London Noir

FULL MOON RISING by JESSICA PALMER

The tiny coffin stood, a silent indictment against society and man. About two feet long and a foot wide, it was about the same size as a shipping carton. Certainly, it did not need the two pallbearers who now carried it. A single man could have lifted it easily and tucked it underneath his arm, without even raising a sweat.

Outside the chapel life went on as usual. Tourist boats chugged up and down the Thames. Cars sped through the Blackwall Tunnel and the Woolwich Ferry did its slow relentless glide back and forth across the waters. Children played and people went about their business oblivious to this small life that had ended too soon.

The men moved the coffin gently into position upon the upraised dais and centred it before the discreetly-curtained doors to the crematorium. Detective Superintendent Mark Noble grimaced as he heard the whisper of metal coasters on a belt that was meant to accommodate far greater weights.

The detective didn’t normally attend the funerals of victims, but this case had touched his heart as few others had. Some would say he was getting soft, but the emotion he felt was anything but malleable. Rather he felt the hard knot of fury and rage. No, outrage. Outrage against a legal system that perpetuated crime. A system that paralysed by protocols. A system that saw the habitual criminal turned loose ‘on a technicality’ and society’s victims on trial.

The government’s recent White Paper proposed to change the system even more, centralizing it here in London, as if the police didn’t have enough to keep them busy. And introducing a quota system. All in the name of efficiency. Noble snorted. Police work was dehumanizing enough without concocting a scheme where crimes were numbers on a rating scale and victims were seen through the haze of statistics and the spectacles of distance.

The officer eyed the coffin. Perhaps that was why he was here because the clear line that had once divided right and wrong had shifted, getting slippery in his grasp. Even his concept of victim and criminal had blurred, as the social welfare system in London disintegrated and the economy worsened. Noble could no longer look at hookers – whether they plied their trade in Piccadilly, Soho, Kensington or near the docks – as anything other than casualties in a war where there were no winners. Once, when he had still been in uniform, Noble had been able to regard the homeless of cardboard city as vagrants, nothing more. Now that they cluttered all of London’s streets, the officer found he couldn’t even make that simple distinction without a great deal of soul-searching.

Since Noble had transferred to London’s eastern Area Two some three years ago, the quality of crime had changed. Its ferocity and brutality had increased. Battery and violence within the home were up, as families instead of pulling together were being pulled apart. Since Noble had been moved to the Major Investigative Team, or AMIT, he only saw it when it reached its ultimate conclusion – death. He coped by carefully closeting his emotions and keeping them under lock and key, or so he thought. He would have liked to believe that he was immune to most things, but not this, not this tiny casket and its sad burden.

The victim had been less than six weeks old. If he remembered correctly with his own children, not even old enough to lift its head and flip from back to tummy unassisted. At that age an infant was a bundle of reflexes. It was like a tiny toy or a marionette, who would be manipulated by touch, movement or sound. Brush something lightly against the bottom of the foot, and the tiny toes curled. Turn its head and watch the arms extend or contract, much like the adult reaction when a doctor tapped upon the lax knee.

A long time ago when his children were young, Noble could have listed the reflexes by name. Hadn’t his wife made him read enough books before the birth of their first? As though parenting was something you could learn like French or Latin. The detective smiled at the memory. Someone next to him coughed, and he hid his smile behind his hand.

But every time the officer recalled the fragile head encased in a bin liner, its base clamped shut with a string, his blood would boil. What crime could the child commit to deserve this punishment? Had it cried too loud and too long? Although the death was not an ungentle one. The child had been sleeping, for the expression was one of repose and not one contorted by fear or infantile rage. The constricting band had been barely tight enough to leave an impression upon soft skin. Just enough pressure had been applied to ensure no air would reach it. In all likelihood, the child had not even been aware of what was happening. The very affection of the act confused him.

That the deed required a certain measure of premeditation, he had no doubt. Who would keep string or bin liners at a baby’s bedside? Both, if they somehow managed to make it into the infant’s cot, could be quite lethal even if there had been no ill-intent.

At this point the Detective Superintendent looked around the small assembly. Only a few people dotted the pews. They clustered in the groups – each leaning into others for support, their weeping muffled – well away from the police and their solitary prisoner. The father was conspicuously absent, but Noble couldn’t blame him for not wanting to confront this sad bundle or to gaze upon his wife’s face. It was said that he had something of a drink problem, and Noble could well imagine the man – his face slack with drink sitting in a darkened living room, marking this occasion in his own way.

There would be little love lost between estranged husband and wife. The husband had reported the crime, and his behaviour had been cold and distant – not with horror and shock – but rather as though his wife and her actions were beneath contempt. Although it couldn’t always have been so, for the woman was covered in bruises. He had beat her. Noble had not questioned it – then. What man would after such a discovery? Now Noble wondered how much time had lapsed between discovery and the call. Long enough to give the wife a sound thrashing, or had the beating preceded the crime?

At first, Noble thought the father’s callous demeanour was a natural reaction, a barrier he erected between himself and the incident. The officer believed that grief would come in its own time, and most likely in solitude, but since then he had seen little to indicate mourning. The husband was indifferent to the child and wife alike – as though even his daughter’s death was not worthy of comment – and the wife had already been supplanted, another woman moving in to take her place.

Knowing this, Noble found he could sympathize with the wife. The woman said not a word in her own defence. She sat mute through interrogation, staring at her feet. Not even flinching to questions shouted within inches of her ear. Unwilling to give by breath or sign any information that would either deny or edify. As if she accepted what was coming to her as her due. In fact, Noble surmised that if she had been willing to speak, she would have probably advocated the reinstatement of hanging just for her benefit, as though she longed to join her child.

And the detective was learning to admire the woman’s reticence. Her silence wasn’t sullen, recalcitrant, or stubbornly belligerent as often observed in criminals. It was acquiescent, even stoic. She simply had nothing to say. She had done the deed and that was all that need to be said. She would neither justify it nor rationalize it to anyone, not even the lawyer who would speak for the defence.

This case seemed to underscore the already distorted demarcation between offender and victim, for Noble sensed more than one victim. He couldn’t help but believe that there was something more here. Something more than what was immediately apparent. Perhaps, he didn’t like a case where the culprit was handed to them on a plate. It was a little too simple, a little too pat, and he had learned that life didn’t come in neat little packages, with crisp clean edges like the coffin that sat forlornly on the altar. It came with raged rim and overlapping lines where nothing was clear-cut or defined.

He examined the woman out of the corner of his eye. The purple bruises had faded to a greenish-yellow. Had the husband killed the child and then beaten the mother into accepting the guilt? No, Noble did not believe the father would have been so tender in the act if he had. Moreover, it seemed unlikely that she would compliantly accept guilt once the threat of violence was removed. Perhaps the beating had preceded the crime, but he couldn’t know for sure. The best medical science had to offer, besides the diagnosis of concussion, was: ‘recent’. And neither husband nor wife were willing to clarify. The husband mumbled vaguely about a fall, and the woman said nothing to contradict him.

Despite the enormity of the crime, the detective found himself wanting to excuse her behaviour. To locate some extenuating circumstance that would have absolved her. She could not plead poverty – it was strange the things a man can do in an economy both depressed and depressing but the couple were not one of the down-and-out who huddled in cramped bedsits throughout London’s east side. Neither were they one of the many whose bread-winner suddenly found himself out of work and their homes under siege from banks and creditors.

The husband had some high-pressure job in the City. Each day he passed into an area cordoned off from the rest of London by checkpoints, past the shattered remains of the building destroyed in the latest IRA attack. His offices were all chromium and glass where men in charcoal grey suits, sitting in front of high tech equipment that linked them to the economies of the world, behaved like children, shouting to one another as the market fluctuated erratically. Robert Simon must have been good at his job if he was still employed. His colleagues spoke highly of his skill, if not of him. He was, they said, one of the movers and the shakers in the City, and Noble detected the note of envy in their voices when they spoke of him. Simon seemed to have an instinct for which stocks to unload when, and which flagging stock might be bought for a fraction of its worth – right before its upsurge. He was like a wolf scenting blood. He capitalized on other people’s pain.

The Simons’ Docklands flat was spacious. Huge! So large that only the living areas were furnished. ‘Flat’ was probably not the right term to describe it – too down market. In one of the many new constructions, it was more like a penthouse and probably wouldn’t have been affordable even to Robert Simon except in this economic climate. The plate glass windows in every room gave panoramic views of London that took Noble’s breath away. Still, the officer didn’t like the place. More like a mausoleum than a home, the Docklands flat with its stark white walls left him feeling cold. The officer definitely preferred his own little mansionette in Greenwich. Right down to the fence that needed mending and the furniture that was worn by too many years’ use.

Everything about this case bothered him. The wife was not young enough to be ruled by passion, but then the act did not appear to be one of passion. Neither was she one of the uneducated. Margaret Simon had an advanced degree in economics and had also held a lucrative job in the City before leaving it for the fairy-tale image of home and family. Theirs should have been a marriage blessed.

With that thought, Noble swung to scrutinize the prisoner. He had asked for leave from remand, contacting the Prison Service at Holloway and obtaining permission which would allow her to attend the service. He had hoped that they would pierce the armour behind which she hid. Bracketed by guards, Margaret Simon moved as if one dead, unaware of her surroundings as they herded her into the pews. She sat where and when they told her. Her head turned neither left nor right. Only as the casket was carried up the short aisle did a cry escape her lips and a shiver run throughout her body, and again Noble wondered what had motivated her…

Pain exploded across her face as the fist plunged. The clenched hand rose to a wicked crescent that hovered above her head. And it fell, gaining width and girth as it dropped, growing fat like the pregnant moon. Rising and falling until it filled her horizon. And her world had grown so small, the instant so frozen, that she had time to observe the texture of his skin, to contemplate the tiny cracks and crevices, the soft down of hair, and bony prominence of knuckles. Like the mountains of the moon. Large and then small, the waxing and waning moon, it descended over and over again to clip her about the head, neck and shoulders.

She felt warm blood spill, as his ring tore her skin from cheek to chin. The hand that moved away was tinged the colour of blood. A harvest moon. Had enough of the Margaret Simon who graduated with honours from Pembroke College, Oxford remained, she might have noted the irony in the fact it was his wedding band, symbol of their union and her bondage, that sliced into her flesh. But all that was left her under the weighty hand of castigation was the primeval part which crawled and whimpered, and blindly hoped to survive.

The fist glancing off her cheek caused her head to rebound against the wall, and set the room to whirling about her, and strange voices slithered into her head.

Crack!

Margaret crept from the rain of blows. Down the long hall and into the bedroom, he followed her. And she stopped short, realizing belatedly that their argument might wake the baby.

A foot in the ribs. Oomph! And she bit her tongue, lest the moan or sob should escape from her lips. The flat of his hand alongside her head crying retribution for some transgression, she didn’t know what.

Crack!

All comprehension of time had vanished, vacated with the human forebrain. All that was left was mammalian reflex, and this moment, this battery of blows was eternal, as if her mind at this minimal level could understand what her conscious mind could not. That this sort of behaviour, once started, would not stop but could only dissolve into bigger and worse violence. In some dim small part of her mind she could see this happening, year in and year out, until one of them died.

Bang! Crash! A lamp fell over, and she held her breath waiting for Ruth’s thready wail. The fist swung decisively, and she realized it was no time to wait. No time to wonder why. No time to reflect on what had set him off. If she endured the attack, there would be enough time to ponder the events immediately prior, worrying at it like a dog with a bone. Time enough later to question. In extremis, she was beyond blaming. She could neither reprove nor accuse. All she could do was react, holding hands over her head instinctively to ward off the repeated blows.

Later she could recall their whirlwind romance and regret the love that had died under his savagery. The fantasy match, which her friends had all envied, come to this. She had waited long to find the right man. So long, that her mother had started to despair, dropping none-too-veiled hints about grandchildren as yet unborn. Hints, which Margaret chose to ignore. She had been cautious, and she thought that she had chosen wisely.

Nothing in her experience could have prepared her for this. Little had she known of the black seed that grew within. Neither could she comprehend the demon that powered this evil. Although she had been forewarned, witnessing a hair-trigger temper on their second date as he cursed, kicked and spat at a flat tyre. But she had dismissed it, even found the childish display somehow endearing. Laughable, as an adult sniggers at a child who, arising after a spill, hits the offending bicycle in a fit of pique. And she swore then that she would never draw that ire upon herself.

The moon rose and fell. Upraised sickle and plummeting full. No longer a hand, but the colliding of planets inside her skull. Not content to pummel this heap of human flesh, Bob pulled her to her feet, holding her limp body against the wall by her throat. The hand arched round, and sound ceased as the impact caused the tympanic membrane to explode. It left behind a ringing. A high-pitched skreigh that was enough to drive her mad.

Another stroke. Something in her face gave, and if felt like her nose was being driven into her skull. Just as his words, punctuating his passion, drove shards into her brain that she could only understand in context. A king in his castle, man had the right to chastise an unrepentant wife.

His attention waned. Her mewling compliance sickened him and he turned his back – the dark side of the moon – withdrawing in disgust and returning to the living room and his drink. Back to the television where he had been before his attention was drawn away by the growl of the dishwasher.

With his harsh attentions gone, there was time suddenly to rue her marriage. Often she thought, perhaps, her decision to wed had been based on hormones and the silent ticking of the biological clock. The woman shook her head, still unwilling to believe, and the very motion set it to throbbing so that her temples kept time with her heart.

Margaret pulled herself into the bedroom. Inside her head, voices shrieked recrimination for unknown sins, not quite obliterated by the tinnitus of the shattered eardrum. Deserved and deserving, she endured it. For the baby, she would endure it silently.

She dragged herself upright to gaze into the cot. The sounds of London traffic receded beyond the pale of pain, and she sagged flaccidly against the wall, wondering what had gone wrong. When their marriage, so optimistically begun, had changed. And what she had done to deserve it.

The chittering voices supplied the answer in an echoing word: Sin…

Her ears rang and rang, and the voices that seem to have insulated themselves inside her head shrieked derision. T’was a woman’s lot.

Society condoned punishment and pain as retribution for sin. The teachings of the church, unheeded for years, whispered in the back of her brain. For the sins of Eve; the sins of woman ever loving man. The serpent smiles, and a woman dies a thousand tiny deaths each and every day. The moon waxes and wanes, cartilage crunches against bone. Small loss, small pain₃ small sacrifice against the millennium of blame. Eden lost.

Margaret gazed out the picture window, her eye drawn away from her immediate surroundings. She hated it here. The Docklands reminded her of some futuristic ghost town, devoid of life and human heart. Their building was virtually empty. It emphasized her isolation. For here, there was no one to hear her cries, and it seemed as though Robert understood this, for his violence had increased lately. And to whom could she turn for help? Not a neighbour. Margaret had none.

She had paid for this home, dearly – her husband taking his ire out upon her person when he learned that the extension to the tube was cancelled and realized his astute investment had gone suddenly awry – and they were trapped in this soulless place.

The wages of sin…

Outside the summer sun sank into the west in a blaze of carnelian and topaz. The Thames below turned to bright crimson and lay like a bloody plaster across the capital. From here, Margaret could see the London skyline beyond the bristle of cranes. On a clear day, she thought she could spot the domed top of St Paul’s. The sight had inspired her once. This evening it left her unmoved.

The baby breathed softly, and Margaret gulped audibly.

Poor child! No daughter should be forced to follow in her mother’s footsteps. Already Margaret knew that the fury must inevitably spill upon the child. Twice, the mother had been beaten as she interposed herself between father and child when the baby’s wails rang too loud. Once she had had to pull Robert off before he had done any real harm.

Margaret levered herself from the wall on shaky feet and turned to face the mirror. Her eyes were swollen and red. One was closed. The crimson flush was starting to darken to magenta. Her nose, it seemed, was skewed as though someone had slapped it on her face as an afterthought. She made a strangulated noise in the back throat as mocking laughter reverberated inside her mind.

And then she turned again to the sleeping infant and breathed her name, Ruth. The baby opened her eyes and Margaret saw herself reflected therein. And the woman trembled, with fear and poignant pain.

Let not the sins of the mother be visited upon the child. And what greater sin could she think of than marriage to this man? Margaret would not, could not, let her daughter suffer at his hands.

The voices whispered on, reverberating inside her skull, filling the hushed room.

Her gaze drifted to the empty bin liner. It lay where she had left it on the bedside table. Her husband’s tirade calling halt to her activities as she tidied up Ruth’s room for the night. On top of the bag, the cord and the mobile she had brought that day lay, ready to be hung over the cot.

Let not the sins…

The tiny face screwed up to bellow, and Margaret felt a stab of panic, fearful should the baby’s howls bring the avenging angel of Robert in upon them. She lifted her hands before her and waved them from side to side before the child’s face, in negation, as though she could silence Ruth with the gesture. The infant’s small pupils focused fuzzily on the motion and tried to follow their movement. Ruth sighed and drifted back into slumber.

Let not the sins of the father… and before Margaret fully realized what she was doing she picked up the bin liner and the string. Then she lifted the baby, cradling Ruth in her arms, crooned to her through cracked and split lips, and slipped the sack over the tiny head. The woman froze, waiting for the child to cry out, or wake in fear, but the opposite happened. Finding comfort in her mother’s arms, the breathing deepened and the little body relaxed.

Margaret returned her daughter to the cot, grabbed the short length of string, and then threaded it under the tiny neck. Crossing the loop, end over end, and drawing the string closed in barely perceptible stages, still humming a sweet lullaby. Until the bag began to bunch at the neck. Biodegradable plastic grazed the skin, and again her movement was arrested as she anticipated the child’s cry.

Nothing. Silence.

Tighter.

Aspel quipped, and in the living room Robert chuckled on cue, his wife forgotten.

Margaret’s daughter would never know agony and such pain.

Tighter.

The soft susurration of breath, the bag expanding like a balloon.

The child’s hopes would never be raised only to be dashed upon the rocks of reality.

Tighter.

The balloon deflated, and a tiny hand clenched at the blanket.

Her daughter would never feel the fire of her father’s fist upon her face.

Tighter.

The bag drew in further, showing an imprint of nose and lips upon white. Satisfied that no oxygen could reach her, Margaret gently tied the cord.