King Rat

  “Yeah. For sure. Do you want to leave me your number or something?”

  “No, I’ll come by again.”

  “Do you want my number, then?”

  “No. I’ll just come by, and if you’re not in, I’ll come by again.” Pete stopped in front of the stairs and turned back. “Hope I see you again, Fabian,” he said.

  Fabian nodded abstractedly, then looked into Pete’s eyes. The tall man was gazing at him with a peculiar intensity, demanding a response. The two were locked for a moment, until Fabian acquiesced and nodded more pointedly. Only then did Pete seem satisfied. He descended the stairs, followed by Natasha.

  The two were speaking, but Fabian could not make out any words. He frowned. The front door slammed shut and Natasha returned to the room.

  “He’s a bit of a weirdo, isn’t he?” Fabian asked.

  Natasha nodded vehemently. “’Strue, man, do you know what I mean? I threw him out at first, he was kind of getting leery.”

  “Trying it on?”

  “Kind of. But he was going on and on about wanting to play with me, and I was intrigued, and he started playing outside. He was good so I let him back in.”

  “Suitably humbled, yeah?” Fabian grinned briefly.

  “Damn right. But he plays…he plays like a fucking angel, Fabe.” She was excited. “He’s the original nutter, you’re right, I know, but there’s something very right about his playing.”

  There was a short silence. Natasha tugged at Fabian’s jacket and pulled him into the kitchen. “I need a coffee, man. You need a coffee. And I need to know about Saul.”

  In the street stood the tall man. He stared up at the window, the flute limp in his hand. His clothes twisted in the wind. He was even paler in the cold, in front of the dark trees. He was quite motionless. He watched the tiny variations of light as bodies moved in and out of the sitting-room. He cocked his ear slightly, pulled his fringe out of his eyes, twisted a lock of hair in his fingers. His eyes were the color of the clouds. He raised the flute slowly to his lips, played a brief refrain. A little group of sparrows wheeled out from the branches of a tree, circled him. The man lowered his flute and watched as the birds disappeared.

  S

  E

  V

  E

  N

  Two eyes stained yellow by death gaped stupidly. All the imperfections of the human body were magnified by utter stillness. Crowley ran his eyes over the face, took note of the wide pores, the pockmarks, the hairs sprouting from nostrils, the patch of stubble under the Adam’s apple that the razor had missed.

  The skin folded up under the chin and became a tightly wound coil, a skein of flesh wrung out to dry. The body was chest-down, limbs uncomfortable, and the head was facing the ceiling, twisted round nearly 180 degrees. Crowley stood and pushed his hands into his pockets to disguise their trembling. He turned and faced his entourage, two burly officers whose faces were identical portraits of disbelieving revulsion, scarcely more mobile than their fallen comrade’s.

  Crowley paced through the small hall to the bedroom. The flat was full of busy people, photographers, pathologists. Fingerprint dust sat in the air in flat layers, like geological strata.

  He peered round the frame of the bedroom door. A suited man crouched on the floor before a figure sitting with splayed legs, leaning against a wall. Crowley looked at the seated man and made a small disgusted noise, as if at rotten food. He stared into the ruinous mess of the other’s face. Blood was smeared across the wall. The dead man’s uniform was saturated with it, stiff like an oilskin coat.

  The suited doctor removed his tentative fingers from the bloody mess, and glanced behind him at Crowley.

  “You are…?”

  “DI Crowley. Doctor, what happened here?”

  The doctor gestured at the slumped figure. His voice was utterly detached, exhibiting the defensive professionalism Crowley had seen before at unpleasant deaths.

  “Ah, this chap, Constable Barker, yes? Well…he’s been hit in the face, basically, very fast and very hard.” He stood, ran his hands through his hair. “I think he’s come here to the front of the room, opened the door and been walloped with a…a bloody piledriver which sent him into the wall and onto the floor, at which point our assailant has borne down on him and cracked him a few more times. Once or twice with his fists, I think, then with a stick or a club or something, lots of long thin bruises across the shoulders and neck. And the line of damage here…” He indicated a particular trough in the bone-flecked pulp of the face.

  “And the other?”

  The doctor shook his head, and blinked several times. “Never seen that before, to be honest. He’s had his neck broken, which sounds straightforward enough, but…well, my God, you’ve seen him, yes?” Crowley nodded. “I don’t know…do you have any idea how strong the human neck is, Inspector? It’s not so very difficult to break a neck but someone has turned his the wrong way round… And they’ve had to dislocate all the vertebrae completely, so that tension in the flesh doesn’t send the head back round to the front. So they didn’t just turn his head round, they pulled upwards while they were doing it. You’re dealing with someone very, very strong, and, I shouldn’t wonder, with some sort of karate or judo or something.”

  Crowley pursed his lips. “There’s no real sign of struggle, so they were fast. Page opens the door and has his neck done in half a second, makes a little noise. Barker moves to the door of the bedroom, and…”

  The doctor looked at Crowley in silence. Crowley nodded his thanks and rejoined his companions. Herrin and Bailey were still staring at the implausible figure of Constable Page.

  Herrin looked up as Crowley approached. “Jesus fucking Christ, sir, it’s like that film…”

  “The Exorcist. I know, Constable.”

  “But like all the way round, sir…”

  “I know, Detective, now give it a rest. We’re leaving.”

  The three ducked under the twists of tape which sealed the flat, and made their way down through the bowels of the building. Outside, a large patch of grass was still surrounded with the same tape that closed off the flat above. Vicious droplets of glass still littered the earth.

  “It doesn’t seem possible, sir,” said Bailey, as they approached the car.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, I saw Garamond when he came in. Quite a big bloke but no Schwarzenegger. And Jesus, he didn’t look capable of…” Bailey spoke quickly, still deeply shocked.

  Crowley nodded as he swung the car round. “I know you’re never supposed to let yourself make judgments about who’s ‘the type’ and who’s not, but I’ve got to admit, Garamond’s shocked me. I thought, ‘Fine, no problem. Argues with the dad, struggle, shoves him out the window, in shock, goes to bed.’ Bit odd that, I admit, but when you’re drunk and freaked out, you do odd things.”

  “But I certainly didn’t have him down for the little Houdini he turned out to be. And as for this…”

  Herrin was nodding vehemently.

  “How did he do that? Door open, cell empty, no one sees him, no one hears a thing.”

  “But all this,” continued Crowley, “this is a real…surprise.” He gobbed the word out with disgust. He spoke slowly, his quiet voice halting momentarily between each word. “What I interviewed last night was a scared, confused, fucked-up little man. Whatever escaped from the station was some sort of master criminal, and whatever killed Page and Barker was…an animal.”

  He thinned his eyes and gently thumped the steering-wheel. “But everything about this is weird. Why did none of the neighbors hear anything going on between him and the dad? His camping story checks out?” Herrin nodded. “We can put him in Willesden at about ten, Mr. Garamond hit the ground at about ten-thirty, eleven. Someone should’ve heard it. How’s it going with the rest of the family?”

  “Series of blanks,” said Bailey. “Mum’s long dead, you know, and she was an orphan. His dad’s parents are dead, there’s no uncles, an aunt in Am
erica no one’s seen for years… I’m moving on to his mates. Some of them have already been calling in. We’ll go chase them up.”

  Crowley grunted assent as they pulled in at the station. Colleagues slowed as he walked past, gazed at him unhappily, wanting to say something about Page and Barker. He pre-empted them by nodding sadly, then moved on. He had no desire to share his shock.

  He returned to his desk, sipping the crap from the coffee machine. Crowley was losing his grasp on what was going on. It was disquieting him. The previous evening, when he had discovered that Saul had walked out of his cell, he had been filthy angry, livid—but he had made the right noises, done the right things. There’d been some major fuck-up obviously, and he would have serious words with a few people, just as the governor had had words with him. He had sent men out delving into Willesden’s darkness; Saul could not have got far. As a precaution, he had sent Barker to join Page in the boring task of watching over the crime scene, just in case Saul should be so stupid as to return home.

  Which it seemed he had done. But not the Saul he had interviewed, he would not believe that. He accepted that he made mistakes, could misjudge people, but not like that, he could not believe it. Something had demented Saul, given him the strength of the unhinged, and changed him from the person Crowley had interviewed into the devastating assassin who had brought such carnage to the small flat.

  Why had he not run? Crowley could not understand. He shoved his fingers into his eyes, kneaded them till they ached. Saul had returned, he pictured it, disorientated and stumbling, to the flat; to atone, perhaps, to try to remember, perhaps; and when he opened the door on the men in uniform he should have run, or fallen to the floor crying, denied all knowledge, snivelled.

  Instead he had reached out towards Constable Page, taken his head in his hands and torn it around in less than a second. Crowley winced. His eyes were closed but that was no respite from the brutal image. Saul had quietly dosed the door behind him, had turned to Constable Barker who was surely gazing at him in momentary confusion, had punched him back five feet, following the suddenly limp body, and beaten his face systematically into a broken, bloody, shattered thing.

  Constable Page was a stupid stocky man, quite new to the force. He was talkative, forever telling idiot jokes. They were often racist, although his girlfriend, Crowley knew, was of mixed race. Barker was a perpetual footsoldier, had been a constable for too long, but would not get the message and change his career. Crowley had not known either of the men well.

  There was an unpleasant somberness about the station: not so much shock as a tentative uncertainty about how to react. People were unused to death.

  Crowley put his head in his hands. He did not know where Saul was, he did not know what to do.

  E

  I

  G

  H

  T

  Greasy-looking clouds slid above the alley in which King Rat and Saul sat digesting. Everything seemed dirty to Saul. His clothes and face and hair were smeared with a day and a half’s muck, and now dirt was inside him. As he drew sustenance from it, it colored what he could see, but he looked around at his newly tarnished world as if it were a cynosure. It held no horror for him.

  Purity is a negative state and contrary to nature, Saul had once read. That made sense to him now. He could see the world clearly in all its natural and supernatural impurity, for the first time in his life.

  He was conscious of his own smell: the old acridity of alcohol splashed on these clothes long ago, the muck from the gutter of the roof, rotting food; but something new underneath it all. A taste of animal in his sweat, something of that scent which had entered his cell with King Rat two nights ago. Maybe it was in his mind. Maybe there was nothing beyond the faint remnants of deodorant, but Saul believed he could smell the rat in him coming out.

  King Rat leaned back against the rubbish sacks, staring at the sky.

  “It occurs,” he said presently, “that thee and me should scarper. Full?”

  Saul nodded. “You’ve got a story to tell me,” he said.

  “I know it,” said King Rat. “But I can’t exercise myself on that particular just yet. I’ve to teach you to be rat. Your eyes aren’t even open yet; you’re still such a mewling little furless thing. So…” He got to his feet. “What say we retire? Grab a bit of tucker for the underground.” He pushed handfuls of leftover fruitcake into his pockets.

  King Rat turned to face the wall behind the rubbish sacks. He moved to the right-angle of brick where the wall met one side of the narrow alley, wedged himself within it in his impossible way, and began to scale the wall. He teetered at the top, twenty feet up, his feet daintily picking between rusting coils of barbed wire as though they were flowers. He squatted between them and beckoned to Saul.

  Saul approached the wall. He set his teeth and jutted out his lower jaw, confrontational. He pushed himself into the corner space, as hard as he could, feeling his flesh mold itself into the space. He reached up with his arms. Like a rat, he thought, squeeze and move and pull like a rat. His fingers gripped the spaces between bricks and he hauled himself up with a prodigious strength. His face ballooned with effort, his feet scrabbled, but he was progressing up the wall in his own undignified fashion. He let out a growl, and heard an admonitory hissing from above him. He pushed his right arm up again, the dank smell of rat-sweat more evident than ever beneath his arms. His legs failed him, he quivered and fell, was caught and pulled into the thicket of crumbling wire.

  “Not so bad, ratling boy. Isn’t it a marvel what you can do with a scrap of decent grub in your belly? You were right up near the top.”

  And Saul felt pride at his climbing.

  Below them was a little courtyard hemmed in on all sides by dirty walls and windows. To Saul’s new eyes the robust dirt of the enclosure was almost too vibrant to look at. Every corner teemed with the spreading stains of decay; this weak spot of the city had been convincingly annexed by the forces of filth. A disconcerting line of dolls gently moldered where they had been placed, their backs to the wall, eyes on the pewter-colored plug in the corner of the courtyard. A manhole.

  King Rat exhaled through his nose triumphantly.

  “Home,” he hissed. “Into the palace.”

  He leapt from the top of the wall, landing in a crouch over the manhole, surrounding it. He made no sound as he came to rest on the concrete. His coat drifted down around him, surrounding him like oily puddle. He looked up and waited.

  Saul looked down and felt the old fears. He steeled himself, swallowed. He willed himself to jump, but his legs had locked into a fearful squat, and he grew exasperated as he readied himself to land beside uncle. He breathed in, once, twice, very deeply, to stood, swung his arms and launched himself at the shape waiting for him.

  He saw grays and reds of bricks and concrete lurch around him in slow motion, he moved his body, prepared his landing, as he saw King Rat’s grin approached him at speed; then the world jolted hard, his eyes and teeth juddered in his face, and he was down. His knees pushed all the air out of his stomach, but he smile with exhilaration as he overcame his spasming belly and sucked air into his lungs. He had flown, had I landed ready. He was shedding his humanity like an old snakeskin, scratching it off in great swathes. It was so fast, this assumption of a new form inside.

  “You’re a good boy,” said King Rat, and busied himself with the metal in the ground.

  Saul looked up. He saw figures move behind the windows above, wondered if anyone could see them.

  King Rat’s London snarl had assumed a didactic tone. “Pay attention, ratling. This here is the entrance to your ceremonial abode. The all of Rome-vill is yours by rights, you’re royalty. But there’s a special palace, the rat’s own hidey-hole, and you bing a waste there through these portholes.” He indicated the metal cover. “Observe.”

  King Rat’s fingers scuttled over the iron disc like a virtuoso typist’s, investigating its surface. He turned his head from side to side, cocked i
t briefly, then suddenly tensed his body and slipped his fingers into infinitesimal gaps between the seal and its shaft. It was like sleight of hand: Saul could not see what had happened, or how the fingers had fit, yet they were there, pulling, in the gaps.

  The manhole cover twisted with a yelp of rust. There was a rush of dirty wind as King Rat pulled it free.

  Saul stared into the pit. The swirling winds of the courtyard yanked at the rich-smelling wisps of vapor emerging from the hole. The sewer was gorged with darkness; it seemed to overflow, seeping out of the open concrete and obscuring the ground. The organic scent of compost billowed out. Just visible, a ladder driven into the subterranean brick plunged out of sight. Where it was riveted to the wall, metal had oxidized and leached out profusely, making the sewer bleed rust. The sound of a thin flow of water was amplified by the yawning tunnels, making for a bizarre booming trickle.

  King Rat looked at Saul. He clenched his hand into a fist, extended a pointing index finger, and his hand described an elaborate twisting path through the air, playfully circling, till it spiralled down and came to rest pointing into the sewer. King Rat stood at the edge of the thin circle. He stepped out over the hole and dropped through the pavement. There was a tiny echoing damp sound.

  King Rat’s voice emerged from underground.

  “Down you come.”

  Saul squeezed his hips through the hole.

  “Tut a lid on it,” said King Rat from below, and laughed briefly. Saul fumbled with the metal cover. He was half in, half out of the sewer. He sank under the weight of the metal. He held it above his head and descended. The light disappeared.

  Saul shivered in the cold of the sewer. His feet clapped on the metal. He stumbled as his feet hit wetness. He backed away from the ladder and rubbed himself in the darkness. Air gusted and hissed; freezing water flooded his shoes.

  “Where are you?” he whispered.