Candleland (6 page)

Outside on the street, he headed towards King's Cross. He walked, eyes front, ignoring the posters like the other pedestrians. He had to find a comfortable, stimulating environment in which to read the report. That meant a pub. But not one round here.

Larkin turned right on to Pentonville Road, the urban cocktail stink of human piss, bad garbage and carbon monoxide stinging his nostrils as he headed for the station. He didn't look back, didn't speculate on the whereabouts of the missing poster boy, told himself he had enough to think about, told himself he couldn't feel those wide, innocent, monochrome eyes bore into his back.

The man, Arabic, Lebanese or something, was poorly dressed, overweight and dead-eyed. But he fed the machine in the corner of the cafe, hands moving over the buttons, eyes interpreting the lights and bleeps, with the solemn, dextrous skill and laser-locked attention of a Jedi master. Larkin, sitting at a nearby table, was supposed to be keeping watch through the window, but his gaze was involuntarily drawn to the man. Eventually, money consumed and none regurgitated, the man rolled out of the cafe and Larkin continued his vigil.

Nineteen years old, dark brown hair (now possibly dyed), last seen wearing black jeans, boots, an old grey sweatshirt and a blue denim jacket. A useless description. Also a photo, swiped by Moir from one of Karen's druggie buddies in Edinburgh: a teenager, sullen, with short hair, pouting mouth and dark-ringed eyes. A look, simultaneously brooding and haunted
.

Larkin had gone to The Spice of Life, an old West End pub on the fringes of Soho, to read the report. All around him the lunchtime crowd were meeting, finding people, while he sat alone, searching, lost. The report was as Jackie Fairley said. The usual methods had been gone through – charities, institutions, hospitals, methadone treatment centres, social services, police, DSS – all blank.

The elder of two sisters, youngest still living with her mother. Parents divorced when Karen was twelve, pressure of father's work blamed. Father married to his job, policeman. Karen took the divorce hard. Father's favourite, now forced to live with her mother who refused the girls any contact with him, persuading them he was to blame for everything. Karen began to believe he had never loved her
.

Her home life was unhappy – she and her mother had never got on. The mother remarried. Karen and the stepfather took a mutual dislike to each other. She began to run away, short jaunts at first, longer each time. Social Services brought her back, intervened, but were powerless to do anything. When she turned sixteen she left and didn't go back. Her mother washed her hands of her. With one daughter and a new husband, Karen was more trouble than she was worth
.

Larkin had read Karen's biography uneasily, the details of her life rendered in a just-the-facts-ma'am Joe Friday kind of way, a form of journalism he had never been able to master. It was both personal and impersonal, like trespassing in a house, close yet distant from someone. He tried to be as objective as possible, but he couldn't help letting his imagination colour the heartache between the words.

Details now become sketchy. Her father moved to Newcastle. Despite efforts on his part, Karen refused to contact him, still blaming him for everything. She drifted into drugs, heroin in particular, and began to mix with people who dragged her down. It was during this time that she became HIV positive
.

After a while she began to tell her peer group that she'd met someone and was going to London to make a new start. No one took much notice one way or the other. Junkies always talked like that. Then one day she was gone. At first her friends missed her, wondered where she was, but gradually began to forget she had ever been there as the need for the next fix took precedence
.

Larkin put the report down and looked round. Suddenly the pub seemed grim, oppressive. He knew it wasn't really, that it was Karen's story affecting him. He ordered another pint and picked up the pages again, scouring through for something – anything – that might give him a lead. His chest gave a sudden heart-gulp as his eyes fixed on a piece he'd somehow missed earlier. It wasn't much, but it was the nearest thing to a clue he'd seen.

Police had been called to a disturbance at 5 Cromwell House on the Atwell Estate in Shoreditch. A fight had been in progress, presumably a drug-related turf war, and everyone in the vicinity had been pulled in. Karen Moir was among the list of people questioned but never charged. She claimed she was just passing and had been drawn into it, and this couldn't be disproved. Reluctantly the police had let her go. That was well over six months ago and that was the last time her name had been recorded anywhere. Slim, admittedly, but all Larkin had to go on. He stuck the report in his pocket, drained his glass, got out his A to Z and, excited to be doing something positive, made his way to Shoreditch.

In conclusion, we failed to find Karen Moir. Whether she is still living under that name, or whether she is still out there at all, is a matter on which we can only speculate
.

To get to Shoreditch, Larkin had to walk through Hoxton, the hippest, most happening part of London. A charmless stretch between Old Street and Shoreditch High Street, a no-man's-land where the City ends and inner city urbania starts, it had been overrun by artists, media folk and their attendant terminally hip hangers-on. This wasn't the gentrification of the Eighties City yuppie, however, this was a new kind of colonisation; the creatives carving out a new capital for themselves, literally in some cases, turning warehouses and old schools into lofts, studios. Everything had a neo-primitive look, as if the lack of amenities was something in itself to be proud of.

Larkin walked south from Old Street tube, down Rivington Street onto Curtain Road. Everyone he passed seemed to be wearing regulation fleeces and cargo pants with trainers on their feet. They all looked to be well into their twenties and thirties and dressed like seventeen-year-olds, except not that many seventeen-year-olds could afford the labels on the clothing and footwear they wore. Cropped hair and goatees were de rigueur for the men and the women all looked like they had shares in the Severe Black Glasses Company. The bars and cafes weren't just that, they were also galleries, film clubs and internet access centres. He caught snippets of converation as he went, overheard customers loudly declaim themselves to each other. For people who make a living from communication, thought Larkin, they didn't seem to have anything to say beyond self-promotion. Larkin couldn't talk: if spouting bullshit in pubs was a crime, he'd have been locked up a long time ago. There was a real buzz about the place, though, a happening vibe that was worlds away from the smug City wine bars that lay half a mile to the west.

He crossed the road and walked over Hoxton Square itself. Leafless trees and threadbare grass, February-bleak. It looked like the kind of place where Sorenson and Sipowitz of
NYPD Blue
would find a dead body. Maybe the artists liked it that way, found it inspiring. He walked further and found the fashionable people thinning, and an unexceptional working-class area taking over. Shops, pubs, cafes. Nowhere near as hip as round the corner, but not that bad. It even had the Hackney Community College, a beige brick building done out in the architectural style of Modern Aspirational.

Larkin began to wonder why Jackie Fairley's people hadn't followed up the lead – this area didn't seem so threatening. Once he reached the Atwell Estate he had his answer. There would be no ultra-hip coffee shops here, no artists revelling in artfully arranged lo-fi surroundings. This wasn't just a sink estate, but seemed to have been designed by the same architect who did the old Soviet gulags. It probably served the same purpose too, as a sinkhole down which had been poured all the undesirables in the area: problem families, fucked over-adults, fucked-up kids, misfits, outcasts and those who through no fault of their own were just plainly poor. Council flats whose inhabitants had slipped as far down the food chain as it was possible to go.

Perhaps it hadn't started out as a slum, but that's how it had ended up. Police, local authority and social workers were afraid to enter, leaving the purest form of Darwinism to flourish. A warren of huge tenement blocks, bolted-together concrete slabs that managed to look both impermanent and as if they'd been there forever. As Larkin walked, he looked at the windows, wondered who was behind them, what wretched things had conspired to bring them here. The despair was almost palpable. Graffiti beginning to proliferate, wall-scrawled territorial, tribalist markings giving Dante-esque warnings to the unwary. Citizens stay out. Larkin entered.

He went down the deserted street, feeling unseen eyes chart his every step, a sharp-edged wind blowing dust and garbage around him. He had memorised the route, not wanting to bring out the A to Z for fear of looking like a tourist, and was tensed and ready for trouble. Were the streets really curling, taking him further and further towards the centre, spiralling deeper and deeper downwards, or was it just his imagination working on him? A slice of fear lodged itself in his subconscious. Was this Hell? He tried to dismiss the thought, and kept walking.

He turned the corner to Cromwell House and immediately knew which one was number five. The patch of earth at the front was decorated with strewn junk food cartons, discarded automotive parts and other forms of human waste. Shrivelled, stunted trees sprouted from patches of yellow grass, dying, starved of light and nutrients, wilting in the shadows of the concrete monoliths. The windows of the flat were boarded up and the door seemed to be made from reinforced battleship steel. Shit, he thought. Crack house.

Larkin checked the street. There was no way into the flat and he doubted the occupants would be in a hurry to answer his questions. That was why the report hadn't made such a fuss about the lead. With this kind of environment it was more of a dead end. Needing time and space to think of his next move, he had noticed a cafe opposite. It sat in a one-storey row of mostly boarded-up, graffitied shops. The ones that were still open had grilled and barred fronts, the cafe no exception. It looked more like a testing ground for various strains of germ warfare, but Larkin had no alternative. He called at the newsagents, picked up a couple of tabloids for camouflage and entered.

He had seen them come and go; sidling up to the door, doing a coded knock, slipping folded money in, getting a poly-wrapped bundle in return. Some were even allowed inside. Occasionally a big flash car would pull up, Beamer or Merc, stereo bleeping and thumping fit to crack the tarmac, and a couple of young black guys dressed like wannabe gangsta rappers would get out, go inside then back in the car and away. Sometimes a young kid, who didn't look to be in double figures, would ride up on a pedal bike, shove something through the slit in the door and zoom off again. Once, a young mixed-race guy, well-built with muscle, wearing a leather bomber, trainers, oversized jeans, with dirty blonde cropped hair, emerged from the flat. Despite the February cold, he wore nothing underneath the bomber, which was unzipped as far as his flaunted six-pack. His posture said he knew how to handle himself. Standing four-square and squat at his side on a leash and harness was a Staffordshire bull terrier, muscle-packed back-up. He looked up and down the street, his attitude expecting either armed police or paparazzi to come running, and when none did, strode off, leading with his dick.

Larkin had read his way through the papers twice, eaten a full English that was surprisingly good, and drunk three cups of coffee that, while not winning any awards, were comfortably the right side of poisonous. He wanted to keep watching, but out of the corner of his eye he could see the sole worker in the cafe, a small, aged West Indian, eyeing him suspiciously from his perch behind the counter. He seemed to be the only person working there, but Larkin kept catching glimpses of shadowy figures in the darkened kitchen area which was cordoned off from the front of the cafe by an old beaded curtain. Larkin didn't know what they were doing in there, but he doubted they were dishwashers. The last thing he wanted was to outstay his welcome in an area like this. The night was begining to cut in, so Larkin decided to pay his bill and leave. He'd plan his next move later.

Larkin moved to the counter, took out some cash from his pocket. The West Indian was dressed in a dirty shirt covered by an apron so multi-coloured with unidentifiable stains it resembled a mid-period Jackson Pollock. He never took his eyes from Larkin all the time he rang up the money in the cash register. Leaning across to give Larkin his change, he spoke.

“Haven't seen you in here before,” he drawled in a rich Jamaican accent.

“No,” said Larkin.

“You're not from round here.” The man's left hand played under the counter. Larkin speculated what was there: a gun, baseball bat, machete, or even a panic button that would bring two dozen steroid-pumped friends running. He decided to choose his answers carefully.

“No, I'm not.”

“You givin' a lot of attention to that place opposite. You police? Mr John Law himself?” The man's posture stiffened. He was bracing himself.

At least Larkin could answer honestly. “No, nothing like that. I'm just looking for somebody. Someone in there might know where she is.”

Some of the man's hostility dropped away. A look of intelligence, of calculation, entered his features. “They won't tell you. Even if they know. They bad, bad boys.” Bitterness crept into the man's voice.

“I know, but that place is the only lead I've got.”

The man stared straight at Larkin, genuinely curious. “Who are you, then? What you do?”

“My name's Stephen Larkin. I'm a journalist.”

The West Indian's eyes suddenly twinkled. A smile edged its way to the corners of his mouth. “A journalist? A newspaper reporter? You lookin' for a story, man?” He puffed his chest out. “Don't waste your time with those boys. Let me tell you the story of my life.”