Billy Friend, the hardened realist, sees Soho as one long, sad poem or dirge, and he lives in the middle of it. Joe is unsure whether that makes him deeper than he appears, or just a little bit pathetic.
The street smells of urine and beer. The last of someone’s chicken dinner sits in an open box. How it has survived the night, Joe cannot imagine. Carefor Mews has rats and urban foxes and human denizens who’d be more than glad to take a bite of such an obvious gift. Well. Perhaps it’s recent.
The front door of the building has a combination lock, a new, electronic one. Joe knows the code—Billy gives it out quite freely, because anything which is stolen from him he can almost certainly steal back again, and he has no enemies. His neighbours find this habit infuriating, but Billy has a way of smoothing things over with people. It’s hard to stay angry with him.
First flight of stairs—no carpet. That strange, silver-specked blue linoleum, with a sandpaper texture so you don’t slip. His shoes make a noise like someone stepping on grit. Scritch. Why is that sound so familiar? Well, he’s been here before. But that’s not why. Hm.
Second flight—wood boards, the edges painted white, still no carpet. Mr. Bradley the building manager intends to put some down, but never quite has. There are drizzles of white paint across the boards, and dents and scratches in the bare wood from stiletto heels and heavy boots. Once, when Joe came here, the whole staircase was one enormous party, a weird stew of low-end toughs, party girls and party boys, and not a few film types with mournful faces complaining about tax equity over pisco sours in plastic cups. Each step goes donk, and some of them creak, too.
Third flight—hard plastic. The whole third floor is owned by one person, a cheerful Romanian named Basil who made some kind of once-in-a-lifetime deal and retired at the age of thirty-two. He bought this place to live in, installed some friends and family, then realised they were exploiting him and threw them all out. Now he lives alone, and paints very, very bad landscapes from his balcony. Basil is under no illusions about the quality of his work, but he likes to paint. Billy finds him infuriating. Joe can talk to Basil for hours about not very much, because Basil feels no need to control, prove, or even examine anything. He just floats, and paints, and occasionally gets very drunk and dances in clogs on the ultramodern floor of his enormous home. His bit of the staircase is a curious translucent block which looks as if it comes from an aquarium.
Fourth flight—rich, luxuriant carpet. “Deep shag,” Billy always says knowingly. The top floor of the building is quite small, because much of Basil’s place is double-height. Still, there’s that strong feeling of James Bond about a Soho penthouse, and Billy plays it all the way to the hilt. The door has another combination lock, this one more serious and more closely guarded.
“Billy!” Joe says, banging on the door. “What the fuck is going on? Are you okay?”
Billy Friend doesn’t answer. Not unusual. He’s a heavy sleeper, and not often alone up here. He’s probably putting on his silk dressing gown.
“Hoy! William Friend! This is Joshua Joseph Spork here, and before you bugger off to warmer climes I need a word in your earhole! Billy! Open up!” Joe bangs again on the door, and his heart gives a single, sickening lurch as the latch clicks, and the door opens just a crack.
Oh, shit.
On the one hand, Joe has never been in this situation before. On the other, he has been to the movies, and he knows that doors which swing open when you touch them are a bad sign. And somewhere in the back of his mind, Night Market voices are speaking in his head: old second-hand instincts are telling him to run.
Melodrama. Most likely is that Billy is downstairs trying to persuade Basil to lend him a Mercedes for his escape from his annoyed clients. And anyway, Joe Spork is a paragon of lawful behaviour, made his old dad an unlikely promise and stuck to it evermore. The world he lives in does not include gunfire or dirty deeds done dirt cheap. And this is London, after all.
He opens the door.
Billy Friend is a fastidious person. He likes to appear louche, but for all that the knot of his tie is forever resting against the second or even third button of his shirt, he is a very tidy man. Joe suspects this very tidiness is partly responsible for his decision to shave his head. The asymmetry, the unpredictability, the messiness of his half-covered head offended him at least as much as it decreased his chances with the ladies. Billy’s only real girlfriend of the last ten years—a bubbly forty-something called Joyce, whose considerable cleavage was matched by a splendidly unpredictable wit—was eventually rejected not because she wanted to marry him or because nature’s depredations on her body became too marked, but because she genuinely did not care where she left her socks. Joyce would roll in from a night at the Lab or Fioridita and throw underwear, overwear, and shoes into separate corners of the room. She’d drag Billy to bed and hurl his cherished Italian brogues into the sink, or blindfold herself with his best silk tie.
“I love that woman, Joe,” Billy moaned shortly before the separation, “but she’s death to a man’s wardrobe and hell on his sense of place.” For Billy, above the hubbub of Soho, his penthouse is a chapel of calm.
Which is why Joe’s sense of alarm is growing. The penthouse is a mess. Is this a sign of Billy’s urgent need to be elsewhere? Did he pack, unpack, discard and start again, leaving a trail of silk boxers and lycra briefs? (And oh, my God, the image that evokes!) Or has he been burgled? And if so, was it done, perhaps, by person or persons in the employ of a fat man with kidneyed sweat and a thin one with a surgeon’s placid face? Or by shadowmen draped in black?
Or is it unrelated? Billy has plenty of irons in the fire. Perhaps he slept with a Russian mobster’s daughter or a boxer’s wife. Perhaps he sold to the wrong person (for the second time this year) a painting “possibly by van Gogh” which quite definitely is not.
Two of Billy’s suits are laid out over the back of the leather sofa. There’s a bottle of milk, half empty (and where does he get bottles any more?) resting on the bar. But still no cheerful bald erotomane, no glad halloo of greeting.
The floor is done up in more of the thick carpet so that Billy can have sex on it without grazing his knees or back. Joe’s shoes make no noise as he walks. He is acutely conscious that a housebreaker, discovered in his profession and armed, might likewise make no sound as he prepared to strike. On the other hand … Joe Spork is a big man. His profile does not invite casual assault. It suggests rather that discretion is the better part of valour. He scoops up the poker from the fireplace.
Billy’s penthouse is in three parts. The outer ring—you might almost think of it as the moat—is where he does his entertaining. It is furnished with glitzy scatter cushions and fertility idols from non-existent indigenous peoples, and a collection of somewhat risqué paintings by an eighties artist whose name no one now remembers.
The middle ring is made up of Billy’s bedroom, in which resides his pride and joy, a great bed with four stone columns looted from a defunct museum in Croatia. The canopy is a driftwood panel carved by a girl in the Maldives whom Billy espoused as the greatest natural talent he had ever met. He brought this thing back as proof of concept and secured her a deal with a gallery in Holborn, only to find, on his return, that she had died in a road accident.
He wasn’t even sleeping with her. He just saw beauty and loved it. On the frequent occasions when Joe asks himself why he remains in touch with Billy, this sad little story is one of the things which persuades him that Billy is more than he appears to be.
Joe stares at the bed. Clean sheets. Billy had time to change them after his most recent lover departed. But unravelled and hauled about the place. So. Billy packed, and then he was burgled.
Something crunches underfoot. Joe looks down. Corn? Wheat? Something like, anyway. Not a sexual fetish he can identify. Packing material? He’s seen, recently, objects packed in popcorn as an environmentally friendly alternative to those pernicious foam nuggets which cling to everything and, if they once esc
ape their box, take refuge all over his workspace. But popcorn is soft and fluffy, and this stuff is notably unpuffed. Gravel, probably, from whichever grand home Billy is presently selling to.
He peers into the bathroom. The same unkind hand has tossed all the shampoo bottles and colognes into the tub. The shower curtain is pulled halfway across, and Joe experiences another frisson of unease. He reaches out with the poker.
The most horrible thing behind the curtain is a bar of soap in the shape of a naked female torso. It’s a fair likeness, but it’s green, and smells of artificial apple.
On, then, to the innermost ring: Billy’s study. It’s a small, cosy little room at the back, with a view of the rooftops. There’s just room beside the desk for a single bed and a bookshelf. After saying goodbye to Joyce, Billy took to sleeping in here so that the size of the double bed wouldn’t remind him she was gone. Joe has a sad, never-uttered conviction that Billy, when alone, sleeps in here a great deal, that this room and this room alone is the truth about his life. Like Soho, the truth about Billy Friend is seen in the quiet times as much as in the loud. In this study, the lonely, almost scholastic little man takes stock, and looks into his mirror, and wonders who is looking back. He reads first editions (the only thing Billy will not chop and recondition, steal, or counterfeit is books) and eats cheese sandwiches made with granary bread from a local baker. He drinks tea. He wears jeans and a jumper and very occasionally calls his distant, disapproving family in Wiltshire to check on the progress of his nephew and two nieces through the horrors of school. University, by now—for the older ones, at least.
Joe pushes open the door. His breath catches a bit. There’s a picture of Joyce in a frame on the desk; she’s smiling a broad, hearty smile, the one she reserved for Billy and shared with him whenever she could. Billy, you’re an idiot. You loved her. You still do. Call her up, get her back. She’ll come. Tidy is a habit, to make or break. Love is more than tidy.
Perhaps he has. Perhaps, in extremis, he’s fled to Joyce. Maybe that’s what this is all about; not Mr. Titwhistle and Mr. Cummerbund and their facile deceptions, but Billy having a minor nervous collapse and junking his old life for a new one with Joyce, puppies, and a messy place in the country. That would be strange, but very nice. Joe could go and visit. He could bring a girlfriend, a serious one, and not worry that Billy would offend her by making a pass (or not offend her by making a pass).
Maybe this isn’t burglary, but commitment. Make a mess. Let go the little streak of mean precision. Let it all hang out.
There’s something on the picture frame. Jam, apparently. That almost settles it. Billy has been sitting here, eating jam (on granary, with too much butter) and realised the futility of his urban party lifestyle. He has tossed back the last mouthful of Mrs. Harrington’s Finest Strawberry Preserve, snuffled up the crusts, and thrown his life into disarray in the name of love. Bravo!
The jam is odourless. Joe sniffs at it again. No. Very strange. It smells of nothing at all. Underfoot, another crunch. More gravel? Yes, but also … something white and bulgy. Popcorn. He prods it with his foot. Not popcorn. Hard. A plastic rawlplug, a picture hook, a binder. He leans down.
A tooth.
He picks it up. Wet. Cold. A tooth. He holds it in his hand. Nicotine-stained, just a little. Polished. Billy takes good care of his dentition. Joe stares at it. How does a perfectly healthy man lose a tooth all of a sudden?
The smell hits him all at once, as if it’s been lurking around the edges of the room and now sweeps down and rushes into his nose and mouth. Flat, metallic, raw and vile, it makes him gag. The tooth. Oh, shit. Shit, oh, shit. The room is going round and up and down, and now there’s an enormous amount of noise in his ears, a rushing static like a radio between channels. He leans on the desk, goes to sit on the bed, and realises just before he does so that it is the source of everything, the ghastly, misshapen lump beneath the sheet which he has been ignoring, somehow, since he came in: a huge, dead, butchered hog’s carcass, except that it is not a hog at all, but a lonely, bald lecher with a monkish heart, and someone has done bad things to him, bloody things which have dripped and stained the carpet, and sprayed the walls in the dark, private corner above the bed.
Beneath the sheet, Billy Friend has been murdered, most awfully, most deliberately, most pointedly, and that is the world now, newborn and hard.
He must have died looking at Joyce’s picture, and Joe cannot decide if that was mercy or a most appalling cruelty.
He shudders.
Billy Friend is dead.
V
The trouble with shooting people;
girls wishing to serve their country;
S2:A.
The trouble with shooting people, Edie Banister now remembers, is that it’s so hard to do just one. Having shot her would-be assassin, and now being, as it were, on the lam, she has to return to her former quite abstemious attitude and not just shoot anyone who impedes her passage. She has already had to speak to herself quite firmly about nearly shooting two irritating pedestrians and a slow driver. She is positively proud not to have ventilated Mr. Hanley, the street-sweeper, who popped up behind her as she was leaving and wished her good morning, and she is really astonished at her own good behaviour in not shooting Mrs. Crabbe, who was merely walking by on the other side of the street, but whom she has never liked.
Focus, old cow.
The gun is extremely heavy in her bag. She has reloaded, out of habit; she does not honestly expect to be assailed in the street, and all that mystical jabber about expecting the unexpected is just so much toffee. Expect the unexpected, Edie was told by a sour veteran sergeant in Burma, and the expected will walk up to you and blow your expectations out through the back of your head. Expect the expected, just don’t forget the rest.
The expected, then, is for her enemy to imagine that Mr. Biglandry has squished her like a bug. The assassin won’t be missed for at least another half-hour, perhaps as much as a day, depending on how long his leash was. Edie has exactly that long to disappear. First step: a change of clothes.
She takes a taxi to a nondescript street in Camden Town, and tells the driver a story about her great-grandchildren so asinine that even she feels slightly sick. After a couple of minutes, he cannot actually look at her in the mirror, and Edie can feel her face sliding in his memory until it is generic: little old lady, average height, average dress. Lawdamercy, but the old baggage can talk.
Still twittering banalities, Edie pays the man, then fishes in her purse for an old-style penny, dated 1959. A proper tip back then, worth nothing at all today. She has a small trove for convincing people she’s dotty.
“Here you are, driver, and God bless!”
He takes it hurriedly, eyes everywhere but on her. He just wants to forget that she was ever in his cab. The feel of round, cold metal, the wrong size and the wrong weight, makes him freeze for a moment. Then he looks down.
“Oh,” he says automatically, “thanks very much.” You poor lamb. She almost feels guilty, but hasn’t the time.
She leaves him staring at the coin. He will recall the sense of aggravation she has engendered, but not much else. In an hour, he will remember her if at all as an amalgam of every fare he has ever disliked.
And then she goes shopping.
Four hours later, in the snug of the Pig & Poet: Edie has tied her hair up in not one but three separate knots, and she is wearing a T-shirt purchased from a barrow trader, a black skirt, and heavy leggings and boots. Camden Town has been good to her. She begged some safety pins from the respectable peeping Tom who runs a dry-cleaner’s at the end of the road, and put the whole thing together to make a formidable new identity: mad old lady punk.
The Pig & Poet isn’t much of a pub. It’s a couple of tables and a miserable jukebox which didn’t work even before Edie took one of her safety pins and shoved it across the two bottom bars of the plug and stuck it back in the wall, thereby causing a short circuit and a strong smell of melted plastic. Th
e snug is now in partial darkness, which just about conceals how mournful it is, and how cheap.
The Irishman who used to run this place managed to get some joy into it just by being who he was, a kind of punchy, endlessly profane little man with a liking for large women. He went off to Exeter, apparently, and has nevermore been seen. Since his departure, the poetry has ebbed from the saloon bar, and the remainder is decidedly piggy. In consequence, it wasn’t hard to get the attic room on cash deposit, no questions asked.
Edie is doing her accounts. By rule of long-ago decision, she does not allow herself unconsidered killings. For all that her recent shooting spree was in the heat, no death should go unnoticed, least of all if she had a hand in it. The power of knowing how to extinguish life in so many ways—and the power which stems from having done it—must be balanced with a respect for what it means to bring someone else’s narrative to a close.
Edie, as she sips on her rum and Coke, takes a moment to wonder if she might have done things differently, and to appreciate the significance of Biglandry et fils, and the appallingness of having snuffed them out. For all that they were grotty, wicked, venal men, they were extraordinary things, both of them ravishing, complex creatures. Perhaps they were loving, too, in their own way. Soldiers for hire, certainly, and rough-hewn. That doesn’t mean they weren’t also dads or sons. Will Mrs. Biglandry curse and wail? Of course she will. Her horror at this circumstance will not be diminished by her husband’s profession—if she ever finds it out. Her son will not be less orphaned, nor her daughter less broken, if she tries to explain that Biglandry’s end was just.
If I were younger, Edie thinks. Or if I had allies. Or if I’d thought a bit longer and planned a bit better. She goes through it in her head, one more time. Killed two, spared one. Bad mathematics, but better than it might have been. Less good than it could have been, too, old cow.