The Happier Dead (24 page)

He looked at the address the spook had given him, traipsing up and down the Strand for want of numbers on the doors. He walked past it several times before he spotted it, because it wasn’t like any club he had ever seen. It was nothing more than a metal door, the kind to be found on old fashioned lifts, where the metal panels fold into one another like a concertina when pulled across. It was covering the entrance to the disused Strand tube station. He looked between the metal slats, and made out chinks of light in the interior. He banged on the door with his fist. Nothing happened. He banged again.

“We’re closed.”

“Police.”

“Piss off.”

“Open the door.”

“Come back in a couple of hours.”

Oates kept hammering his fist against the gate. No one came, but in his frustration he tried to force it open, and found it unlocked. Inside the sliding metal gate, the tiled hall of the former tube station was bathed in the warm light of a huge globe suspended from the ceiling. At the bottom of the milky glass he could make out the shadows of dead insects. The walls were tiled in green and white, and the old wooden ticket booth still stood in the corner. Behind the glass stood a tall, broad transvestite in heavy make-up.

“My name’s Florence Agogo, but you can call me Flo. What can I do for you, mister…?”

The voice was soft and penetrating. Very different from the gruff sound that had told him to piss off, but he was pretty certain they had both come from the same mouth.

“Detective Chief Inspector.”

“Aren’t you a big one. Have you come to protect us from all those ragamuffins outside?”

“I’m looking for a girl.”

“Will I do?”

“This one.”

Oates held up the photograph the spook had given him. Flo gave an enormous sigh.

“So romantic, running about the city looking for your sweetheart on a night like this. It’s enough to warm the cockles of a cynical girl’s heart.”

“Don’t fuck about.”

She stared at him through the glass, and pursed her glittery lips. Oates held her gaze.

“Alright, let’s see it.”

Oates handed her the photograph through the little partition. She had to scrabble a bit to get her scarlet nails between the edge of the photograph and the smooth metal surface of the counter. When she had it, she held it up the wrong way round in front of her face, and looked at the blank backing.

“Never seen her before. She’s a bit plain mind.”

Oates punched the glass of the booth and cracked it. Flo gave a theatrical scream and pressed her hands to her fake breasts. He punched again and radial cracks spread to the corners of the glass. The third punch smashed the glass and Oates shoved his fist through, the jagged edges cutting at his wrists as they rolled up his sleeve. He grabbed for her, but she dodged and Oates got a fistful of wig. It came away in his hands, revealing sparse brown hair combed flat beneath a tight flesh-coloured net. Flo screamed again, snatching for the hairpiece, which was tangled now in the fingers of Oates’s glove, and glittering with shards of glass. Oates was shouting too.

“Take a closer look. Take all the time you need.”

“Can I help you, sir?”

The voice was loud but calm. Oates turned without removing his hand from the glass to find a smartly dressed man standing in the centre of the lobby behind him. Flo stopped struggling.

“Florence, perhaps you’d like to take a few moments to tidy yourself up.”

“She started it, Mr Ingram,” Flo said, pointing at Oates.

“We can’t have you greeting the guests like that.”

“No, Mr Ingram.”

“Why don’t you go through and take a seat at the bar,” the man said to Oates. “We’re still setting up, I’m afraid, but we should be able to manage a drink. Whisky, yes?”

Oates removed his hand from the glass with a great deal more care than he had thrust it through. He was bleeding from several cuts around the wrist, and he rolled his sleeve down to staunch the blood. The man led him across the marble floor of the ticket office and down into what must once have been the lobby. This area was filled with plush leather seats around a low stage, with a small bar at one side. On the stage were two women in ballerina costumes stretching and making simple turns. Their movements showed an uncanny doubling, and as he watched he realised they were identical twins. The place was getting ready for the night. Someone switched on music with a low beat. Oates took the whisky offered him. He showed the manager the girl’s photo.

“Lara thought you might be coming round.”

“She’s the one who sent those kids after me?”

Mr Ingram nodded. “You killed a good boy out there.”

“That good boy tried to shoot me,” Oates said, “How did you know him?”

“They come into the club sometimes. I’ll just find someone to take you down.”

The man was gone for perhaps fifteen minutes. During that time Oates finished his drink, and called for another. The atmosphere in the club was like the backstage area of a theatre before the big show, and he found himself buoyed up by the infectious excitement. One of the barman, who wore a smart red waistcoat, was turning brightly coloured bottles over the back of his wrist, flinging them over his shoulder like a juggler and muttering: “Who’s the best? Who’s the best?” under his breath. A heavily tattooed man with snakes wound around his muscles walked down the stairs on his hands, jumping from palm to palm on each step. Someone’s girlfriend sat on the stage, a skinny young thing smoking and trying not to look out of place.

There was no talk or awareness of the impending riots outside – though perhaps there was an extra charge in the air, a brittleness like that among the policemen swapping jokes with one another in their cordon outside One New Change. The feeling of self-conscious bravery that came with behaving normally in the face of impending disaster. It seemed to Oates a peculiarly English quality. It was almost as if they relished danger as an opportunity to prove their imperturbability, the way a bullfighter goes into the ring to walk with his back to the bull in his fancy clothes.

18:15 HOURS

THURSDAY 21 NOVEMBER

2035 (REAL WORLD)

W
HEN THE MANAGER
reappeared, he was accompanied by a man chewing gum. The gum chewer stared at Oates in a way that made him close his fists.

“Okay, she will see you,” Mr Ingram said, “Carlos here is going to take you down.”

Oates rose from his stool. The manager appraised him at his full height.

“You are quite large. I hope you’re not scared of small spaces.”

He smiled at his own joke, and Carlos chuckled. He turned away without speaking, and Oates followed him from the bar down a spiral staircase sectioned off from the lobby by a red velvet rope. As they moved further into the earth, the air grew warm and close. At the first landing, perhaps twenty feet or so beneath the surface of the street, there was a small door marked VIP, and Oates caught the glisten of painted skin through the portal window. The staircase turned and turned down into the ground, and soon Oates had lost all sense of how many steps he had descended. He wanted to ask Carlos where they were going, but something told him that his guide would simply laugh at his querulousness, and he didn’t want to give him the satisfaction.

With Carlos moving ahead of him, he was able to observe the way the front pocket of his sweatshirt bulged and bounced when he descended the steps. His hand seemed to find its way to the lump under the fabric every minute or so to check it was still there. Carlos was carrying a concealed weight he wasn’t used to, and Oates was glad he’d cleaned his own gun in Chris’s office. Take any opportunity to maintain your weapon and clean your socks. Army rules to live by.

The music of the club above faded and was replaced by the sound of music coming up from below. At last they came out into another space decorated with green and white tiles in the style of the entrance hall above. The platform of the old tube station had been transformed into a kind of shanty town, with a whole series of makeshift buildings standing with their backs to the curved wall and their mouths opening onto a thin strip of pavement along the yellow line that in working stations demarcated the safe distance the commuters have to stand from an approaching tube train.

The shacks were designed to create privacy rather than to provide shelter in the enclosed space, and so many of them were little more than fabric stretched over frames, like the screens around a hospital bed. Looking down the length of the station, Oates could see one such construction with walls made of grubby white sheets. Inside there burned an electric light, creating on the external wall the silhouette of a figure reading a book, distended to great size by its proximity to the lamp. Along with the strings of Christmas lights that crisscrossed the roof of the tunnel, there were lines of washing hanging in the column of air that moved steadily down the tube. Among the clothes were several different sets of uniforms he recognised. There was a nurse’s blue smock, and a series of branded t-shirts from an upmarket coffee place.

The pavement was too narrow for two men to pass abreast, and so at regular intervals there were sets of makeshift stairs leading down onto the tracks. As the space against the station walls was domestic, the space between the tracks was commercial. It was like an old-fashioned market, rows of stalls hung with foods, clothes, hardware, books, magazines, coloured lights, Japanese fans, breathing masks, children’s toys and live animals in cages and glass tanks. The music he had heard winding its way up the stairs was coming from speakers mounted on the corners of one of the stalls.

In the well closest to Oates’s feet, a woman wearing dirty cycling shorts and a t-shirt cut off at the stomach was cooking crabs. She was wearing a single rubber glove, and she reached down and picked up a handful from a bucket of dirty water beside her on the ground, before tossing them on to the skillet, a corrugated sheet of metal sitting on a barrel of low fire.

They danced frantically for a few seconds, the woman herding them with a short paddle when they came close to escaping. There was a hiss of moisture almost as if the little animals were screaming, and then they died on their feet, turning brown and crisping. As Oates descended the steps, he saw that the fresh crabs moving in the filthy water were a nacreous translucent white, as if they too had existed for generations in the caverns under the streets.

They had been travelling down the tunnel for three hundred metres or so when Carlos stopped. Oates had allowed himself to fall back a little when the two of them had left the relative safety of the shanty town, and pulled up behind him. He leant against a concrete pillar and hooked the hem of his jacket away from his holster, ready to take cover and pop the gun if Carlos’ shand slipped into the front pocket of his sweatshirt. Carlos went instead for the pockets of his trousers, and produced a long length of rag. It was filthy, and Oates expected him to blow his nose on it, but instead he hung it over his shoulder. He dug around again and came up with a white plastic cable tie.

“You must be bloody joking,” Oates said, nodding at the cable tie.

Carlos frowned. He had obviously been looking forward to telling Oates he would have to go blindfolded and tied up, and was irritated that Oates had pre-empted him. The two of them stared at one another. Neither moved. Oates could hear the drip, drip of water in the echoing hollow of the disused tunnel and, somewhere in the distance, the rumble of a tube train bearing commuters in the parallel universe of the city of London.

“Lara says you come in a blindfold with your hands behind your back or you don’t come at all.”

“What if I refuse?”

“Then maybe you don’t come and you don’t get to leave either,” Carlos said, and pulled the stock of the pistol from his sweatshirt pocket, showing it to Oates. From what Oates could see, it looked a more serious prospect than the piece the boy had pulled on him in the shopping mall.

Oates decided to get the thing dealt with as quickly as possible. He put out his hands, with the wrists together. Carlos spat on the ground, and walked towards him, his heavy boots crunching on the gravel. Oates could feel the tension behind the bravado as he advanced, and the tickle of incipient triumph, as Carlos allowed himself a little foretaste of the pleasure he would feel at having an agent of the state to lead blindfold back to his comrades. When he was close enough he reached out with the cable tie. Oates jerked his wrists back suddenly, and Carlos gasped.

“Just playing,” Oates said.

Carlos scowled at him, and went again for his wrists, meaning to grab them this time to stop him pulling the same trick. The movement created just enough momentum for Oates to seize Carlos’s hands and yank him forward off his feet. He gasped as Oates lowered his head like a charging bull. Carlos’s cheek bone met the intractable logic of his forehead with a crack loud enough to send back echoes from the ends of the empty tunnel. He sat down hard and curled into a ball, clutching his injury with both hands. The gun fell out of his sweatshirt onto the space between the tracks, and Oates picked it up.

“You alright?” Oates asked him.

“Ah, my face, you broke my fucking face!”

“Come here.”

He took the back of Carlos’s sweatshirt in one gloved hand and hoiked him upright. He picked up his chin with the other, and looked into his eyes. Both pupils were the same size, and when Oates shone the light from the torch into them they constricted. He had a lovely sunrise coming up on the left hand side of his face, but his nose was unbroken, and he could move his jaw up and down and left to right.

“You can head to the hospital for an x-ray after we’re done, but you’re fine for now. Put your hands behind your back.”

Carlos did as he was asked. The headbutt had knocked ten years off him. If there was a hardened paramilitary core to the Mortal Reformers, Oates had yet to find it. He didn’t fancy their chances against Miranda’s army of groundsmen. He yanked the cable tie tight.

“On your knees,” Oates said.