Alan Moore - Jerusalem

He reaches for another biro and then cancels the reflexive gesture halfway through. His croaker tells him he should scale his habit down to maybe just a fountain pen once in a while, on weekends or at special celebrations. Ah, the hell with it. He pushes back his chair and rises from his dressing table in the hope that some activity might take his steel-trap P.I. brain-box off his cravings. Studs goes through to the front office, tricked out to resemble a carpeted landing, staircase and English suburban downstairs hall to throw his creditors and gangland adversaries off the scent, and checks the message on the answerphone.

“Bob, for fuck’s sake, what’s that voice about? You sound like you’re an old Etonian child-molester. This is Alma, by the way. Sorry to call you at your mum’s, but if you’re coming to the show tomorrow don’t forget to bring along the Blake stuff that I asked you to dig up, assuming you’ve come up with anything. If not, it’s no big deal. Just never speak to me again. And why is Robert Goodman not in at the moment? Is he playing polo? ‘Robert Goodman’. Bob, nobody calls you Robert. To be frank, most people aren’t polite enough to even call you Bob. Most people groan and make a sort of gesture with their hands. Then they sit down, and then they cry. They cry like babies, Bob, at the idea of your existence. Anyway, I hope to see the Blake material at the exhibition, with you holding it if absolutely necessary. Take care, Bobby. Never change. Talk to you soon.”

His blood, he notices, is not immediately turned to ice there in his veins. That’s storybook detective stuff and in real life the best that he can manage is pink slush, but, still, it ain’t a pretty feeling. Sure, Studs knows the name, the voice, the avalanche of undeserved abuse. He knows the dame: a long, tall drink of battery acid going by the moniker of Alma Warren. Think of those surprisingly large clots of hair you sometimes haul from a blocked bathtub trap, and then imagine one with eyes and a superior demeanour: right there’s a description that a police sketch artist could work from. She’s the kind of cast-iron frail you don’t forget without hypnosis, and yet somehow the whole Warren case has slipped Studs’ bullet-creased and woman-addled mind until just now, this moment.

How it is with Warren, she’s got some variety of modern art scam going for her where the rubes pay out big bucks to see her schizophrenic scribbles. Months back, Studs called in at her bohemian dump along East Park Parade, just up the street from where he used to flop when he was living in here in town, presumably at some point after his tough hard-knock boyhood in the Bowery district of New York, or Brooklyn, or wherever it was Studs grew up. It’s only backstory. He’ll figure it out later. Anyway, he’d dropped by at the artist’s squalid dive to find her working frantically amidst billowing cumuli of contraband, bewildering images in different media propped all around the parlour until Studs had felt like he was trapped inside some kind of busted Grateful Dead kaleidoscope. Between pulls on a reefer long enough to qualify as penis envy and erratic daubs at her unfathomable canvas, she’d explained she was preparing something like three dozen pieces for a new show she was holding in the run-down neighbourhood where she’d grown up. Studs frankly doubts it was as rough and desperate as his own upbringing in the mean streets of the Bronx — perhaps Hell’s Kitchen, Satan’s Bidet, somewhere colourful like that — although by all accounts the Boroughs is still having lousy luck. Warren’s old district ain’t just on the wrong side of the tracks, it’s on the tracks themselves, in pieces and squashed flat by near eight hundred years of rumbling social locomotion.

He remembers having an unpleasant run-in with the place back in his childhood, when his parents had insisted that he take dance-classes at the Marjorie Pitt-Draffen School in Phoenix Street, around the back of Doddridge Church. Or was it him, insisting on the dance class? Studs, his memory crammed full of bodies, barrooms and the brunettes he’s let slip between his fingers, can’t recall. It doesn’t matter. The important thing is that he had to wear a kilt. A nine-year-old boy in a kilt, taken to dancing classes in a thug-menagerie like Alma Warren’s former neighbourhood. Studs thinks that ought to count as child abuse. He’s mentioned it to Warren and her only comment had been that if she’d encountered him back then she’d more or less have been compelled to beat him up: “Posh kids in kilts, it’s one of the unwritten laws”. Now that Studs thinks about it, he was beaten up more often as a soft-centred young schoolboy than as a hard-bitten private eye, and on the great majority of those childhood occasions he was wearing ordinary trousers. He suspects the business with the kilt is only part of the equation.

The real kicker is that the dishevelled artist’s show is scheduled for tomorrow, and that furthermore it’s taking place at the day nursery in Phoenix Street which used to be the Marjorie Pitt-Draffen School. This exhibition is connected with the case she wanted Studs to take up when he called to see her that day on East Park Parade. As Warren had explained it to him then, she had twenty or thirty pieces finished but the subject matter wasn’t all connecting up the way she hoped it would. From Studs’ perspective it was like she’d loaded up a sawn-off shotgun with a buckshot of significance then fired it at a wall expecting the blast-pattern to make sense. There were some images inspired by hymns, a tile arrangement based upon the life of local Holy Joe Phil Doddridge and some nonsense that concerned a stone cross brought here from Jerusalem. One picture seemed to be a likeness of Ben Perrit, a poetic rummy Studs knows from back in the day, and there was some mixed-media business meant to represent determinism and the absence of free will, or at least that’s what the pot-saturated painter claimed. In Studs’ opinion, Warren’s exhibition is a random four-lane pile-up of ideas with nothing joining them together, and to make things worse she seems to think the whole mess should somehow connect with William Blake.

“I mean, I’ve got a lot of references to my family having come from Lambeth, but I’m thinking it needs something more substantial, something that pulls all the themes together. So, Bob, that’s what I want you to do. Find out how Blake ties into all of this. Find out what links Blake with the Boroughs and I promise that I’ll paint you, Bobby. I’ll immortalise you, and together we’ll inflict your face upon a blameless future. How’s that for an offer?”

Studs’ opinion, which he didn’t venture at the time, is that the offer is a standard Alma Warren contract in that it involves no actual money. Immortality and £1.50 will buy Studs another pack of biros. Still, it’s work, and he accepted it. The paint-flecked hag has Studs over a barrel and if he can’t make good on the case he knows he’s finished in this town. Warren will see to it. She knows too much about him, all those stories buried in his violent past that he prefers to keep that way. He grimaces as he recalls the time he bumped into her on the Kettering Road and she’d asked, no doubt in an affectation of concern, why he was limping.

“Well, I was, uh … I was in Abington Park last night, up by the bandstand. As you know, I like to keep my hand in with the acting. What I do is, I rehearse parts so that I’ll be ready if I’m offered them. It was a sort of secret agent role where the scene opened with me standing on the bandstand and then, at a signal, what I do is vault over the handrail and land on the grass so that I’m in a cat-like pose. I look around, scanning the darkness, then run off into the shadows.”

Warren had just stared at him, blinking her creepy eyes in disbelief.