Nicholas Royle - Regicide

I looked at it for a minute or two but couldn’t work out where it represented. So I switched off the main light and went into the back office where I made coffee, pulled the anglepoise lamp down over the desk and lit a cigarette.

I studied that map. I gave it twenty minutes’ solid concentration. I don’t give up easily once I feel I’m on to something. I’d always enjoyed crossword puzzles, word games, Scrabble. It’s the challenge of figuring out something to which you know there is an answer. It’s just a question of working it out.

I knew North London well enough to be certain it was not north of the river and my knowledge of South, East and West London was good enough to be fairly sure it was, in fact, nowhere in the capital. And yet it looked like someone had needed to go somewhere and they had taken the A — Z and photocopied a page to take with them because they didn’t want to carry the whole thing. Then they’d dropped their page in the street. A London street, which would suggest they were going somewhere in London. But it wasn’t London. By the end of twenty minutes I was confident enough to put money on it being out of town. I’d been looking for clues in the street names to what provincial city it might be part of, but there was nothing, no mention of the Tyne or the Potteries, no name check for the Malverns, the Chilterns or the Peaks. There weren’t any obvious Irish, Scots, Welsh or Cornish names. They were all bland, English street names. I’d walked down several of them in different cities but not on the same page.

I would have to look at my A — Zs when I got home.

At this stage the map was just a diversion, a puzzle that I expected would keep me occupied for a day or two until I found out whereabouts in the country the streets on it were located. It looked like an area quite close to a city centre. Some of the roads were densely packed. There were long straight drives and grids of narrow streets. There was a park, a canal and railway lines and I would have said from the movement towards the top of the page that the city centre lay just to the north. An inch south of where it started getting busy there was an estate where the streets curved around and around like that game of solitaire where you have to get the ball to the middle of the maze. There was even a little circle at the centre.

I stubbed out my second cigarette, put the map back in my pocket and switched off the light. I sat for a moment looking through the doorway into the darkened shop. Passing cars splashed light over the racks of dog-eared LP sleeves, flashing in the CD cases in the wall-mounted display units. I liked the silence after the continuous noise of the day. I have always liked busy places best when they are empty. It’s partly because I’m there and all the other people are not, and partly it’s that although they’ve gone they’re still very much in mind because of the traces they leave: echoes, memories, smells, a door left open, a dropped glove or, in the case of my shop, a misfiled LP sleeve or a list written in felt tip that says, ‘Only Ones, Dead or Alive, P. Furs, The Servant(?)’.

I hesitated at the door. It had started to rain. Rear lights melted into red pools as cars braked for the stop sign. I hoped the original owner of the map fragment wasn’t wandering around getting wet and hopelessly lost. Then, as I was turning the key in the lock to let myself out, the phone began to ring. I thought about leaving it because the shop was closed, but it was possible it was someone who’d tried me at home and wanted to get hold of me. I left the door unlocked and darted back into the little office.

‘Hello,’ I said, and as soon as I’d said it I knew there was no one there. I heard that same metallic sound I’d heard on the phone at home the night before. Then a whole train of olfactory hallucinations kicked in. I imagined I could smell axle grease and diesel oil and the peculiar tang of rusty cast iron.

My imagination, I told myself as I got up to go. As I was leaving the office, my eye alighted on an old tool box I’d stashed under the desk a few weeks earlier after I’d been doing some emergency repair-work on the car. There was an oily rag sticking out of the top section. I smiled to myself. Imagination overload. I nipped up the back stairs to use the toilet.

Walking to my car I realised I was looking twice at everything I saw, watching taxis and buses and pedestrians. As if I were looking for something without knowing what.

The rain had stopped but my car was covered with droplets. From a distance of thirty yards, because of the streetlamp directly above it, it looked as if it were encrusted with jewels. Once I was behind the wheel I took the pack of Camels from my boot and hit the lighter in the dash. The car started on the third attempt and the lighter clicked out. I raised it to my cigarette, averting my eyes from the glowing spiral filament.

I drove home slowly, avoiding puddles wherever possible because the engine on the Escort did not react well to direct contact with water. The Hong Kong Garden looked inviting — as it did every night of the week — so I went in and ordered hot and sour soup and fried chicken with pineapple and waited while it was prepared.

I was halfway through my dinner when I remembered the map. I didn’t know why I kept forgetting it. Five minutes later I had the map open on the coffee table, the London A — Z, my food and a can of Sapporo. Things were looking up. I went right through the A — Z, checking every page. I picked out a couple of the street names from the map and tried them out on the A — Z index. They were in there, but not on the same page.

Finally I was satisfied that what I had already believed was indeed the case. The streets on the map were nowhere to be found in London.

I also had A — Zs for Birmingham, Manchester and Newcastle. Before looking for them — I wasn’t entirely sure where they were — I stuck on a CD. Something by Vangelis seemed right, just to play in the background while I got on with my search. I chose The City , because it seemed kind of appropriate, and turned the volume low. The downstairs tenant was out — I was on the second floor at the top of the building, there was one tenant on the first floor and the Hong Kong Garden occupied the ground floor. I was glad he was out. When he was in, my life was like a film with a heavy metal soundtrack.

I found the other A — Zs on a bookshelf in the bathroom and spent half an hour or so looking through them before concluding that the streets on the map were not to be found in Birmingham, Manchester or Newcastle.

Obsessive behaviour? I guess so, but to me it didn’t seem all that different from trying to complete a crossword puzzle. It occupied my mind and stopped me thinking about Annie Risk. I took out a road atlas and pored over that for a while, studying the city centre street maps in the back and glancing through the place names in the index.

The following evening, after I’d locked up the shop around 6pm, I drove into town, parked up by Russell Square and walked over to Charing Cross Road. I had the map in my pocket and an hour or so in hand before the bookshops closed. In a succession of basements, enveloped by the smell of new books, I checked the indexes of every A — Z and every street plan for all the major towns and cities in the UK. I checked Cork and Dublin. The map didn’t figure anywhere. I’d ruled out Australia and America and former colonies.

It was 9.30pm when I arrived home, which I thought sounded like a pretty good time to phone Annie Risk. It was likely she would tell me to fuck off but I couldn’t just let it go.

I rang the number and she answered. The conversation went something like this.

‘Aw, go on.’

‘No.’

She wasn’t interested in a relationship. She’d recently broken up with someone and the experience had left her wary of men in general. She wasn’t ready to try again. I said there’d be no pressure, no commitments on either side, we’d see each other when we both wanted to etc. ‘Doesn’t sound like much of a relationship,’ she said. Oh, and she said no. She kept on saying no.