“In here’s all the info we’ve got on the case so far. What we need is a certain bad boy name of Wati. Flits about a bit, does Wati. We need him brought to heel.”
wati wati? some voice said out of smoke. sands like a nonce sands like a paki oozes wati cunt?
“Half a mo,” Collingswood said. slag a slag she heard, arl nick that cunt. She dropped the folder into the fire. done me prad.
The ghost-things made ah noises, as if they were lowering themselves into a bath. They churned up a froth of aether that made Collingswood’s skin itch.
Ghosts, she thought. As if.
IT WAS A CON TRICK, WHOSE GULLED VICTIMS WERE THE TRICK itself. A persuasion. These things she had made, constituted of vague but intensely proud memories of canteen banter, villains brought down, uppity little cunts slapped into place, smoky offices and dirty, seedy, honourable deaths, had not existed until a few moments before.
Ghosts were complicated. The residue of a human soul, any human soul at all, was far too complex, contradictory, and willful, not to say traumatised by death, to do anything anyone wanted. In the rare and random cases when death was not the end, there was no saying what aspects, what disavowed facets of persona, might fight it out with others in posthumous identity.
It isn’t a paradox of haunting-it only appears to be to the alive-that ghosts are often nothing at all like the living whose trace they are: that the child visited by the gentle and much-loved uncle succumbed to cancer maybe horrified by his shade’s cruel and vindictive needling; that the revenant spirit of some terrorising bastard does nothing but smile and try with clumsy ectoplasmic intervention to feed the cat his fleshly leg had kicked days before. Even had she been able to invoke the spirit of the most tenacious, revered, uncompromising Flying Squad officer of the last thirty years, Collingswood might well have found the spirit a wistful aesthete or a simpering five-year-old. So the experience and verve of genuine dead generations were closed to her.
There was another option. Toss up a few crude police-functions that thought they were ghosts.
Doubtless there was some soul-stuff from genuinely deceased officers in the mix. A base, an undercoat of police reasoning. The trick, Collingswood had learnt, was to keep it general. Abstract as possible. She could clot together snips of supernatural agency out of will, technique, a few remnants of memory and, above all, images, the more obvious the better. Hence the cheap police procedurals she burnt. Hence the televisions and the tapes, copies of The Sweeney and The Professionals, spiced with a little Dixon for sanctimony, swirled up into a golden-age nonsense dream that trained her spectral functions in what to do and how to be.
This was no arena for nuance. Collingswood wasn’t concerned with fine points of post-Lawrence policing, sensitivity training, community outreach. This was about the city’s daydream. A fetishised seventies full of proper men. There went a DVD of Life on Mars onto the pyre.
What Collingswood did was motivate into being tenacious gung-ho clichés that believed themselves. She heard herself slipping into the absurd register the functions themselves used, the kitsch pronouncements and exaggerated, stretched-out London accents.
“There you go, squire,” she said. “That’s yer lot. Wati. Last known address: any fucking statue. Job: making our lives difficult.”
They did not have to be, could not really be, clever, the faux ghosts; but they had a nasty sort of cunning, and the accrued nous of years’ worth of screenwriters’ fancy. little bastard she heard them say. look at this shit, a billowing of ashes of case notes. bring this little toerag in, overtime, nonce, slag, guv, sarge, proceedin long the eye street. They clucked the words. They muttered in conspiracy, compared nonexistent notes. Collingswood heard them say names from the case-wati billy dane adler archie teuthex bleedin nora-as they learnt them from the burning files.
The presence or presences-they shifted between unity and plurality-slipped out of sensibility, out of the room. fuckin bleedin ell, Collingswood heard. whats coming to him.
“Alright,” she said, as they went, and the smell of burnt crap and blown-out televisions, no longer clotted to them, began to fill the room. “Bring him in. Don’t… you know. You’ve got to bring the little sod in. Need to ask him a few questions.”
MARGE WENT EVERYWHERE SHE COULD IMAGINE THAT MIGHT HAVE connections with Leon or Billy, and put up photocopied posters. An hour and a half on her laptop, two jpegs and a basic layout, Have You Seen These Men? She gave their names, and the number of a mobile phone that she had bought specifically, dedicated purely to this hunt.
She stapled them to trees, put the posters on newsagent notice boards, taped them to the sides of postboxes. For a day or two, she would have said that she was approaching her situation as normally as she, as anyone, could in the circumstances. She would have said that while, yes, of course, losing her lover in this bewildering way, and then of course being menaced by those terrifying figures, was horrendous, sometimes horrendous things did happen.
Marge stopped telling herself that when, after a day then another day, she did not go to the police to tell them of her encounter. Because-and here it became difficult to find words. Because something was different in the world.
Those police. They had been keen to get answers from her, fascinated in her as a specimen, but she had felt not a scrap of personal concern from any of them. It was obvious that they had an urgent task to do. She was also, she realised, pretty certain that task had nothing to do with keeping her safe.
What was all this? What the hell, she thought, is going on?
She felt caught up, as if in fabric getting stretched. Work came through a filter. At home, nothing was working quite right. The water when it came from her taps spattered, interrupted by air bubbles. The wind seemed determined to slap her walls and windows worse than usual. At night her television reception was bad, and the streetlamp outside her house went on and off, ridiculously bust and imperfect.
Marginalia spent more than one evening walking from sofa to window, sofa to window, and looking out, as if Leon-or Billy, who appeared more than once in these, what were they, reveries-might be just outside, leaning on the lamppost, waiting. But there were only the passersby, the night-light of the nearby grocery, and the lamp unleaned-on.
It was after many hours of blackout-lightup, a theatrical effect through her curtains, one night, that in her exasperation at it Marge paid the streetlight some attention, and realised with a physical jolt, an epiphany that had her momentarily staggering and holding herself up against the walls, that the illumination’s vagaries were not random.
She detected the loop. She sat still for minutes, watching, counting, and at last and reluctantly, as if to do so would grant something she did not want to grant, she started to make notes. The streetlamp fizzed in, fizzed out. Spark spark. Quick, slow, a lengthier glow. On off on-on-on off on off on off, and then a fuzzing fade and another little pattern.
What else could it be? Long-short in careful combinations. The lamppost was spitting out its light at her in Morse code.
She found the code online. The lamppost was saying LEONS DEAD LEONS DEAD LEONS DEAD.
MARGE MADE IT TELL HER THAT REPEATEDLY, MANY TIMES. SHE DID not think, during all those long minutes, about how she felt. “Leon’s dead,” she whispered. Tried not to think its meaning, only ensuring that she had translated the dot-dash glimmers correctly.
She sat back. There was aghastness, of course, at the bad absurdity, the how of that message; and the words themselves, their content, their explanation of Leon’s disappearance, she could not unhear, keep out. Marge realised she was weeping. She cried long, near-silently, in shock.