Slow Motion Ghosts Read online

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  SATURDAY: 11 APRIL 1981

  Blood and Petrol

  SUNDAY: 23 AUGUST 1981

  Examination of a Mask

  Twisting Green Pathways

  The Face Illuminated

  MONDAY: 24 AUGUST 1981

  X for Unknown

  Dolls and Curses

  Teardrop

  The Six Wounds

  Third-Party Blues

  The Woman in the Car

  Caught on Tape

  Drawn in Blue Ink

  The Silhouette

  Tethered

  TUESDAY 25: AUGUST 1981

  Available Light

  The Gallery

  A Field in England

  The Haunted Ones

  Fair Harbour

  WEDNESDAY 26: AUGUST 1981

  Taken by the Tide

  Living in the Dark

  Through Unreal Streets

  A Talk on the A229

  A Cabinet of Curiosities

  THURSDAY 27: AUGUST 1981

  Secret Lives

  Seven Years Apart

  A Woman’s Journal

  The Closed Room

  Names on a List

  Ordinary Human Weakness

  Lipstick Scar

  FRIDAY 28: AUGUST 1981

  The Story of a Mask

  A Face in the Crowd

  The Specialist

  A Meeting by the River

  Possible Kings

  A Doorway to Paradise

  A Faraway Night

  Edenville

  MONDAY 31: AUGUST 1981

  The Call-Out

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Also by Jeff Noon

  Copyright

  SLOW MOTION

  GHOSTS

  Jeff Noon

  To Steve

  SATURDAY

  11 APRIL 1981

  Blood and Petrol

  Hobbes arrived at Brixton police station around eight thirty that night. He travelled in with four other officers in a patrol car, one of whom kept effing and blinding at what he was seeing through the windows. ‘Jesus Christ! Can’t we just let them kill each other?’ Charlie Jenkes told him to shut the hell up, it was bad enough.

  DI Hobbes sat there, squeezed on the back seat. He felt sick with nerves.

  At the station yard they were quickly organized and issued with orders. Hobbes took charge of a group of nine uniformed constables.

  Christ, he hadn’t done anything like this, not for years.

  A van drove them at speed to a drop-off point, spewed them out, into the mayhem. They had six plastic shields between them, their only defence against whatever waited for them out there on the frontline. No helmets, no proper riot gear. Hobbes’s task was to drive the rioters off Shakespeare Road so a fire engine and an ambulance could get through. He got the line fixed and set the men marching in step, but the rank was quickly broken as they entered the fray. Youths were gathered further down the street, cutting it off. A police car was lying on its side. One rioter bent down to light a pool of petrol and the car burst into flames. The young men and women cheered and danced around the vehicle.

  They looked like teenagers. Kids. Nothing more.

  Most of them were black, but there were some white faces among them.

  Hobbes shouted orders. He forced his squad to get back in line, to stand its ground, shields interlinked in front of them, centurion style, and then to move forward slowly, slowly, one step at a time. No heroics. ‘No fucking heroics, do you hear me?’ His words were blown aside by the night’s craziness.

  In a side street a fire engine was waiting to come through, an ambulance parked up behind it. The front window of the fire engine had been smashed in. Now Hobbes had his objective in sight, he urged his men on. They were moving well, already pushing some of the rioters back into a cross street, when a hail of missiles landed on them. Rocks, house bricks, bottles. They smashed and clattered against the shields. He tried to keep his men together but it was no good, more missiles came over and the line staggered, an officer lost his footing, and two of the shields broke apart. A beer bottle found its target, hitting a constable full in the face. He fell. His colleagues stumbled around him.

  Hobbes ran to the fallen man and pulled him free of the scrum. The officer’s nose was broken. Eyes glazed over, watery. No recognition in them.

  ‘Pull back, pull back!’

  By sheer force of will, Hobbes got the nine men back to the parked van, two of them dragging their injured colleague along. In the distance Hobbes could see even more burning cars, and beyond that a building on fire, a public house.

  Kill the pigs! Kill the pigs!

  Smoke stung his eyes. He was out of breath, his sides ached. In more than twenty years on the force he’d never faced anything like this, not even when he was on the beat himself, working streets as poor and deprived as these were. Something had changed in the passing years.

  Hobbes screamed at his men to regroup, and they did so under his command, eight of them now. And he pushed them forward, putting himself in the frontline, glad for the shield he shared with the officer at his side, a man he had never seen before in his life.

  The missiles hit like the force of God, worse than before, over and over.

  He could hear cheering. Kids were running forward to lob their stones and bottles and then retreating back to their own lines. It was war, plain and simple.

  But the cops were breaking through now, forcing the rioters back. And then a bottle hit a shield to Hobbes’s left and exploded into flames. Ignited petrol splashed over the shield, turning it into a sheet of yellow fire. The bloody thing wasn’t even fireproof. The plastic of the shield melted. The heat was intense.

  The line broke, fell back.

  Hobbes was left there, alone.

  Half hidden in the shadows, someone was lying on the street ahead, groaning. Not a policeman, he saw that now. A civilian. A black woman. Caught in the crossfire. He had to help her, and so he ran forward, keeping low. Time slowed to a crawl, the sirens grew distant in his hearing. He glanced back.

  His men had scattered to other positions, he was exposed.

  No protection, no defence. Just himself.

  The woman was unconscious. He couldn’t move her.

  A bottle broke into smithereens on the pavement next to him, followed by a scream of rage. Hobbes looked up to see a single youth running towards him, his features hooded: race, colour and identity hidden. In his hand a weapon of some kind, a stone or a brick. Hobbes staggered. He started to move away and then felt something thud against his head.

  There was no pain, not at first.

  His hand touched at his temple.

  Sticky, red. What the fuck was that?

  He stumbled, nearly fell. His legs were weak. And he knew by instinct that the rioter was almost upon him, coming in for a second attack.

  Hobbes closed his eyes, his hands came up to protect his face.

  And then he was being pulled back, away from the trouble. Somebody had hold of him, was dragging him off the street as two lines of shielded officers ran forward as one, straight into the maelstrom. The noise was overwhelming.

  But now Hobbes had fallen into a side alley.

  It was quieter here, secluded. He felt the wall at his back and slid down to the ground. Charlie Jenkes was there with him. His friend had saved him.

  ‘Charlie,’ he whispered, his mouth hardly working.

  ‘Keep quiet,’ Jenkes replied. ‘You got hit.’

  Yes, he saw the blood now and his eyes blurred over.

  ‘The woman …’

  ‘She’s safe. Don’t worry.’


  Jenkes pressed his palm against Hobbes’s head, against the cut. And they knelt together, the two of them, as close as they’d ever been as partners. It was a simple act of comradeship. But when he looked directly at Detective Inspector Jenkes’s face – dirty, streaked with soot and sweat, teeth gritted – he saw only madness written there, a hatred that burned as wildly and fervently as any of the rioters they were facing that night.

  Hobbes should’ve guessed right then that something was going to go wrong.

  But he didn’t guess. He couldn’t. Days would pass before that hatred was played out to its full intensity, and by then it would be too late.

  SUNDAY

  23 AUGUST 1981

  Examination of a Mask

  He stood at the gate of the semi-detached house, peering along the short garden path to the front door, the downstairs windows, and the upper-storey window behind which he knew the dead person slept on, waiting for him. It was coming up on nine in the evening, the sky cloudy, but a street lamp’s glow directly overhead gave off a clear yellow light. The other members of the squad were standing around chatting, leaning against their cars, or handling the small crowd of onlookers that had already gathered, waiting for Inspector Hobbes to finish whatever it was he had to do. He could hear laughter, one of the old lags mocking him, no doubt. But he had to be alone, that was his thing. He’d only been here a week since the transfer. And before that, four weeks off, paid leave. For his own protection. And now this.

  He couldn’t believe he had to prove himself all over again at the age of forty-four, but there it was.

  He kept on looking, examining. It was a perfectly normal suburban house in a well-tended avenue lined with trees. The garden was overgrown compared with those on the two neighbouring sides. Perhaps the resident had been lazy, maybe he was away from home a lot. Perhaps the neighbours disliked him because of this, for bringing down the property values of the street. Hobbes had a mind that clicked through possibilities, one after another.

  He opened the gate and walked down the path to the door. He knew that the woman who’d found the body had rung the bell a couple of times, and then walked around to the rear of the house. He wondered if she’d peered through the half-open curtains of the front window? He copied her imagined actions, seeing a sparsely furnished living room, part of a coffee table, and a television set.

  Hobbes followed the woman’s route down the side of the house. He wanted to trace her steps, to understand the moment of discovery.

  There was enough light from the windows to view the back garden. It was even worse than the front: a scruffy lawn marred with patches of earth, dying flowers at the borders, and an old armchair close by, slowly decaying. There was a wooden fence and beyond that a line of trees, the night sky over South West London.

  The back door of the house was ajar. Cautiously he pushed it further open and stepped inside. Unwashed pots in the sink, trays of half-eaten TV dinners, the waste bin overflowing. The stink of rotten food. Again, the state of the room contrasted with the street, the expected middle-class values. He walked along the corridor into the living room. The walls and the ceiling were painted white. One armchair, a settee, the coffee table. The new minimal look; he’d seen it in the Sunday supplements. Except that one entire wall of the room was lined floor to ceiling with shelves of vinyl records, with an expensive-looking hi-fi system fitted neatly among them. The only personal detail was a framed photograph showing a young man with an older couple: son and parents, smiling. Two cups on the table, each one half filled with cold tea. Stretched out between the cups were several sheets of paper, one next to the other, overlapping. Some were covered in typescript with handwritten additions; others entirely handwritten complete with many crossings-out. It looked like poetry, or song lyrics. The signature Lucas Bell had been added at the bottom of each sheet of paper. The name was vaguely familiar to Hobbes.

  He walked back into the hall and paused at the foot of the stairs. A sound could be heard coming from the floor above. A voice. It was very quiet, requiring all his attention to hear it. He headed up the stairs, taking them slowly, and by the time he’d reached the landing his breath was held tight in his throat. His senses were perfectly alert. On the left he passed an open doorway and saw a room filled with musical instruments: guitars, keyboards, amplifiers, a drum kit. He thought briefly that this was a strange part of London for a rock musician to live: sleepy, leafy Richmond. There was a story there, Hobbes felt sure.

  He moved on a few more steps along the landing and then stopped. Now he could hear it clearly, the music playing softly from a doorway ahead. The same line of a song repeated over and over, carried by a young male voice. He followed the sound into the front bedroom and stood in the doorway, studying the scene in front of him.

  The moment. Take it in. Concentrate.

  The room was lit only by the street lamp outside, shining through the partly open curtains, tinting the blue walls and the white sheets. A man was lying on the bed. The victim. He was fully clothed, dressed in a blue shirt and black trousers, his body twisted into a terrible shape.

  Brendan Clarke. Twenty-six years old.

  This much Hobbes knew. The name and age of the victim. But he resisted as yet the urge to examine the body. Instead he continued his careful search of the room. It had not been cleaned or vacuumed in a while; every surface was covered in dust. He saw a telephone on a small table against the far wall. An ashtray next to the phone contained the long stub of a cigarette, its white filter tip stained with lipstick. Hobbes thought about that; he noted the brand name written around the filter.

  The song played on, coming from a music centre near the window. A few records were stacked against the wall, with the sleeve of one album lying on the floor beside the machine: Backstreet Harlequin by Lucas Bell. Now Hobbes remembered the name of the singer from early in the last decade, the glam rock era. The lid of the player was raised and the record album was circling. A lump of sticky blue putty, the kind used to fix posters to walls, had been placed on the vinyl, near the end of the first track. Because of this the stylus cartridge was held in place, so that the needle was trapped in the groove. The same musical phrase was repeating itself endlessly, marked by a click, a few bars of instrumental sound and the singer’s voice, one half-line of lyrics.

  Nothing left to lose … click.

  Nothing left to lose … click.

  Nothing left to lose … click.

  Hobbes examined the surface of the record as it spun around, looking for prints. He could see none. But then he stared at the lump of putty and his eyes widened. A fingerprint was clearly visible in the soft blue material.

  He looked out of the bedroom window, at the lamp-lit length of Westbrook Avenue. It had started to rain. That would make it worse for the officers who were still waiting down there. They all hated him. For his odd ways, his attitude, and most of all for what had happened to DI Jenkes. The stories travelled with him. He turned back to face the room. In doing so, he noticed in the uniform coat of dust on top of a cupboard, a clean circle, some few inches across. Something had been removed. This image was carefully stored away.

  Now for the body.

  Hobbes walked back to the bed and stared down at the victim’s face. The blood had long dried. The doctor had given an estimated time of death: late last night or early this morning, call it midnight for ease. Christ, but that was a long time to wait, twenty-odd hours lying here alone. With the music playing for all that time, heard by nobody until that poor woman got here an hour ago and found the body.

  He studied each wound in turn.

  One of the eyes, the left one, was little more than an empty dark pool. The mouth had been slit at each corner a full inch, forming a cruel grin. A crude letter X had been carved into the forehead. Smaller injuries were visible on the cheeks and brow. Blood had also flowed from a jagged cut in the right-hand side of the neck, probably the injury that had killed him. It left a large dark red stain on the pillow beneath.
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  The victim’s mouth was wide open, filled with some object, but Hobbes could not tell what it was because of the blood that had welled there. It might be a ball of crumpled paper. He guessed it had been placed in the mouth after death, and he felt a sudden urge to reach inside the mouth and pull the object loose. His fingers twitched with impatience.

  He breathed easily, with intent, to steady himself.

  The victim’s shirt was also stained with blood around the neck and chest. He bent closer. There was something inside the breast pocket, the edge of it protruding. With a fingernail he nudged it free until it lay exposed on the shirt front. It was a playing card of some kind, a court card, but of a design he had never seen before: a young man was walking along happily, a dog at his side. One more step would lead him over the edge of a cliff. The card was marked with a zero at the top, and the designation The Fool at the bottom.

  Hobbes leaned back upright. There was a second reason why he liked to be alone in these initial moments of an investigation, beyond the urge to concentrate; he needed to make the pledge without being stared at, or wondered about. He did so now, speaking in a cold whisper: ‘Mr Clarke. I will find out why this was done to you. From that knowledge I will find out who did this to you. I will hunt the perpetrator down and bring them to justice.’ He paused and then added, ‘This I promise.’

  Hobbes stepped back a few paces.

  He had seen many crime scenes over the years, a few as bad as this or worse, but even given the circumstances and the state of the corpse, something about this room, this particular situation, was not right, not as it should be.

  He was missing something.

  The thought took him over completely.

  DS Latimer found him five minutes later when she entered the room. He was still there, motionless, silently staring down at the body of the victim.

  Twisting Green Pathways

  The station’s interview room was small and windowless, already hazy with cigarette smoke. A female constable was standing to attention near the door. There was a wooden table with three scuffed plastic chairs set around it, and nothing much else.