Hawksmoor (20 page)

He was about to leave the flat as quietly as he had arrived but then on a sudden instinct he slammed the door and, as he went out into the early evening, he enjoyed the sound which the heels of his shoes made on the pavement. As he walked down St Giles Street he could see two street musicians ahead of him, one of whom was singing a melancholy pop-song while the other begged for money. Hawksmoor recognised the refrain, although he could not remember where he had heard it: I will climb up, climb up, even if I Come tumbling down, rumbling down.

And when the singer gazed at him he felt uneasy; he could find no coins in his pocket, and stared helplessly as the other gambolled around him with open palms. It was only when he had gone a few yards further that he realised that the singer had been blind.

It had grown cold by the time he reached the home where his father was kept; he believed that he was late but, as he hastened down the gravel drive, he felt the old agony return at the sound of plates rattling within the building and the bark of a dog somewhere in the yard behind the large brick house. 'He's waiting for you,' the nurse said with a smile which lasted only as long as she looked at him, 'He's missed you, he really has.' They walked together down a corridor where the smell of old age lingered and then gusted suddenly as a door slammed in the distance. Some of those who passed Hawksmoor glared at him, while others came up to him, all the time talking and then fingering his jacket -perhaps they thought they knew him well, and were continuing with a conversation which had only recently been broken off. One old woman stood in a night-dress, her back against the wall, and repeated 'Come John, come John, come John' into the air in front of her, until she was taken gently by the arm and led away still muttering. This was a quiet place, although Hawksmoor knew that it was only the drugs which kept most of them from screaming.

'Oh it's you,' his father murmured when Hawksmoor approached him; then he stared down at his hands, groping at them as if they belonged to someone else.

And Hawksmoor thought: this is how I will see you always, bent down and looking at your own body. 'I've just come to see how you are, Dad,' he said loudly.

'Well please yourself. You've always pleased yourself.'

'And how are you keeping?'

'I keep myself to myself.' And he glared at his son. 'I'm all right.'

And there was another pause before he added, 'There's life in the old dog yet'.

'Are you eating well?'

'I couldn't tell you about that. How do I know?' He sat very still on the edge of his narrow bed when a nurse passed with a trolley.

'You look healthy enough. '

'Oh yes. Well, I haven't got worms.' And then suddenly his hands trembled uncontrollably. 'Nick,' he said, 'Nick, is there still more to come? What happened to that letter? Did they find you out?'

Hawksmoor looked at him astonished. 'What letter, Dad? Is this a letter you wrote?' He had a sudden image of the mail being burnt in the basement of this place.

'No, not me. Walter wrote it. You know the one.' And then the old man gazed out of the window. His hands had stopped trembling but he made shapes in the air with them, all the time murmuring under his breath. Hawksmoor leaned forward to hear and, as he came closer to his father, he smelt once again his flesh and his sweat.

And he could still remember the days, many years before, when after his mother's death he could smell the drink on his father's breath as he lay sodden and snoring in his armchair. Once Hawksmoor had opened the door of the toilet, and he was sitting in front of him with his shrivelled cock in his hand. 'Don't you knock,' he said, 'before coming in?' And after that Hawksmoor always felt ill when he ate the food his father prepared. But there came a time when his disgust seemed to cleanse him, and he grew to enjoy the silence of the house and the purity of his hatred. And slowly, too, he learned to hold himself back from all others: he despised their laughter and their talk about sex, and yet he was still fascinated by such things, like the popular songs which unnerved him but which sometimes so overwhelmed him that he eventually woke from them as from a trance.

On his thirteenth birthday he had seen a film in which the central character was a painter who, unable to sell his work, grew cold and hungry as he went from one unsuccessful interview to the next; eventually he had become a vagrant, sleeping in the streets of the city where once he had walked in hope. Hawksmoor left the cinema in a mood of profound, terrified apprehension and, from that time, he was filled with a sense of time passing and with the fear that he might be left discarded on its banks. The fear had not left him, although now he could no longer remember from where it came: he looked back on his earlier life without curiosity, since it seemed to lack intrinsic interest, and when he looked forward he saw the same steady attainment of goals without any joy in their attainment. For him, the state of happiness was simply the state of not suffering and, if he cared for anything, it was for oblivion.

He was leaning forward to listen to his father, but he heard only the words, 'Here comes a candle!', before the old man looked up at him and, with a smile like that of a child, spat in his face. Hawksmoor recoiled, and looked at him in horror before wiping his cheek with the sleeve of his raincoat: 'I'm late!' he shouted, 'I'm going!' And there was a general wailing and commotion in the ward as he departed.

Mrs West heard the ringing and looked down into Grape Street: 'Is it you again?'

'Is he not back yet?'

'He's come and he's gone. He's always rushing around.'

She was bored with her own company on this summer evening.

'You can come up and wait for a minute,' she said, more quietly now, 'He may not be long.'

'I'll just come up for a minute then. I can't stay.' And Walter Payne ascended the stairs.

Mrs West was waiting for him at her door, having hastily replaced her cardigan over her blouse which, even so, gaped open at one or two points. 'You just missed him. Didn't you hear him slam that door. It's shocking.' She was discomposed enough to lean against Walter as she bent down over a teapot and a plate of biscuits. 'What do you fancy?

Go on, have a brandy snap. Be a devil.' And then she added as Walter sat down with a sigh, 'I suppose it's important is it?'

'I work with him '

She interrupted. 'Oh, him. Don't ask me anything about him. I can't give you any information there. My hands are tied.' And her hands came out before her, one placed on top of the other as if they were bound together at the wrist. Walter looked down in alarm, while at the same time Mrs West noticed the brown spots on her wrinkled and faded skin. 'I can't fathom him,' she said, almost to herself, before glancing curiously at the plate of brandy snaps and then grabbing another one. Walter would have liked to pursue this subject, but she carried on talking as she ate. 'But these old houses, you see, you never know what you're hearing. Sometimes I wonder what it was like before my time, but you never know…'And her voice trailed off just before she stuffed another biscuit into her mouth. 'And I didn't catch your name.'

'It's Walter.'

'Well then, Walter, tell me a bit more about yourself.'

'Well, like I told you, I work with him upstairs.' And both of them now looked up at the ceiling, as if Hawksmoor might even then have his ear to the floor. 'Previously I was with computers.'

Mrs West settled herself comfortably in her chair. 'Now that's a subject I don't understand. Like my thermostat.'

'It's simple. You feed in the information and out comes the answer.'

Walter never tired of this subject, although his eagerness seemed to exhaust Mrs West. 'You know, you could put the whole of London in the charge of one computer and the crime would go right down. The computer would know where it was going to happen!'

'Well that's news to me, Walter. And how does this computer know what to do?'

'It's got a memory bank.'

'A memory bank. Now that's the first time I've heard about anything like that.' She shifted in her seat. 'What kind of memory?'

The memory of everything.'

'And what does this memory do?'

'It makes the world a safer place.'

'Pull the other one!' she said as she lifted her skirt slightly and kicked her leg in the air. Her curiosity now sated, she moved over to the television and switched it on; and in companionable silence they both settled down to watch the cartoons which had appeared on the screen. Mrs West shrieked with laughter at the antics of a wolf and the little creatures it was pursuing; even Walter found himself amused by the inhabitants of this harmless world. But when the cartoon was over she gazed out of the window.

Walter rose to leave: 'It doesn't look as if he's coming back, does it?'

Mrs West shook her head. 'No he's out again for the night if I know him.' And Walter wondered what she meant. 'You can come again,' she said as he left the flat. Then she went to her window and watched him as he walked away, her hands drumming against her sides.

And it was not long after that Hawksmoor returned. When he opened the door of his flat, the full weariness of the evening hit him: he longed for sleep, since there was something screaming within him which needed to be laid to rest. The lights of Grape Street were reflected in his dark room, and he had only just entered it when he shrank back in alarm: something was sitting, or crouching, in the corner. He turned on the light quickly, and saw that it was only a jacket he must have flung there. 'My second skin,' was the phrase which occurred to him, and he repeated it softly to himself as he prepared for sleep. Then he dreamed, as others do, although he had learned how to forget his dreams.

The next morning he was sitting in his office, his back to the light, when Walter came in whistling. 'Don't you knock,' he asked, 'before you walk in?'

Walter paused until he saw that he was smiling. 'I called at your flat last night, sir, to tell you the news.' For some reason Hawksmoor blushed but, since he said nothing, Walter continued -although more hesitantly than before. 'It's as we expected, sir.' He laid some papers down on Hawksmoor's desk. The only blood and tissue groups were from the victim. Nothing at all off the other one, the assailant.'

'And did the other one leave no prints or marks?'

'As I said, nothing at all.'

'Doesn't that strike you as odd?'

'It's unusual, sir.'

'Good thinking, Walter.' Hawksmoor put on his glasses and pretended to examine the papers which Walter had brought to him. 'I want you to type out a report for me,' he said at last, 'and I want you to address it to the Assistant Commissioner. Put in all the usual details date and time of discovery, list of responsible officers, you know what I mean.' He leaned back and took off his glasses: 'And now, Walter, I will give you the facts as I understand them'.

And these were the facts, as far as anybody understood them at this time. On the evening of November 17 in the previous year, the body of a boy later to be identified as Thomas Hill, who had been missing from his home in Eagle Street for seven days, was discovered in one of the passages of the abandoned tunnel by Christ Church, Spitalfields: he had been strangled, apparently by hand since there were no ligature marks around the neck; and several ribs were broken which, with internal bruising, suggested that he had fallen from a height of at least thirty feet. Despite the most exhaustive examination, however, no trace of his murderer had yet been found -certainly no print marks, and no particles of the killer's clothes, were discovered anywhere in the vicinity. A thorough search of the grounds and of the tunnel had revealed nothing but a bus-ticket, and some pages torn from one of the many religious pamphlets on sale in the church itself: no significance could be attached to any of these items. House-to-house enquiries had been equally unsuccessful and, although certain suspects had been closely questioned, no real evidence of guilt was forthcoming. Then on May 30 of this year a vagrant known as 'Ned', but whose real name was Edward Robinson, was found by the door of the crypt beneath S t Anne's Limehouse; it was assumed at first that in a drunken stupor he had fallen down the steep flight of steps which lead to the crypt, but forensic examination revealed that he had been strangled -again no trace of the murderer was found upon the tramp or in the surrounding grounds. The only possible clue to the killer's identity was a photograph, very badly creased and damaged but apparently that of a small child, which had been found in a pocket of the vagrant's overcoat.

There was no reason to connect this killing with the murder of Thomas Hill six months previously, and in fact it might have been safe to assume that Edward Robinson had been a victim of one of the innumerable and often violent quarrels which break out between those inhabitants of the area known to the police as 'transients'.

Exhaustive questioning, however, had revealed no evidence of a fight or quarrel. The absence of prints or saliva upon the dead man had once more baffled the forensic scientist, and it was he who eventually surmised that there was a 'comparability factor' between the two cases. And then on August 12 of this year the body of a small boy, Dan Dee, was discovered in the ground behind St George's-inthe-East, Wapping. It transpired that the victim had left his house in Old Gravel Lane around six the previous evening in order to join his friends in a game of football beside the Tower Hamlets Estate; when he had not returned by eleven, his anxious parents contacted the police but it was not until the following morning that a constable had found the child's corpse lying beside an abandoned shelter in the grounds of the church. He had been strangled, apparently by manual means, but again no prints were found on the neck or body. House-to-house enquiries, a thorough search of the grounds, and exhaustive forensic tests had revealed nothing: an unhappy fact which Hawksmoor now added to the end of his report.

He could not help smiling as he recounted the details of these murders, and by the time he had finished he felt quite calm. 'So you see, Walter,' he said in a lower tone now, 'We live in the shadow of great events'. And then he added: 'If only we knew what they were.'