Christopher Fowler is the author of a series featuring Arthur Bryant and John May, who are members of the fictional Peculiar Crimes Unit. The Bryant and May series is set primarily in London, with stories taking place in various years between the Second World War and the present. Whilst there is a progressive narrative, many of the books focus on flashbacks to a major criminal incident from the detectives’ shared past. His other publications include a study of unjustly forgotten authors, Invisible Ink.
Suddenly the lights had gone out.
Opening the front door of the apartment and peering into the dimness of the top floor corridor, I became aware of a tall man in a black nylon Nike T-shirt and jogging shorts standing against the distant wall.
‘I thought I heard someone outside,’ I said nervously. ‘Were you banging?’
He lowered his left shoe and came closer. A narrow skull framed by slept-on hair, deep-set eyes that diverged disconcertingly. ‘We’ve got cockroaches. Bloody great brown things like they have in America. I just chased one the size of a small cat out into the hall. They come up from the river at high tide. It’s because the lights are out. They come out in the dark. I thought I’d squash it, but if they’re strong enough to breed after a nuclear blast I suppose they can survive a rubberised heel.’
He dropped the shoe and wriggled a bony foot back into it. ‘So I’m not the only one still here. I haven’t seen you before. Hang on a minute.’
He produced a plastic pocket torch and shone it right in my eyes. When I waved the beam aside he ran it over my body, lingering on my chest, then flicked it to the floor.
‘I suppose you know there’s no power on for the next twelve hours. I haven’t seen him lately. Is he away?’
‘Who?’
‘The man who lives here.’ He gestured to my front door.
‘I’m looking after the place for the owner,’ I explained.
‘Ah. I suppose he’s off on business. They always are.’
‘I’m sorry?’
‘The so-called residents of this block. I’m next door, the corner penthouse of this concrete Shangri-La. North-westerly view. Not exactly Turner’s vision of the river, but north-easterly had already gone.’ He offered a long hand, with pale fingers that wrapped around mine like crab legs. ‘My name’s Dr Elliot, by the way.’
‘June Cryer,’ I said. His palm was unpleasantly moist. I looked down at his running shorts and imagined his testicles sticking to his legs.
‘Do you need any light?’
‘I found some candles. And a small torch. I didn’t know the lights were going to be out when I agreed to—’
‘Essential maintenance, apparently. I’ve got a good alternative. Follow me. It’s alright, I don’t bite ladies until you know me.’
I realised I was prepared to trust him because his voice was cultured and confident. That’s the class system in a nutshell. The BBC might have Indian newsreaders now but they make damned sure they sound like Old Etonians. I knew I must sound horribly suburban to him. ‘Estuarine’, that’s what they call my accent in polite circles. ‘Chav’, that’s what everyone else says. It makes me ashamed, the way I kowtow to people with posh voices. I keep having to remind myself it’s not a sign of intelligence. I didn’t belong here in this expensive block of flats – sorry, luxury riverside lofts. I was doing a favour for a girlfriend’s friend.
Dr Elliot held open the door for me. ‘Hurricane lamps,’ he suggested. ‘I went out and purchased a job lot from some peculiar Turkish shop in Kennington Road. They’re only pressed tin but they add a gothic atmosphere.’
‘I wouldn’t have thought this building needed any more atmosphere.’
‘Extraordinary, isn’t it? A veritable palace of bad dreams. Makes you wonder what the architect was thinking. A Frenchman, apparently. It’s their uncompromising nature that makes them so artistically adroit. And so fucking rude. He must have had a very strange idea of London in his head.’
He led the way into the darkened lounge, stopping to light a pair of the tin lamps on a sideboard. Weak light burnished maroon walls, picking up the glister of expensive gilt frames. He turned and smiled. His eyes were bothersome because I couldn’t tell where he was looking. ‘At least the water’s gas-heated. You should have been given adequate warning about the electricity. Bad friend not to tell you. You’ll be undressing in the dark.’
‘I’m not sure I would have come if I had realised.’ I followed Dr Elliot around the room as he lit the lamps. His apartment was squarer and taller than the one I was sitting, with windows on two sides, the walls painted in deep crimsons and browns, lined with medical textbooks. I stopped before the riverside windows to check the view from a different perspective.
From here, London seemed veiled in steel grey mesh. Beside the curtains, what I’d thought was a life-sized statue was revealed to be a full-sized cutaway model of the human body, its skull sectioned to expose a quarter of pink plastic brain, one bulbous eye in its socket, a bright crimson rubber heart, blue-grey lungs, maroon liver and coiled intestines the colour of a flamingo. He had scabby pink rubber arms and legs.
‘Oh, that’s Maurice. He’s a bit startling, isn’t he? The idea was to make him look like the sort of chap you’d find in a medical training college in the 1930s. We’ve grown very attached to each other.’
‘You’re a doctor?’
‘God, no. I’m not interested in the plumbing side of things. Psychiatric research. Motivational stuff for corporate staff training. Physical and psychological effects of sudden life-change. I organise behavioural experiments on patients, poorly paid volunteers mostly, mess about with their preconditioning, change their diets and stress levels, try to work out what triggers their responses, generally fuck them about until they scream like stuck pigs. What do you do?’
‘Oh, I’m nobody at all,’ I replied without thinking. No one had ever asked what I did. Dr Elliot frightened me. He confirmed my assumption that only businesspeople would live in a building of such peculiarly masculine design. Women like me would always be invisible here.
‘Come now. I rarely find that’s true in my line of work. Everyone’s somebody, even if they don’t know it.’
‘All right. Then I’m a housewife.’
‘Is that all? I don’t think I know anyone who’s just a housewife. It’s such a Fifties word, so redolent of aprons and baking. Won’t you be uncomfortable here? It’s very dark. We might as well be cut off in some ghastly remote part of the country, instead of being in central London.’
There was something arrogant and suggestive in his manner that irritated me. ‘I’ve got a friend coming over later,’ I lied. ‘Anyway, civilisation’s just outside.’
‘Do you really think so? I look out and see chimps in vans shouting at cyclists, no one you could actually rely on. The words “guttural” and “polyglot” spring to mind.’ He rolled the words around in his mouth like brandy, trying them out. ‘Guttural. Polyglot.’
‘I’ll be fine when my friend gets here,’ I repeated.
‘The outside buzzer’s not working and the main entrance door is open. You’d better tell him to come up the stairs, and sing so as not to frighten you. It’s one of those nights when you never know who might come wandering in.’
‘I won’t be frightened, don’t worry.’
‘That is … if your friend is a man.’ His distracting eyes reflected light like some nocturnal animal. He was studying me too intently, a hazard of his job, perhaps. ‘What made you agree to stay here, I wonder?’
‘The money,’ I answered honestly, sensing he knew when I lied. ‘My friend’s boyfriend is the owner, Malcolm. I have this friend, Cathy.’
‘You mean girlfriend?’
‘No, a girl who’s a friend. She’s seeing Malcolm, and he offered to pay me if I stayed until Monday morning. The security system being out. He has paintings.’
‘Yes, the power’s off overnight. I don’t suppose the insurers would cover that. He didn’t tell you the lights would be off as well.’
‘No. I’ve never met him. As I say, it was a favour …’
‘So you’re like one of my paid volunteers. Is this a service you provide regularly?’
‘No. I’m just helping my friend out.’
‘If you were that much of a friend you wouldn’t be taking his money, would you? Or perhaps the exchange of cash eases the social transaction for you both.’ He managed to extract a lascivious meaning from every word, using too much tongue. He joined me at the window, standing too close. ‘Of course, I knew you weren’t like the rest of them as soon as I saw you.’
‘In what way?’
‘My dear lady, the residents here are the vanished rich. Overseas professionals renting from agents. I’ve only met three of them, a Swiss banker, a Russian electronic surveillance expert and a plastic surgeon of indeterminate and dubious origin. They’re somewhat overcautious about their privacy. Not terribly interested in their neighbours. They like to bring ladies here for a few hours, then let them out to find their way home in tears. You could hammer on their doors screaming blue murder and they wouldn’t open.’
‘How did you end up here?’
‘I see too much of people’s emotions at work. We need a place that pacifies us.’
‘You could live in the country,’ I suggested. As he dropped onto the sofa and folded his legs, I saw that he was wearing see-through socks, pulled up too high.
‘In a village with a bad Italian restaurant and a pub with morris dancers? No, my practice is in town, and the building suits my needs.’ He stretched out a hairy white wrist and tapped the back of the seat, as though beckoning a cat. Repelled, I remained standing. ‘Besides, it’s rather interesting as a social experiment. I’m waiting for it all to break down, you see. That’s when the real discoveries are made, when organisation collapses into chaos. These lovely properties are built on slum land. The buildings have been pimped into ersatz hotel suites for multicultural money-churners who share no common social skills whatsoever. It’s a giant leap back into a dark age, psychologically speaking. Yet there are compensations.’
‘It’s more cosmopolitan,’ I suggested.
‘Yes, unsophisticated people always say that. It’s a poor substitute for society. In my opinion—’
‘My friend,’ I interrupted lamely, ‘he might be waiting for me.’
He clapped his hands with unnerving suddenness. ‘Then I mustn’t keep you, must I?’ He jumped up and guided me from the room. I felt relieved to be leaving, but he suddenly stopped in the doorway and turned back to me, his face so close that I could taste his breath. ‘You know the fun of having a little place in town? This isn’t a family building, so there can be … experimentation. Only our gallant captains of industry can afford to live here, and it’s never a good idea to put them all in a group. Guess what the rates of mental abnormality are in this country. One in five among the general populace, one in three among senior corporate executives. The higher you go, the more fucked-up it gets, psychologically speaking. These people aren’t for you. Especially when the lights go out. I think you’d be better off away from here, back in your little terraced house. Here, take one of these with you.’
He handed me one of the hurricane lamps and rested his hand lightly in the small of my back, the supercilious ushering of a doctor seeing off an unrespected patient. ‘You’d better go, or I might want to keep you here all night.’
I turned in the doorway and studied him. ‘Can I ask you something about Maurice?’
Dr Elliot glanced back at the eviscerated dummy. ‘Him?’
‘Yes, doesn’t he bother you, standing there like that in the dark?’
‘Not at all. There’s nothing to be afraid of when you’ve already been as far as you can go. We have no secrets from each other.’
Dr Elliot closed the door before I’d managed to find my way back to the apartment, as though he had quickly decided that I was unattractive and not worth flirting with. Deeply unsettled by the encounter, I returned to Malcolm’s flat holding the lantern high so that I could check the stark rooms.
The reflection from the river’s palisade of floodlit buildings had robbed the walls of their corrosive colours. I looked in the bedroom cupboards and found plain grey suits and white shirts, as neatly arranged as shop displays. Clearly, Malcolm’s wife didn’t stay here. A single pair of young women’s shoes, gaudy and damaged, lay in the bottom of a cupboard, proof of his unfaithfulness. His wife’s home would be more warmly decorated. That was where he lived. This was just for sex, any woman coming here could see that. It was why Malcolm’s wife avoided the place; she wouldn’t want to be confronted with such obvious evidence. I wondered if Cathy came here in the early evenings after work to strip and pose before him.
I pulled back the glass doors and stepped out onto the balcony. The scene below drew attention in a way that the view from my south London flat never did. In the far corner to the left, I could see into Dr Elliot’s penthouse. Even though the rooms were dark it was possible to spot the psychiatrist standing in his window, as motionless as his medical dummy.
I fancied a drink, but the only tonic I could find was flat, so I tipped fruit juice onto what I hoped was decanted gin, and stood proprietorially behind the bar at the rear of the lounge, sipping slowly. The room was stuffy, and the temperature control panel was not apparent in the gloom. I studied the paintings by lamplight. They didn’t look especially valuable, but I had only ever seen paintings in books.
I found some fat candles in a sideboard and lit them. Stretched out on an umber couch in the lounge, I watched the creamy flames poised in glowing wax like a line of torch-bearing monks, and tried to summon a sense of independence, but there was nothing. The room grew warmer. No street sounds reached my ears. Up here there was only the soughing of the late summer storm-sky. Cocooned in the huge robe, my eyelids grew heavy.
My dreams were uneasy, dislocated; first I was back at home in my old sunshine yellow lounge, but stripped bare of furnishings, bright wavering light, and someone was crouching naked in a corner, plangently suffering. Before this hunched child walked a dark creature with blank eyes, rattling something rhythmically in a large steel pot. It held a ladle, clicking against the metal rim, back and forth, back and forth, the sound of a clock, or pipes quickly heating.
When I awoke and looked at my watch it was a quarter to midnight, and I could still hear the clicking. It faded and grew, as if the night air was catching it.
Rising, I took one of the candles and watched its shifting golden sphere raise walls where there had been none. The edges of the light led me to the second bedroom and a floor-length mirror. I studied my spectral reflection, rather pleased with it. Robed in white, candle raised, the heroine of a Victorian novel was distorted in dark machine-rolled glass.
A cool draught stippled my skin. One of the glass doors to the balcony stood ajar. I couldn’t remember if I had left it like that. I wanted to close it, but was compelled to step outside and approach the source of the clicking sound.
The breeze from the river was sharper now, cuprous and sour. I looked to my right, across to the corner balcony, scanning the pastel darkness, and flinched when a torch-beam strafed the windows. Placing the candle out of the wind, I looked harder. The third apartment was set at a steeper angle than Dr Elliot’s, affording me a dim view of its interior. Its balcony door was open, a thin beam of light bouncing across the walls. I couldn’t tell if the girl on the balcony was looking in my direction. Her hands were raised to her throat, long black hair fluttering like flags at her arched back.
A low wave of air attacked my candle and snuffed it out. When I glanced back, the girl was outlined against the pale night like a statue, a memorial to some household divinity, affixed to the building in spiritual appeasement. I could tell she was young by her slender waist, small raised breasts and flat stomach. She could have been a dancer, a model. She lifted her hands high above her tilted head, her fingers spread wide and reaching, as if waiting to be carried up into the night air. High above her, electricity flared within the clouds, like a faulty connection in heaven. For a moment it looked like she had caused it.
The girl was not alone. A tall figure stepped out to join her. Steel sheened her long neck. I heard the passing of a chain, saw the rattle and flash of links. The man was chaining her up.
An urgent whisper escaped her throat and was carried on the thermals trapped between the apartments. I stepped closer to the edge of the balcony and tried to see what was happening. The building’s crazed geometry stood against the never-night of the London sky. An unscalable drop fell to the riverside road, seven floors below. When I looked up again the girl had disappeared. Inside the apartment, the torchlight started to recede. I left the balcony, puzzled.
Although my own front door was closed I could hear it shifting slightly back and forth in the jamb. Freed from the grip of electricity, the latch-bolt had slipped from the strike plate. Against the beating of my heart, I peered outside into the hall for the second time in the evening.
Faint light flickered where there had been none before. In the centre of the floor stood a fat black candle, obscenely leaking grease as a question mark formed around its base. Shoe prints, fresh and wet, led across the grey cord carpet tiles into the corridor from the stairs.
Then I saw them.
Beside the door of the next apartment, outlined against a panel of night sky, the man had his captive propped against the wall with her head bowed and a steel shackle attached around her neck. The girl’s face was obscured by glossy black hair that fell as straight as pencils.
The man bent awkwardly from the waist, as if he was wearing a back-brace. His legs seemed almost to belong to someone else. The girl was barefoot and bare-breasted, dressed only in pale baggy jeans. She fell forward, to be propped upright by her strange companion. A maze of dark spots glinted around her bare feet on the carpet. She made a vague, hopeless grab at the arms of the broken man and sank drunkenly down the wall, doubling over with a high cry of frustration, or possibly laughter.
I took a pace back in alarm when she suddenly thrust out her arms toward me. The man turned in my direction, his features lost in darkness, but I could see a single lidless eye staring, daring a response.
I didn’t wait to find out what he was doing, or what was going on between him and the girl. It was best not to know. In the suburbs you don’t talk to your neighbours even if they’re being murdered. Be it black mass, buggery or bestiality, the general opinion is that it’s best to leave them enjoying themselves so long as everyone’s over eighteen.
Slamming the door and running back to the bedroom, I scrabbled for matches and relit the candle, then tore open the zip of my case for jeans, a sweater, a jacket. Unable to lay hands on my trainers, I was forced into heeled shopping shoes, all the while thinking, Murderers, perverts, I should never have come here. Why would anyone chain a young girl up like an animal? I wondered if she was an unwilling participant in the kind of sex games you read about every Sunday in the family newspapers.
Remembering my mobile, I ran back to the kitchen, found it, checked the reception meter and saw there were no bars available. End of the ground floor corridor, Malcolm had told Cathy to tell me, that was the only place where you could get reception at the moment.
The front door hadn’t been locked or even pushed shut. My feet were numb on the cold floor. Space expanded ahead, folding outward into the rooms as I raised the light. I stopped in the doorway to the guest room and shifted the lantern forward.
She was standing behind the door.
She dropped her arms over my head and I screamed, releasing the lantern. The cheap glass didn’t break but oil splashed in a spray of tiny comets, setting the bed quilt alight. I twisted in her tightening embrace, so that her stomach was pushed against my buttocks, and tried to tip her over, but she proved too strong. In my state of panic I couldn’t tell if she was trying to get help or hurt me. She suddenly pulled up her hands and I shoved as hard as I could, forcing her against the wall. I had little hope of stopping her, but she fell away.
Grabbing the end of the bedspread I flicked it over on itself, so that the burning patches were smothered. One crackling chunk of material floated and brushed against the wardrobe in a shower of autumn sparks. Acrid smoke hazed the air. The girl had frog-dropped to the floor and closed herself into a foetal position at the base of the wall.
I set the candle on the floor and tried to get a clear look at the collar on her neck, but she twisted from the light. Her lank black hair curtained her eyes. As my fear subsided, I heard her moaning. I waited for her to look up, flinching in anticipation of some terrible sight, but the face that stared back was magazine-beautiful. She was perhaps eighteen, with empty blue eyes and sharp jawline of a photographer’s model.
The slim steel noose was fixed tightly at her throat, a metal version of the plastic tags that electronics shops used to bundle cables. She was trying to speak but her voice was undecipherable, a spatula-on-burnt-pan rasp. My instinct was to try and wrench it from her neck, but I was frightened of making matters worse because it was fastened so tightly.
She was clearly in pain. Where the steel edge bit, her skin was ringed with a raw, violet line. Her wrists were connected by a white plastic tag, so that she looked like a product that had been delivered to the wrong address and dumped on the floor in the recipient’s absence.
I tried to pull the collar apart, but she flinched and twisted when I touched her, an eel writhing on a hook. I had no idea what to do. The look of fear on her face panicked me even more. Another flinch, more violent this time. Her legs kicked out hard as her muscles bunched. Should I go and fetch the creepy, condescending Dr Elliot, or would that be worse?
I pulled at the steel circle, but I couldn’t slip my fingers beneath it. Running to the kitchen I pulled open drawers, searching for a knife. Then I remembered the lethal-looking set of Sabatier knives that lined the wall, and selected one of the smaller blades. By the time I returned to the bedroom she was lying arched on her back, convulsing violently against the collar. I scraped back her hair and held her head steady, trying to slip the knife blade under the band, but it was impossible to do so without cutting her neck. I needed something else, something that could …
In the kitchen I had seen a pair of heavy spatchcock scissors, designed for chopping chickens apart. Now I ran back and grabbed them.
She lay still on the beechwood floor of the bedroom, as pale as bone. The collar was so tight that her face had turned a mottled indigo, the colour of a bad sprain. Suddenly she coughed, spattering the walls, the floor and me. Her head fell back, eyes bulging hard.
I tried to work the tip of the scissors under the band, but couldn’t without slicing her skin. Several times I caused pinpricks of blood and apologised with a grimace. I could see I would be forced to dig deeper. I wiggled the blade under the steel edge and felt her flesh yield.
I was making a mess of her neck. I dug under again. The metal was thin but incredibly strong. I finally managed to shift the tip of the scissor blade right beneath it, but it seemed to take forever to saw all the way through. As it broke she fell back, sucking in air.
I cut the plastic ties from her wrists and dragged her to the balcony doors. She had almost no body fat, and weighed nothing. Her body was cadaver-white and muscular. We left a skidmark of blood through the flat. She still clutched at her throat and the side of her head, but was unable to move her hands properly. Behind me, the light from the tipped-over lantern fanned and died to a faint blue pulse.
I brought her a beaker of water, blundering and spilling most of it in the darkened flat. She winced and allowed the water to overflow her mouth.
‘I have to go for help. Who did this to you?’
Moving the lantern closer, I was finally able to see the side of her head. A sore-looking lump rose at the base of her right ear, up toward the occipital outcrop of her skull. A blood vessel had burst in her right eye. She’d been hit pretty hard. I needed to get her into the light, so I slipped my hands under her armpits and pulled. The stinging reek of the burned coverlet made my eyes water.
Her breath had become shallow and fast. I lowered her against the wall and pulled the scorched eiderdown from the bed, wrapping the unburned part around her shivering body, but when I tried to stand, my legs folded beneath me. The room rotated away as the shock of the last few minutes began to catch up.
I wondered if the psychiatrist next door had any useful medical knowledge. He had warned me about the others in the building, told me to go home, and I had ignored him. I knew I should at least bring him here, but tried to raise myself again and failed.
The girl was laying on her side, breathing more faintly than ever. I gave up trying to stand and lay down beside her for a minute, less a gesture of solidarity than an inability to command my muscles. Shoving the spatchcock shears into the rear pocket of my jeans, I put my head back, listening as our respiration matched and phased.
When I rose and opened the front door again, I made damn sure that her attacker had gone. Only the black candle remained, guttering in the sudden draft. My inability to aid the girl was upsetting, but I was out of my depth and needed help.
I’d left the lantern behind because it seemed wrong to leave her alone in darkness. When I tried to unglue the black candle the wick was extinguished in splashed wax, and as the spirit of the flame departed I found myself stranded with the front door closing behind me, a truly blind panic tamping down my senses.
The bell on the lintel of Dr Elliot’s door failed to work without electricity. I slapped my hand against the wood but there was no answer. He’s gone out, I thought, he’s asleep, he’s refusing to help me, just like the others he told me about.
I pressed my ear on the cool maple grain and listened. Nothing. Perhaps I had only seen his dummy at the window. What kind of man would keep a dessicated corpse on display in his lounge? These people weren’t my kind, I didn’t understand them or want to be like them. The backs of my arms were sweating ice. How much time had passed since I discovered the girl, seconds, minutes, half an hour? The absence of light seemed to rob me of other senses.
Dr Elliot finally answered the door in a creepily short towelling robe. He looked liverish and guilty, his skin as slick and breath as shallow as if he’d been running or having a marathon bout of afternoon sex, and his hair was sticking up on one side like a duck wing. For a moment he didn’t seem to remember me.
‘Oh, it’s you again.’
‘I need to talk to you. It’s urgent.’
‘Then I suppose you’d better come in.’
He seemed reluctant to admit me, not standing quite far enough aside to allow me by. ‘You’ll have to be quick.’ He smoothed his hair into place. ‘I’m expecting someone very shortly.’
‘Something awful has happened.’
‘Really. Do you have to involve me?’
As I passed his bedroom door I caught a glimpse of several leather straps attached with rings and buckles, laid out on the duvet in a fetishistic order that reminded me of the spanners and pairs of pliers my husband kept under our stairs. Dr Elliot led the way into the kitchen, scratching, and poured himself orange juice.
‘A girl. I saw her in the third apartment, the empty one. Then she was outside with a man who had … there was something wrong with him. Then she came into my apartment. She had a thing around her neck.’
‘It sounds as if you were dreaming. I hope so. I have no history of being useful to strangers.’ He seemed bored by me and walked away, so that I was forced to follow him into the lounge.
Dr Elliot dropped onto the sofa, his robe falling open at an uncomfortably high level. Either he hadn’t noticed or was unalarmed by the notion of displaying his genitals. ‘Are you familiar with the legend of Pasiphae?’ He glanced over at the bare wall, as if checking to see if it was listening, and I noticed that the eviscerated dummy was missing.
‘A Greek myth,’ I said, puzzled by the change of subject.
‘Oh the Greeks, endless cruel revenges of a sexual nature. The daughter of Helios was cursed by Poseidon so that she lusted after a huge white bull. In order to copulate with it, she had Daedalus build her a portable wooden structure covered with cowhide, which she climbed inside, and the bull raped her. She gave birth to the Minotaur.’
I had no idea why he was telling me this. His robe had opened further, exposing a testicular sac like a fortnight-old peach. I wondered if he did this with all his female guests, in the same way that baboons exposed their backsides to mates. He smiled as he lazily flicked the robe back in place.
‘A shocking excess of female sensuality and deceit, don’t you think? Painfully penetrated for the pleasure of others, the ruptured Pasiphae was wilfully damaged by her beast. Surely any female who would allow that must be damaged herself.’
There was a noise in the hall. The girl’s attacker was standing in the lounge doorway. Maurice’s sectioned face, one side skull-bone, the other a Brylcreemed 1930s gent, turned. His single naked eye stared down at me. He seemed to be having trouble staying in one place, and I realised it was because he was balancing on what were presumably prosthetic legs, incongruously clad in grey tracksuit bottoms. A glistening red plastic penis poked up from his waistband below his multi-coloured intestines like some kind of X-rated glove puppet.
Dr Elliot addressed his friend. ‘Oh hello, we were just talking about you.’
‘The girl didn’t want to play,’ said Maurice, his sinewy jaw muscles working against bared ceramic teeth. He sounded like a BBC presenter from the distant past, as though a recording was playing inside his chest.
‘How is he doing that?’ I shouted, standing. ‘Is this some kind of trick?’
‘God, no, he’s like this all the time,’ said Dr Elliot, snorting. ‘It’s just that you people never usually see people like Maurice. I’m surprised he managed to keep his mouth shut when you were here.’
Maurice took a step forward, wobbling slightly, like a World War II pilot on calipered stumps. His eyes swivelled over me.
I had to ask. ‘How is he moving?’
‘Obviously, he’s alive, but he’s not been well for a long time, ever since he got out of Helmand province. The army surgeons repaired the physical parts but the mind never truly heals. And he’s got worse lately. Now he needs a steady supply of girls to keep him calm. They stop him from going strange. You probably get the same effect from – oh, I don’t know, shopping.’ His crab-fingers traced a pink scar on his inner thigh. ‘It’s fascinating from a clinical point of view. There are new frontiers opening all the time. Don’t get me started, I could bore for Britain on the psychological effects of war. Sometimes the solution is to give the patient exactly what he needs. Maurice, where’s our little Pasiphae?’ He turned to me. ‘Forgive the pun. Pacify, you see?’
Pasiphae. I tried to imagine her hunched on all fours inside the hot darkness of the rough wooden box, her exposed private parts extended back toward the cool opening in the planks, waiting for the burning heat of the bull’s great member to tear her apart. One human, one an artificial representation of a human form, reconstructed after God-knows-what kind of horrific accident.
‘The lady hurt her, not me. It wasn’t Maurice.’ Maurice dropped his jaw and laughed in his scratchy recorded BBC manner, staring at me as he wavered in the doorway.
‘Don’t worry, Mrs Housewife, you’re quite safe from Maurice, you’re too old for him,’ said Dr Elliot.
I still had the spatchcock scissors in my back pocket, and felt like sticking them in his balls.
‘Better run away now, though. Maurice doesn’t take kindly to people who spoil his nights. Neither do I.’
Maurice wavered on his stumps, guffawing madly, his laughter turning into a string of ragged sobs. I pushed from the room and fled the building, leaving them to their experiments.
You always suspect there’s a class that lives so far apart from you that you have no idea what their lives are like. That night, I caught a glimpse inside this other world, and it made no sense to me at all. The curtain briefly parted, then closed again. I know now where these people live, in the darkened luxury apartments that line the Thames, in the backstreets of Belgravia, in the blind shuttered terraces of Kensington. Their money is accepted with no questions asked, their crimes go unreported, their behaviour remains unchecked.
The next day I asked Cathy to ask Malcolm about the residents of his building, but he never told her anything, or perhaps she never asked, so I never found out.
I walked past the apartment tower in daylight and it appeared normal. But looking up at the sky-reflecting windows, I got the feeling that Dr Elliot and his friends were looking down at me, hoping to find solace in the lower orders again tonight, wishing I would go away and be replaced by someone younger, prettier, poorer, lonelier.
I think – for just an instant – I saw the curtain part again.