Kraken (3 page)

Billy stared at the stands on which the
Architeuthis
tank should be. He was still adrenalized. He listened to the officers.

“Search me for a fucking clue, mate …”

“Shit, you know what this means, don’t you?”

“Don’t even get me started. Hand me that tape measure.”

“Seriously, I’m telling you, this is a handover, no question …”

“What are you waiting for, mate? Mate?” That was to Billy, at last. An officer was telling him just-courteously to fuck off. He joined the rest of the staff outside. They milled and muttered, congregating roughly by jobs. Billy saw a debate among directors.

“What’s that about?” he said.

“Whether or not to close the museum,” Josie said. She was biting her nails.

“What?” Billy said. He took off his glasses and blinked at them aggressively. “What’s the sodding debate? How big does something have to be before its nickage closes us down?”

“Ladies and Gents.” A senior policeman clapped his hands for attention. His officers surrounded him. They were muttering to and listening to their shoulders. “I’m Chief Inspector Mulholland. Thanks for your patience. I’m sorry to’ve kept you all waiting.” The staff huffed, shifted, bit their nails.

“I’m going to ask you to please
not talk
about this, ladies and gents,” Mulholland said. A young female officer slipped into the room. Her uniform was unkempt. She was speaking on some phone hands-free, muttering at nothing visible. Billy watched her. “Please don’t talk about this,” Mulholland said again. The whispering in the room mostly ceased.

“Now,” Mulholland said, after a pause. “Who was it found it gone?” Billy put up his hand. “You, then, would be Mr. Harrow,” Mulholland said. “Can I ask the rest of you to wait, even if you’ve already told us what you know? My officers’ll speak to you all.”

“Mr. Harrow.” Mulholland approached him as the staff obeyed. “I’ve read your statement. I’d be grateful if you’d show me around. Could you take me on exactly the route you did with your tour?” Billy saw that the young female officer had gone.

“What is it you’re looking for?” he said. “You think you’re going to find it…?”

Mulholland looked at him kindly, as if Billy were slow. “Evidence.”

Evidence. Billy ran his hand through his hair. He imagined marks on the floor where some huge perfidious pulley system might have been. Drying puddles of preserver in a trail as telltale as crumbs. Right.

Mulholland summoned colleagues, and had Billy walk them through the centre. Billy pointed out what they passed in a terse parody of his usual performance. The officers poked at bits and pieces and asked what they were. “An enzyme solution,” Billy said, or, “That’s a time sheet.”

Mulholland said: “Are you alright, Mr. Harrow?”

“It’s kind of a big thing, you know?”

That wasn’t the only reason Billy glanced repeatedly behind him. He thought he heard a noise. A very faint clattering, a clanking like a dropped and rolling beaker. It was not the first time he had heard that. He had been catching little snips of such misplaced sound at random moments since a year after he had started at the centre. More than once he had, trying to find the cause, opened a door onto an empty room, or heard a faint grind of glass in a hallway no one could have entered.

He had concluded a long time ago that it was his mind inventing these just-heard noises. They correlated with moments of anxiety. He had mentioned the phenomenon to people, and though some had reacted with alarm, many told some anecdote about horripilation or twitches when they were under pressure, and Billy remained fairly sanguine.

In the tank room the forensic team was still dusting, photographing, measuring tabletops. Billy folded his arms and shook his head.

“It’s those Californian sods.” When he returned to where most of the staff were waiting he joked quietly about rival institutes to a workmate outside the tank room. About disputes over preservation methodology that had taken a dramatic turn. “It’s the Kiwis,” Billy said. “O’Shea finally gave in to temptation.”

H
E DID NOT GO STRAIGHT BACK TO HIS FLAT
. H
E HAD A
long-standing arrangement to meet a friend.

Billy had known Leon since they had been undergraduates at the same institute, though in different departments. Leon was enrolled in a PhD course in a literature department in London, though he never talked about it. He had since forever been working on a book called
Uncanny Blossom
. When Leon had told him, Billy had said, “I had no idea you were entering the Shit Title Olympics.”

“If you didn’t swim in your sump of ignorance you’d know that title’s designed to fuck with the French. Neither word’s translatable into their ridiculous language.”

Leon lived in a just-plausible rim of Hoxton. He camped up his role as Virgil to Billy’s Dante, taking Billy to art happenings or telling him about those he could not attend, exaggerating and lying about what they entailed. Their game was that Billy was in permanent anecdote overdraft, always owed Leon stories. Leon, skinny and shaven-headed and in a foolish jacket, sat in the cold outside the pizzeria with his long legs stretched out.

“Where’ve you been all my life, Richmal?” he shouted. He had long ago decided that blue-eyed Billy was named for another naughty boy, the William of
Just William
, and had illogically rechristened him for the book’s author.

“Chipping Norton,” said Billy, patting Leon’s head. “Theydon Bois. How’s the life of the mind?”

Marge, Leon’s partner, inclined her face for a kiss. The crucifix she always wore glinted.

He had only met her a few times. “She a god-botherer?” Billy had asked Leon after he first met her.

“Hardly. Convent girl. Hence tiny Jesus-shaped guilt trip between her tits.”

She was, as Leon’s girlfriends were more often than not, attractive and a little heavy, somewhat older than Leon, too old for the dilute emo-goth look she maintained. “Say Rubenesque or zaftig at your peril,” Leon had said.

“What’s zaftig?” Billy said.

“And fuck you ‘too old,’ Pauley Perrette’s way older.”

“Who’s that?”

Marge worked part-time at Southwark Housing Department and made video art. She had met Leon at a gig, some drone band playing in a gallery. Leon had deflected Billy’s Simpsons joke and told him that she was one of those people who had renamed herself, that Marge was short for Marginalia.

“Oh
what?
What’s her real name?”

“Billy,” Leon had said. “Don’t be such a wet blanket.”

“We’ve been watching a weird bunch of pigeons outside a bank is what we’ve been up to,” Leon said as Billy sat.

“We’ve been arguing about books,” said Marge.

“Best sort of argument,” said Billy. “What was the substance?”

“Don’t sidetrack him,” said Leon, but Marge was already answering: “Virginia Woolf versus Edward Lear.”

“Christ Alive,” said Billy. “Are those my only choices?”

“I went for Lear,” said Leon. “Partly out of fidelity to the letter L. Partly because given the choice between nonsense and boojy wittering you blatantly have to choose nonsense.”

“You obviously haven’t read the glossary to
Three Guineas,”
said Marge. “You want nonsense? She calls ‘soldiers’ ‘gutsgruzzlers,’ ‘heroism’ equals ‘botulism,’ ‘hero’ equals ‘bottle.’”

“Lear?” Billy said. “Really? In the Land of the Fiddly-Faddly, the BinkerlyBonkerly roams.” He took off his glasses and pinched the top of his nose. “Alright, let me tell you something. Here’s the thing,” he said at last and then whatever, it stalled. Leon and Marge stared at him.

Billy tried again. He shook his head. He clucked as if something were stuck in his mouth. He had at last almost to shove the information past his own teeth. “One of … Our giant squid is missing.” Saying it felt like puncturing a lid.

“What?” Leon said.

“I don’t …” Marge said.

“No, it doesn’t make any more sense to me.” He told them, step by impossible step.

“Gone? What do you mean ‘gone’? Why haven’t I heard anything about it?” Leon said at last.

“I don’t know. I’d have thought it would have … I mean, the police asked us to keep it secret—oops, look what I did—but I didn’t expect that to actually work. I’d thought it would be all over the
Standard
by now.”

“Maybe it’s a what-d’you-call-it, a D-Notice?” Leon said. “You know, one of those things where they stop journalists talking about stuff?”

Billy shrugged. “They’re not going to be able to … Half that tour group have probably blogged the shit out of it by now.”

“Someone’s probably registered bigsquidgone dot com,” Marge said.

Billy shrugged. “Maybe. You know, when I was on my way, I was thinking about maybe I shouldn’t … I almost didn’t tell you myself. Obviously put the fear of God in me. But the big issue for me’s not that the cops didn’t want us to tell: it’s the whole ‘totally impossible’ thing.”

T
HERE WAS A STORM THAT NIGHT AS HE HEADED HOME, A HORRIBLE
one that filled the air with bad electricity. Clouds turned the sky dark brown. The roofs streamed like urinals.

As he entered his Haringay flat, precisely at the second he crossed the threshold, Billy’s phone rang. He stared through the window at the sodden trees and roofs. Across the street, a twirl of rubbishy wind was gusting around some klaggy-looking squirrel on a rooftop. The squirrel shook its head and watched him.

“Hello?” he said. “Yeah, this is Billy Harrow.”

“… somethingsomething, ’bout damn time you got back. So you’re coming in, yeah?” a woman on the line said.

“Wait, what?” The squirrel was still staring at him. Billy gave it the finger and mouthed
Sod off
. He turned from the window and tried to pay attention. “Who is this, sorry?” he said.

“Will you bloody listen? Better at shooting your mouth than listening, ain’t you? Police, mate. Tomorrow. Got it?”

“Police?” he said. “You want me back to the museum? You want—”

“No. The station. Fuck’s sake clean your ears.” Silence. “You there?”

“… Look, I don’t appreciate the way you’re—”

“Yeah, I don’t appreciate you gabbing away when you was told not to.” She gave him an address. He frowned as he scribbled it on some takeout menu.

“Where? That’s
Cricklewood
. That’s nowhere near the museum. What’s …? Why did they send someone from up there down to the museum …?”

“We’re done, mate. Just get there. Tomorrow.” She rang off and left him staring at the mouthpiece in his chilly room. The windows made sounds in the wind, as if they were bowing. Billy stared at the phone. He was annoyed that he felt obliged to acquiesce to that last order.

Chapter Three

B
ILLY HAD BAD DREAMS
. H
E WAS NOT THE ONLY ONE
. T
HERE WAS
no way yet he could know that night sweats were citywide. Hundreds of people who did not know each other, who did not compare their symptoms, slept harried. It was not the weather.

It meant a trek, that meeting to which he had been ordered, that he pretended to himself to consider ignoring. He considered, or, again, pretended to consider, calling his father. Of course he did not. He started to dial Leon’s number but again did not. There was nothing to add to what he had said. He wanted to tell someone else about the disappearance, that strange theft. He auditioned recipients of that phone call in his mind, but his energy to do so, to say anything, kept spilling out, left him repeatedly.

That squirrel was still there. He was sure it was the same animal that watched him from behind the gutter, like a dug-in soldier. Billy did not go in to work. Was not even sure if anyone was in that day and did not call to check. He called no one.

At last—late, as the sky became grey and flat, later than his rude interlocutor had desired, in some feeble faux disobedience—he set out from his block by a commercial yard near Manor House for a 253 bus. He walked through scuffing food wrappers, through newspapers, through flyers urging repentance being peeled one by one by the wind from a discarded pile. In the bus he looked down on the low flat roofs of bus shelters, plinths for leaves.

In Camden he took a Tube, came up again a few steps on for another bus. He checked his mobile repeatedly, but all he received was one text from Leon—
LOST NE MORE TREASURES??
On that last leg Billy looked into areas of London he did not know but that felt tuggingly familiar, with their middling businesses and cheap eateries, the lampposts where unlit Christmas street ornaments put up early in readiness or left unplucked a whole year dangled like strange washing. He wore headphones, listened to a soundclash between MIA and an up-and-coming rapper. Billy wondered why he had not thought to insist the police just pick him up, if they were going to have their HQ in this ridiculously out-of-the-way patch.

Walking, even through his headphones Billy was startled by noises. For the first time ever outside the corridors of the Darwin Centre, he heard or imagined that glass noise. The light in that early evening was wrong.
Everything’
s
screwed up
, he thought. As if the fat spindle of the
Architeuthis’
s body had been slotted in and holding something in place. Billy felt like a lid unsecured and banging in the wind.

The station was just off the high street, much larger than he expected. It was one of those very ugly London buildings in mustard bricks that, instead of weathering grandly like their red Victorian ancestors, never age, but just get dirtier and dirtier.

He waited a long time in the waiting area. Twice he got up and asked to see Mulholland. “We’ll be with you shortly, sir,” said the first officer he asked. “And who the fuck’s he?” said the second. Billy grew more and more irritated, turning the pages of old magazines.

“Mr. Harrow? Billy Harrow?”

The man coming toward him was not Mulholland. He was small and skinny and trimly kempt. In his fifties, in plain clothes, a dated brown suit. He had his hands behind his back. As he waited, he leaned forward and up on his toes more than once, a dancey little tic.