Desmond Barry - London Noir

“I can tell you that this one is different.”

“So far, forensics suggest that she was killed the same way as Adam.”

“Yes, but she is different. Powerful.” Ani nodded his head, impressed. “The red and the white on the dress are for Ayaguna. He is a young orisha, a fighter. You know him as St. James, and when he comes, he rides a white horse. Now she rides with him. He likes the girls, you see, he likes them young like this. Their blood is clean. This is strong juju. You’ll find things inside her: clay, gunpowder, silver, maybe copper.”

“Anything else?”

Ani, who had been staring at the stains on his tabletop, turned to look directly at Heldon.

“Yes, my friend, I can tell that you’re not sleeping well.”

Heldon was caught off guard. “Well, you might say I’m taking my work home with me.”

“Like O’Brien?”

“No. And I don’t intend to end up like him. But yes, this has shaken me up. I didn’t expect another one so soon. And then I suppose there’s the war.”

“There is always war, that is Ayaguna’s business. But there will be no war where this girl came from. She is one of their own. A peace offering.”

“I was talking about Iran, but yes, we think the girl was another Nigerian.”

“No, she is not one of ours. She is from the Congo,” replied Ani, with a certainty that Heldon could not question. “That’s where the trouble is. But for now there will be no war. She died to end the fighting. She will keep Ayaguna happy for a while. How long depends how well the sangomas know him. If they know him well, she will have died with six fingers and six toes. Her skin cut six times with a blade and burned six times with a flame.”

“If she died to prevent a war, why was she killed here and not in her home country?”

“The sangomas don’t like war. It upsets the balance. So much death creates problems for everybody. Now the smart ones are over here.”

“Makes sense. I don’t like war either. Okay, thanks, Ani. We’ll be in touch.”

Heldon returned to the night. The cats were gone.

Forensics showed that Ani was right. Mineral analysis of her bones revealed that she was indeed Congolese. The girl had swallowed, or been forced to swallow, a mix of gunpowder, silver, copper, and clay. She had been bound and stabbed several times, then scorched with a burning twig from the iroko tree. They had not found her limbs, so they couldn’t count her fingers and toes; but Heldon suspected that if they ever found them, there would be six of each.

African newspapers revealed that the Congo had been on the brink of another bout of bloodshed, but in the past few days an agreement was reached between the warring factions. With over three million already dead, you would think they were tired of killing.

The story hardly made the UK nationals; the situation in Iran was worsening, despite the fact that things in Iraq had hardly improved since the Allied pullout eighteen months earlier. And now they were regrouping, preparing to flex their muscle against a defiantly hostile Iranian leadership. The mid-term government disingenuously declaring that the opportunity for peace lay in the hands of the Iranians, not the combined forces amassing at the nation’s borders.

More dead children.

Rather than desensitizing him to death, Heldon’s work had revealed to him its full horror. He knew what a bullet meant: the torn, seared flesh; the shattered bone; the screaming; the smell of blood. He had no children of his own, but he knew that the statistics of war weren’t just numbers. They were a thousand Adams, a thousand Eves. Blasted, mutilated, lying in rivers, in puddles, in the arms of their parents; caught in the camera’s lens, denied over breakfast, ignored on the train.

As an inevitable war loomed once again, the antiwar protests had grown incandescent, seething with fury and frustration. Heldon took part as often as he could. He didn’t tell his colleagues, just as he didn’t tell them everything that Ani had told him. It was easier that way.

He didn’t tell them about his other research either. There was no need. And he hadn’t told Ani. Again, why bother? He probably already knew all about the killings anyway. They had occurred throughout Europe and Africa over the years. Many, like Adam, were for power. Terrible as they were, they no longer interested Heldon. He was only interested in the others; the others like Eve. They were different. And they had worked. The evidence was there on the record — brief respites in long histories of warfare. Powerful juju.

She is one of their own... different... powerful.

Ani’s words drove Heldon onward as he strode through the car park behind Kingsland Shopping Centre. Smooth, smothered by concrete, a no-man’s-land between road and rail. Few people entered the mall through this back way. Once past the main entrance to Sainsbury’s, the shops tail off into a mirror of what’s available outside on Kingsland High Street.

A gray mid-morning on a school day. Any kids around now are avoiding something.

Now she rides with him.

He found her under the outdoor metal stairwell. Hood up. Not doing anything.

She was one of our own.

He had thought about this moment over and over again. Can a death ever be justified? Is one unpromising life worth ten thousand others? If it works, then yes, it is. Suddenly, Heldon knew exactly what he was doing.

“Hi. Shouldn’t you be in school?”

“What’s it to you? You a teacher?”

A flash of his card. “No, I’m a policeman. And I think you should come with me. Don’t worry, you’re not in trouble. I have a very important job to do, and I need your help. How would you like to ride a white horse?”

Without protest, the girl left with him.

Elephant & Castle

As an incomer to London, I have — almost inevitably — found myself enchanted with the city, in more than one sense of the word. I have enthusiastically thrown my hat in with those who purport to read the city; I have picked and hunted for the obscure volumes which I hope will allow me to enter their hallowed halls through recitation of the Sacred Names of the Lost Rivers, and gestured endlessly toward the notions which underpin their fictions.

For the most part, my own experiments in drift have been confined to the northern shores and, due to a specific confluence of geographical happenstance and the practicalities of car-engine maintenance, to the mysterious islets of the dead between Maida Vale and Ladbroke Grove; ghost country, the lands of the west. Too dead even for Ballard.

Think London as Mappa Mundi: wealth and comfort in the west, wealth and sterility in the far north, squalor and industry in the east (less of the latter these days — heritage docks, churches turned Starbucks), and in the south, a cliché Heart of Darkness. Incongruous strips of pristine brickwork along the river, a seething, churning mess we’d rather not think about.

It’s uncharted territory, our own little Third World, just a little too feral for the tame psychogeographer. Not the heritage poverty of the East End, this is the real thing, waving a shattered bottle in your face and ranting a cloud of whiskey fumes before smacking you down and stripping you to your frame. There’s a reason sorcerers don’t cross running water; down here, they’d be trading your scrying glass for rocks within the hour.

But then it hits me, walking from tube to Thameslink at the Elephant, the peak of the delta — Old Kent Road another Nile, tarmac khem, its length vanishing off toward an unknown source in the mythic lands supposed to exist outside the M25. And here at the peak of the delta are the tunnels.