Hammerport

Fatigue smothered and blinded her, trapped her beneath iron eyelids. A footstep; someone was in the room.

Blood rushed through adrenaline-scorched veins but failed to break the torpor. Maybe the Cloth had come to claim her at last; maybe she wanted it to end, too much running, the numbness begging her to be made permanent.

Then she thought of her baby. Suddenly she was smashing out of her tomb of exhaustion, eyes wide open, hands ready to attack, to kill. She launched into bolt upright position in a single movement and found herself staring into a woman’s eyes.

At first, the woman’s features were blurred, distorted, as if the air in the bedroom was desert hot. Ariadne blinked a few times; the visitor’s face came into focus.

Short dark hair, shorter than she remembered, hovered over curious eyes and a beguiling smile. The visitor wore tight-fitting black clothes, possibly a lycra tracksuit. A necklace hung around her neck and from it a Hamsa pendant dangled.

‘Oh God,’ Ariadne said. ‘I didn’t realise it was you. I thought it might be the Cloth.’

Fay continued to smile.

‘Did you see Theo with Bobby downstairs?’

Fay snapped into a disarming frown. She yanked something small – metallic shiny – out of a pocket and pointed it at Ariadne.

Ariadne jerked herself backwards against the headboard.

‘Didn’t I tell yew?’ Fay shouted, the harsh Aussie accent uncomfortable on Ariadne’s tired ears. ‘Didn’t I bloody tell yew? No phones, at all. Fakking period! No bloody mobile phones!’

Fay threw the mobile at the floor. It exploded into fragments across the carpet, a horde of shiny spiders scuttling away in fear for their lives.

‘I’ll be down in a minute, Mum, okay?’ Henry shouted from his bedroom.

There it was, sitting on YouTube. Brenna, you bloody bitch! A mobile phone video of a real live dead body.

He lost his job, he’d angered Mum and now the internet knew that he’d let his friends see a dead body before he dialled 999.

If the police didn’t call on him again soon, someone else surely would. He started typing an e-mail to YouTube, to ask them to take the video down. He would use words like ‘insensitive’ and ‘offensive’ in the e-mail.

‘HENRY! GET YOUR LAZY UNEMPLOYED ARSE DOWN HERE!’

‘Alright! Alright!’ he shouted back. In panic, he kicked the power off button on the beige PC under his desk. The e-mail vanished, along with games of both Minesweeper and Spider that he had not finished.

‘Oh shit shit,’ he moaned aloud. Henry started the PC up again, waited for the usual messages and rubbish to get displayed as it loaded Windows. A blue screen appeared, complaining about his hard drive being corrupt. Brenna had told him many times not to hit the power button to switch off his PC. Always tell Windows to shut down. You might get a blue screen saying that your hard drive is corrupt, she had said.

There would be no e-mail tonight.

‘My?’

‘I’m supposed to be the strong one here,’ Tom said with a constipated smile. ‘It’s your life that was dashed against the rocks, not mine. Look at me. Perfect health. With a beautiful eye for terrible cardigans.’

Colin pulled a bit closer to Tom. ‘Rrrreally, ‘sokay. I wuh-wuh-wanna help. Paaayback. You jus’ name.’ He took a deep breath. ‘Whasss problem?’

‘Did you watch the news recently? Oh no, of course you didn’t. Silly me. You wouldn’t have known. There was this American tourist you see…’

Colin knew immediately. ‘Missshell Norf.’

‘Yes,’ Tom said, turning to face Colin, puzzled.

‘I ssssaw pick-pick-ture in Metro. I… rrrremembered. You talk… long time.’ The effort to get these words out was grinding him down. Exhaustion was creeping up on him. He wanted to go back to the multi-coloured jigsaw; it was more restful than this.

Tom smiled. ‘Actually she did most of the talking. She preferred to be called Mizzy. She was a strange girl. Happy and blessed with opportunity, but unable to deal with success. I’m glad you remember. I saw you skulking about at the back.’

Colin felt aggrieved. ‘Not sssspying. No, no. My firssst week an’ an’ wun’ned to ssssee-‘

Tom grabbed Colin around elbows, almost restraining him. ‘Colin, Colin, don’t get so agitated. I’m not trying to attack you. I’m your friend. Always remember that. Calm down.’

Colin nodded but shook out of Tom’s grip; touching was uninvited and unwelcome. ‘Whassit? Wha’ you… wan? Fr-fr-frrrrom me?’ His mouth was the wrong shape for every syllable and consonant, mutating them into grunts and slurrs. He wanted Tom to get to the bollocking point.

‘I went to see the police. They… they don’t have a clue. She died in a bad way. They did not tell me the truth. She deserved better. She had come unstuck in her own life, drowned by events of – of her own making. She had such pretty eyes that looked so sad. She was-‘

‘Tom!’ The point, get to the bloody point.

The reverend couldn’t quite look into Colin’s eyes as he made his request, his gaze fixated on Colin’s neck instead: ‘The police won’t do it. So I want you to. I want you to find out who did it. She deserves that.’

Colin saw the deep honesty in the young reverend’s eyes and was compelled. Even though what Tom was asking was huge, Colin was overwhelmed with a sense of duty. He waved his arms towards his chest, imploring the reverend for information. ‘Al-rrright. Tell. Tell meeee. All.’

Tom began to tell Mizzy’s story. When Tom was finished, dawn was piercing the skin of the horizon.

From the balcony that circled the spire, Colin had expected to see the sparkling web of a city at night, the glistening vibrancy of a London after dark stretching into an unknowable horizon. St. Paul’s Cathedral. The London Eye. The Houses of Westminster. The frayed edges of the suburbs. In fact, the view was bollocks. Office blocks and modern buildings cut out dark, towering silhouettes, swallowing chunks of the vista in their hungry jaws.

‘You see this?’ Tom said, standing beside him, looking out into the cluttered cityscape around them, smiling. The wind blew through Tom’s blonde, stiff locks, disturbing his usual tidy and clean facade.

A crisp packet drifted through the air, hovered briefly before them. Ready Salted. It continued on its journey.

Colin didn’t want to offend and glanced around a bit before answering. ‘Uhnmmm, yerh.’

‘Looking at it… what would you think of God, if you were a believer when you saw this?’

Ugly. Wrong. Dirt and grime and fake hope. A broken palace, decorated with pretentious grandeur and corpses on trees. An economic engine that took no prisoners and made a handful of mega-winners. This was what he saw.

‘Come on, speak to me,’ shouted the reverend, still smiling.

Colin didn’t want to speak, but he forced the words out. ‘Yerh, well… would ffffink, why? Why werd he do such a thing?’

Tom didn’t respond.

Had he answered correctly? ‘Erm, ‘sraight?’

Tom responded, ‘Personally, I find it magnificent. He allows us to build such grand dreams. Many fail, of course, many fail. But he won’t stop us from trying. Keep making new dreams, perhaps better than before. Perhaps… worse…’

The reverend’s eyes were empty, but his smile was implacable.

‘Making new dreams is like making new beliefs, and belief can be a terrible curse as well as a blessing, Colin,’ the rector continued, an empty grin straining his lips. ‘Just intensely believing in something, doesn’t make it true. It can be made into a trap, like a web. Reeling in victims. London itself is a trap, which is why I came here, really.’

That was exactly why Colin had no religion; take your pick of arbitrary beliefs. Anything that wasn’t provable could be made true through belief. It reminded him of some rule from higher maths that reflected the same idea, God’s theorem or something like that.

Colin wanted to believe in a just god; but a just god wouldn’t have trampled over his life on a whim. Suddenly, the anger was back. Colin stared out at the offices and the drunken wanderers frightened to go home to an empty flat, or worse, to a flat with someone there, waiting and judging. Unaware, blissfully ignorant of the fine line between their inconsiderate existence, and the end of everything.

Bollocks. Snap out of it. Poor, poor me.

‘Tom, uhnmmm, whassron? Rrrrong?’ He was flustered, unable to get the words out he wanted. He sounded stupid. Like an idiot. Like idiotic bollocks. People judged him all the time. People thought he was an idiot. He wasn’t an idiot. Tom, concentrate on Tom. Something was wrong with Tom.

Tom turned, facing Colin head on. He stretched his smile as far as it would go; it now looked surreal, like a sad clown. ‘Oh, nothing, really. Nothing, well… I just… just need your help.’

A corner was missing.

He hated jigsaws but there was nothing else to do. He couldn’t bear TV, having not watched it for so long, with all its noise and flashy graphics. It needled into his brain like poisonous acupuncture. The TV stayed off and he refused to let Tom watch it whenever he dropped by.

Beside the jigsaw lay the latest rejection letter, a suitable candidate for being torn up and turned into the missing corner piece.

He didn’t know what picture was hiding within the jigsaw, having found the jigsaw in a shabby shoebox beneath a pile of magazines dating back to 1987. The pieces were too small to reveal any form of shape, but they covered the white table top like the escaped contents of some vivid kaleidoscope.

There was a knock at the door.

Colin lurched off the seat, shaking the table. A few of the jigsaw pieces spilled onto the floor. Wonderful. More pieces missing in action.

He opened the door to reveal Tom, not entirely a surprise as he was the only person who ever came knocking. Colin greeted his benefactor with a soft grunt.

Tom was out of his religious get-up, showing off a brown cardigan that would have been at home in the 1970s and pair of tatty old trousers. It just didn’t look right, a young man wearing an old man’s garb. Even the black dress looked better than this.

‘Well, hello there, my good friend. What keeps you up this late at night?’

‘Uhnmmm,’ Colin said. ‘Rrrrejection.’

Tom grabbed Colin’s elbow. ‘Now look here, Colin, everyone else who has stayed in my small room has found work. It wasn’t easy and it certainly took longer than a few weeks. Give it some time. You can stay here as long as you need. I won’t chuck you back on the street, you hear?’

Colin nodded and responded with a submissive grunt.

‘Now come on, why don’t you come into the church this evening?’

‘Oh uhnmmm, d-dunno if…’ Colin stuttered. He was sounding like an idiot again.

Tom laughed. ‘Such the shy boy.’ He slapped his hands together. ‘Come along, there’s no service, it’s too late for that. I’m not going to ‘ – he lunged with his hands, pretending to grab and roar at Colin – ‘try to convert you! Ooh spooky!’

Colin tried to smile, but felt bad. Tom deserved, at the very least, a modicum of courtesy. But courtesy… it was so difficult to get the hang of after the wilderness years. People ignored him, pitied him or hated him. Or even all three at once. His approach had always been to avoid other people. Practice was needed on his social skills. But it so frightening; people expected answers to their questions and responses to their comments.

‘Alrrright, yeah. Sure. Uhnmmm… sure.’

Colin left the room a letting agent would describe as cosy. He locked the door, leaving behind its rickety table, its badly-sprung bed and its makeshift kitchen. It was far better than the pavement under a broken neon sign, but he still had mixed feelings about this situation: he’d chosen a harsh existence for a reason. He had asked Tom to let him be, but oh no, not Tom…

He turned around to face the church interior. Rows of empty pews leered at him. Tom beckoned him towards the stairs.

‘What did I do?’ asked Tom.

The inspector moved to the window behind Tom and gazed beyond. There was new energy in his stride that wasn’t there at the moment he had planted the pastries on the table.

‘You really should try one of the pastries, they are quite good,’ said Paul.

‘Thank you but-‘

‘You see until you mentioned the cat,’ said Paul, ‘I’m afraid to say – and this is most unprofessional of me – that I thought we were going nowhere. It’s not as if it was the perfect crime or anything, but the evidence points nowhere, no one had seen anything. No one had responded to our calls for help. Not even the people in her own hostel until we threatened to deport them. Some people are terribly unhelpful, Tom.’

The reverend nodded. ‘Yes, I see.’

‘But the cat! The cat makes it all clear!’

‘I don’t understand, Paul. Why is the cat so important?’

‘The cat, my good Christian friend, is why Mizzy was in that house. There were bloody paw prints everywhere. We thought some cat just got injured.’ He suddenly raved like a television detective. ‘No! She was lured! I’m sure of it!’

‘Paul,’ said Tom. ‘Why are you telling me this?’

‘I’ve been down in the dumps for days,’ Paul said, turning glum. ‘I’m diagnosed bipolar, you see, and this stress just doesn’t help.’ Paul whispered in confidence, ‘If I get all whiney and down-hearted in front of the boys here, well, it’s not good for morale, is it?’

His tone brightened again, and he said loudly, ‘Aah! That feels so much better. Oh thank you Tom! Thank you! Hope is great, isn’t it? I should come down and pray with the godly folk one of these days.’ He patted the reverend’s hand.

Paul grabbed the chocolate something, and started to munch on the hard, crispy vomit part first. He looked pretty happy with himself, his smile relentless.

‘Sometimes you just need to talk to someone about things,’ Tom said. ‘Mizzy talked to everybody.’

‘Yes, yes, that’s it precisely. She talked to someone about her cat dream. The wrong person, who used it against her. Still he is ashamed of what he did, we know that much. Yes, yes. She talked to someone about her cat dream. But who? Who?’

Paul stared at Tom intensely again, as if trying to figure something out about the reverend. Then he asked: ‘Have I seen you on TV?’

Tom shrugged.

‘Ah well. But who knew about her story, Tom? Who? Who?’ He took another bite and asked ‘Who’ again, while blowing a blizzard of icing sugar across the table.

Tom answered while brushing the sugar from his cassock, ‘Her story was pretty well-crafted. I’d even go as far as to say rehearsed. I think she’d already told it many times. I think, well, she probably told it to just about everybody. That’s what she told me after the cat dream. No one really listened to her story, just… just like me, so she kept on telling it.’

‘That’s very sad, isn’t it? She kept on telling it until someone listened. And the person who listened was her killer. That’s very sad, indeed. Makes me feel quite depressed, you know. God, what is this world coming to? What’s wrong with cities? What the Hell is God playing at, eh? Tell me that. I’m going to move to the country, that’s what I’m going to do. That’s just awful. Terrible.’

‘Indeed, it is,’ agreed Tom.

A long silence followed, during which Tom observed Paul’s brain in full swing. Sorting details, shuffling through facts, trying to add up numbers and see what answers matched and what didn’t. He could see that the inspector was a clever man, a calculator that could take a limited amount of information and determine all the possible logical conclusions.

‘So, Reverend,’ said Paul. ‘If it would not be too impolite a question to ask, may I inquire as to where you were on the day that Miss North was murdered?’

‘Hello, Reverend,’ said the inspector, closing the door behind him.

The inspector was a plump, shortish man in his thirties, a grey bar code painted on his scalp and a well-meaning glint in his beady eyes. He wore a rumpled grey suit that was too big for him; likely he had lost weight since its purchase. A tie hung from his neck like a crashed kite, its navy pattern twisted and knotted. The bottom button of his wrinkled shirt had refused to fasten.

The inspector banged a plate carrying pastries on the table. One of the pastries stood out; it was a chocolate something that had burst from one end, vomiting in appealing beige.

‘Hello, Inspector. Why don’t you call me Tom?’

The inspector smiled. ‘Well, why not? Hello Tom! Pleased to meet you. And let’s dispense with the ‘inspector’ nonsense. Please call me Paul.’

They shook hands. This was getting off to a good start, an excellent start.

‘So my colleagues mentioned that you had something to tell me about our poor late Miss North?’ Paul sat down on the other side of the table.

Tom’s smile failed him. ‘Oh yes. Yes indeed. Gosh, this interview room is a bit cold and, well, rather unfriendly don’t you think?’

‘I’m sorry,’ Paul laughed, his stubbled chin wobbling. ‘But we don’t have different interview rooms for nice people and bad people, Tom.’

‘Oh no, no, of course. I, uh, would like to know first… did she suffer? Mizzy. Tell me Mizzy didn’t suffer.’

Paul raised an eyebrow. ‘Mizzy? Is that what she called herself?’

‘Yes, that’s right.’ Tom was insistent. ‘Did she suffer?’

Paul excavated a notebook from his jacket and scribbled on a new page in capital letters: “MIZZY”. The page was now full and he flipped it to the next blank page. Paul’s super-sized writing was a menace to the rainforests of the world.

The inspector looked up, leaned backwards and stared intensely at Tom’s neck. Tom’s dog collar chafed in response.

‘I can’t talk about the details of the case, I’m sure you understand.’

A little upset, Tom frowned and said, ‘She was in a fair bit of trouble. Quite depressed. I hear you say it was murder. I just need to know whether she suffered or not? Was it quick? I just need to know, for my conscience, you understand. That poor girl. Maybe I didn’t help as much as I should have.’

‘Look here, Tom, what kind of trouble? Drugs? Crime?’ Paul leaned forward sharply and his permanent smile deepened a little more. ‘Perhaps… incest?’

‘No… no! She was just a little unhappy, Inspector. Paul.’ Tom surrendered the table to the inspector, leaning backwards to keep distance between them.

Paul sighed, a little disappointed. His smile also failed him. ‘Look, Tom, I can’t…’ Paul stopped. ‘Well I guess, no, she didn’t suffer at all. Just don’t go telling any papers about that, eh? Between you and me?’ He winked and his smile returned.

‘Oh, thank you Paul, you’ve put my mind to rest. I was so worried it was a really violent death, I think she was opening up to everybody she met. Trusting, looking for something. Like kids in one of those internet chatrooms looking for like-minded friends. Blank faces from the other side of a monitor. I hope she is at rest now, at least.’

‘Tom,’ Paul said, leaning forwards across the table. ‘I don’t mean to press, but I think it’s important you tell me everything you know about, uhhh…’ – he checked the previous page of his notebook – ‘…Mizzy.’

Tom nodded. ‘Of course. Well, Mizzy came to me a few days, I think, before she was due to return to America. She was a bit lost, wrapped up in herself. She told me some of her life story. She had sabotaged every success in her life but was mystified as to what was going wrong.’

Tom went through the Mizzy’s story, what he remembered of it. Paul looked bored, disenchanted with all this attention to detail. Tom had nothing to offer of recent history, real people or real places – this was all he had. A convoluted, futile narrative that had been relayed to him.

Tom had made a mistake; he was just wasting the man’s time. He should have just left, quit, walked out the door.

But then he mentioned the dream about a cat.

Paul woke up and said, ‘Stop. Hold on there, Tom. Back up a little. Did you just say a cat?’

‘Yes, she had a dream about a cat. A nightmare really. A cat with stigmata. She thought it meant something. I think it was just-‘

Paul laughed out loud, apparently out of shock rather than humour. ‘Well, well, well. Isn’t that a turn up for the books? Thank you, Tom. Thank you for coming down here today.’

The inspector got up, walked over to Tom, and patted him hard on the shoulder.

‘I’ll be there Friday night, Neville. Not this evening, I’m afraid. Been a long day,’ Tom said into the mobile. He played with the chunky silver buttons on the old black and white, his “secret” pulpit TV, stroking without depressing. He crouched low within the pulpit, hidden from the absent congregation.

Neville’s unplaceable accent remained unconvinced. ‘But Tommy, we got-ta no one here covering right, ya? Tonight, no soup run. That’s what we facing.’

Tom’s gaze smacked into one of the pillars of the church and followed it upwards as it sprayed out across the ceiling. Christian forms like cherubs and angels rode the waves of the spray. The cherubs and angels were discoloured with dust.

‘I feel bad for you, Neville, really I do, but it’s been a long day.’ Tom was uncomfortable because it had been a quiet day with barely a visitor, but he was under the weather, maybe with a virus. The virus was probably attacking his nervous system from his temples, because that’s where the pain was. He rubbed one temple with his free hand, it didn’t make any difference.

‘Oh-kay, Tommy. I just want you to know I tried. Can’t do it alone, ya? Phoebe, she also down with plague she say. Phoebe always down with the plague, I say. It’s oh-kay Tommy. Ta-ta.’

‘I know, I know, Neville. Don’t want to let the team down. I’ll make sure I’m available Friday as usual.’

BBC1 was showing some documentary about the homeless, but it was 7pm so it was probably populist and easy to follow and hence do no real good. It was either going to paint the homeless as evil, scrounging criminal types or people who can do no wrong and are just victims of terrible circumstances out of their control. He wasn’t going to wait to find out; there was no middle ground with these television people.

Neville closed the call so Tom laid the mobile to rest. If Tom had persevered and helped out with the soup kitchen he knew he’d be in terrible shape tomorrow. He wanted to be in peak condition for the talk he was hosting in the church at lunchtime; there was a good turn out for certain speakers and Dr. Moore was always a favourite.

He switched over to BBC2. The picture rolled; he gave the box a knowing tap. He’d have to throw away Old Faithful soon. Apparently everything was going digital. There was no room for an old black and white these days, the world was so rich and vibrant and full of colour. Believing in black and white, good and evil, was also fairly outdated.

‘Oh no,’ he mumbled to himself. Some silly American drama about well-dressed and clean-cut superheroes. Absolutely not, tish tosh. Americans were a bouncy and vivacious lot and Tom loved their vitality, but their predilection for vanity and narcissism would be their undoing.

ITV, adverts. Channel 4 wasn’t even going to get a chance because all they showed was Big Brother as far as he could tell. As he didn’t get digital, there was only one option left: Five. Fingers crossed. He pushed in the clunky silver button for Five and hidden springs snapped into place, grunting under load.

A short news bulletin was on.

A five-year old boy, afflicted with a threatening heart defect was found a heart transplant at the last minute. Without the transplant, it was likely he would have perished in the near future. It was a miracle. But, wondered Tom, the donating boy was probably not so keen on the miracle. Tom found it a terribly one-sided article. Miracles don’t come free. Like the markets many of his patrons played in, the world of miracles was a zero-sum game.

He had no love of the insufferable television people. Interesting events were held at the Church all the time and some of them came along once. ‘We’ve finished all our questions for the piece but need to do a little bit more for a few noddy shots, yeah?’ What on earth was a noddy shot?

The piece about the church was never shown. More important headlines about hearsay, rumour and celebrity had probably pushed the piece out. Or maybe it was the Archbishop of Canterbury; always sneaking off with the limelight whenever anyone had to say something interesting to say about the downtrodden and the meek. Then he wondered if he had made a mistake and considered that they were not people from the news but, rather, documentary people. He didn’t recall what they said they were filming for.

There was then some news about the body of a woman being found in an abandoned house in West London. She had already been identified as Michelle North, an American tourist who had not returned to the US when expected a month ago. A picture of her was shown on the screen. The police were asking for any information people might have about the case. They were saying it was murder but instead of discussing details, the news bulletin switched to pictures of her parents, caught in blurry video footage from American news channels.

Her mother wept openly and without restraint under the heat of emotional, knee-jerk cameras; her father pretended he had more iron strength but his eyes nurtured a glare of distrust. Rabbits desperate to cross the road, followed by vicious headlights.

‘How do you feel, Mrs. North?’

‘Mr. North! How is your wife feeling?’

‘Is it true that she was strangled? We heard she was strangled. Can you comment?’

‘Do you think London, England is a dangerous place now, Mrs. North?’

Tom looked down at the wooden boards, scratched and pock-marked. Something trembled at the back of his throat. ‘Oh, dear Mizzy,’ he said, as tears seeped out. ‘Poor, poor girl.’