London Under Midnight (18 page)

    'I can't let you do this,' Trajan told him. 'I don't know what that man means to you, but we must find April.'

    'Let go of me. He'll get away.'

    'No.'

    'Damn it, Trajan. See that guy? He's haunted London for the last three months. His graffiti's everywhere.'

    'So?'

    'Don't you understand? If whoever attacked you makes a habit of it then our painter down there might have seen something.'

    Trajan was doubtful. 'You think-'

    Ben slipped from the muscular grasp then moved along the jetty. Too late. The second Ben started to climb over the rail the artist moved with the speed of a cat. He shot over the rail on to the platform and sped noiselessly across the boards towards the pier, which would take him back to shore. Then he'd vanish into the streets in the blink of an eye.

    Only Trajan was there. The big man blocked the narrow gantry. When the artist saw there was no exit that way he ran back on to the jetty to be confronted by Ben.

    In front of Ben was a slightly built guy of around thirty with a crooked nose and dark brown eyes beneath a mass of curly black hair.

    The man held up the aerosol, showing he was armed with nothing more lethal than paint. 'Okay, okay.' His words were a gabble. 'My name is Spiro Akinedes. This is my first offence. I'll do as you say.'

    'Mr Akinedes,' Ben began. 'We're not the police.'

    'No?'

    'I just want to talk to you.'

    'You own the boat?'

    'The one you've just decorated?' Ben shook his head.

    'Then you'll let me go?'

    'As soon as we've talked.'

    'I'm not interested in talking.'

    'Then I'm not interested in letting you go.' Ben made his voice tougher. 'And if you don't talk we'll take you to the nearest police station.'

    'You wouldn't do that.'

    'You're a famous graffiti artist, Mr Akinedes. The police have been looking for you for weeks.'

    'What do you want to know?'

    Trajan was mystified, but stayed quiet. Ben realized that suggesting this individual might know something about April's disappearance was riotously optimistic to say the least. And yet… in the back of Ben's mind was the cryptic conversation with the hermit in his boat on a pole near Tower Bridge. Elmo Kigoma had urged Ben to uncover the meaning of the Vampire Sharkz graffiti then write about it. All this - the graffiti, April's disappearance, the hermit's veiled warnings - suddenly appeared to be linked. It resembled one of those puzzles made up of random shapes that appeared to be on the verge of fitting together to create a recognizable picture. Ben knew he needed to accumulate enough facts and the answer to all these puzzling clues would fit together and make a coherent whole. Even though he'd been commissioned by his editor to find this mystery graffiti artist the story had vanished from Ben's radar. All that interested him was finding April Connor and, by the most slender of possibilities, Spiro Akinedes might know some tiny but vital fact. Meanwhile, the man cast wary glances; standing in one place for too long made him uneasy.

    Ben asked, 'What's it mean?'

    The man turned the aerosol over in his hands, while his brown eyes bulged with fear.

    'Ben.' Trajan sighed. 'This gentlemen can't help you. Let him go.'

    'He can go,' Ben agreed. 'I just need a moment of his time.' He glanced at the red graffiti on the side of the boat. 'Vampire Sharkz: They're coming to get you. Is that a threat or a promise or a prophecy?'

    'It's just a thing I do,' the man replied with a shrug.

    'For just a thing that you do you've worked bloody hard at it. How many times have you painted it? A thousand? Two thousand?'

    The man's eyes became pained as if he didn't want to be reminded. 'Oh, plenty.'

    'Then you have a good reason, Mr Akinedes?'

    He gave a grim nod.

    'That logo and the smiling faces are all over London.' Ben walked across the jetty boards. 'You don't just paint something like that on an idle whim, do you?'

    'Leave him alone, Ben,' Trajan said. 'Can't you see he's scared?'

    Ben kept an unwavering eye on the artist. 'Scared? What of? Vampire Sharkz?'

    'I need to go now, Mister…'

    'Call me Ben. So what's troubling you?'

    'Shoes!' The word burst from his lips as if to betray him.

    The response caught Ben by surprise. 'Shoes? What's wrong with my shoes?'

    'You're walking where I've got to work.' Spiro Akinedes spoke as if it was the last thing he wanted, only the words spilled out by themselves. 'Please… the soles of shoes are covered with bacteria, viral contamination… just so dirty.' He gulped. 'You've got to keep your shoes away from this part here.' He gestured a portion of the decking, then added, 'Show me the bottom of your shoes.'

    Ben obliged, lifting one foot then the other.

    'Thank you,' the man said with a sigh of relief. 'You can never be sure. You might have stepped in something… you know, dog faeces, they can have a worm that…' He gestured near his face. 'Feeds on the eyes. Blinding.'

    Trajan began, 'Ben, I think the gentlemen's-'

    'No, I'm not mad.' In the dim light he abruptly crouched down, shook the aerosol, and began to spray on to the planking; the first letter was a distinctive V. 'If you must know I suffer from OCD. Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. It's related to anxiety disorders - had it since I was a kid. If you're in the grip of OCD you're trapped by repetitive thoughts and bizarre habits. It's not madness. More than two per cent of the population suffer from it.' He worked the aerosol; its atomizer jetted a stream of red on to the timber. V-A-M-P. 'The habits are senseless, distracting; OCD sufferers realize they're locked into irrational behavior patterns, but they find it difficult to break out… often they don't… usually they accommodate it.' He finished VAMPIRE. 'Symptoms of OCD are obsessional ideas and compulsive behavior - including endless hand washing, arranging household ornaments into special patterns, then checking, and re-checking, for hours on end. Fear of dirt.' The words cascaded from him like a heartfelt confession. By now he'd sprayed VAMPIRE SHARKZ.

    Trajan impatiently tapped the handrail. 'Ben, leave him. This is getting us nowhere.'

    'Just give me another minute. I'm on to something.'

    Spiro Akinedes muttered as he painted. 'OCD has a neurological basis, can respond to medication. OCD can run in tandem with other conditions. Tourette's syndrome. And trichotillomania - this is the urge to pull out hair, eyelashes and body hair.' He glanced up. Ben noticed the man had no eyebrows. 'Pluck, pluck. Please, don't come any closer. It's your shoes. Shoes bother me. They always have. They go tramping through all that dirt; it's a feeding ground for rats; dogs use the streets as a lavatory; not all excrement you see on a pavement is canine; people, too. All shoes are magnets for microbes. Disease of the sole… get it?' The joke might have been part defence mechanism, but the man wasn't amused by his own witticism, he merely returned to carefully drawing the smiling faces that flanked the words 'They're coming to get you'.

    Ben crouched down to watch the man work, but kept his distance… or rather made sure his shoes were far enough away from Spiro's arm as it made long sweeps to aerosol the red circles that would become the
☺.

    Ben said, 'If you have OCD you repeat the same compulsive actions.'

    'Yes. I shouldn't be ashamed, but I am.' The man blushed.

    'Since childhood?'

    The man nodded as he worked.

    Ben rubbed his jaw. 'But this Vampire Sharkz graffiti is new.'

    The artist paused for a second before adding the grinning mouth and eyes inside the circle.

    Ben continued. 'People with OCD often believe that their rituals protect themselves from danger.'

    'Or the people they love.'

    Trajan said urgently, 'Hurry up. This is getting you nowhere.'

    'On the contrary.' Then he addressed Spiro Akinedes, who compulsively repeated this graffiti across London. 'Who are you protecting with this message?'

    'It's not a message. It's a warning. The faces are the protective element. That's what it means to me.'

    'So who are you protecting? Yourself?'

    Spiro shook his head. 'People look at me and they think I'm a piece of walking crap. They say that what I paint here is meaningless. But the truth is I love people. I love this city. Look at that.' He held up his hand. The fingers and palm were covered in blood red blisters. 'I get blisters because I paint this night and day. It's crucifying me but I've got to do it.'

    'But you've not always painted the Vampire Sharkz message.'

    'You're right. I used to be preoccupied with shoes. Every morning I'd put on rubber gloves then rub the soles clean with toilet paper. It took ten minutes to do each shoe. I had eight pairs in all. When I finished I locked them in a cupboard lined with clean newspaper. I'd go into another room but I'd be filled with this overwhelming anxiety that I'd missed a speck of dirt. I was terrified that my wife or kids would somehow swallow it and they'd be infected with disease.' He began gulping again as if the idea of dirty soles nearly made him vomit.

    'So what happened, Mr Akinedes? Why aren't shoes your main concern now?'

    'You're an insightful man.' He stopped painting and held out his hand. 'Lift your foot.'

    Ben obeyed and the man touched his shoe. 'No, shoes don't bother me like they did. I couldn't have done that six months ago.'

    'Instead of shoes it's now Vampire Sharkz graffiti. Why?'

    'Because…' The man finished the motto. 'Six months ago I stood in my bedroom that overlooks a canal in Teddington. I saw shapes moving through the water like sharks. And just as I can see you they came out of the canal. They just burst out on to the bank in a mass of spray. There were some fishermen standing there. Only those things weren't sharks, they were people. They killed the fishermen by biting their throats and faces. Then I watched them drink the men's blood. After that they returned to the water. They swam like sharks.'

    'Vampire Sharkz.'

    'That's how I think of them, and if you know anything about OCD you know once a phrase gets stuck in the sufferer's head it stays there.'

    Trajan became interested. 'You say there were people in the river that bit the fishermen?'

    'Yes, go on, mister. Feel free to mock me. Call me mad.'

    Trajan rubbed his face as if he'd woken from a trance. 'Then I must be mad, because I watched a man biting April.' He touched his side. 'Just here, above the hip.' His eyes were troubled and his entire body trembled.

    The painter stared at Trajan. 'You've seen them, too?'

    Trajan stepped on to the jetty to pore over the graffiti with a sudden fascination. He saw in that slogan the key to April's disappearance.

    

    
VAMPIRE SHARKZ

    ☺
They're coming to get you
☺

    

    Trajan took a deep breath. 'So now you paint this warning all over the city?'

    'Nobody else believes me but you.'

    'Does anyone else understand the meaning of it?'

    'You have to know this fact, mister. Not only do I think it's the right thing to do, my OCD means I can't
stop
painting it. This is my new compulsion. Before, I could almost control my condition because I knew the incessant shoe cleaning was irrational. But this
is
essential. I have to warn everyone.' His voice cracked with emotion. 'It blisters my hands. I'm exhausted, and do you know how much I spend on this stuff?' He brandished the aerosol can. 'I'm selling everything I own to buy more. My family can't take it. Sophie's taken the kids back to her mother.' He rubbed his eyes with the heel of his hand. 'But it's not a disease anymore. This is vital! I don't want anyone else to die, only I can't have painted it enough because your friend was bitten by these monsters; that means I've failed you and I've failed her; if-'

    'It's okay,' Ben said gently. 'Now we know what's happening it's not a battle you have to fight by yourself.'

    This seemed to relieve the man of his burden. His voice became calmer. 'Vampire Sharkz. It seems crazy but that's what they are. I know they appear to be human but they swim in the rivers and canals. I see them all the time. If you looked in here right now you might see one just under the surface. Fast, like pale sharks zipping through the water.'

    Ben eyed the brown swirl of the Thames in the street light. It was closer to the decking as the tide continued to rise. Close enough, in fact, for a hand to dart from the waters and grab him by the ankle.

    The man still talked. 'As well as the warning I knew I had to add a symbol of protection. The smiling face is just that. It's a happy human face. That has to count for something, doesn't it? It might help counter the evil that's in that water.' He nodded at the chocolate-brown liquid that swept its bobbing flotsam upstream. 'OCD doesn't fine-tune your obsessions.'

    Trajan frowned. 'Are you saying that something that you call a vampire shark attacked my fiancee?'

    Spiro said, 'I get obsessive about facts. I know that more people suffer from OCD than schizophrenia. I know it's caused by abnormal neurochemical activity. I can name every street in London. But I don't know the biology of those creatures in the water. But I paint my warning everywhere I can. That's the best I can do.'

    Ben nodded. 'Thanks for talking to us, Mr Akinedes.' He held out his hand.

    The artist shook it, then shook Trajan's with the words, 'I hope you find who you're looking for.'

    As the pair left the pier, Trajan said quietly to Ben, 'Does he mean there's some kind of animal in the water?'