Alan Moore - Jerusalem

An atavistic pineal tingle tells him that he’s being watched, an ingrained P.I. reflex critical to his imaginary line of work. Swivelling his extraordinary profile, like the cliff-face simulacrum of an Indian chief in Fortean Times , he glares uphill to where a rotund little man with curly white hair and a matching beard, possibly one of Santa’s helpers, stands poised apprehensively on Marefair’s corner. The rube’s face, bespectacled eyes wide and fixed on Studs with an expression of startled incomprehension, rings a faint ’40s hotel reception bell in his recall, sets him to shifting the half-empty coffee cups and stacked pornography from his internal filing cabinet, sifting through the outdated mug-sheets for a moniker to go with the familiar, shifty features.

As the piece of work turns hurriedly away like he’s pretending that he hasn’t just been clocking the detective, making across Marefair for the other side and pointedly not looking back, the penny drops. The interloper on Studs’ private made-for-TV drama is the former councillor James Cockie, that same jovial countenance affixed beside the header of a weekly column in the local Chronicle & Echo , copies of which he’s perused while staying at his mum’s place. This being the code name for his office. You can’t be too careful.

Watching the retired council head laboriously roll his fleshy snowball off up Horsemarket towards the Mayorhold, the unfrozen Piltdown man-hunter reflects on Cockie’s late but perhaps pertinent arrival in this last stretch of the storyline. While technically the genre generally demands the killer be a character the readers or the viewers have been introduced to early in the game, there’s always those convention-bucking mavericks like Derek Raymond, with his greasy beret still behind the bar down at the French in Soho, mimicking real life in that the culprit’s often no one who’s been seen before. In oddball works like that, Studs soberly reflects, the tale turns out to have been more about the labyrinthine mental processes of the protagonist than the contortions of the case he’s trying desperately to solve. That said, there’s no compelling literary imperative that rules out the ex-councillor from the inquiry. With the former Labour politician’s dwindling mass receding from view in a slow red shift, Studs puts it all together.

Having had, presumably, a hand or at the very best a chubby finger in the neighbourhood’s brutal demise while still in office, even if entirely passively, Jim Cockie fits the profile. There was that look in his bugged Tex Avery eyes, furtive and guilty, right before he’d turned around and walked off in a hurry. Don’t they say, if you wait long enough, the murderer always returns to where it happened, to the crime scene? Sometimes it’s to gloat, or sometimes in a panic-stricken effort to conceal incriminating evidence. Occasionally, so they tell him, it’s to masturbate, although Studs doubts if that would be the motive in this current instance. Once in a long while, of course, the perp’s compulsion to revisit the chalk outlines of their killing ground might be born of a genuine remorse.

Uphill, the new prime suspect is diminishing away to nothingness like a white phosphor dot shrinking into the starless vastness of a cooling 1950s telly. Curling his lower lip until he’s worried that it could roll up and travel down his chin, the stumped P.I. turns south and heads back down the way he came. He knows that Cockie is protected; knows that he could never get a case to stick. Forget it, Studs. It’s Chinatown.

The triangles and diamonds of a stencilled sky behind the old gas-holder hulking further down the slope are starting their decline to indigo, and he can feel the utter jet of night descending on whatever narrative he’s in, the big obsidian coming down upon this over-complicated continuity with desperate hours to go before tomorrow morning and his rendezvous with Warren at her exhibition. He heads back to where he left the, oh, he doesn’t know, time-travelling De Lorean or something, with his craggy head a place of gothic transepts and determinism, the soul-crushing clockwork of the hackneyed, billiard-ball plot trajectory, this character-arc passing for a life.

He thinks of crosses, double-crosses and the Mr. Big behind the scenes pulling the strings for Hervey, Wesley, Swedenborg and all the rest, the man upstairs who’s always careful to keep out the picture, an elusive boss of night and mortal intrigue, frequently reported dead but always with some wiggle room left for a sequel.

He locates his car in the protracted slow dissolve of twilight, drives home, checks to see if any casting agencies have left a message, eats his warmed-up dinner, goes to bed. After a great while and a mug of Horlicks, everything goes noir.

Den wakes beneath the windswept porch alone

On bone-hard slab rubbed smooth by Sunday feet

Where afternoon light leans, fatigued and spent,

Ground to which he feels no entitlement

Nor any purchase on the sullen street;

Unpeels his chill grey cheek from chill grey stone

Then orients himself in time and space.

The roof’s a black-ribbed spine viewed from the floor

With on one wall some obsolete decree

Meant for the Cypriot community

And at the near end an iron-studded door,

A Bible-cover slammed shut in his face,

Or that of some more academic tome.

He struggles up onto one threadbare knee.

Moved on by night, he’s slept instead by day

Beneath Saint Peter’s covered entranceway

Thanks to the shame of university

And a conviction that he can’t go home,

Can’t face his parents, ask yet more reprieves

Of those who’ve done so much, left in the lurch

Through furthering Den’s literary bent.

He’s stopped attending lectures, blown the rent

To shelter in this all but disused church,

A sweat of monsters beading on its eaves,

This sentry-box in lieu of an address.

Yearning to write, he’s learned to teach from men

With targets, goals to which they must adhere,

Themselves regretting the proffered career

That he’s let go. His failures pounce while Den

Still fumbles at the latch of consciousness

In this, his latest of unfixed abodes.

Twenty last week and homeless, that’s the thing,

Ambitions snuffed and dreams long since wrung out,

A student loan he dare not think about

Here in his hutch, its corners harbouring

Their soil and silver foil in abject lodes

When all he’s ever craved is poetry,

The fire that Keats and Blake and Ginsburg had.

To be it, not to teach it. He can’t bear

Chalk-dusted years of common-room despair

Nor the reproof of hard-up Mum and Dad

Who’ve gone without for his tuition fee.

Thus one door closes, while another shuts

Where Offa’s sons raised the communion cup.

To doss in Saxon palaces and forts

Might hold, he thinks, a poetry of sorts

So with a sigh he stands and gathers up

His bag as though it were his spilling guts,

Recalling meanwhile that it’s Friday night

With, just for once, somewhere he’s meant to be:

Some bald guy who’s got drugs, up Tower Street way,

Offering dreamtime and a place to stay.