Barker, Clive - Books of Blood Vol. 5

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Clive Barker's

Books of Blood

Volume 5

Contents

The Forbidden

The Madonna

Babel's Children

In The Flesh

The Forbidden

Like a flawless tragedy, the elegance of which structure is lost upon those

suffering in it, the perfect geometry of the Spector Street Estate was only

visible from the air. Walking in its drear canyons, passing through its grimy

corridors from one grey concrete rectangle to the next, there was little to

seduce the eye or stimulate the imagination. What few saplings had been

planted in the quadrangles had long since been mutilated or uprooted; the

grass, though tall, resolutely refused a healthy green.

No doubt the estate and its two companion developments had once been an

architect's dream. No doubt the city-planners had wept with pleasure at a

design which housed three and thirty-six persons per hectare, and still

boasted space for a children's playground. Doubtless fortunes and reputations

had been built upon Spector Street, and at its opening fine words had been

spoken of its being a yardstick by which all future developments would be

measured. But the planners - tears wept, words spoken - had left the estate to

its own devices; the architects occupied restored Georgian houses at the other

end of the city, and probably never set foot here.

They would not have been shamed by the deterioration of the estate even if

they had. Their brain-child (they would doubtless argue) was as brilliant as

ever: its geometries as precise, its ratios as calculated; it was people who

had spoiled Spector Street. Nor would they have been wrong in such an

accusation. Helen had seldom seen an inner city environment so comprehensively

vandalized. Lamps bad been shattered and back-yard fences overthrown; cars

whose wheels and engines had been removed and chassis then burned, blocked

garage facilities. In one courtyard three or four ground-floor maisonettes had

been entirely gutted by fire, their windows and doors boarded up with planks

and corrugated iron.

More startling still was the graffiti. That was what she had come here to

see, encouraged by Archie's talk of the place, and she was not disappointed.

It was difficult to believe, staring at the multiple layers of designs, names,

obscenities, and dogmas that were scrawled and sprayed on every available

brick, that Spector Street was barely three and a half years old. The walls,

so recently virgin, were now so profoundly defaced that the Council Cleaning

Department could never hope to return them to their former condition. A layer

of whitewash to cancel this visual cacophony would only offer the scribes a

fresh and yet more tempting surface on which to make their mark.

Helen was in seventh heaven. Every corner she turned offered some fresh

material for her thesis: 'Graffiti: the semiotics of urban despair'. It was a

subject which married her two favourite disciplines - sociology and aesthetics

- and as she wandered around the estate she began to wonder if there wasn't a

book, in addition to her thesis, in the subject. She walked from courtyard to

courtyard, copying down a large number of the more interesting scrawlings, and

noting their location. Then she went back to the car to collect her camera and

tripod and returned to the most fertile of the areas, to make a thorough

visual record of the walls.

It was a chilly business. She was not an expert photographer, and the late

October sky was in full flight, shifting the light on the bricks from one

moment to the next. As she adjusted and re-adjusted the exposure to compensate

for the light changes, her fingers steadily became clumsier, her temper

correspondingly thinner. But she struggled on, the idle curiosity of passers-

by notwithstanding. There were so many designs to document. She reminded

herself that her present discomfort would be amply repaid when she showed the

slides to Trevor, whose doubt of the project's validity had been perfectly

apparent from the beginning.

'The writing on the wall?' he'd said, half smiling in that irritating

fashion of his, 'It's been done a hundred times.'

This was true, of course; and yet not. There certainly were learned works

on graffiti, chock full of sociological jargon: cultural disenfranchisement;

urban alienation. But she flattered herself that she might find something

amongst this litter of scrawlings that previous analysts had not: some

unifying convention perhaps, that she could use as the lynch-pin of her

thesis. Only a vigorous cataloguing and cross-referencing of the phrases and

images before her would reveal such a correspondence; hence the importance of

this photographic study. So many hands had worked here; so many minds left

their mark, however casually: if she could find some pattern, some predominant

motive, or motif, the thesis would be guaranteed some serious attention, and

so, in turn, would she.

'What are you doing?' a voice from behind her asked.

She turned from her calculations to see a young woman with a pushchair on

the pavement behind her. She looked weary, Helen thought, and pinched by the

cold. The child in the pushchair was mewling, his grimy fingers clutching an

orange lollipop and the wrapping from a chocolate bar. The bulk of the

chocolate, and the remains of previous jujubes, was displayed down the front

of his coat.

Helen offered a thin smile to the woman; she looked in need of it.

'I'm photographing the walls,' she said in answer to the initial enquiry,

though surely this was perfectly apparent.

The woman - she could barely be twenty - Helen judged, said:

'You mean the filth?'

'The writing and the pictures,' Helen said. Then: 'Yes. The filth.'

'You from the Council?'

'No, the University.'

'It's bloody disgusting,' the woman said. 'The way they do that. It's not

just kids, either.'

'No?'

'Grown men. Grown men, too. They don't give a damn. Do it in broad

daylight. You see 'em... broad daylight.' She glanced down at the child, who

was sharpening his lollipop on the ground. 'Kerry!' she snapped, but the boy

took no notice. 'Are they going to wipe it off?' she asked Helen.

'I don't know,' Helen said, and reiterated: 'I'm from the University.'

'Oh,' the woman replied, as if this was new information, 'so you're nothing

to do with the Council?'

'No.'

'Some of it's obscene, isn't it?; really dirty. Makes me embarrassed to see

some of the things they draw.'

Helen nodded, casting an eye at the boy in the pushchair. Kerry had decided

to put his sweet in his ear for safe-keeping.

'Don't do that!' his mother told him, and leaned over to slap the child's

hand. The blow, which was negligible, began the child bawling. Helen took the

opportunity to return to her camera. But the woman still desired to talk.

'It's not just on the outside, neither,' she commented.

'I beg your pardon?' Helen said.

'They break into the flats when they go empty. The Council tried to board

them up, but it does no good. They break in anyway. Use them as toilets, and

write more filth on the walls. They light fires too. Then nobody can move back

in.'

The description piqued Helen's curiosity. Would the graffiti on the inside

walls be substantially different from the public displays? It was certainly

worth an investigation.

'Are there any places you know of around here like that?'

'Empty flats, you mean?'

'With graffiti.'

'Just by us, there's one or two,' the woman volunteered. 'I'm in Butts'

Court.'

'Maybe you could show me?' Helen asked.

The woman shrugged.

'By the way, my name's Helen Buchanan.'

'Anne-Marie,' the mother replied.

'I'd be very grateful if you could point me to one of those empty flats.'

Anne-Marie was baffled by Helen's enthusiasm, and made no attempt to

disguise it, but she shrugged again and said: 'There's nothing much to see.

Only more of the same stuff.'

Helen gathered up her equipment and they walked side by side through the

intersecting corridors between one square and the next. Though the estate was

low-rise, each court only five storeys high, the effect of each quadrangle was

horribly claustrophobic. The walkways and staircases were a thief's dream,

rife with blind 'corners and ill-lit tunnels. The rubbish-dumping facilities -

chutes from the upper floors down which bags of refuse could be pitched - had

long since been sealed up, thanks to their efficiency as fire-traps. Now

plastic bags of refuse were piled high in the corridors, many torn open by

roaming dogs, their contents strewn across the ground. The smell, even in the

cold weather, was unpleasant. In high summer it must have been overpowering.

'I'm over the other side,' Anne-Marie said, pointing across the quadrangle.

'The one with the yellow door.' She then pointed along the opposite side of

the court. 'Five or six maisonettes from the far end,' she said. 'There's two

of them been emptied out. Few weeks now. One of the family's moved into Ruskin

Court; the other did a bunk in the middle of the night.'

With that, she turned her back on Helen and wheeled Kerry, who had taken to

trailing spittle from the side of his pushchair, around the side of the

square.

'Thank you,' Helen called after her. Anne-Marie glanced over her shoulder

briefly, but did not reply. Appetite whetted, Helen made her way along the row

of ground floor maisonettes, many of which, though inhabited, showed little

sign of being so. Their curtains were closely drawn; there were no milk-

bottles on the doorsteps, nor children's toys left where they had been played

with. Nothing, in fact, of life here. There was more graffiti however,

sprayed, shockingly, on the doors of occupied houses. She granted the

scrawlings only a casual perusal, in part because she feared one of the doors

opening as she examined a choice obscenity sprayed upon it, but more because

she was eager to see what revelations the empty flats ahead might offer.

The malign scent of urine, both fresh and stale, welcomed her at the

threshold of number 14, and beneath that the smell of burnt paint and plastic.

She hesitated for fully ten seconds, wondering if stepping into the maisonette

was a wise move. The territory of the estate behind her was indisputably

foreign, sealed off m its own misery, but the rooms in front of her were more

intimidating still: a dark maze which her eyes could barely penetrate. But

when her courage faltered she thought of Trevor, and how badly she wanted to

silence his condescension. So thinking, she advanced into the place,

deliberately kicking a piece of charred timber aside as she did so, in the

hope that she would alert any tenant into showing himself.

There was no sound of occupancy however. Gaining confidence, she began to

explore the front room of the maisonette which had been - to judge by the

remains of a disemboweled sofa in one corner and the sodden carpet underfoot -

a living-room. The pale-green walls were, as Anne-Marie had promised,

extensively defaced, both by minor scribblers - content to work in pen, or

even more crudely in sofa charcoal - and by those with aspirations to public

works, who had sprayed the walls in half a dozen colours.

Some of the comments were of interest, though many she bad already seen on

the walls outside. Familiar names and couplings repeated themselves. Though

she bad never set eyes on these individuals she knew how badly Fabian J.

(A.OK!) wanted to deflower Michelle; and that Michelle, in her turn, had the

hots for somebody called Mr Sheen. Here, as elsewhere, a man called White Rat

boasted of his endowment, and the return of the Syllabub Brothers was promised

in red paint. One or two of the pictures accompanying, or at least adjacent

to, these phrases were of particular interest. An almost emblematic simplicity

informed them. Beside the word Christos was a stick man with his hair

radiating from his head like spines, and other heads impaled on each spine.

Close by was an image of intercourse so brutally reduced that at first Helen

took it to illustrate a knife plunging into a sightless eye. But fascinating

as the images were, the room was too gloomy for her film and she had neglected

to bring a flash. If she wanted a reliable record of these discoveries she

would have to come again, and for now be content with a simple exploration of

the premises.

The maisonette wasn't that large, but the windows had been boarded up

throughout, and as she moved further from the front door the dubious light

petered out altogether. The smell of urine, which had been strong at the door,

intensified too, until by the time she reached the back of the living-room and

stepped along a short corridor into another room beyond, it was cloying as

incense. This room, being furthest from the front door, was also the darkest,

and she bad to wait a few moments in the cluttered gloom to allow her eyes to

become useful. This, she guessed, had been the bedroom. What little furniture

the residents had left behind them had been smashed to smithereens. Only the

mattress had been left relatively untouched, dumped in the corner of the room

amongst a wretched litter of blankets, newspapers, and pieces of crockery.

Outside, the sun found its way between the clouds, and two or three shafts

of sunlight slipped between the boards nailed across the bedroom window and

pierced the room like annunciations, scoring the opposite wall with bright

lines. Here, the graffitists had been busy once more: the usual clamour of

love-letters and threats. She scanned the wall quickly, and as she did so her

eye was led by the beams of light across the room to the wall which contained

the door she had stepped through.

Here, the artists had also been at work, but had produced an image the like

of which she had not seen anywhere else. Using the door, which was centrally

placed in the wall, as a mouth, the artists had sprayed a single, vast head on

to the stripped plaster. The painting was more adroit than most she had seen,

rife with detail that lent the image an unsettling veracity. The cheekbones

jutting through skin the colour of buttermilk; the teeth - sharpened to

irregular points - all converging on the door. The sitter's eyes were, owing

to the room's low ceiling, set mere inches above the upper lip, but this

physical adjustment only lent force to the image, giving the impression that

he had thrown his head back. Knotted strands of his hair snaked from his scalp

across the ceiling.

Was it a portrait? There was something naggingly specific in the details of

the brows and the lines around the wide mouth; in the careful picturing of

those vicious teeth. A nightmare certainly: a facsimile, perhaps, of something

from a heroin fugue. Whatever its origins, it was potent. Even the illusion of

door-as-mouth worked. The short passageway between living-room and bedroom

offered a passable throat, with a tattered lamp in lieu of tonsils. Beyond the

gullet, the day burned white in the nightmare's belly. The whole effect

brought to mind a ghost train painting. The same heroic deformity, the same

unashamed intention to scare. And it worked; she stood in the bedroom almost

stupified by the picture, its red-rimmed eyes fixing her mercilessly.

Tomorrow, she determined, she would come here again, this time with high-speed

film and a flash to illuminate the masterwork.

As she prepared to leave the sun went in, and the bands of light faded. She

glanced over her shoulder at the boarded windows, and saw for the first time

that one four-word slogan had been sprayed on the wall beneath them.

'Sweets to the sweet' it read. She was familiar with the quote, but not

with its source. Was it a profession of love? If so, it was an odd location

for such an avowal. Despite the mattress in the corner, and the relative

privacy of this room, she could not imagine the intended reader of such words

ever stepping in here to receive her bouquet. No adolescent lovers, however

heated, would lie down here to play at mothers and fathers; not under the gaze

of the terror on the wall. She crossed to examine the writing. The paint

looked to be the same shade of pink as had been used to colour the gums of the

screaming man; perhaps the same hand?

Behind her, a noise. She turned so quickly she almost tripped over the

blanket-strewn mattress.

'Who - ?'

At the other end of the gullet, in the living-room, was a scab-kneed boy of

six or seven. He stared at Helen, eyes glittering in the half-light, as if

waiting for a cue.

'Yes?' she said.

'Anne-Marie says do you want a cup of tea?' he declared without pause or

intonation.

Her conversation with the woman seemed hours past. She was grateful for the

invitation however. The damp in the maisonette had chilled her.

'Yes...' she said to the boy. 'Yes please.'

The child didn't move, but simply stared on at her.

'Are you going to lead the way?' she asked him.

'If you want,' he replied, unable to raise a trace of enthusiasm.

'I'd like that.'

'You taking photographs?' he asked.

'Yes. Yes, I am. But not in here.' 'Why not?'

'It's too dark,' she told him.

'Don't it work in the dark?' he wanted to know.

'No.'

The boy nodded at this, as if the information somehow fitted well into his

scheme of things, and about turned without another word, clearly expecting

Helen to follow.

If she had been taciturn in the street, Anne-Marie was anything but in the

privacy of her own kitchen. Gone was the guarded curiosity, to be replaced by

a stream of lively chatter and a constant scurrying between half a dozen minor

domestic tasks, like a juggler keeping several plates spinning simultaneously.

Helen watched this balancing act with some admiration; her own domestic skills

were negligible. At last, the meandering conversation turned back to the

subject that had brought Helen here.

'Them photographs,' Anne-Marie said, 'why'd you want to take them?'

'I'm writing about graffiti. The photos will illustrate my thesis.'

'It's not very pretty.'

'No, you're right, it isn't. But I find it interesting.'

Anne-Marie shook her head. 'I hate the whole estate,' she said. 'It's not

safe here. People getting robbed on their own doorsteps. Kids setting fire to

the rubbish day in, day out. Last summer we had the fire brigade here two,

three times a day, 'til they sealed them chutes off. Now people just dump the

bags in the passageways, and that attracts rats.'

'Do you live here alone?'

'Yes,' she said, 'since Davey walked out.'

'That your husband?'

'He was Kerry's father, but we weren't never married. We lived together two

years, you know. We had some good times. Then he just upped and went off one

day when I was at me Main's with Kerry.' She peered into her tea-cup. 'I'm

better off without him,' she said. 'But you get scared sometimes. Want some

more tea?'

'I don't think I've got time.'

'Just a cup,' Anne-Marie said, already up and unplugging the electric

kettle to take it across for a re-fill. As she was about to turn on the tap

she saw something on the draining board, and drove her thumb down, grinding it

out. 'Got you, you bugger,' she said, then turned to Helen: 'We got these

bloody ants.'

'Ants?'

'Whole estate's infected. From Egypt, they are: pharoah ants, they're

called. Little brown sods. They breed in the central heating ducts, you see;

that way they get into all the flats. Place is plagued with them.'

This unlikely exoticism (ants from Egypt?) struck Helen as comical, but she

said nothing. Anne-Marie was staring out of the kitchen window and into the

back-yard.

'You should tell them - ' she said, though Helen wasn't certain whom she

was being instructed to tell, 'tell them that ordinary people can't even walk

the streets any longer - 'Is it really so bad?' Helen said, frankly tiring of

this catalogue of misfortunes.

Anne-Marie turned from the sink and looked at her hard.

We've had murders here,' she said.

'Really?'

'We had one in the summer. An old man he was, from Ruskin. That's just next

door. I didn't know him, but he was a friend of the sister of the woman next

door. I forget his name.'

'And he was murdered?'

'Cut to ribbons in his own front room. They didn't find him for almost a

week.'

'What about his neighbours? Didn't they notice his absence?'

Anne-Marie shrugged, as if the most important pieces of information - the

murder and the man's isolation - had been exchanged, and any further enquiries

into the problem were irrelevant. But Helen pressed the point.

'Seems strange to me,' she said.

Anne-Marie plugged in the filled kettle. 'Well, it happened,' she replied,

unmoved.

'I'm not saying it didn't, I just - '

'His eyes had been taken out,' she said, before Helen could voice any

further doubts.

Helen winced. 'No,' she said, under her breath.

'That's the truth,' Anne-Marie said. 'And that wasn't all'd been done to

him.' She paused, for effect, then went on: 'You wonder what kind of person's

capable of doing things like that, don't you? You wonder.' Helen nodded. She

was thinking precisely the same thing.

'Did they ever find the man responsible?'

Anne-Marie snorted her disparagement. 'Police don't give a damn what

happens here. They keep off the estate as much as possible. When they do

patrol all they do is pick up kids for getting drunk and that. They're afraid,

you see. That's why they keep clear.'

'Of this killer?'

'Maybe,' Anne-Marie replied. 'Then: He had a hook.'

'A hook?'

'The man what done it. He had a hook, like Jack the Ripper.'

Helen was no expert on murder, but she felt certain that the Ripper hadn't

boasted a hook. It seemed churlish to question the truth of Anne-Marie's story

however; though she silently wondered how much of this - the eyes taken out,

the body rotting in the flat, the hook - was elaboration. The most scrupulous

of reporters was surely tempted to embellish a story once in a while.

Anne-Marie had poured herself another cup of tea, and was about to do the

same for her guest.

'No thank you,' Helen said, 'I really should go.'

'You married?' Anne-Marie asked, out of the blue.

'Yes. To a lecturer from the University.'

'What's his name?'

'Trevor.'

Anne-Marie put two heaped spoonfuls of sugar into her cup of tea. 'Will you

be coming back?' she asked.

'Yes, I hope to. Later in the week. I want to take some photographs of the

pictures in the maisonette across the court.'

'Well, call in.

'I shall. And thank you for your help.'

'That's all right,' Anne-Marie replied. 'You've got to tell somebody,

haven't you?'

'The man apparently had a hook instead of a hand.'

Trevor looked up from his plate of tagliatelle con prosciutto.

'Beg your pardon?'

Helen had been at pains to keep her recounting of this story as uncoloured

by her own response as she could. She was interested to know what Trevor would

make of it, and she knew that if she once signalled her own stance he would

instinctively take an opposing view out of plain bloody-mindedness.

'He had a hook,' she repeated, without inflexion.

Trevor put down his fork, and plucked at his nose, sniffing. 'I didn't read

anything about this,' he said.

'You don't look at the local press,' Helen returned. 'Neither of us do.

Maybe it never made any of the nationals.'

'"Geriatric Murdered By Hook-Handed Maniac"?' Trevor said, savouring the

hyperbole. 'I would have thought it very newsworthy. When was all of this

supposed to have happened?'

'Sometime last summer. Maybe we were in Ireland.'

'Maybe,' said Trevor, taking up his fork again. Bending to his food, the

polished lens of his spectacles reflected only the plate of pasta and chopped

ham in front of him, not his eyes.

'Why do you say maybe?' Helen prodded.

'It doesn't sound quite right,' he said. 'In fact it sounds bloody

preposterous.'

'You don't believe it?' Helen said.

Trevor looked up from his food, tongue rescuing a speck of tagliatelle from

the corner of his mouth. His face had relaxed into that non-committal

expression of his - the same face he wore, no doubt, when listening to his

students. 'Do you believe it?' he asked Helen. It was a favourite time-gaining

device of his, another seminar trick, to question the questioner.

'I'm not certain,' Helen replied, too concerned to find some solid ground

in this sea of doubts to waste energy scoring points.

'All right, forget the tale - ' Trevor said, deserting his food for another

glass of red wine. ' - What about the teller? Did you trust. her?'

Helen pictured Anne-Marie's earnest expression as she told the story of the

old man's murder. 'Yes,' she said. 'Yes; I think I would have known if she'd

been lying to me.'

'So why's it so important, anyhow? I mean, whether she's lying or not, what

the fuck does it matter?'

It was a reasonable question, if irritatingly put. Why did it matter? Was

it that she wanted to have her worst feelings about Spector Street proved

false? That such an estate be filthy, be hopeless, be a dump where the

undesirable and the disadvantaged were tucked out of public view - all that

was a liberal commonplace, and she accepted it as an unpalatable social

reality. But the story of the old man's murder and mutilation was something

other. An image of violent death that, once with her, refused to part from her

company.

She realized, to her chagrin, that this confusion was plain on her face,

and that Trevor, watching her across the table, was not a little entertained

by it.

'If it bothers you so much,' he said, 'why don't you go back there and ask

around, instead of playing believe-in-it-or-not over dinner?'

She couldn't help but rise to his remark. 'I thought you liked guessing

games,' she said.

He threw her a sullen look.

'Wrong again.'

The suggestion that she investigate was not a bad one, though doubtless he

had ulterior motives for offering it. She viewed Trevor less charitably day by

day. What she had once thought in him a fierce commitment to debate she now

recognized as mere power-play. He argued, not for the thrill of dialectic, but

because he was pathologically competitive. She had seen him, time and again,

take up attitudes she knew he did not espouse, simply to spill blood. Nor,

more's the pity, was he alone in this sport. Academe was one of the last

strongholds of the professional time-waster. On occasion their circle seemed

entirely dominated by educated fools, lost in a wasteland of stale rhetoric

and hollow commitment.

From one wasteland to another. She returned to Spector Street the following

day, armed with a flashgun in addition to her tripod and high-sensitive film.

The wind was up today, and it was Arctic, more furious still for being trapped

in the maze of passageways and courts. She made her way to number 14, and

spent the next hour in its befouled confines, meticulously photographing both

the bedroom and living-room walls. She had half expected the impact of the

head in the bedroom to be dulled by re-acquaintance; it was not. Though she

struggled to capture its scale and detail as best she could, she knew the

photographs would be at best a dim echo of its perpetual howl.

Much of its power lay in its context, of course. That such an image might

be stumbled upon in surroundings so drab, so conspicuously lacking in mystery,

was akin to finding an icon on a rubbish-heap: a gleaming symbol of

transcendence from a world of toil and decay into some darker but more

tremendous realm. She was painfully aware that the intensity of her response

probably defied her articulation. Her vocabulary was analytic, replete with

buzz-words and academic terminology, but woefully impoverished when it came to

evocation. The photographs, pale as they would be, would, she hoped, at least

hint at the potency of this picture, even if they couldn't conjure the way it

froze the bowels.

When she emerged from the maisonette the wind was as uncharitable as ever,

but the boy waiting outside - the same child as had attended upon her

yesterday - was dressed as if for spring weather. He grimaced in his effort to

keep the shudders at bay.

'Hello,' Helen said.

'I waited,' the child announced.

Waited?'

'Anne-Marie said you'd come back.'

'I wasn't planning to come until later in the week,' Helen said. 'You might

have waited a long time.'

The boy's grimace relaxed a notch. 'It's all right,' he said, 'I've got

nothing to do.'

'What about school?'

'Don't like it,' the boy replied, as if unobliged to be educated if it

wasn't to his taste.

'I see,' said Helen, and began to walk down the side of the quadrangle. The

boy followed. On the patch of grass at the centre of the quadrangle several

chairs and two or three dead saplings had been piled.

'What's this?' she said, half to herself.

'Bonfire Night,' the boy informed her. 'Next week.'

'Of course.'

'You going to see Anne-Marie?' he asked.

'Yes.'

'She's not in'

'Oh. Are you sure?'

'Yeah.'

'Well, perhaps you can help me...'She stopped and turned to face the child;

smooth sacs of fatigue hung beneath his eyes. 'I heard about an old man who

was murdered near here,' she said to him. 'In the summer. Do you know anything

about that?'

'No.'

'Nothing at all? You don't remember anybody getting killed?'

'No,' the boy said again, with impressive finality. 'I don't remember.'

Well; thank you anyway.'

This time, when she retraced her steps back to the car, the boy didn't

follow. But as she turned the corner out of the quadrangle she glanced back to

see him standing on the spot where she'd left him, staring after her as if she

were a madwoman.

By the time she had reached the car and packed the photographic equipment

into the boot there were specks of rain in the wind, and she was sorely

tempted to forget she'd ever heard Anne-Marie's story and make her way home,

where the coffee would be warm even if the welcome wasn't. But she needed an

answer to the question Trevor had put the previous night. Do you believe it?,

he'd asked when she'd told him the story. She hadn't known how to answer then,

and she still didn't. Perhaps (why did she sense this?) the terminology of

verifiable truth was redundant here; perhaps the final answer to his question

was not an answer at all, only another question. If so; so. She had to find

out.

Ruskin Court was as forlorn as its fellows, if not more so. It didn't even

boast a bonfire. On the third floor balcony a woman was taking washing in

before the rain broke; on the grass in the centre of the quadrangle two dogs

were absent-mindedly rutting, the fuckee staring up at the blank sky. As she

walked along the empty pavement she set her face determinedly; a purposeful

look, Bernadette had once said, deterred attack. When she caught sight of the

two women talking at the far end of the court she crossed over to them

hurriedly, grateful for their presence.

'Excuse me?'

The women, both in middle-age, ceased their animated exchange and looked

her over.

'I wonder if you can help me?'

She could feel their appraisal, and their distrust; they went undisguised.

One of the pair, her face florid, said plainly: 'What do you want?'

Helen suddenly felt bereft of the least power to charm. What was she to say

to these two that wouldn't make her motives appear ghoulish? 'I was told...

she began, and then stumbled, aware that she would get no assistance from

either woman. '...I was told there'd been a murder near here. Is that right?'

The florid woman raised eyebrows so plucked they were barely visible.

'Murder?' she said.

'Are you from the press?' the other woman enquired. The years bad soured

her features beyond sweetening. Her small mouth was deeply lined; her hair,

which had been dyed brunette, showed a half-inch of grey at the roots.

'No, I'm not from the press,' Helen said, 'I'm a friend of Anne-Marie's, in

Butts' Court.' This claim of friend stretched the truth, but it seemed to

mellow the women somewhat.

'Visiting are you?' the florid woman asked.

'In a manner of speaking - '

'You missed the warm spell - ' Anne-Marie was telling me about somebody

who'd been murdered here, during the summer. I was curious about it.'

'Is that right?'

' - do you know anything about it?'

'Lots of things go on around here,' said the second woman. 'You don't know

the half of it.'

'So it's true,' Helen said.

'They had to close the toilets,' the first woman put in.

'That's right. They did,' the other said.

'The toilets?' Helen said. What had this to do with the old man's death?

'It was terrible,' the first said. 'Was it your Frank, Josie, who told you

about it?'

'No, not Frank,' Josie replied. 'Frank was still at sea. It was Mrs

Tyzack.'

The witness established, Josie relinquished the story to her companion, and

turned her gaze back upon Helen. The suspicion bad not yet died from her eyes.

'This was only the month before last,' Josie said. 'Just about the end of

August. It was August, wasn't it?' She looked to the other woman for

verification. 'You've got the head for dates, Maureen.'

Maureen looked uncomfortable. 'I forget,' she said, clearly unwilling to

offer testimony.

'I'd like to know,' Helen said. Josie, despite her companion's reluctance,

was eager to oblige.

'There's some lavatories,' she said, 'outside the shops - you know, public

lavatories. I'm not quite sure how it all happened exactly, but there used to

be a boy... well, he wasn't a boy really, I mean he was a man of twenty or

more, but he was - she fished for the words, '...mentally subnormal, I suppose

you'd say. His mother used to have to take him around like he was a four year

old. Anyhow, she let him go into the lavatories while she went to that little

supermarket, what's it called?' she turned to Maureen for a prompt, but the

other woman just looked back, her disapproval plain. Josie was ungovernable,

however. 'Broad daylight, this was,' she said to Helen. 'Middle of the day.

Anyhow, the boy went to the toilet, and the mother was in the shop. And after

a while, you know how you do, she's busy shopping, she forgets about him, and

then she thinks he's been gone a long time...'

At this juncture Maureen couldn't prevent herself from butting in: the

accuracy of the story apparently took precedence over her wariness.

' - She got into an argument,' she corrected Josie, 'with the manager.

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CliveBarker'sBooksofBloodVolume5ContentsTheForbiddenTheMadonnaBabel'sChildrenInTheFleshTheForbiddenLikeaflawlesstragedy,theeleganceofwhichstructureislostuponthosesufferinginit,theperfectgeometryoftheSpectorStreetEstatewasonlyvisiblefromtheair.Walkinginitsdrearcanyons,passingthroughitsgrimycorridorsf...

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