China Mieville - Kraken

“… Look, I don’t appreciate the way you’re-”

“Yeah, I don’t appreciate you gabbing away when you was told not to.” She gave him an address. He frowned as he scribbled it on some takeout menu.

“Where? That’s Cricklewood. That’s nowhere near the museum. What’s…? Why did they send someone from up there down to the museum…?”

“We’re done, mate. Just get there. Tomorrow.” She rang off and left him staring at the mouthpiece in his chilly room. The windows made sounds in the wind, as if they were bowing. Billy stared at the phone. He was annoyed that he felt obliged to acquiesce to that last order.

BILLY HAD BAD DREAMS. HE WAS NOT THE ONLY ONE. THERE WAS no way yet he could know that night sweats were citywide. Hundreds of people who did not know each other, who did not compare their symptoms, slept harried. It was not the weather.

It meant a trek, that meeting to which he had been ordered, that he pretended to himself to consider ignoring. He considered, or, again, pretended to consider, calling his father. Of course he did not. He started to dial Leon’s number but again did not. There was nothing to add to what he had said. He wanted to tell someone else about the disappearance, that strange theft. He auditioned recipients of that phone call in his mind, but his energy to do so, to say anything, kept spilling out, left him repeatedly.

That squirrel was still there. He was sure it was the same animal that watched him from behind the gutter, like a dug-in soldier. Billy did not go in to work. Was not even sure if anyone was in that day and did not call to check. He called no one.

At last-late, as the sky became grey and flat, later than his rude interlocutor had desired, in some feeble faux disobedience-he set out from his block by a commercial yard near Manor House for a 253 bus. He walked through scuffing food wrappers, through newspapers, through flyers urging repentance being peeled one by one by the wind from a discarded pile. In the bus he looked down on the low flat roofs of bus shelters, plinths for leaves.

In Camden he took a Tube, came up again a few steps on for another bus. He checked his mobile repeatedly, but all he received was one text from Leon-LOST NE MORE TREASURES?? On that last leg Billy looked into areas of London he did not know but that felt tuggingly familiar, with their middling businesses and cheap eateries, the lampposts where unlit Christmas street ornaments put up early in readiness or left unplucked a whole year dangled like strange washing. He wore headphones, listened to a soundclash between MIA and an up-and-coming rapper. Billy wondered why he had not thought to insist the police just pick him up, if they were going to have their HQ in this ridiculously out-of-the-way patch.

Walking, even through his headphones Billy was startled by noises. For the first time ever outside the corridors of the Darwin Centre, he heard or imagined that glass noise. The light in that early evening was wrong. Everything’s screwed up, he thought. As if the fat spindle of the Architeuthis’s body had been slotted in and holding something in place. Billy felt like a lid unsecured and banging in the wind.

The station was just off the high street, much larger than he expected. It was one of those very ugly London buildings in mustard bricks that, instead of weathering grandly like their red Victorian ancestors, never age, but just get dirtier and dirtier.

He waited a long time in the waiting area. Twice he got up and asked to see Mulholland. “We’ll be with you shortly, sir,” said the first officer he asked. “And who the fuck’s he?” said the second. Billy grew more and more irritated, turning the pages of old magazines.

“Mr. Harrow? Billy Harrow?”

The man coming toward him was not Mulholland. He was small and skinny and trimly kempt. In his fifties, in plain clothes, a dated brown suit. He had his hands behind his back. As he waited, he leaned forward and up on his toes more than once, a dancey little tic.

“Mr. Harrow?” he said in a voice thin like his moustache. He shook Billy’s hand. “I’m Chief Inspector Baron. You met my colleague, Mulholland?”

“Yeah, where is he?”

“Yes, no. He’s not here. I’m taking over this investigation, Mr. Harrow. Sort of.” He tilted his head. “Apologies for keeping you waiting, and thank you very much for coming in.”

“What do you mean you’re taking over?” Billy said. “Whoever it was spoke to me last night didn’t… She was bloody rude, to be honest.”

“Though I suppose with us lot taking over your labs,” Baron said, “where else were you going to go, eh? I suppose there’ll be no pickling for you till we’re done, I’m afraid. Maybe you can think of it as a holiday.”

“Seriously, what’s the score?” Baron led Billy down striplit corridors. In the white light Billy realised how dirty his glasses were. “Why’ve you taken over? And you’re way out here… I mean, no offense…”

“Anyway,” said Baron. “I promise we won’t keep you any longer than we have to.”

“I’m not sure what it is I can do for you,” Billy said. “I already told you lot everything I know. I mean, that was Mulholland. Did he mess up then? Are you a cleaner-upper?”

Baron stopped and faced Billy. “It’s like a film, this, isn’t it?” he said. He smiled. “You say, ‘But I’ve told your officers everything,’ and I say, ‘Well now you can tell me,’ and you don’t trust me and we dance a little bit and then eventually after a few more questions you get to look horrified and say, ‘What, you think I had something to do with this?’ And we go round and round.”

Billy was speechless. Baron did not stop smiling.

“Rest assured, Mr. Harrow,” he said. “That is not what’s going on here. My absolute honour.” He held his hand up in a scout pledge.

“I never thought…” Billy managed to say.

“So having made that clear,” Baron said, “do you reckon we can dispense with the rest of the script and you can give me a hand? That’s a blinder, Mr. Harrow.” His little voice fluted. “That’s peachy. Now let’s get this done.”

It was Billy’s first time in an interview room. It was just like on telly. Small, beige, windowless. On the far side of a table were a woman and another man. The man was in his forties, tall and powerful. He wore a nondescript dark suit. His hair was receding, his haircut severe. He clasped his heavy hands and regarded Billy levelly.

The first thing Billy noticed about the woman was her youth. She was out of her teens maybe, but not by much. She was, he realized, the policewoman who’d done a brief cameo at the museum. She had on a blue Metropolitan Police uniform, but it was worn more informally than he would have expected her to get away with. It was not buttoned up, was a bit thrown-on. Clean, but rucked, hitched, and tweaked. She had on more makeup than he would have thought permissible, too, and her blonde hair was messily fancily styled. She looked like a pupil obeying the letter but straining against the spirit of school uniform rules. She did not even glance at him, and he could not see her face more clearly.

“Right then,” said Baron. The other man nodded. The young WPC leaned against the wall and fiddled with a mobile phone.

“Tea?” said Baron, gesturing Billy to a chair. “Coffee? Absinthe? I’m joking of course. I would say ‘Cigarette?’ but these days, you know.”

“No, I’m fine.” Billy said. “I’d like to just-”

“Of course, of course. Alright then.” Baron sat and pulled bits of paper from his pockets and searched through them. The scattiness was not convincing. “Tell me about yourself, Mr. Harrow. You’re a curator, I think?”