BONE MACHINES

by John Dodds

Published by Just Imagine It Ink

Copyright 2012 by John Dodds

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book. This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, brands, media, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. The author acknowledges the trademarked status and trademark owners of various products referenced in this work of fiction, which have been used without permission. The publication/use of these trademarks is not authorized, associated with, or sponsored by the trademark owners.

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Audiobook version

Bone Machines is available on CD, MP3 disc from Blackstone Audio (August 2012)

Author’s Blog

Bone Machines and Other Fictions

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PART ONE

THE BONE FLUTE

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Chapter One

From the artist’s journals

It was tasteless of the boy to die before I could kill him. His heart, I expect. Amyl nitrate, ecstasy, God knows what else, must have put too much strain on it once he’d realised what was coming. All the more tasteless because of the trouble I’d gone to, bathing him, binding him with soft rope, gagging him and easing him into the cage. Everything had been perfect up until that point. Well, no, strictly speaking that’s untrue. There was the business with the toenail. I’ll come back to that presently. First, I need to tell you about the cage.

The cage is a four-foot cube of corrosion-resistant titanium alloy with a drop-down gate like the side of a baby’s cot. It sits on a sandstone plinth I made specially. To begin with I bind the occupants until they resemble giant foetuses, then I push them inside the cage and draw up the gate. There’s no need for a padlock because of the efficiency of my knots; father was in the navy and taught me tricks with rope and string when I was five or six. Knots have fascinated me ever since. The one-inch square mesh on the floor of the cage allows the occupants to balance their weight evenly on the soles of their feet so they don’t topple. I remember as a child father telling me that’s the way we all leave this world: feet first. He told me this as undertakers carried my mother’s coffin down the narrow staircase from her bedroom and through the front door to the waiting hearse. He didn’t cry as I recall. Nor did I. But not from taking my father’s lead. It was because by then I knew it was mother who’d betrayed me. All along it was she. I’d been blaming the wrong person. At least father loved me, and often told me so. That may be one reason I adopted his name for my public persona: Stephen Morrell.

Unlike mother, father was a pragmatist. He and I both secretly knew her piety would do her no good in the end, that the messages in the reproduction religious paintings she hung up all around the house were lies.

If you’re seeking the origins of my work, at least for my current series, it’s right there, in those cheap prints.

One of them in particular comes to mind. It hung it above the mantel of our horrid 1960s fireplace with its beige marbled tiles, its blackened grate and brass companion set gleaming in the fire glow. The print bulged here and there in its chunky wooden frame. The paper had a faux-weave embossed in it to resemble canvas, a touch that heightened its tackiness. In the picture a boy in Victorian garb, bloomers and a jacket and a flouncy shirt, is perilously close to the edge of a densely vegetated cliffside. Behind him a white-robed Christ is stretching a hand towards the boy’s shoulder to save him from falling. We’ll never know if Christ succeeded, but for my own part it would be a matter of satisfaction if he didn’t and the boy were to have plunged to his death.

There were other pictures, too, mostly Madonnas.

But I am more interested in the Christ.

Renaissance paintings depicting The Passion often show Christ with a resigned look on his face, like he’s rolling his eyes upward at the punchline of a bad joke. Clearly, neither the artists nor their models for Jesus understood real suffering. They were simply pandering to public tastes of the time, and the Catholic Church would hardly have parted with any of its gold for anything which too graphically depicted Christ’s torment.

Passion fascinates me, as a concept at any rate. Sexual passion is one sort, the anguish of torture and physical abuse another. Depicted in art ecstasy and agony can appear similar, the face of a woman experiencing orgasm or exquisite pain virtually indistinguishable. Why is that, I wonder?

Still, unlike Renaissance artists, it’s important to me to be sincere in the expression of my art. As a post-modernist I don’t need to show torment graphically. Instead it is implied, leaving ample space for the imagination.

But I digress. Back to the boy.

He said his name was Bartholomew. I picked him up at The Equinox Club, one of the city’s more popular gay hangouts. He offered me poppers as we danced to the primitive, tribal rhythms of techno pop. Pulsating strobe lights carved his cheekbones in deep hollows. He was pretty, in a way, and his baby skin and firm muscles interested me. A quick sniff of the little bottle of amyl nitrate made my heart jolt and for an instant I didn’t have control of my own body. I didn’t like the feeling one little bit. Normally I’d never allow anything, chemical substance or emotion, to cloud my rationality. It won’t happen again.

Back at his flat, it was easy to persuade him to take the injection: he loved being penetrated, he joked. For him it was just one more way to get sick kicks. He’d wanted to touch me in the lift on the way up, but I wouldn’t allow it, told him I preferred to be teased first. This excited him all the more. On another occasion I might have taken advantage of the excitement. But tonight the Muse was upon me and I had to contain its flame; I couldn’t have something as banal as sex extinguishing it.

Once the drug took effect I lifted him up and cradled him in my arms like the Madonna cradling her dead son at the foot of the cross. He was small and light, or I might not have managed it. His face looked beatific as I laid him gently on the bed.

It took another hour to get back to the studio, collect my four-by-four and park outside the apartment block. Luckily, I’d taken Bartholomew’s security card. This early in the morning there was no guard in reception, but even if there had been I was hauling the boy with my arm across my shoulder as if he was dead drunk, and the guard would have ignored us. After dragging him across the car park to the Toyota, I bundled him over the rear seats. By my calculation he’d come round in another three hours or so. Plenty of time.

He started to waken only once he was secure inside the cage, squatting naked in the foetal position, suspended above the vat.

You’re probably interested in my process, so let me explain. First, I slowly lower the subject into the vat, which contains a special cocktail of acids and enzymes. The stuff slops through the mesh, burning the soles of the feet and the fleshy pads of the toes, moving slowly up to the instep and the ankles. The look of horror in the subject’s face as the flesh melts off the bone and they see their inner structure for the first time in their lives, is worth the extra effort of the bindings I use on them.

In many ways I hated to sully the young man’s delicate pale skin. Skin translucent like that of a nocturnal animal, thin enough to see the blood pushing through the tracery of veins across his collar bone and temples, and in the delicate instep of his perfectly-manicured feet.

This is where I come back to the toenails. Something so small, a tiny detail like that can be enough to delay or even force me to abandon a project. I noticed a trace of aubergine-coloured nail varnish on the boy’s big toe, a flake remaining from a previous painting that had gradually peeled off. It revolted me for some reason, as though someone less talented had been tinkering with my work.

I fetched some solvent and a cotton bud, swabbing at the varnish until the nail was as clean as the others. Now I was ready to begin.

Bartholomew screamed through his mask, and his eyes bulged like those of a horse with brain fever.

I’m sorry, but I simply can’t bear imperfect work. You might call it a flaw in my character.

Chapter Two

The cacophony of telephones ringing across The Metropolitan’s newsroom can be difficult for a newcomer to get used to. The piercing polyrhythms of trills, pulses and beeps can make you reach for the earplugs. The insistent whine of the phone on Raymond Bissett’s messy desk, stood out from the background noises, a soprano against the opera chorus.

Reluctantly, Ray picked it up.

“I thought I said to hold my calls.”

Doreen in reception swallowed her apology and pressed on. “It’s a Detective Inspector Kendrick. He says that — ”

“Never mind, Doreen, put him through.”

The name was vaguely familiar. Twenty years a newspaperman and still he struggled with the hierarchy in the police force. He was familiar enough with the rank and file cops (“the lower orders,” his editor Frank McVay had scornfully dubbed them) but less so with the higher ranks. After all, it was the street level uniforms that were his bread and butter. These guys fed him the juicy gossip and gave him some of his better tip offs — in return for favours, naturally. But D.I. Kendrick? A new boy, maybe?

“Mr Bissett?” The voice sounded like it had a bad cold. “You’re a difficult man to get a hold of.”

“Yeah, well, I’m working.”

“Yeah, I know. The football hooliganism thing. The guys in the suits and tyre irons in their briefcases. Shocking stuff.”

Ray was impressed that Kendrick knew what was keeping his nose to the grindstone this week. He also picked up the detective’s ironic use of the word “shocking”.

“You’ve read my stuff, then?”

“I keep up to date. But, look, I’m no’ phoning to chat about current news. It’s more about an old case.”

A trickle of unease ran down Ray’s spine. And all at once a picture snapped into focus. A young constable, just as eager and ambitious as Ray had been, observing Ray’s police interview. The interview had felt more like an interrogation, especially since he was thoroughly, incontrovertibly guilty. Not that he was being charged with anything. The interview had been interminable, the tapes swapped at least twice. The pause button was pressed a few times, too, long enough for the questioning detective to say to him, “If you don’t start telling the truth, boy, I’ll break your fucking fingers and you’ll have to dictate your stories to your fucking secretary in future. And you’ll need her to wank you off for the rest of your life, because you won’t be able to do it yourself.”

Constable Kendrick had frowned slightly at this, Ray recalled. Evidently ill at ease with something not by the book, the young constable nevertheless watched and learned. But the almost puritanical frown also said, “I know you’re lying, too, Bissett.”

“Dogs and children,” Ray said before he realised he had spoken.

“What?”

“Oh, sorry. Thinking aloud. I do that sometimes. I was thinking that dogs and children have a kind of sixth sense. They’re able to suss out a person’s real character, get the true picture right away.”

“That doesn’t explain how child molesters get away with it, so your theory’s not up to much.”

“They’re often fathers and uncles, aren’t they?”

“Very often, yes.”

“Well the kids wouldn’t trust what their instincts were telling them, would they? And if it’s a stranger he’d have to be a brilliant actor, or too fast for the child to stop what was happening to them.”

Kendrick sighed on the other end of the phone. “Your point being. . .?”

“My point being old cases. Someone always knows the truth. But evidence is withheld. Concealed. An innocent person, like a child, sees the crime but is too scared to talk. Or there’s a police inspector taking bribes from gangsters. Or corrupt politics is involved.”

“Listen, Bissett, I need to ask you some quest—”

“Ever read Ibsen, Kendrick?”

“Detective Inspector,” Kendrick corrected. “No, I haven’t. Why?”

“There is a theme in some of his work about the past never going away. About a big secret coming back to haunt the main character.”

“Is that why you think I’m calling?”

“I noticed you dropped the mister.”

“And I noticed you dropped the Detective.”

“Let’s call it quits, then. This is about the Heathrow hostage crisis, isn’t it? Call me a liar.”

“I’m not calling you a liar, Mr Bissett. Not yet. But you’re right, it is about Heathrow. Indirectly.”

Ray could think of a dozen smart responses he could make. Such as how he never wrote his own headlines – that was up to the sub – or that you need to have a good story before you can have a good headline. But he couldn’t be bothered. All the energy seemed to have drained out of him. As though he’d just eaten a big lunch and all he wanted to do now was have a nap. Or run away, whichever might be the wiser course.

“Mr Pearson says have you got the story finished yet.” David something or other, the new copy boy grinned inanely over Ray.

Ray cupped his hand over the mouthpiece of the phone. “Bugger off, son, there’s a good chap.”

David wotsisname flinched. Ray Bissett had never spoken to him like this before. But it was a valuable lesson. The lesson that says everyone has his or her ignition point. The boy withdrew, possibly to make more tea.

Ray cradled the telephone to his ear with his shoulder while he rattled off the last paragraph and watched the 12-point Times Roman font unravel across the screen. His brain was divided, the journalistic autopilot guiding the story in for a safe landing while a small vulnerable part of him listened for the voice of doom to tell him he was under arrest for murder.

His therapist — stress counsellor, he’d called himself, one of the people all the hostages were offered afterwards — told him earnestly, “You didn’t kill anyone, Ray. The terrorists did that. There’s often guilt associated with situations like this. The feeling that you could have done something. Perhaps overcome the killer, knocked the gun from his hand or something of the sort.”

Oh, sure. He could politely have asked the bruiser with the balaclava over his head to please just hand over his Uzi, like a nice terrorist, in case he hurt someone with it. And the last thing he was prepared to do was tell his counsellor the truth about what happened.

He hit the print button and watched the copy roll out of the laser printer sitting beside Pearson’s desk.

Pearson glanced at the pages sliding out of the printer, then over at Ray. His eyes said, “about bloody time.”

“So, when can we have a chat?” Kendrick had plainly been talking for a while without Ray hearing a word.

“A chat?”

“Yes, a chat. This isn’t official, Mr Bissett, but I’d advise you to hear what I have to say.”

“Okay, it’s an unofficial threat, then?”

Kendrick spoke through clenched teeth. “Look, what is your problem? We both know that others were involved in the Heathrow thing. I did some of the background research. But my papers were...suppressed.”

Ray felt he was missing something. If Kendrick wasn’t after him, what was it? If there was a bottom line here, the policeman wasn’t saying. Maybe he thought the phones were bugged.

“Okay, fine. How about tomorrow. Do you know Café Quay?”

“Yes, good cappuccino if I remember rightly.” Kendrick seemed almost human at that moment. “First thing in the morning, say nine?”

“Cosy,” Ray said.

He hung up. He pointed at the clock above the printer and tilted his head to Pearson, indicating that his shift was over and he was off home. Pearson sighed and vigorously red-penned proof marks onto a galley. Pearson was of the old school and rarely signed off final proof onscreen, insisting on initialling the final one on paper. Onscreen he always managed to find something new, though usually more through pedantry than typographical or grammatical error. He missed hot lead, basically, the impression made on the galley proofs by the inked blocks of lettering, the authoritative look of the final newspaper. He always insisted that digitally printed newspapers look grey instead of black. And colour pictures were anathema to him. What he wasn’t though was the jaded alcoholic hack of popular myth. Colin Pearson was a top-flight sub editor, and a fine journalist of the old school. Also a shithead bastard of the first order.

He arrived home at three a.m., the time of morning when death rates in hospital soar. Ray used to wonder why that was the case. The fact had been well researched. Having stared death in the face in that antiseptic Heathrow Terminal lounge, in the eyes of the terrorist, olive skin showing around his eyes in the opening of his ski mask, death was no longer the dark angel but a frightened boy fighting for a cause he didn’t fully understand. Death is also the fog in the throat, the congealed terror that holds you still like a fly in aspic until your throat closes forever. Perhaps three a.m. is when the fog is at its densest, the perfect moment for death to reap its fullest harvest.

Sliding the brass security bolts shut behind him Ray entered his dim apartment. The only illumination was the residual yolky yellow of streetlights three floors below and the green flashing indicator on his ansaphone.

He threw his coat across the couch, then pressed “play” on the machine. There were seven messages, two from different people at the newsdesk asking him to come in early in the morning, a few from friends inviting him out for a drink, or a party, or the theatre, and a couple from Caroline.

“Dad? You on late shift again? Well, call me, will you? Doesn’t matter what time. If I’m not in, I’m out. Ciao.”

Her second message worried him. “It’s me again. Look, you know I said I’d never ask you for anything? Well I kind of need to ask you for something now...don’t be mad at me. I could use some money. Not a huge amount, but...well, you know how it is. Sorry.”

An elongated beep cut her off; the microchip handled messages in twenty-second chunks, and Caroline had spoken slowly, her voice smudged by alcohol or possibly drugs. No, he mustn’t think that. Caroline didn’t do drugs. She enjoyed a drink, yes, but always steered clear of the rest, that’s what she always said. And he believed her, mainly because he wanted to. She’d only succumbed to peer pressure in her first year at secondary school, pleading for the latest, most expensive trainers for her birthday or button-sided tracksuit bottoms that everyone around her age were wearing. After that Caroline never went out of her way to fit in. Fitting in was the resort of weak-willed, feeble-minded jerks, she once informed her dad. To put him off the scent, perhaps.

University education for his daughter was a source of great pride to Ray, who had not enjoyed such a privilege himself, even though it had been through choice and not lack of opportunity. He’d entered journalism at the age of nineteen, straight out of secondary school, and now his daughter was studying for a degree in physics and chemistry. By some miracle Ray, who only passed arithmetic second time around and that by the skin of his teeth, had produced a child who was an analytical whiz, and she could have inherited nothing from her mother’s genetic makeup, since Anne was the artistic type, a musician. At least she thought herself a musician. Ray often wondered why her career remained in the doldrums, after two well-reviewed albums, one of jazz standards, a second of keyboard improvisations.

If Caroline was coming to him for money instead of her mother, she must be in real trouble. Or so he reasoned, the way a parent will against evidence to contrary. And, as a parent will, he elected not to call his daughter and disturb her in the middle of the night.

Instead, he went to bed and lay awake worrying.

Chapter Three

Contemporary art venues like The Syntax Gallery can feel like warehouses between shows, especially in the week leading up to a big opening. Indeed some of these buildings were warehouses originally, when industry and not vanity had been the coin of the realm. The hard labour within their walls back then had carved out a landscape that made it possible today for talentless nonentities to become celebrities.

Stephen Morrell was a notable exception to the rule, and very far from being talentless. A young artist whose star was in the ascendant, and who in spite of courting controversy managed to be unassuming and charming, and had none of the aggressive pretensions of many of his peers.

A chill breeze sighed through the corridor leading from the open steel doors in the loading bay. Morrell shivered slightly, rubbing at the sleeves of his charcoal grey silk suit. He wanted to scream for the doors to be closed, but instead he smiled at the gallery attendant pulling bundles of straw from a packing case, and said, “Any chance of a bit of heating in here?”

The attendant, a small woman, a girl really of about 25, with short-cropped black hair smiled back apologetically. “The thermostats have just come on, Stephen. Once they’ve unloaded everything we can close the doors and...normal service will be resumed.”

“Ah, right. Fine.”

Stephen slid the Raybans down the bridge of his nose and appraised the female. Quite attractive in a mundane sort of way. Broad hips, ripe for child-bearing; probably be the only real creativity of which she was capable. Not that he cared one way or the other. People were just meat essentially. Meat in a refrigerator, in this case. Jesus, it was cold.

Arranged around the raw brick walls and leaning against studded iron pillars which supported the vast roof, was a series of framed pictures, most of them covered in bubble wrap, criss-crossed masking tape over the glass to prevent it shattering in transit. On one picture, through interstices in the masking tape grid one could see splurges of colour, red and brown and grey, like marks in an abstract paintings. On closer inspection the work proved to be a photograph. The attendant glanced over her shoulder, following Morrell’s gaze.

“One of my early ones,” he explained. “A dead cat in a bath of formaldehyde. A bit crude, I think.”

“No, not at all.” The girl was eager to please, starstruck. “It’s kind of beautiful in a way. I mean, we’re all so frightened of death but in some cultures it’s celebrated.”

“You’ve been reading my catalogue,” he said, presenting a winning smile.

The girl blushed hotly. “Yes, of course. But it’s true. We’re more than just flesh, aren’t we? I’m not religious, but I really believe that, like there’s something —”

“Inside?” Stephen prompted, although the conversation was quickly becoming tedious. She was a simpleton. With a simple view of the world. But the prompt would feed her ego. She was having an actual, honest-to-God intellectual debate with Stephen Morrell. The Stephen Morrell.

“Yes, inside. Decay is just part of the natural cycle, and as such —”

Jesus, but she was boring.

“We should celebrate decay,” he finished for her. “Exactly. That’s my point in the photographs. To celebrate decay. Confront people with their fears. But, more importantly, to confront them with self disgust.”

“Self disgust?” The girl rustled more straw.

There were only two other people in the gallery. Over in the corner a quiet argument was taking place between a middle-aged man in a cheap suit and a lanky younger man with a pony tail and gaunt features. The gallery technician, the man with the pony tail, was behaving like a school janitor, ruler of the roost, denying that such and such a job could be done in the way the less knowledgeable man in the suit was suggesting. It was the usual pre-opening wrangle and power play. The man in the suit was clicking a retractable ballpoint pen over a clipboard and lowered his head as he tried to insist that his opinion was the right one. Stephen wanted to take his pen and punch the point of it into the jelly of his eye.

“What was I saying?” Stephen’s train of thought had momentarily distracted him. “Oh, yes. Self-disgust. All very Freudian, I suppose. It’s, like, being repelled by the human condition. We all basically hate our bodies, otherwise the fashion and cosmetics industry wouldn’t be doing such great business. Or dieticians, health centres, the pharmaceutical industry. Have you seen my anorexia and bulimia series?”

The girl, evidently uncomfortable about being overweight and hiding her body inside shapeless clothing – in this case a standard issue gallery boiler suit in a hideous shade of green – muttered that she had not.

Stephen, realising he was stepping onto shaky ground, changed tack. “But I’m also saying the body is something to celebrate. Ruebens loved the flesh, or we wouldn’t have those paintings of all those glorious women. All I’m saying —” and here he crouched down and removed his sunglasses so he was eye to eye with the girl, “All I’m saying – Yvonne, is it?” She pinked, not realising Stephen made it his business to remember everyone’s name, no matter how unimportant they were. “ – is that there’s also something majestic in decay. Eroticism is the antidote to death, isn’t it? And doesn’t knowing death more intimately make life all the more erotic?”

Yvonne Graeme, three years out of art school and nothing to show for it but putting up other artists’ exhibitions, nodded agreement modestly, as if she’d been listening to a key lecture for her final examinations. She was flattered, too, by the intimate turn in the conversation.

“Oh,” she said, moving aside a final straw bundle to reveal the contents of the crate. It was a Lucite block embedded at six inch intervals with pairs of human femurs. The transparent block was a foot wide, three feet long and three feet deep. “Oh, wow.”

Almost at a loss for words, she lowered the sides of the box to reveal the object in its entirety, and it shone as if from an inner glow beneath the halogen lamps pocking the ceiling. “It’s beautiful.”

“Thanks, Yvonne. You’re very kind.” Of course it is, Stephen thought and, excusing himself, made his way over to the arguing men.

“Ah, Stephen. Hi. Slight problem. Andy here – ” The suit, who was the curator, Paul Marks, made a dismissive nod in the other’s direction, “ – claims we can’t light Homunculus in this space.”

Homunculus was a favourite piece of Stephen’s, a photo-object, he called it. It was an ambiguous humanoid shape that could have been a foetus inside a resin structure suggestive of a caesarean section. The image itself was half photograph, half tissue, as though ill-formed flesh were emerging in three dimensions from the two dimensional plane of the photograph. A dome of yellowish liquid formed a kind of lens through which the image could be barely seen. When a journalist suggested the liquid might be urine, Stephen had replied, “I prefer the audience to make its own interpretation of what they’re seeing.” Homunculus was also, of course, a reference to alchemy, and the creature the alchemist would keep bottled as a magical component in the process of turning base metal into gold. Or, as Stephen would say, turning death and decay into art.

“The plinth’s too wide, for a start,” Andy said. “People’ll bump into it. And there’s no junction box for a spotlight here.”

“Well, can’t you make a temporary one?”

“We’d have to gaffer tape the wires to the floor. Against fire regulations not to. And they’d be underfoot, not in a good position.”

Ironically Andy was renowned for playing fast and loose with fire regulations himself, especially if he was providing sound and lighting for rock groups in the theatre space. Stephen was well aware of this, since he had met little Hitlers just like him all over the world. He decided to take him to one side, and in doing so hooked an arm fraternally across his shoulder.

“Andrew,” he said, slowly, so there would be complete clarity between them. “I realise mounting a show can be a difficult proposition. And you must have your share of challenges. But maybe if you laid off the cocaine and got on with the fucking job in hand we could achieve something here, eh? What do you think?”

The technician tensed visibly. Stephen’s wide smile showed a mouthful of perfectly straight and white teeth, a set that any orthodontist would be proud of. He shuffled off the artist’s arm and said to the curator, “We could maybe rig something up in the joists, take away a ceiling panel, run cables across the loft and put a rig just opposite the pillar. Box in the plinth, too, so it doesn’t get bumped.”

“Excellent,” said Stephen, rubbing his hands together and winking at Andy. The technician turned away, suddenly finding an urgent need to busy himself with his wiring diagram, noting some alternations with a pencil, abstractedly sniffing and wiping his nostrils with his thumb.

It was a lovely moment for Stephen, a joyful moment, drawing attention to the technician’s habit, making him self-conscious about it. It may be that he hadn’t snorted since yesterday, when he had pulled an all-nighter striking the previous show, but the mere mention of the word cocaine had made his septum tingle and he couldn’t stop the automatic swiping motion of his finger.

The power of suggestion might be an idea one associated with Victorian charlatans and vaudeville hypnotists. But Stephen learned early on that there existed a real power in the populist idea, perhaps even a scientific explanation. What happens if a group of boys, making mischief, stand in a pedestrian precinct, look up at the sky between the tiers of department stores, and point heavenward? Everyone who notices looks up too, only to find there is nothing there, apart from a few stray clouds. Pavlov’s dog. Ring a bell and it salivates. Here was a power that Stephen learned to use, even as a child, to thwart the school bully, to gull teachers, or any authoritarian figure. All except for his father, against whom this power was useless.

“Do you want to check the press release now, Stephen?” Paul asked.

“I’m sure it’ll be fine. Just let me have a copy before you ship it to the media.”

The curator seemed puzzled. Stephen Morrell was well known for his attention to detail, and it was unlikely he would disregard a detail as important as the press release for his first major retrospective. Stephen appeared to be studying one of his large scale photographs leaning against the wall, but in reality he had caught his reflection like Narcissus in the pool. Except that in those smoke grey eyes Stephen Morrell was seeing, not himself, but his father’s face, smelling the stale tobacco off his father’s breath. He quickly pushed his Raybans back on.

The curator said, “Gallery Two’s almost ready, if you want to have a look.”

Stephen nodded assent and the two men picked their way across snaking electrical cables, tins of paint, hammers and saws, and an array of other tools. They passed between a pair of brick pillars into the coal black space of the main gallery.

Twelve upright packing cases were placed around the floor like Egyptian sarcophagi. Instead of hieroglyphs the words “Fragile. Handle with Care.” were stencilled on them in red. Stickers on the top left hand corner of each, beneath an assertive black arrow, advised: “This Way Up.”

One of the works had already been unpacked and mounted in position. Inside a flat, rusty iron ring like a barrel-maker’s, the ring in turn enclosed in a square of the same hammered iron, was suspended a human skeleton, legs and arms splayed widely apart in a pastiche of DaVinci’s Vitruvius. The suspension devices were bondage equipment from a fetish shop: a leather corset cinched around the lower ribcage, with hip flanges linked by steel chains anchored to the equatorial points of the ring. Hands and feet were manacled in position, the leather clasps wittily lined with poodle-pink fur. There was a rubber bondage mask over the skull, eyeless but with a breathing filter like a World War Two gas mask. The piece was entitled “Crucifixion III,” the title itself embossed in an aluminium plate mounted on an oak block between the skeleton’s feet. The skeleton itself was as blindingly white as plaster of Paris. The only colour on the whole sculpture was on the indentations where toenails would have been on the living person. The indentations, all ten of them, had been painted meticulously with aubergine-coloured nail varnish.

Chapter Four

Ray was still angry with his daughter as he sat down in the pine-backed booth next to the doorway to the kitchen of Café Quay. When she’d said on the phone she needed a little money he didn’t expect she meant more than two months’ salary.

“Three grand?” he gasped. “How much do you imagine I get paid, Caroline? What’s more your mum gets half of anything I do earn.”

Caroline, at her father’s behest, had come round to the flat earlier this morning, to discuss the loan in person. It wasn’t that he wanted to make things any more difficult. He only wanted her to look him in the eye and tell him everything was fine and that she was not in any kind of trouble. She couldn’t.

Her black jeans were scruffy from continual wear. Her grey sleeveless satin jacket with the velvet collar looked like a dog that had been out in the rain. Caroline’s shoulder-length auburn hair was bedraggled, and her eyes were distant. Ray’s heart squeezed; he wanted to take her in his arms. Instead he raised his voice.

“You could buy a car for that kind of cash. But that’s not what it’s for, is it?”

She sat on the couch, knees tightly together, shoulders hunched, a mug of coffee gripped between long, pale fingers. A slight shake of the head gave him his answer.

Ray paused before asking the next question: “Are you pregnant?”

How much was an abortion these days? Did you have to pay for one or not? He hadn’t a clue.

She giggled. “Dad. You must be getting cloth-eared in your old age. . .”

“Less of the old. I’m not forty yet.”

“Maybe you didn’t hear me when I told you I was gay.”

Ray said, “Ha, ha, very funny. Okay, I remember you said you were determined never to have kids, but turning lesbian’s a bit extreme isn’t it.” He was trying to be amusing, and failing.

She stood up, a spark of anger in her eyes: “I knew I should have gone to mum!”

“Shit, Caroline, I’m sorry. I’m sorry...okay? To be honest I don’t really care if you’re a. . .”

“Bisexual, actually,” she joked.

“Oh, aye, of course, I remember. You’re my daughter, and I love you. You damned well know I’m not judgmental.”

“You’re making me feel like a criminal.”

Ray sighed. “Dammit, Caroline, you can be so obtuse. You’re deliberately misunderstanding me.”

“Poor you.” Caroline managed a smile.

“Less of the sarcasm, young lady. I’m not saying I’d mind if you were...pregnant. I don’t much enjoy growing older. . .the beard gets tougher to shave, for a start. . .but grandchildren would be nice I sometimes think. In weaker moments.”

“You could still have those. I want kids.”

“Yes, but. . .” Ray felt a lightbulb pop over his head. “Bloody hell, Caroline. You want the money for artificial insemination?”

And that, finally, cracked her up completely. Caroline laughed so hard she fell back against the couch, spilling coffee on the carpet.

Ray sat there feeling more than somewhat foolish.

But when she sat up again, she was crying, not tears of laughter, but of real pain.

He knelt down and enfolded her in his arms until her wracking sobs subsided.

“Okay, babe,” he said. “Of course you can have the money. I’ll get it for you tomorrow. No questions asked. Fine by you?” He pushed her back by the shoulders so he could look into her face. How can such an ugly bastard have produced such a beautiful daughter, he wondered.

“Thanks. . .dad. Thanks. I do love you, you know. Even though you’re an intolerant sod sometimes.” Spoken through a broad grin, fortunately.

Sitting in the cafe’s booth now Ray clenched his teeth as he visualised the meeting he would need to have with his bank manager. Oh, sorry, I forgot, Account Executive, Personal Loan Manager, the new branding, which Ray equated with calling the office cleaner a hygienist or a clinical functionary. Everything was about branding nowadays. The rule of the logo. Even The Metropolitan had succumbed, its weekend supplement renamed M, just that, the letter M. What the hell was it supposed to mean? Masturbation, Ray supposed.

“Fancy another coffee?”

Ray looked up. Kendrick’s features were familiar after all, and unlike Ray he had hardly put on any weight at all. The beginnings of crow’s feet around the eyes were the only obvious indication that he had grown any older. He was wearing an expensive suede jacket over a check shirt, with designer jeans and timberland boots on his slender legs.

Kendrick caught Ray’s ironically amused expression. “I told you I’m off duty. It’s unofficial. Now, about that coffee?”

Ray turned the thick pottery coffee bowl around on the tabletop, peering at the dying cappuccino froth in the base like Circe predicting the future.

“Large,” he said, winking at the waitress. “Cinnamon topping, not chocolate.”

Ray watched Kendrick’s confident stance as he added something Ray couldn’t make out, making the waitress giggle.

“Cinnamon it is.” She played with her hair as he talked, and looked at him coyly under her lashes. A bit of a flirt, our Detective Inspector Kendrick.

When he came back to the booth, sliding the tray of coffees across the pine tabletop and easing himself onto the bench opposite, Ray commented: “She’s a bit young for you, don’t you think?”

“A lot of them prefer older guys. And you can call me Tom.”

Ray said, “A lot of older guys like to think they do.”

Kendrick clicked two sweeteners from a dispenser he produced from his pocket into the cup, and watched the little white disks dent the milky foam, not sinking until he stirred them in with a teaspoon.

“Watching your weight?” Ray could not resist asking.

“No. Watching you, if you must know.. Mind if I call you Ray?”

“Why, Tom, this is all so sudden,” he said, a poor parody of a shy Southern belle.

“Are you always sarcastic?”

“Not always. Depends on whom I’m addressing.”

“You’re a bit defensive, eh – Ray.” Kendrick sucked a mouthful of coffee and wiped a frothy moustache from his top lip.

Ray made no reply, and studied D.I. Kendrick dispassionately. He was probably mid to late thirties or so, doubtless quite young to hold the rank he did. Fit, sinewy rather than muscular, with a sprinkling of white through his crew-cut black hair, which doubtless appealed to certain young women with a penchant for older men. Mature, but not too mature. His eyebrows were full, little black dots at the bridge of his nose suggesting they had a tendency to meet in the middle but were regularly plucked away; otherwise they would have made him seem to be permanently frowning. His mouth was small, the lips thin, a feature of a person with a stubborn streak.

“So what is it you want to ask me about Heathrow?” The mere word was enough for Ray to envisage the sketchy shape of his recurrent nightmares. Two syllables, Heath-Row, two gunshots echoing around the passenger lounge. In his nightmare the surprising volume of blood splashing against the enamelled wall was grey – Ray never dreamed in colour – but his brain told him it was red, as red the carpet the airport rolled out for visiting dignitaries. Ears still ringing from the first shot, a second followed after angry shouts in Arabic or some such language. Twin rivers of blood ran in torrents across the hard, shiny floor, breaking into tributaries. An Amazon of glutinous, grey blood, finally pooling around his feet, sucking him down like a quagmire. He would invariably awake then, sweating and wondering if he had called out in his sleep, even though there was no-one there now to hear him if he had.

“Our snipers brought down two of the terrorists. Another killed himself with a cyanide pill – very James Bond, I thought – and one managed to escape. It was a woman, not an Israeli. A European, possibly opposed to the conflict on religious grounds. A fanatic. One of the passengers. I wondered if you knew her.”

So Kendrick didn’t know the truth, not really, only what he had read in Ray’s stories back then.

“I interviewed her, yes, but over the phone. Said she was calling from Hamburg.”

“To give you more background for your pieces?” Kendrick snapped the tiny biscuit provided with the coffee between his teeth. He chewed thoughtfully and gestured with the uneaten half. “And you checked out what she told you?”

“Of course. I’m a good journalist, Kendrick, even if you don’t think so.”

“I didn’t say you aren’t. In fact, quite the opposite. I think you’re an excellent journalist, only a little misguided occasionally.”

Ray bristled. “Misguided in what way?”

“Well,” Kendrick paused, laid the biscuit half in the saucer, brushed his fingers together to get rid of crumbs and continued, “Like others of your kind. . .”

Ray did not like such generalisations; his view showed in his face.

“. . .like some reporters,” Kendrick amended, “You believe in telling the truth. At least, the truth the way you see it.”

“And what’s wrong with that? We’re in the entertainment business, after all.” Ray was being facetious.

“You don’t really believe that. You sometimes write as if you’re on a campaign for justice.”

“Maybe I don’t really feel that justice exists other than as a concept. An abstraction.”

“But you want it to exist. You need to feel it can, same as me. Anyhow, as I was saying, the truth the way you see it is often at any cost. Like the name and shame campaign against paedophiles.”

“That wasn’t our paper. We did an editorial criticising it. It was the worst kind of tabloid sensationalism, and dangerous as well. Mind you, I’d have liked to kill the sick fuckers myself.”

“It stopped us from doing our job properly.”

Ray wanted to add, but did not, that if the police had been doing their job properly there would be no need for tabloid vigilantism.

“Look, Kendrick – Tom – I wrote factual, accurate accounts of what happened at Heathrow, the pro-Jewish campaigner who happened to be there and who happened to escape, also read what I’d published and chose to contact me to put their side of the story—”

“—which you printed,” Kendrick finished.

“Which we printed, yes. It was a gift. But nothing in that article was supportive of what they did. It was a balanced commentary.”

“Suggesting you supported their actions.”

“No, not at all!” Anger flared in Ray. “Their cause might well have been just. That was all I was saying, but the way they chose to fight their corner wasn’t. No way was I supportive of terrorism.”

“And what if the terrorists had been Muslim fundamentalists? Would you have said they were wrong?”

“Both sides have their points of view. Westerners like us can never fully comprehend the complexities.”

The counter argument was becoming flaccid, so Ray decided to give up on it.

“Okay,” Ray said, “You’ve made your point. Mine is that I had to publish. The stuff that woman told me was important, an aspect to the story that the other papers didn’t have.”

“So it was all about selling papers, was it?”

A trap. And Ray had fallen straight into it.

He sat back and gulped at the strong coffee, which had become slightly bitter as it cooled. His head pounded from too much caffeine and lack of sleep, that and the prospect of facing whatever urgent demands his editor would be making of him later. He had called in with a delaying tactic in order not to have to arrive early, claiming an estate agent was a friend of one of the football hooligans and had some information about him. This part was factually correct, though Ray had actually spoken to the man two days ago, one of several leads he was pursuing. Conscience, or fear of being found out for his misdeeds fifteen years ago, insisted that he meet the policeman this morning rather than go to his office. No matter how much he intellectualised about how the past never completely goes away, he blocked the reality of it emotionally, the way none of us believe we are ever really going to die.

“The thing is, Ray, I can accept most of what you’re telling me, but—”

“No, Kendrick,” Ray interjected. “Hang on a minute. There’s something I don’t get here. Interpol took over the case so far as I’ve been told. It’s probably lying dormant in their files right now. No, what I don’t get is what your interest is, and why now.”

Kendrick waited.

“I mean,” Ray said, “Digging up the past is what you people do, but this is bloody archaeology. All you’ll get is the woman’s name, if you’re extremely lucky. And that won’t do you a blind bit of good, other than having the satisfaction of seeing her arrested. There’s politics involved here, man. Too big for a city copper.”

“Bad timing,” Kendrick said with a note of resignation in his voice. “My timing was bad. I pulled the files on the terrorists. See, trouble was I also had a file on the woman. I knew who she was. And so did my boss.”

Ray was flabbergasted. “You’re kidding me.”

“She was – is – the daughter of a certain Euro MP, but the powers that be felt it was too big a story to come to light. So my material was, like I said, suppressed.”

“And you want revenge?”

Kendrick snorted. “Ha. Hardly. I was a young cop, ambitious yes, but not stupid. I got to where I wanted to go.”

“Early promotion?”

Kendrick glared. “I bloody worked for it, sunshine. Keeping my mouth shut helped, that’s all.”

“So why are you telling me this now? Feeling bad about yourself?”

“No, Ray, I’m not. Are you?”

“What do you mean by that?”

“See, what I wondered, Ray, after the event, a good while after if you must know, was how you happened to be in Terminal One at the time.”

It was as if he had been kicked in the stomach, regardless of the instinct Ray had all the while that Detective Inspector Kendrick knew the whole story. And had known it for every minute of the past fifteen years.

A long silence ensued.

“Two people died maybe because of you, Ray.”

A glacier calved inside Ray’s chest, a chunk of his heart dropping into a frozen ocean. It was only what he had told himself again and again. Because of him. Ray Bissett, a strong-minded, ambitious young man who wanted to make it big in the world of journalism. An informant with political connections had tipped him off about the impending hostage situation, in exchange for a large sum of money, which cleaned out Ray’s bank balance. He regarded this sacrifice as worthwhile. If he could be in the midst of the crisis, even going to the trouble of purchasing a ticket to Paris without intending to go there, he would have the story of a lifetime. Reasoning that he was putting his own life at risk was to no avail; like many ambitious young men he felt invulnerable. Reason also argued that a hostage situation such as this was so quixotic that there could be no real danger to the passengers. Reason had been mistaken.

“A boy called Philip Carr died from a bullet wound through his head. And a woman called Valerie James, who was with her husband at the time, died from the bullet that tore open her carotid artery. The boy was nine, and the woman was twenty eight.”

Ray was trembling; he couldn’t prevent it. Shaking the way he had finally done in the therapist’s office when he revealed the truth, when he had howled inconsolably, remorseful tears spilling hotly across his cheeks while he fought for breath between sobs. His eyes smarted now, and he cupped a hand across them so Kendrick would not see.

“Your wife left you because of it,” Kendrick informed him, simply.

God, this guy was unrelenting.

“So are you going to arrest me for withholding information?” Ray wiped his eyes and fixed Kendrick with a look that said “You can’t prove a thing.”

Kendrick leant forward. “To be honest, Ray, I’m not convinced that would do either of us much good. I’m as guilty as you are, after all.”

“But,” he added, “I do want that woman arrested. Fact is I want to keep my career on track, but there are people who don’t want me to move any higher up the ladder. I’m working on something that could be important and this stuff from the past is sort of. . .getting in the way, if you catch my drift.”

Ray was puzzled but also intrigued. “Hang on. You’re going a little fast for me here. Are you asking me to help you in some way?”

Kendrick shrugged. “I don’t suppose you’d piss on me if I was on fire. So, no, I’m not asking you. I’m telling you. Or, let me put it another way. I have information about this woman, who she is, where she can be found, and what her involvement with the hostage situation was. All you have to do is go public with it, which is your job after all. And wouldn’t do your career any harm, either.”

He was referring to Miriam Allen of course.

“So long as I keep you out of it.”

Kendrick gave a tight-lipped smile. “Good boy. Now you’re getting it.”

“Or else what?”

“You know what, Ray. Remember what you said about Ibsen.”

Ray glanced at his watch, unwilling to make a response. “Listen, I have to go to work now, or my editor’ll sack me.”

Kendrick nodded, waving him off with a promise that he would be back in touch.

Chapter Five

It was past midnight when the corrugated metal shutters of The Syntax Gallery’s loading bay were rolled down. The gallery thoughtfully provided taxi cab rides home for the late workers, although the fares were in reality offset by the low wages offered to these eager art students who were willing to work their arses off for the privilege of being bathed in the reflected glow of those of their number who got a show and the fewer who made the big time. Stephen thought these drones perfectly adorable. If the reason for their existence was to serve him, well let them serve. Standing on the pavement he studied his name laminated in a large, white serif typeface on the plate glass windows flanking the gallery’s entrance. The lettering, double spaced according to a typographic trend favoured by many designers, was too pristine, he felt. It was starting to annoy him. He’d demand it be changed in the morning, regardless of the inconvenience or expense.

Restlessness infected him at such times, towards the completion of a piece or on the eve of a big opening. Adrenaline pumped through him, a feeling of restless power like that of a hungry predator surged from his abdomen to his temples. It wasn’t a predator’s need for hot blood that took hold of him, though, but a need to dominate or subdue or humiliate another human being.

A cab drew alongside, its green light off to indicate it was reserved, and parked, its large diesel engine ticking over reassuringly. The driver raised his head questioningly, but Stephen shook his and said, “They’re just locking up.” The driver flipped open a newspaper and squinted to read it the dim cablight. Stephen caught a portion of the headline: “. . .Deny Shocking Discovery.” As he flipped past the page dominated by the photograph of a bare breasted girl, the colours muddy in the poor light, a sub heading said, “Forensic Anthropologist Consulted.” That would be one of the newspaper’s hired “experts.” These so-called experts were paid to offer an opinion about a case they had no involvement in, and lacked the scientific rigour of those working on the ground who knew better than to shoot their mouths off.

Stephen frowned, slightly ill-at-ease for no reason he could pin down. Forensic anthropologist. Not very catchy as tabloid headlines go. Therefore of particular significance.

Brushing past him with no apology, Andy the technician, an arm cinched in ownership around Yvonne Graeme’s waist, hustled her into the cab and followed behind. She looked out from the darkened far corner with an air of embarrassment that she was about to let this skinny, ageing hippy work of his cocaine buzz on her. “It comes with the territory,” her eyes seemed to say. The curator had swanned off hours ago in his reconditioned Humber Sceptre, a scarlet and silver motor whose retro futurist design reflected its owner’s personality to a tee. Like its owner, it to was pretentious, chunky and noisy at speed.

“Goodnight, Yvonne,” Stephen said, making a particular point to not acknowledge the technician’s existence. “And thanks for all your help tonight.”

She lowered her head in pleasing modesty. A mumbled response along the lines that she was simply doing her job. Stephen didn’t expect the same argument to hold for what she was about to let the stringy technician do to her all night long, and he intellectualised the emotion of feeling sorry for her.

As the cab drove off, Stephen leaned toward the window, his head seemingly disembodied by the darkness in the foyer. Removing his sunglasses and dropping them into his top pocket he pulled his fingertips down the smooth, hairless line of his jaw. His lips were full, florid, the sort of lips that man or woman might be drawn to kiss, the eyelids sensual and heavy-lidded. This androgynous sexuality drew people to Stephen Morrell, together with his mercurial, if unpredictable, personality. Never being sure of where you were with him excited many of his admirers, of which there were as many men as women. Stephen saw all of this in himself, saw it now in his pale reflection in the night-darkened glass, a deep and abiding narcissism bolstered by his many sexual and business conquests in addition to a talent which some critics described as “astonishing.”

Walking was therapeutic, he found, and he strode away from the gallery, aimlessly at first, observing the few passers-by, leaving theatres or bars and heading home or going to clubs. An inebriated couple, the woman in a satin party dress, the man in a dinner suit with loose bowtie and his starched collar undone, staggered past singing, “Goodnight Irene.”

A trio of girls with bare legs and plastic mini skirts which barely covered their backsides, shivered and giggled as they negotiated with the bouncers for entrance to a nightclub. One of the girls, petite, with dirty yellow hair, clutched at the jacket of the beefiest of the three guardians of the club and hissed into his ear. He laughed and said, “You’re too young for me, doll. I’ll get the jail.” And so she was. Drawing closer, Stephen could see that the girl must have barely been twelve years old; she probably wasn’t a hooker, because one of the older girls, whom she resembled, was scowling. Possibly this was her sister, who had reluctantly promised her unconcerned parents she would look after.

Shadowed in a doorway opposite, Stephen observed the scenario unfold: the indifference of the bouncers, the resentfulness of the girls that could any moment spiral into rage and verbal abuse. One of the bouncers glanced idly up and down the legs of the eldest girl, lost interest and made a remark, which produced a coughing laugh in his colleague. The youngest one was the most antagonistic, spoiling for a fight, the result perhaps of too many alcopops in her system; her arms were goosebumping and she rubbed them abstractedly as she tried other tactics to get them inside. She spoke too quickly and shrilly for Stephen to catch what she was saying, but the result was that the lead bouncer, a bald, square-shaped man, merely folded his arms across his chest and gazed blankly into the space just past her ear.

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