The Unblemished (11 page)

'I'm a friend of Sammy Dyer's. I'm a freelance photographer. I was
at Leonard Wright's grave the other –'

'Richard Dreyfuss. Yes, I remember. What do you want? You
want to show me some big shark you caught?'

'I just wanted to ask if you'd had any luck finding the graverobber.'

'Graverobber. Jesus. What are you? Can't you talk in any terms
of reality? Do you live in some film world, some fantasy world?
This is London, Dreyfuss. Two thousand and eight.'

'Well, what do
you
call him?'

He heard the line grow muffled. He thought he heard Laurier say
something like,
I'll be with you in a minute, just got to get rid of some
wanker.
'I call him the perpetrator. We haven't got a name for him
yet. We haven't been introduced. Maybe you know him. Do
you
know him?'

Oh Jesus God, friend, I think so.
'Is the person digging these
people up the same person taking chunks out of them?'

There was a long pause. Laurier's voice, when it returned, was
more careful, more sedulous, more seductive. Bo could suddenly see
how Laurier was a good policeman. He would hate to be in an interrogation
room with him. He was slick. He was a serpent.

'Who said the bites we discovered were from a human mouth?'

Bo struggled to answer but could only convey an insinuating
silence. Laurier penetrated it.

'Do you know something we don't?'

'I just guessed. They looked human.'

'Yeah,' Laurier said, suddenly sounding weary. 'That bite radius
shit.'

'And I've seen ... things.'

'Talk to me, Dreyfuss. Speak slowly. Speak some sense.'

Bo considered putting down the phone. He didn't know what he
wanted to say. He had called Laurier on an impulse and now things
seemed to be sliding away from him. He could see Laurier jotting his
name in a notebook. Maybe getting someone to run a check on him.
He was in his thoughts now, whereas five minutes previously he
hadn't been.

'Just ... suspicious figures. Loners on the street. I think
they might be violent. They had a look about them. They ... I was
just wondering if you'd seen anything? Or had any reports?'

'We get reports every day, son. We live in fucking London.
"Loondon" they call it in here. We're busy, all right? We're trying to
find out what's going on with the disinterments. We don't need your
paranoid witterings to bog us down. If you know something, then
squawk. If you don't, then fuck off and stop mithering.'

'I'm sorry,' Bo said. 'I just –' The line went dead.

Bo tossed his handset on to the sofa. Brilliant. They had him down
either as a potential suspect or a time-waster, a nut.

He stormed to his darkroom and switched on the safelight. He sat
on the floor and rubbed his eyes until they were sore, trying to push
some ideas into view. But all he could think about was how he had
been unable to stomach any food for the last two days.

In the red glow of the safelight, his hands seemed too smooth and
soft to belong to him. The half-moons of his fingernails were jet
black, ragged. He wondered if the previous night's dream had been a
dream after all.

The process chemicals are at the right temperature. There are two
rolls of film to be developed.

Like a Marine reassembling his rifle after cleaning, you could do
this in your sleep. You wish you did. It might distract you from what
occurs when you are in that alien country you enter every time you
switch out the light.

You remove the film in total darkness. You always shut your eyes
when you do this, as if keeping them open brings greater risk of the
film's exposure to light. You cut the tapered leader square, carefully load
the film on to a spiral, and place it in the stainless steel developing tank.
Pour in the developer quickly; development begins the second the
chemical makes contact with the emulsion on the film. You tap the tank
against the work surface a few times to get rid of any bubbles. For ten
seconds of every minute the film is being developed, you must tip and
shake the tank to ensure a uniform flow of fresh solution. Start the
timer.

Gone midnight, where do you travel? And why? You peel yourself
away from the soft, warm curves of your woman or your dreams and
dress quickly. You pad downstairs and stand on the doorstep. Why
do you sniff the air? Why is your face upturned to the night, as if
bathing it in the light of the moon?

The chemicals react until the second all is drained from the developing
tank, so you also have to do this quickly. Now pour in the
stopper until it overflows the neck of the tank. Agitate to neutralise
any remaining developer. Pour away the stopper and add fixer. This
stage can take up to ten minutes. Again you must shake the tank
regularly. Wash the film thoroughly for thirty minutes with cool,
filtered water.

You walk away from people, yet towards them. From light to
shade. From noise to silence. You walk barefoot through dew-soaked
grass. The moonlight is sometimes so intense that it blinds you.
Everything is painted by its strange pallor. You tread through this
talcum wasteland expecting to see footprints following you when you
check behind. In the urban quiet, you can sometimes hear a
heartbeat. You can't tell if it is your own, or that of someone pursuing
you, or of the city itself. It can't possibly belong to the person you are
going to see.

You hang the long strip of film and remove excess water with a
sponge. You lightly blow a cool hairdryer over it. When it's ready,
you cut the negative into strips and place them, one at a time, on a
lightbox. You pull out the Schneider loupe that goes with you everywhere
and find your hand shaking as you try to identify the shots you
need to enlarge. Here's the one taken at the graveyard in Stoke
Newington. And here, on the other film, are the shots of the events in
Liverpool Road. None of the pictures contain any immediacy for you.
It's almost as if you never took them. You make the enlargements,
your hands falling to tasks they know almost better than themselves.
The test strip, the cleaning of the negative and the enlarger; the familiarity
is a balm that anaesthetises you from the fresh shock of the
images stolen from recent days as they loom out of the ghost-white
printing paper. A picture at the cemetery of a face you don't
recognise, snapped in an attempt to break into the horror of that day.
Close-up, blurred, the features loosened by shock, the skin white. The
eyes filled with a crazed look, of hunger, of lust. Fear.

The shots at Emma's flat on Liverpool Road: plenty of handshake,
crazy angles, images taken from an aspect of retreat. You slip
the shots into a glassine bag and tuck it into your sweatshirt.

You switch off the safelight and emerge into a room that seems to
have been infected by the artificial dark of the past few hours. The
digital camera is in your hand though you never remembered pausing
to pick it up. You lock the SLR in a suitcase and stow it in the back
of the wardrobe. No development, no darkroom from now on. You
feel as though you've been living your life more fully on the photo
paper than in reality. The Ixus will go everywhere with you now. It
will be the only way to keep hold of reality, a shield to protect you; a
charm to ward off the changes you feel inside.

There are three messages on your mobile phone, all of them from
Keiko. You delete them without listening. You must not see her
again. She'll be safer that way. And then the phone is ringing again
and her name is in the display and your thumb hovers over the
touchpad. But to let her in is to kill her.

You hurl the Motorola at the wall and watch it turn to plastic rain.

Darkness is coming and you can feel every cell of your body
reaching out to meet it. You pack a rucksack. You check your wallet
for cards and cash. You check the phone book. No
Vero, R.
No
disappointment because it's no surprise. So it's to be done the hard
way.

You go out. You're hungry and you're beginning to intuit what it
is you're hungry for. You pull off the tarp, climb astride the Ninja,
and kick it to life. The dark fills your nostrils and settles against the
back of your throat. It jags around your brain like an inhaled
narcotic.

North or south. East or west. It doesn't really matter. All roads
lead to the same dark little bolthole. The taste of insects on your
tongue. The spectral glitter of chitin.

Darkness has fallen and there are mouths to feed. You open the
throttle and let fly.

That face from Abney Park cemetery. That was you, wasn't it?

That was
you.

Five days after his final visit to the prison, on a late afternoon in early
December, Malcolm Manser got his driver Jez Knowlden to pull in
at the Esso garage on Edgware Road and fill a gallon container with 4-star.
They then drove to a pub in Notting Hill where Manser disappeared
into the cellar with the manager and a member of the door staff.
Twenty minutes later he returned to the S-type with a bin bag wrapped
tightly with gaffer tape. He placed this on the back seat and instructed
Knowlden to follow him up the main road while he did a little shopping.

He bought three disposable Bic lighters, a garden spade, and two
large green plastic sacks for garden waste. He bought a black Maglite
torch. He bought two steak-and-cheese subs from Sub City and gave
one to Knowlden. They ate them while parked illegally on the main
road, laughing at the people who went into the retro clothes shop to
buy overpriced rags.

A call came through from Tim Chandos at New Scotland Yard.
Sarah Hickman's car had been found in Southwold. It wouldn't be
long before they picked her up.

'Don't pick her up,' Manser said. 'We'll sort it. We'll take it from
here.'

* * *

Jez Knowlden was known as 'Knocker' to his friends because of a
dirty fighting habit. He invariably got the first punch in, although it
was more like a rap, as if he were knocking on a door. The blow
would come from up high, directed down on to the bridge of the
nose, which bled easily if hit right. Once a man was bleeding, the fight
was over: they often had no stomach to continue. If you saw
Knowlden eyeing the space between your eyes, step back and walk
away because big pain was coming.

He had served in the first Iraq war as a driver for the Army. When
he came back to the UK his ability behind the wheel brought him to
the attention of the Secret Service, for whom he spent five years
shuttling ambassadors, diplomats, ministers, and other VIPs through
late-night London streets. He was the prime minister's driver for his
last six months of office. Driving was his life.

He was dishonourably discharged from MI6 for drug offences: off
duty he was signing out cars with false papers to make overnight
cocaine runs up to Edinburgh and Glasgow. He received a five-year
suspended sentence, escaping prison thanks to the intervention of a
number of high-ranking military and government staff. Nevertheless,
he gravitated towards the criminal fraternity and used the cover of his
new job – driving HGVs for a brewery – to continue trafficking
between Scotland and the major cities south of the border. He ended
up as a chauffeur again when he was being stopped by motorway
police more times than he felt comfortable with, but this time it was
for Big I Am villains trying to be something they weren't: drug
dealers, pimps, and gun sellers. He drove second-hand souped-up
BMWs, Bentleys and Mercs, almost always in black or white. He was
wiping down seats covered in come, coke, and Krug. The deals being
negotiated in the badlands of south London were for three- and fourfigure
amounts. Skulls were being cracked for £150. He was taking
orders from teenagers who wanted 50 Cent pumping on the car stereo
all day and who thought class was an off-the-peg suit matched with
Nike trainers and plenty of bling. The gold was so soft, it bent if you
looked at it.

He almost crashed a car one night when his boss for the evening
told him his shoes had cost more than Knowlden earned in a month.
The guy went home with a bloody nose, and Knowlden was finished
in the underworld.

In May 2003, Knowlden was back in HGVs, working for a
removals firm specialising in trans-continental relocations. He and his
mate, a fey student called Colin with a beard that looked like an
accumulation of dust, had spent three hours hefting boxes filled with
books and more crockery than could ever be used by a young couple,
newly married or no, into a dilapidated pile of Charentaise stone
situated in a blink-and-you-miss-it village fifteen miles north of
Cognac. The job finished, they repaired to the town eager to quench
their thirst with some of the famous spirit manufactured there and
maybe bring a couple of bottles back for the gimps at HQ who were
on less glamorous duties.

They hit the bars full steam, knowing they weren't expected back
before the following evening and could sleep off their inevitable
shitstorm headaches in the wagon's cabin on one of the open parking
lots up in the industrial area of Chateaubernard before the long haul
back up to Le Havre.

'What's this half-pint shit?' Colin said, when they asked for their
first beers. 'I've been working like a bastard. My throat's drier than a
nun's cunt.'

'You have to specify that you want a large beer.' The voice came to
them from their left. They both turned: a guy wearing immaculate
clothes, sunglasses. He had a bald head and a neatly trimmed full
beard. He was looking down at the bar, at his glass of Ricard and jug
of water. 'The French ... they're a civilised lot over here. They think
you want a beer, it's something to wet your throat with while you chat
about Camus or Sartre or Zidane.
Une grande bière, s'il vous plaît.
'

'Grande bier, hey?' Colin said, rubbing his pathetically coated
chin. He made his order and a pretty waitress came back with a litre
of Pelforth. It had been poured into something that resembled a glass
bucket. The boy was overjoyed.

The stranger, Knowlden thought, really was wearing some beautifully
cut gear – an Armani jacket, some kind of subtle designer
T-shirt, moleskin trousers that were a kind of dark grey but were
probably referred to as anthracite by the manufacturers, and leather
boots that screamed pound signs. Next to him on a stool was a
carefully folded nubuck leather jacket and a snazzy Merrell briefcase.
Knowlden knew instinctively that he wanted to work for him. He was
dedicated to him, a hundred per cent loyal, and they hadn't even
shared a conversation yet.

They stayed on at that one bar all night and drank litre vases of
Affligem as well as pastis and Meukaw cognac. It was a good bar,
and the waitress flirted, and they could order
entrecôte
and
frites
and
salade verte
after nine, which was unheard of in any London boozer
they knew. The stranger introduced himself but never once took off
his sunglasses. It didn't look pretentious on him, somehow,
Knowlden decided. And there was something else he noticed. No
matter how much they drank, the stranger remained in control, like
Knowlden himself. He liked that. It was reassuring. This was not a
man to go off half-cocked. He would not render himself vulnerable
by getting into a rage.

Colin, on the other hand, was bladdered. He was leaning over the
bar, his jeans slowly travelling south while he attempted to ask the
barmaid to marry him. Knowlden and Manser talked. Manser was
impressed by Knowlden's career. Knowlden liked how Manser didn't
brag about his position in the world. He had a few fingers in a few
pies and he was making headway; that was all he said, although
Knowlden knew it was more than that, and he knew that Manser
knew he knew that.

By the end of the night, with Colin slumped against the bar and the
barmaid singing to him, Knowlden and Manser were finishing each
other's sentences.

'I could do with ...' Manser began.

'... a driver like me,' Knowlden completed.

'Actually, I was going to say "a piss".'

They got on. There was chemistry. Drinks finished, as Knowlden
carried Colin off to the wagon, there had been a handshake, a
swapping of email addresses and mobile numbers, a nod, a look, an
understanding. Two months later, Knowlden had again handed in his
notice on the long vehicles and accepted Manser's offer of work.
Chauffeur, bodyguard, right-hand man.

'I need someone I can trust,' Manser had told him. 'Someone who
isn't squeamish. Who accepts that different people have different
needs and doesn't make judgements.'

'You could be diddling your grandmother with
merguez
sausages
and I wouldn't double take,' Knowlden said. But he did, when
Manser told him what he was into.

A long pause. The sense of a line being crossed.

'I'd take a bullet for you,' Knowlden said.

'How about a
merguez
sausage?'

He didn't want to expose Knowlden to this kind of nasty shit so soon,
but he needed some help. Gyorsi, when explaining his plan, was
adamant that he would not fight what must come to him, the disfigurement
that was necessary if he was to return to his public, but
Manser knew what the body was capable of when it was taken into
realms it ought never to experience. Instinct took over.

In the end, though, Knowlden was unfazed. They had spoken
about his experiences in Iraq in 1991, specifically about the friendly fire
deaths he had witnessed when an A-10 accidentally dropped its
payload on a pair of light armoured vehicles fifty miles south of the
burning Burqan oil fields in southern Kuwait, a day after the
commencement of Desert Storm. Three of the four crew members
were obliterated, six smoking boots the only indicator of how many
grunts had been travelling. The other crew member had survived,
somehow protected from the fireflash that liquified his colleagues,
but he had been mortally wounded by shrapnel. A burning piece of
metal had carved through his stomach, cauterising the wound as it
went. He was sitting on the desert floor looking through the massive
hole in his torso, his stomach burning in the sand a few feet away like
something fallen off a barbecue, when Knowlden got to him.

'He watched me pull out my pistol and he was asking me, in this
calm voice, not to do it. He could see that he was going to die, he
wasn't going to see the sun set or place his head on a pillow, or a
woman's breast, ever again. I just sat with him and waited for the
shock to hit him, and then he didn't even know who I was or where
we were or what had happened to him. He watched me shoot him
between the eyes and by then I don't think he even knew what the gun
was.'

Twilight was approaching when they turned the S-Type on to the
gravel lay-by edging the forest. In this flagging light, the evergreens of
the forest – the moss coating the bark, the creepers, the ferns –
appeared to be staining the sky immediately above. They walked
without conversing, as if the discussion they had just had in the car
had exhausted all topics for a time, made them redundant. They
moved swiftly, following Manser's compass and his acquaintance
with the trees. Darkness moved into the gaps around them like
something being absorbed. Apart from their boots in the mulch of
dead leaves and rotten sticks on the forest floor, the sounds of their
breathing, the occasional clatter of wings in the heights and the
chitter of insects coming to life under shadow, there was little noise.
Until, fifteen minutes deep into the forest, they heard tinny music
coming from a cheap radio.

The crumbled edifice of the old building announced itself; candles
were dotted around the small clearing, yellowing the sterile layout
and making it seem almost welcoming. Gyorsi Salavaria was
kneeling, naked, in front of a broken shard of mirror, shaving, his old
radio sitting next to him in the grass. The Chordettes singing 'Mr
Sandman'.

'Are you ready for this, Gyorsi?' Manser called. He placed the
rucksack on the floor and removed the plastic can of petrol, began
unscrewing the cap.

'Yes, Malcolm ... are
you
?'

Knowlden stepped forwards and held Manser down.

Manser struggled, but Jez's arms were like branches from an oak
tree. 'What is this?' he whined. 'Gyorsi? Jez?'

When the fire was lit, the roar of it was grand enough to drown
out any screaming.