Bold as Love (24 page)

‘But you don’t need to prove anything,’ said Allie. ‘He’s confessed.’

‘Not exactly,’ said Fiorinda. ‘He knows he’s guilty as hell, but he’s not guilty of murder, as he never meant to kill them. He sticks to that.’

‘We still need evidence, no matter how he pleads.’ DCI Holland looked at Ax and Sage. ‘Only a few of the recordings involve other adults. We believe they were made some time ago, same vintage as the commercial kiddie-porn videotapes. They’ve been copied and re-copied, there are no masters. This next one is a little different.’ She held up a plastic cassette, bagged and sealed. ‘The picture and sound quality are poor, but for some reason he didn’t enhance anything, and there are other differences. It could be an original.’

They watched. The movie kept moving as planned. It was the same drama, familiar by now to Allie and Fiorinda. The child who does not want to be there, who keeps asking,
can I go home now,
who tries charm and tries co-operation and tries pleading, and then just panics: but nothing works. The adults barely speaking. In this movie they were wearing hoods over their faces instead of having their features blurred out; white robes over their naked bodies. There was a fire, and candles. Maybe they liked the idea of the Ku Klux Klan or some other secret society thing. The scene seemed to be happening in a cellar, and there was a satan face on one wall.

‘As you can see,’ DCI Holland murmured, ‘this isn’t 113 Ruskin Road, but somewhere strangely like it—’

Shortly, Fiorinda said, ‘I don’t think it’s original.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because the original would be more than thirty years old, the tape would have rotted away. I think the cellar in Ruskin Road may be an imitation of this one… The little boy is Pigsty.’

The techs stopped the tape, plugged their cassette playback machine into their Conjurmac, cut and pasted the child’s face, rebuilt it, aged it, lined it up with photos of the adult—

‘She’s right,’ said one of them, ‘I think she’s right.’

‘Oh,
what
a surprise,’ sighed DCI Holland.

‘What goes around, comes around,’ muttered another of the techies.

‘Doesn’t it. Always…’ The bleak-eyed police officer turned to Ax. ‘I think we’ll stop there, Mr Preston, Sir—’

‘Ax,’

‘Ax. And Mr—ah—um—er—’

The poor woman was baffled as to how you address Aoxomoxoa politely—even unmasked, and revealed as merely a very tall blond, with cornflower blue eyes and the body of an oversized gymnast. Fiorinda noticed again the weird way the police treated both of them. With reserve naturally, we are all under investigation; but with
serious
respect. It was most clear in DCI Holland. The techies were more just old-fashioned fascinated.

‘Sage.’

‘Yes. Thank you both for attending the session. I won’t subject you to any more of this tonight, but we will have to ask you to view all the material. And answer some questions.’

‘Of course,’ said Ax.

The techies were packing up. ‘And thank you, Fiorinda,’ said DCI Holland, warmly. ‘As ever. You’ll be seeing him tomorrow, usual time?’

‘Yes.’

‘Mr Preston, now that you’re back we’ll need another meeting with your press office. I hope we can co-operate fully over handling the media. Could we—?’

‘Yeah, sure.’

Allie and Ax went out into the corridor, fixed a time. The police took themselves off. ‘How is she coping?’ said Ax.

‘Fio? Just amazing. She’s held the whole thing together.’

‘I know
that.
I have not been on another planet. I meant, with this shit.’

‘I think she’s okay. The only sign of…well, the night when we’d found the body, she was
vicious
with poor Lola Burnet. It was shocking. Suddenly she was, she was like some people think Fiorinda always is.’

‘Yeah. Talented little monster, not capable of normal emotions. Only we know different, don’t we. God, I wish I could keep her out of this. But I can’t.’

Allie didn’t know what to say. To feel flattered that Ax was confiding in her seemed a cruel response to his anxiety. She wanted to touch him, but those video diaries poisoned all gestures of affection.

‘I’m glad you’re back, Ax. We’ve missed you.’

‘Yeah. Look, I’ll see you later.’

Fiorinda and Sage were sitting where he had left them. He sat down again beside Sage. Somewhere overhead the grown up version of that little boy, those soft little limbs, that sweet, open face, was watching tv with his burly police bodyguards, who never let him out of their sight (except when he was with Fiorinda), in case he should harm himself. Ax had been to visit, before the video session. What could you call it? A courtesy call? Pigsty a little slack and gone to seed. Wanted to get back to his tv. Spoke of what he’d done as a terribly bad habit, that he’d taken up again because he was under a lot of stress.

‘I didn’t kill them, Ax. The deaths was accidental. That’s a fact.’

‘When my mother was dying,’ said Fiorinda, ‘All that time, I went on hating her. I still hate her now. It isn’t about what happened with my father, I know she wasn’t to blame. It’s about years and years of her being sunk in misery, and ignoring me. It’s so easy to be brutal to someone who is helpless. It is instantly addictive,
instantly
. She was dying in pain and loneliness and I couldn’t be gentle. Couldn’t even fake it, most of the time… That is such a vile state to be in. I think it’s hell. I’ve been thinking, that’s where Saul Burnet lives, that’s where he
lives
, it’s the place where his emotions survived. It’s very strange. When he talks about what he did to those other children, when he’s saying really hideous things, he becomes human. And I pity him, and I feel that we are not so far apart. The rest of the time he’s still a complete jerk, with his cunning plans to get round the system. God, he’s mortally afraid of being declared a head case—’

She wiped away the tears that were running down her face.

‘I’m so sorry for him.’

Later, around midnight, they gathered in the Sunlight Bar. No staff: they were serving themselves. They’d come to find Ax, hoping that Ax home from the wars would have some brilliant solution, but Ax wasn’t doing them any good. He was in a booth by the terrace, Fiorinda in his arms and her head on his shoulder, neither of them taking much notice of anyone. Sage was in the window seat opposite, staring through dark glass into the night. The others, grouped around these three, were getting drunk but not at all merry, wreathed in cannabis smoke but not at all mellow. Gallows humour impelled them to discuss
Bleeding Heart
, the Heads’ new album, which was raking it in, usual Aoxomoxoa and the Heads style. And that hideous hit single, too.

‘What do you do with all your money Sage?’

‘Don’t think he spends it on clothes,’ muttered Allie.

‘It all goes on running that van,’ said Chip. ‘How many fossil fuel gallons to the millimetre?’

‘Van doesn’t run on petrol, so there.’

‘Doesn’t run at all, mostly,’ said George Merrick. ‘Can’t get greener than that.’

‘So where does the fortune go?’ insisted Verlaine. ‘What’s the secret vice?’

‘I give it away.’

‘What, all of it?’

‘Nah, just most of it.’

What was ‘Who Knocks’ about? The lyrics weren’t provided, you had to piece them together. There’s this cannibal in a cellar, (it would have to be a cellar, wouldn’t it) sitting among bones and bits of flesh, that used to be beautiful girls, (spooky, delicate detail about the beauty of
parts
: hair, eyes, ears, etc). There’s a staircase with a door at the top. He’s watching this door, up there in the shadows. Someone’s knocking, it’s a woman he’s killed and eaten, she wants to come in, he’s very scared, should he let her in?

Well, does he let her in or doesn’t he. We need to know, and it is not clear.

‘Can’t remember.’

‘You are so weird, Sage,’ said Anne-Marie. Since that night, the second utterly terrible night in their history, Anne-Marie and Smelly Hugh had switched camps; and been accepted, with reservations. Anne-Marie was okay, if she was a bit of a crystal swinging folkie: and Smelly wasn’t such a bad guy. ‘Why d’you have to do a song about a serial killer anyway?’

‘Tisn’t about a serial killer.’

‘How d’you know it isn’t? You just said you’ve forgotten what it’s about.’

‘Because I’m not a serial killer.’

Sage had taken off his mask for the video session. The skull was back in place, but there wasn’t much sign of that glorious monster, Aoxomoxoa. The person there in the window, tired and still, absently fending off the banter, was much more like the Sage that Fiorinda and the Heads knew; and now Ax. But
the guy in Who Knocks is meant to be me,
he said: and implications blossomed like cancers. How far from Sage’s personal darkness to what Pigsty did? How far from those dead children to the heart of rock and roll?

Everybody is thinking the same thing, thought Fiorinda. We went to that seminar, out of pique, or curiosity, or because those tree-hugging, car-trashing hippies were about to become important; or for some other reason that seemed important at the time. Really we were looking for our leader, and we found him. But the leader wasn’t Ax, it was Pigsty. That’s what we have to face now, delayed reaction, finally hitting us. Paul invented him, we accepted him. We went along.

‘Why’s he protecting the other bastards in the videos?’ said Dilip, eventually.

‘I don’t think he’s protecting them,’ said Ax. ‘I think they may be dead.’

‘He’s killed them, too?’

‘Not exactly. Remember the death row thing? Five of those prisoners were re-offending lifers, on paedophile charges. I think Pigsty’s movie-making friends may have been among them.’

‘God,’
said Sage: and then, frowning, ‘Why didn’t you tell DCI Holland that?’

‘Because I only just thought of it.’

The emotional atmosphere deteriorated further, if that were possible.

Abruptly, Sage jumped up, like a huge bouncing toy. ‘Ah, this is no good. C’mon, let’s go somewhere, out.
Not
the San. Let’s see if Allie can get us in somewhere cool and fashionable.’ The skull wore its craziest grin. ‘C’mon, come on. On your feet, out of here, all of you, let’s hit the town.’

Next day at the Insanitude, in the room the Few had refitted as their office, with the windows overlooking the Victoria Monument, everyone pitched in to bring As up to date. A ring of scuffed tables and chairs, secondhand classroom furniture bought very cheaply, had become their forum. Ax and Sage took places on either side of Fiorinda. The alert, don’t-even-think-about-it physical presence they’d brought back from Yorkshire made them look like her bodyguards.

The government was keen to co-operate with Ax’s Crisis Management plans, not so keen on funding. Luckily the dangerous element in the drop out hordes, still growing, still roaming around looking for action, seemed happy, for the moment, with free gigs, good works, beer money; the occasional dodgy vegetable curry. In some regions the Volunteer Initiative was working well, some not so good. There was a danger that employers would use the volunteers as free labour and dump their unskilled staff, simply exacerbating the problem.

‘It doesn’t happen much,’ said Fiorinda. ‘They give our drop-outs simple chores, that do not cause much damage, and displace no one.’

‘Good, that’s good. Better than I’d hoped.’

‘They like the romantic packaging, but they know they’re buying into a protection racket. Do just what the Countercultural Movement wants, or else.’

‘Right,’ said Ax, grinning. ‘Wouldn’t want it otherwise. We need them scared.’

The Few laughed, very glad to have Ax back, to have these three installed: a wall nothing was going to get through, an inevitable triumvirate.

Pigsty was formally charged and taken into custody. Fiorinda persuaded him to co-operate with the psychiatric assessment. She went on visiting him, in the remand centre at Lloyd Park in Croydon, the Category A public sector prison that had replaced the disgraced Wormwood Scrubs. The story in the media grew in baroque detail, but the expected eruption of Countercultural violence did not happen, not even in Saul Burnet’s native Northampton.

The Chosen came up to London and had a terrible conference with their frontman and with Kit Minnitt, the band’s manager. But then, instead of quitting, Ax started gigging with them, driving down to the West after dark, meeting the others wherever they were playing. No advertising, people just arrived and found Ax on stage, and were thrilled: and the fingers still worked, though it seemed to Ax that they should not. They began to plan the album, their first since
Dirigiste
, that would become
Put Out The Fire
—the valedictory, the personal goodbye from the Chosen to a lost world, that seemed to belong to everyone who’d been travelling with them through these two years. The title was not a reference to the end of the Islamic Campaign, but to a classic Who track. It meant,
that song is over
. There’s no going back.

It was amazing how normal life seemed in this interlude; normal in terms of what they’d started to call normal. Slave for manager Ax. Do your shift on the hospital cleaning, the hedge planting, the classroom aiding; whatever’s going. Late at night, if you get the chance, do some drugs and get on the town with Aoxomoxoa. Lean on the big strange guy’s ferocious energy, like all those global punters, until he pounces on some willing unknown, and disappears with her. As Dilip said, watching Sage on the pull was like flat racing: over too quick to be entertainment.

‘Have you noticed,’ said Verlaine to Chip, ‘how he keeps away from
her
on the dancefloor? Because when he’s smashed out of his brain he can’t trust himself—’

‘He keeps away from me too,’ sighed Chip, ‘I tries not to take it personal. You are way off, Pippin. Haven’t you
noticed
him and Ax? It’s classic, innit. The endless one night stands, the mask, the outrageous homophobic remarks—’

‘Don’t get your hopes up,’ said Verlaine unkindly. ‘I’m right.’

They’d been missing their telly, for which they had no time under Ax’s regime. Triumvirate watching was shaping up as an excellent soap—substitute.