in its context, of course. That such an image might be stumbled upon in surroundings so drab, so conspicuously lacking in mystery, was akin to finding an icon on a rubbish-heap: a gleaming symbol of transcendence from a world of toil and decay into some darker but more tremendous realm. She was painfully aware that the intensity of her response probably defied her articulation. Her vocabulary was analytic, replete with buzzwords and academic terminology, but woefully impoverished when it came to evocation. The photographs, pale as they would be, would, she hoped, at least hint at the potency of this picture, even if they couldn't conjure the way it froze the bowels.
When she emerged from the maisonette the wind was as uncharitable as ever, but the boy waiting outside – the same child as had attended upon her yesterday – was dressed as if for spring weather. He grimaced in his effort to keep the shudders at bay.
"Hello," Helen said.
"I waited," the child announced.
Waited?"
"Anne-Marie said you'd come back."
"I wasn't planning to come until later in the week," Helen said. "You might have waited a long time." The boy's grimace relaxed a notch. "It's all right," he said, "I've got nothing to do."
"What about school?"
"Don't like it," the boy replied, as if unobliged to be educated if it wasn't to his taste.
"I see," said Helen, and began to walk down the side of the quadrangle. The boy followed. On the patch of grass at the centre of the quadrangle several chairs and two or three dead saplings had be
en piled.
"What's this?" she said, half to herself.
"Bonfire Night," the boy informed her. "Next week."
"Of course."
"You going to see Anne-Marie?" he asked.
"Yes."
"She's not in'
"Oh. Are you sure?"
"Yeah."
"Well, perhaps you can help me…"She stopped and turned to face the child; smooth sacs of fatigue hung beneath his eyes. "I heard about an old man who was murdered near here," she said to him. "In the summer. Do you know anything about that?"
"No."
"Nothing at all? You don't remember anybody getting killed?"
"No," the boy said again, with impressive finality. "I don't remember."
Well; thank you anyway."
This time, when she retraced her steps back to the car, the boy didn't follow. But as she turned the corner out of the quadrangle she glanced back to see him standing on the spot where she'd left him, staring after her as if she were a madwoman.
By the time she had reached the car and packed the photographic equipment into the boot there were specks of rain in the wind, and she was sorely tempted to forget she'd ever heard Anne-Marie's story and make her way home, where the coffee would be warm even if the welcome wasn't. But she needed an answer to the question Trevor had put the previous night. Do you believe it?, he'd asked when she'd told him the story. She hadn't known how to answer then, and she still didn't. Perhaps (why did she sense this?) the terminology of verifiable truth was redundant here; perhaps the final answer to his question was not an answer at all, only another question. If so; so. She had to find out.