The Mammoth Book of Best British Mysteries

CONTINUITY ERROR by Nicholas Royle

Christine rang Maddox on his mobile. A little accident, she said. A bump.

“Was anyone hurt?”

“No, no one was hurt.”

He made his way to the side street in Shepherd’s Bush where it had happened. A one-way street temporarily blocked off by roadworks at the junction with Goldhawk Road. Estate agent’s on the corner. Christine had reversed away from the roadworks and at five miles an hour hit a silver Toyota coming out of the concealed exit from the sunken car park behind the estate agent’s.

By the time Maddox arrived, the driver of the silver Toyota was in full magnanimous third-party mode, confident the insurance companies would find in his favour. Maddox hated him on sight. Too reasonable, too forthcoming. Like providing his address and insurance details was some kind of favour.

Maddox’s son Jack had got out of the car and stood staring at the small pile of shattered glass on the road, seemingly transfixed by it. Christine was visibly upset, despite the unctuous affability of the Toyota driver and Maddox’s own efforts to downplay the situation.

“It’s only a couple of lights and a new wing. No one was hurt, that’s the main thing.”

Two days later, Maddox and Jack were walking past the top of the side street. The roadworks had been removed and a car was exiting into Goldhawk Road without any difficulty.

“Is that where the accident happened, Daddy?” asked the little boy.

“Yes.”

Jack stopped, his big eyes taking in the details. The fresh asphalt by the junction, the concealed exit from the sunken car park behind the estate agent’s.

“Is it still there?” the little boy asked.

“What? Is what still there?”

“The accident. Is the accident still there?”

Maddox didn’t know what to say.

They were getting ready to go out. Christine was ready and Maddox was nearly ready, a too-familiar scenario. She waited by the front door, smart, made-up, tall in new boots and long coat, enveloped in a haze of expensive perfume.

“Are you nearly ready, Brian?”

That she added his name to the harmless query was a bad sign. It meant her patience was stretched too thin. But he’d lost his car key. He’d looked everywhere. Twice. And couldn’t find it.

“Where did you last have it?” she shouted up the stairs.

The unhelpfulness of the question grated against his nerves.

“I don’t know. That’s the whole point.”

He started again. Bedroom (bedside drawer, dressing gown). Jacket pockets. Kitchen.

“Have you looked in your box?”

“Yes, I’ve looked in my box.”

They each had a box, like an in-tray, in the kitchen. Christine never used hers, but always knew where everything was. Maddox used his, but still managed to lose at least one important item every day. Wallet, phone, keys. Chequebook, bank card. Everything always turned up, sooner or later, but in this case, not soon enough.

“I can’t find it. I’ve looked everywhere.”

Heavy sigh.

If the atmosphere hadn’t become tense he would jokingly accuse her of having hidden it, of trying to make him think he was losing his mind. But that wouldn’t play now. They were beyond that.

“It’s probably at the flat,” she said, loading the word with her customary judgmental emphasis.

“How could it be at the flat when my car’s outside?” he snapped before realizing that she must have been joking.

“It’s a pity you don’t have a spare key,” she said.

“It’s a pity your car’s in the garage,” he retorted, “about to be declared uneconomical to repair. Look, Christine, it’s very late. I can’t find it and I certainly won’t find it with you hovering, getting all wound up, so I suggest you get a cab and I’ll follow.”

“But what if you don’t find it?”

“I’ll find it. I’ll be there, just a little late, that’s all. You go. You’ll easily pick up a black cab on the Green. You’re only going to Ladbroke Grove.”

Sweating, he listened as the front door was opened and shut – slammed. Gate clanged. Fading echo of footsteps receding. He felt the tension flow out of him and collapsed on to the nearest chair. He loosened his tie and reached for a glass.

In their bedroom he pressed the power button on his laptop. While waiting, he stared blankly at the framed poster on the wall. A production he’d been in more than twenty years ago. Colossus. Clive Barker’s play about Goya. He allowed the faces of cast members to run through his mind, particularly those who’d gone on to other things. Lennie James – you saw him on television all the time now. A part in Cold Feet. A one-off drama, something he’d written himself. That prison series. Buried. Right. Buried in the schedules.

Aslie Pitter, the most naturally talented actor in the cast. He’d done one or two things – a Channel Four sitcom, guest appearance in The Bill - then disappeared. Maddox had last seen him working for a high-street chain. Security, demonstrating product – he couldn’t remember which.

Elinore Vickery had turned up in something at the Waterman’s. Maddox had liked her, tried to keep in touch, but there was an invisible barrier, as if she’d known him better than he knew himself.

Missing out on a couple of good parts because of his size (five foot five in stocking feet, eight stone dead), Maddox had quit the theatre and concentrated on writing. Barker had helped with one or two contacts and Maddox sold a couple of horror stories. Over the years he’d moved away from fiction into journalism and book-length non-fiction. The current project, New Maps of Hell, hadn’t found a home. The publishers he’d offered it to hadn’t been able to reject it quickly enough. They didn’t want it on their desks. It made them uncomfortable. That was fine by Maddox. He’d worry if it didn’t. They’d want it on their lists, though, when it was too late. He’d finish it first, then pick one editor and let the others write their letters of resignation.

He read through the afternoon’s work, then closed the laptop. He opened his bedside drawer and there was his car key. He looked at it. Had it been there before? Of course it had. How could it not have been? But he’d not seen it, so it might as well not have been. It had effectively disappeared. Hysterical blindness? Negative hallucination?

He pocketed the key and went downstairs. The door closed behind him and the car started first time. He sneaked past White City – the exhibition halls were gone, torn down for a future shopping centre – and slipped on to the Westway. He didn’t think of Christine as he approached Ladbroke Grove, but of Christie, John Reginald Halliday. The former relief projectionist at the Electric, who had murdered at least six women, had lived at 10 Rillington Place, later renamed Ruston Close before being demolished to make way for the elevated motorway on which Maddox was now driving. The film, starring Dickie Attenborough as the killer and John Hurt as his poor dupe of an upstairs neighbour, who swung for at least one of Christie’s crimes, had been filmed in Rillington Place itself. Maddox understood, from comments posted on ghoulish message boards on the internet, that the interiors had been shot in No.8 and the exteriors outside No. 10. But when the police, acting on a tip-off from Timothy Evans, yanked open a manhole cover outside No. 10, Attenborough could be seen peering out through the ground-floor window of the end house in the terrace, No. 10, where three of Christie’s victims had been walled up in the pantry, his wife Ethel being found under the floorboards in the front room. For Maddox it was the key shot in the film, the only clear evidence that they’d gained access to the charnel house itself. The only other explanation being that they’d mocked up the entire street in the studio, which he didn’t buy.

The case accounted for five pages in Maddox’s book. He concentrated mainly on the interweaving of fact and fiction, the merging of film and reality. Attenborough as Christie. No.8 standing in for No. 10, if indeed it did. The internet also yielded a piece of Pathé film footage of the demolition of Ruston Close. Two men with pickaxes. A third man speaking to camera. A burning house. Shots of the house at the end of the street with the white (replacement) door. Clearly the same house as that in the film. But there was no sound, the reporter mouthing inaudible commentary. Maddox lured a lip-reader to the flat, a junior editor from one of the publishers that had turned down his book. She reminded him of Linzi with her green eyes and shoulder-length streaked hair. Even in heels she didn’t reach Maddox’s height, but she had a confident, relaxed smile, She held his gaze when he spoke to her and appeared to be looking into his eyes, but must have been watching his lips, as she relied heavily on lip-reading.

Maddox was careful to make sure she was looking in his direction before speaking to her, probably over-careful. She must have spent a lifetime compensating for situations in which people wouldn’t have made such allowances. Working backwards from the first words she managed to lip-read and then having to catch up. So much information assumed rather than known for certain, but Maddox could relate to that. In some areas of life he, too, knew nothing for certain. The deaf woman’s name was Karen. He assumed the proposal for his book had been rejected by someone senior who had given Karen the unpleasant job of telling the author, but he didn’t know that for certain. Possibly she’d read it and rejected it herself and only agreed to provide lip-reading services because she felt bad about it.

When she entered the flat, Maddox felt at ease. In control. He apologised for the loud, bass-heavy music coming from the downstairs flat, but she said she couldn’t hear it.

“I thought you might be able to feel it,” he said.

“It’s a new building,” she said. “Concrete floors. Otherwise…”

He showed her the footage. She said it wasn’t straightforward. The quality was poor and the picture kept pixellating, plus the reporter unhelpfully turned his head to the side on several occasions.

Maddox asked her if she would come back and have another go if he was able to tidy the picture up a bit.

“I don’t think I’ll be able to get much off it for you,” she said.

“If you wouldn’t mind just trying one more time, perhaps when you’re less tired,” he said. “It’s very important to me, for my book, you know.”

Maddox pulled into one of the reserved spaces outside a block of purpose-built flats in the depressed residential trapezium bordered by Green Lanes and the roads of West Green, Seven Sisters and St Ann’s. He listened to the ticking of the cooling engine for a few moments as he watched the darkened windows of the second-floor flat. The top flat.

The street door had been left open by one of his neighbours. He walked up.

Inside the flat, he left the light switched off, poured himself a drink and sat in the single armchair. He pulled out his phone and sent a short text message. Orange street-lighting cast a deathly glow over the cheap bookshelves stacked with pulp novels, true crime, horror anthologies and dystopian science fiction. His phone chimed. He opened it, read the return message and replied to it. When he’d lived here, the room had been dominated by a double bed. Moving into Christine’s house had allowed him to turn the tiny flat into the dedicated office he’d always wanted by burning the bed on the waste ground out the back. He’d considered giving it away, since selling it had struck him as tiresome: placing an ad, answering calls, opening the door to strangers. Easier to burn the damn thing and all the memories associated with it. So then he’d moved his desk from the east end of the room, under the Velux window, to the west-facing windows overlooking the street.

Another text arrived. He read it and closed the phone without replying.

As usual, loud music was playing in the downstairs flat.

He drained his glass and let his head fall back against the soft cushion. The Artex ceiling had attracted cobwebs and grime, but he doubted he would ever feel the need to repaint or clean it. Very few people ever came here. Linzi had spent a lot of time in the flat, of course. He laughed bitterly, then chewed his lip and stared at the ceiling, sensitive to the slightest noise in spite of the thump of the bass from the downstairs flat. Christine had hardly stepped over the threshold. She’d been once or twice soon after they’d met, but not since. There was no reason to. It was clear from the odd comment that she resented his keeping the flat, since it was a drain on resources, but as he’d argued, there was no room in the house for all these books and tapes. Not to mention the stuff stored in the loft. He chewed his lip again.

He switched on the stereo and the ordered chaos of Paul Schütze’s New Maps of Hell clattered into battle with the beat from below. Schütze’s 1992 release was the constant soundtrack to any work he did on the book in the flat. (On the rare occasions that he worked on it at the house, he played the follow-up, New Maps of Hell II: The Rapture of Metals.) He believed it helped. It started out as an aid to getting the mindset right, he sometimes imagined telling Kirsty Wark or Verity Sharp in a television interview, and soon became a habit, a routine. I simply couldn’t work on the book without having the music playing in the background. It was about the creation of a hermetically sealed world. Which, I suppose you have to admit, Hell is. Although one that’s expanding at an alarming rate, erupting in little pockets. North Kensington, Muswell Hill. London is going to Hell, Kirsty.

He opened a file and did some work, tidied up some troublesome text. He saved it and opened another file, “Dollis Hill”. Notes, a few stabs at an address, gaps, big gaps. He was going to have to go back.

He replayed the mental rushes. Autumn 1986. A fine day. Gusty, but dry, bright. Walking in an unfamiliar district of London. A long road, tree-lined. High up. View down over the city between detached houses and semis. Victorian, Edwardian.

The entry-phone buzzed, bringing him back to the present with a start. He closed the file. He got to his feet, crossed to the hall and picked up the phone.

“The door’s open. Come up,” he said, before realising she couldn’t hear him.

He remained standing in the hall, listening to footsteps climbing the interior staircase. When the footsteps stopped outside his door there was a pause before the knock came. He imagined her composing herself, perhaps straightening her clothes, removing a hair from her collar. Or looking at her watch and thinking of bolting. He opened the door as she knocked, which startled her.

“Come in,” he said. “Thanks for coming.”

All Maddox had done to improve the image on the video was change the size of the Media Player window so that the reporter’s mouth, while slightly smaller, was less affected by picture break-up.

While Karen studied the footage, Maddox crossed to the far side of the room. He returned with a glass of red wine, which he placed beside the laptop. Karen raised a hand to decline, but Maddox simply pushed the glass slightly closer to her and left it there. Finally, while she was watching the footage for a third time, her hand reached out, perhaps involuntarily, to pick up the glass. She took a sip, then held the glass aloft while studying the image of the jaunty reporter: Michael Caine glasses, buttoned-up jacket, button-down shirt, hand alighting on hip like a butterfly.

Maddox watched as she replayed the footage again. Each time the reporter started speaking, she moved a little closer to the screen and seemed to angle her head slightly to the left in order to favour her right ear, in which she had a trace of hearing, despite the fact there was no sound at all on the film. Habit, Maddox decided.

Karen leaned back and looked at Maddox before speaking.

“He’s saying something like newspaper reports… of the investigation… into the discovery of the burned-out bodies of two women… Fifteen – or fifty – years ago… Something of the century. I’m sorry, it’s really hard.”

Her speech was that of a person who had learned to talk the hard way, without being able to hear the sound of her own voice.

‘That’s great. That’s very helpful, Karen. It would be fifteen, not fifty. I didn’t even know for certain that he was talking about Christie’s house. Burned-out, though, are you sure? That’s strange.”

“No, I’m not sure, but that’s what it sounds like.”

Karen’s choice of expression – sounds like - reminded him of a blind man who had asked Maddox for help crossing the road as he was going to see the doctor.

Maddox went to fill up her glass, but she placed her hand over it.

“I’ve got to go,” she said. “I said I could only stop by for a minute.”

Maddox stood his ground with the wine bottle, then stepped back.

“Another time,” he said.

“Have you got something else you want me to look at?”

“I might have. If it’s not too much of an imposition.”

“Just let me know.”

He showed her out, then switched the light off again and watched from the window as she regained the street. She stopped, looked one way, then went the other, as if deciding there and then which way to go. Hardly the action of a woman with an appointment. He watched as she walked south towards St Ann’s Road and disappeared around the corner, then he sat down in the armchair and emptied her wine glass. His gaze roved across the bookshelves and climbed the walls before reaching the ceiling. He then sat without moving for half an hour, his eyes not leaving the ceiling, listening to the building’s creaks and sighs, the music downstairs having been turned off.

He took a different route back, climbing the Harringay Ladder and going west past the top of Priory Park. He floored the pedal through the Cranley Gardens S-bend and allowed the gradient to slow the car so that he rolled to a stop outside No. 23. There he killed the engine and looked up at the second-floor flat where Dennis Nilsen had lived from October 1981 to February 1983. One of Nilsen’s mistakes, which had led to his being caught, was to have left the window in the gable dormer wide open for long periods, attracting the attention of neighbours.

Maddox looked at his watch and started the engine. He got on to the North Circular, coming off at Staples Corner, heading south down Edgware Road and turning right into Dollis Hill Lane. He slowed to a crawl, leaning forward over the wheel, craning his neck at the houses on the south side. He was sure it would be on the south side. He definitely remembered a wide tree-lined avenue with views over central London. Land falling away behind the house. Long walk from the tube. Which tube? He didn’t know.

He turned right, cruised the next street. He wasn’t even sure of the street. Dollis Hill Lane sounded right, but as soon as he’d got the idea of Cricklewood Lane off the internet that had sounded right too. He’d gone there, to 108/110 Cricklewood Lane, after reading on the net that that was where they’d shot Hellraiser. When he got there and found it was a branch of Holmes Place Health Clubs, he worked out it must have been the former location of Cricklewood Production Village, where they’d done the studio work.

Some time in the autumn of 1986, Maddox had come here, to a house in Dollis Hill. A movie was being made. Clive Barker was directing his first film. Hellraiser. They were shooting in a rented house and Maddox had been invited to go on the set as an associate of Barker’s. He was going to do a little interview, place it wherever possible. Could be his big break. It was good of Clive to have agreed to it. Maddox remembered the big white vans in the street outside the house, a surprising number of people hanging around doing nothing, a catering truck, a long table covered with polystyrene cups, a tea urn. He asked for Steve Jones, unit publicist. Jones talked to him about what was going on. They were filming a dinner party scene with Andrew Robinson and Clare Higgins and two young actors, the boy and the girl, and a bunch of extras. Maddox got to watch from behind the camera, trying to catch Barker’s eye as he talked to the actors, telling them what he wanted them to do. Controlling everybody and everything. Maddox envied him, but admired him as well. A make-up girl applied powder to Robinson’s forehead. A hair-dresser fixed Ashley Laurence’s hair. They did the scene and the air was filled with electricity. Everyone behind the camera held their breath, faces still and taut. The tension was palpable. The moment Barker called “Cut”, it melted away. Smiles, laughter, everyone suddenly moving around. Maddox noticed the hairdresser, who looked lost for a moment, diminutive and vulnerable, but Steve Jones caught Maddox’s arm in a light grip and cornered Barker. The director looked at Maddox and there was a fraction of a second’s pause, no more, before he said, “Brian,” in such a warm, sincere way that Maddox might have thought Clive had been looking forward to seeing him all morning.

They did a short interview over lunch, which they ate on the floor of a room at the back of the house.

“We’re surrounded by images which are momentarily potent and carry no resonance whatsoever,” Barker was saying in transatlantic Scouse. “Advertising, the pop video, a thing which seems to mean an awful lot and is in fact absolutely negligible.”

Maddox noticed the hairdresser carrying a paper plate and a cup. She sat cross-legged on the floor next to another crew member and they talked as they ate.

“What frightens you?” he asked Barker.

“Unlit streets, flying, being stuck in the tube at rush hour. Places where you have to relinquish control.”

Once they’d finished, Maddox hung around awkwardly, waiting for a chance to talk to the hairdresser. When it came – her companion rising to go – he seized it. She was getting up too and Maddox contrived to step in front of her, blocking her way. He apologised and introduced himself. “I was just interviewing Clive. We’ve known each other a couple of years. I was in one of his plays.”

“Linzi,” she said, offering her hand. “I’m only here for one day. The regular girl called in sick.”

“Then I’m lucky I came today,” he said, smiling shyly.

She was wearing a dark green top of soft cotton that was exactly the same shade as her eyes. Her hair, light brown with natural blonde streaks, was tied back in a knot pierced by a pencil.

“Are you going to stick around?” she asked.

“I’ve done my interview, but if no one kicks me out…”

“It’s a pretty relaxed set.”

He did stick around and most of the time he watched Linzi, promising himself he wouldn’t leave until he’d got her number. It took him the rest of the afternoon, but he got it. She scribbled it on a blank page in her Filofax, then tore out the page and said, “Call me.”

The chances of finding the house in darkness were even less than in daylight. He’d been up to Dollis Hill a couple of times in the last few weeks, once in the car and once on foot. Lately, he’d been thinking more about Linzi, and specifically about the early days, before it started to go wrong. He’d spent enough time going over the bad times and wanted to revisit the good. He wanted to see the house again, but couldn’t. He needed to locate it for his book. He’d rewatched the film, which contained enough shots of the house’s exterior that it should have been easy to locate it, but it didn’t seem to matter how many times he trailed these suburban avenues, the house wasn’t there. Or if it was, he couldn’t see it. He’d begun to think it might have been knocked down, possibly even straight after the shoot. It could have been why the house had been available. In the film there was a No.55 on the porch, but that would be set dressing, like the renumbering of 25 Powis Square, in Performance, as No.81.

He looked at his watch and calculated that if he was quick he could get to Ladbroke Grove in time for coffee and to drive Christine home, thereby reducing the amount of grief she would give him. Negligibly, he realized, but still.

In the morning, he feigned sleep while she dressed. Her movements were businesslike, crisp. The night before had been a riot, as expected. When he had turned up at the dinner, two and a half hours late, she had contented herself with merely shooting him a look, but as soon as they left she started. And as soon as she started, he switched off.

It didn’t let up even when they got home, but he wasn’t listening. He marvelled at how closely he was able to mimic the condition with which Karen, his lip-reader, had been born. Thinking of Karen, moreover, relaxed him inside, while Christine kept on, even once they’d got into bed. Elective deafness – it beat hysterical blindness.

When he was sure Christine had left the house – the slammed door, the gate that clanged – he got up and showered. Within half an hour, having spent ten minutes pointing the DVD remote at the television, he was behind the wheel of the car with his son in the back seat. South Tottenham in twenty minutes was a bigger ask by day than by night, but he gave it his best shot. Rush hour was over (Christine, in common with everyone who worked on weekly magazines, finished earlier than she started), but skirting the congestion charge zone was still a challenge.

He parked where he had the night before and turned to see that Jack was asleep. He left him there, locked the car and walked up. He had decided, while lying in bed with his back to Christine, that it would be worth going up into the loft. Somewhere in the loft was a box containing old diaries, including one for 1986. He had never been a consistent diarist, but some years had seen him make more notes than others. It was worth a rummage among the spider’s webs and desiccated wasps’ nests. His size meant he didn’t bang his head on the latticework of pine beams.

The loft still smelled faintly of formalin. He suspected it always would until he got rid of the suitcase at the far end. He shone the torch in its direction. Big old-fashioned brown leather case, rescued from a skip and cleaned up. Solid, sturdy, two catches and a strap with a buckle. Could take a fair weight.

He redirected the torch at the line of dusty boxes closer to the trap door. The first box contained T-shirts that he never wore any more but couldn’t bear to throw away. The second was full of old typescripts stiff with Tipp-Ex. The diaries were in the third box along. He bent down and sorted through: 1974, a shiny black Pocket Diary filled mainly with notes on the history of the Crusades; 1976, the summer of the heatwave, Angling Times diary, roach and perch that should have been returned to the water left under stones to die; 1980, the deaths of his three remaining grandparents, three funerals in one year, coffins in the front room, all burials; 1982, his first term at university, meeting Martin, his best friend for a while. Martin was a year older, which had impressed Maddox. The age difference hadn’t mattered. Everything was changing. Leaving school, leaving home. Living in halls. Martin was a medical student. They would stay up late drinking coffee and Martin would smoke cigarettes and tell Maddox about medicine, about anatomy and about the bodies he was learning to dissect.

Maddox could listen to Martin for hours. The later they stayed up, the more profound their discussions seemed to become. Maddox watched as Martin dragged on his cigarette and held the smoke in his lungs for an eternity, stretching the moment, before blowing it out in perfect rings. When Martin talked about the bodies in the anatomy lab, Maddox became entranced. He imagined Martin alone in the lab with a dozen flayed corpses. Bending over them, examining them, carefully removing a strip of muscle, severing a tendon. Getting up close to the secrets, the mysteries, of death. Martin said it didn’t matter how long he spent washing his hands, they still smelled of formalin. He held them under Maddox’s nose, then moved to cup his cheeks in an affectionate, stroking gesture.

“You don’t mind, do you?” he said, as his hand landed on Maddox’s knee.

“Could you get me in there? Into the lab?” Maddox asked, shaking his head, picturing himself among the bodies, as Martin’s hand moved up his thigh.

“No. But I could bring you something out. Something you could keep.”

Martin’s hand had reached Maddox’s lap and Maddox was mildly surprised to discover that far from objecting, he was aroused. If this was to be the downpayment on whatever Martin might fetch him back from the dissection table, so be it.

“I’ve got something for you,” Martin said a couple of days later, “in my room.”

Maddox followed Martin to his room.

“So where is it?” Maddox asked.

“Can’t just leave that sort of thing lying about. But what’s the rush?”

Martin lay down on the bed and unbuckled his belt.

Maddox hesitated, considered walking out, but he felt certain he’d always regret it if he left empty-handed. Instead, he knelt beside the bed and spat into his palm.

Afterwards, Martin pulled open his desk drawer.

“There you go,” he said.

Maddox withdrew a strong-smelling package. He started to work at the knot in the outermost plastic bag, but it wouldn’t come easily. He asked Martin what it contained.

“A piece of subcutaneous fat from the body of a middle-aged man. If anyone ever asks, you didn’t get it from me.”

Maddox returned to his own room on the seventh floor, washing his hands on the way. He cut open the bag and unwrapped his spoils. The gobbet of fat, four inches by two, looked like a piece of tripe, white and bloodless, and the stench of formalin made him feel sick and excited at the same time. Maddox was careful not to touch the fat as he wrapped it up again and secured the package with tape. He opened his wardrobe and pulled out the brown suitcase he’d liberated from a skip in Judd Street.

He saw less of Martin after that. At first he contrived subtly to avoid him and then started going out with Valerie, a girl with fat arms and wide hips he picked up in the union bar on cocktails night. He wasn’t convinced they were a good match, but the opportunity was convenient, given the Martin situation.

The piece of fat remained wrapped up in its suitcase, which smelled so strongly that Maddox only had to open the case and take a sniff to re-experience how he had felt when Martin had given him the body part. As he lay in bed trying to get to sleep (alone. Valerie didn’t last more than a few weeks) he sometimes thought about the man who had knowingly willed his cadaver to science. He wondered what his name might have been and what kind of man he was. What he might have been in life. He would hardly have been able to foresee what would happen to the small part of him that was now nestled inside Maddox’s wardrobe.

When Maddox left the hall of residence for a flat in Holloway, the case went with him, still empty but for its human remains. He kept it on top of a cupboard. It stayed there for two years. When he moved into the flat in N15, he put the suitcase in the loft, where it had remained ever since. The piece of fat was no longer in Maddox’s possession, but the suitcase was not free of the smell of formalin.

Maddox’s 1986 diary was at the bottom of the box. It took only a couple of minutes to find what he was looking for. “Hellraiser, 11:00 a.m.” he’d written in the space reserved for Friday 10 October. A little further down was an address: 187 Dollis Hill Lane.

He drove to Dollis Hill via Cranley Gardens, but on this occasion didn’t stop.

“Why didn’t I think of checking my old diaries before, eh, Jack?” he said, looking in the rear-view mirror.

His son was silent, staring out of the window.

Turning into Dollis Hill Lane from Edgware Road, he slowed to a crawl, oblivious to the noisy rebuke of the driver immediately behind him, who pulled out and swerved to overtake, engine racing, finger given. Maddox brought the car to a halt on a slight incline outside No.187. He looked at the house and felt an unsettling combination of familiarity and non-recognition. Attraction and repulsion. He had to stare at the house for two or three minutes before he realised why he had driven past it so many times and failed to recognise it.

Like most things recalled from the past, it was smaller than the version in his memory. But the main difference was the apparent age of the building. He remembered a Victorian villa, possibly Edwardian. The house in front of him was new. The rendering on the front gable end had gone up in the last few years. The wood-framed bay windows on the first floor were of recent construction. The casement window in the top flat, second floor, was obviously new. The mansard roof was a familiar shape, but the clay Rosemarys were all fresh from the tile shop. The materials were new, but the style was not. The basic design was unchanged, from what he could remember of the exterior shots in the film, which he’d looked at again before coming out, but in spite of that the house looked new. As if a skeleton had grown new muscle and flesh.

“Just like Frank,” he said out loud.

“What, Daddy?”

“Just like Frank in the film.”

“What film?”

“They made a film in this house and I came to see them make it. You’re too young to see it yet. One day, maybe.”

“What’s it about?”

“It’s about a man who disappears and then comes back to life with the help of his girlfriend. It happened in that room up there.” He pointed to the top flat. “Although, the windows are wrong,” he said, trying to remember the second-floor window in the film. “I need to check it again.”

The only part of the exterior that looked as if they’d taken care to try to match the original was the front door.

As he’d walked from the Hellraiser set back to the tube two decades earlier, he’d read and re-read Linzi’s number on the tornout piece of Filofax paper. He called her the next day and they arranged to meet for a drink.

“Why are you so interested in this house, Daddy?” Jack asked from the back seat.

“Because of what happened here. Because of the film. And because I met somebody here. Somebody I knew before I met your mother.”

Linzi lived in East Finchley. They went to see films at the Phoenix or met for drinks in Muswell Hill. Malaysian meals in Crouch End. He showed her the house in Hillfield Avenue where he had visited Clive Barker.

“Peter Straub used to live on the same road, just further up the hill,” he told her.

“Who’s Peter Straub?”

“Have you heard of Stephen King?”

“Of course.”

“Straub and King wrote a book together. The Talisman. They wrote it here. Or part of it, anyway. King also wrote a story called ‘Crouch End’, which was interesting, not one of his best.”

Maddox and Linzi started meeting during the day at the Wisteria Tea Rooms on Middle Lane and it was there, among the pot plants and mismatched crockery, that Maddox realised with a kind of slow, swooning surprise that he was happy. The realisation was so slow because the feeling was so unfamiliar. They took long walks through Highgate Cemetery and across Hampstead Heath.

Weeks became months. The cherry blossom came out in long straight lines down Cecile Park, and fell to the pavements, and came out again. Linzi often stayed at Maddox’s flat in South Tottenham, but frowned distastefully at his true-crime books. One morning while she was still asleep, Maddox was dressing, looking for a particular T-shirt. Unable to find it, he climbed up the ladder into the loft. Searching through a box of old clothes, he didn’t hear Linzi climbing the ladder or see her head and shoulders suddenly intrude into the loft space.

“What are you doing?” she said.

“Shit.” He jumped, hitting his head. “Ow. That hurt. Shit. Nothing. Looking for something.”

“What’s that smell?”

“Nothing.”

He urged her back down the ladder and made sure the trap door was fastened before pulling on the Eraserhead T-shirt he’d been looking for.

Whenever he went into the loft from then on, whether Linzi was around or not, he would pull the ladder up after him and close the trap door. The loft was private.

When he got back to the flat that evening, he went up into the loft again – duly covering his tracks, although he was alone – and took the small wrapped parcel from the suitcase. The lid fell shut, the old-fashioned clasps sliding home without his needing to fasten them. Quality craftsmanship.

When it was dark, he buried the slice of tissue in the waste ground behind the flats.

As the decade approached its end, the directionless lifestyle that Maddox and Linzi had drifted into seemed to become more expensive. The bills turned red. Maddox started working regular shifts on the subs’ desk at the Independent. He hated it but it paid well. Linzi applied for a full-time job at a ladies’ salon in Finsbury Park. They took a day trip to Brighton. They went to an art show in the Unitarian Church where Maddox bought Linzi a small watercolour and she picked out a booklet of poems by the artist’s husband as a return gift. They had lunch in a vegetarian café. Maddox talked about the frustrations of cutting reviews to fit and coming up with snappy headlines, when what he’d rather be doing was writing the copy himself. Linzi had no complaints about the salon. “Gerry – he’s the boss – he’s a really lovely guy,” she said. “Nicest boss I’ve ever had.”

They spent the afternoon in the pubs and secondhand bookshops of the North Laines. Maddox found a Ramsey Campbell anthology, an M. John Harrison collection and The New Murderers’ Who’s Who. On the train waiting to leave Brighton station to return to London, with the sun throwing long dark shapes across the platforms, Linzi read to Maddox from the pamphlet of verse.

“ ‘This is all I ever wanted / to meet you in the fast decaying shadows / on the outskirts of this or any city / alone and in exile.’”

As the train rattled through Sussex, Maddox pored over the photographs in his true-crime book.

“Look,” he said, pointing to a caption: “Brighton Trunk Crime No.2: The trunk’s contents.”

“Very romantic,” Linzi said as she turned to the window, but Maddox couldn’t look away from the crumpled stockings on the legs of the victim, Violette Kaye. Her broken neck. The pinched scowl on her decomposed face. To Maddox the picture was as beautiful as it was terrible.

Over the next few days, Maddox read up on the Brighton Trunk Murders of 1934. He discovered that Tony Mancini, who had confessed to putting Violette Kay’s body in the trunk but claimed she had died accidentally (only to retract that claim and accept responsibility for her murder more than forty years later), had lodged at 52 Kemp Street. He rooted around for the poetry pamphlet Linzi had bought him. He found it under a pile of magazines. The poet’s name was Michael Kemp. He wanted to share his discovery of this coincidence with Linzi when she arrived at his flat with scissors and hairdressing cape.

“Why not save a bit of money?” she said, moving the chair from Maddox’s desk into the middle of the room. As she worked on his hair, she talked about Gerry from the salon. “He’s so funny,” she said. “The customers love him. He certainly keeps me and the other girls entertained.”

“Male hairdressers in women’s salons are all puffs, surely?”

Linzi stopped cutting and looked at him.

“So?” she said. “So what if they are? And anyway, Gerry’s not gay. No way.”

“Really? How can you be so sure?”

“A girl knows. Okay?”

“Have you fucked him then or what?”

She took a step back. “What’s the matter with you?”

“How else would you know? Gerry seems to be all you can talk about.”

“Fuck you.”

Maddox shot to his feet, tearing off the cape.

“You know what,” he said, seizing the scissors, “I’ll cut my own fucking hair and do a better job of it. At least I won’t have to listen to you going on about Gerry.”

He started to hack at his own hair, grabbing handfuls and cutting away. Linzi recoiled in horror, unable to look away, as if she were watching a road accident.

“Maybe I should tell you about all the women at the Independent?” he suggested. “Sheila Johnston, Sabine Durrant, Christine Healey… I don’t know where to start.”

It wasn’t until he jabbed the scissors threateningly in her direction that she snatched up her bag and ran out.

The next day he sent flowers. He didn’t call, didn’t push it. Just flowers and a note: “Sorry.”

Then he called. Told her he didn’t know what had come over him. It wouldn’t happen again. He knew he’d be lucky if she forgave him, but he hoped he’d be lucky. He hadn’t felt like this about anyone before and he didn’t want to lose her. The irony was, he told her, he’d been thinking his flat was getting a bit small and maybe they should look for a place together. He’d understand if she wanted to kick it into touch, but hoped she’d give him another chance.

She said to give her some time.

He shaved his head.

He drove down to Finsbury Park and watched from across the street as she worked on clients. Bobbing left and right. Holding their hair in her hands. Eye contact in the mirror. Gerry fussing around, sharing a joke, trailing an arm. As she’d implied, though, he was distributing his attentions equally among Linzi and the two other girls.

Mornings and evenings, he kept a watch on her flat in Finchley. She left and returned on her own. He chose a route between his flat and hers that took in Cranley Gardens in Muswell Hill. He parked outside No.23 and watched the darkened windows of the top flat. He wondered if any of the neighbours had been Nilsen’s contemporaries. If this man passing by now with a tartan shopping trolley had ever nodded good morning to the mass murderer. If that woman leaving her house across the street had ever smiled at him. Maddox got out of the car and touched the low wall outside the property with the tips of his fingers.

Linzi agreed to meet up. Maddox suggested the Wisteria Tea Rooms. It was almost like starting over. Cautious steps. Shy smiles. His hair had grown back.

“What got into you?”

“I don’t know. I thought we’d agreed to draw a line under it.”

“Yes, you’re right.”

At the next table a woman was feeding a baby.

“Do you ever think about having children?” Linzi asked, out of the blue.

“A boy,” Maddox said straightaway. “I’d call him Jack.”

Maddox didn’t mention Gerry. He took on extra shifts. Slowly, they built up trust again. One day, driving back to his place after dropping Linzi off at hers, he saw that a board had gone up outside 23 Cranley Gardens. For sale. He rang the agents. Yes, it was the top flat, second floor. It was on at £64,950, but when Maddox dropped by to pick up a copy of the details (DELIGHTFUL TOP FLOOR ONE BEDROOM CONVERSION FLAT), they’d reduced it to £59,950. He made an appointment, told Linzi he’d arranged a surprise. Picked her up early, drove to Cranley Gardens. He’d never brought her this way. She didn’t know whose flat it had been.

A young lad met them outside. Loosely knotted tie, shiny shoes. Bright, eager.

Linzi turned to Maddox. “Are you thinking of moving?”

“It’s bigger and it’s cheap.”

Linzi smiled stiffly. They followed the agent up the stairs. He unlocked the interior door and launched into his routine. Maddox nodded without listening as his eyes greedily took everything in, trying to make sense of the flat, to match what he saw to the published photographs. It didn’t fit.

“The bathroom’s gone,” he said, interrupting the agent.

“There’s a shower room,” the boy said. “And a washbasin across the hall. An unusual arrangement.”

Nilsen had dissected two bodies in the bathroom.

“This is a lovely room,” the agent said, moving to the front of the flat.

Maddox entered the room at the back and checked the view from the window.

“At least this is unchanged,” he said to Linzi, who had appeared alongside.

“What do you mean?”

He looked at her and realized what he’d said.

“This flat’s all different. I’ve seen pictures of it.”

The story came out later, back at Maddox’s place.

“You took me round Dennis Nilsen’s flat?”

He turned away.

“You didn’t think to mention it first? You thought we might live there together? In the former home of a serial killer? What the fuck is wrong with you?”

“It’s cheap,” he said, to the closing door.

He watched from the window as she ran off towards West Green Road. He stayed at the window for a time and then pulled down the ladder and went up into the loft. He pulled up the ladder and closed the trap door. He opened the big brown suitcase. It was like getting a fix. He studied the dimensions of the suitcase. It was not much smaller than Tony Mancini’s trunk.

Christine was at work. Maddox read a note she’d left in the kitchen: “We need milk and bread.”

He went into the living room and took down the Hellraiser DVD from the shelf. Sitting in the car with Jack outside the house on Dollis Hill Lane, Maddox had noticed something not quite right about the windows on the second floor. They were new windows and set in two pairs with a gap between them, but that wasn’t it. There was something else and he didn’t know what. He fast-forwarded until the exterior shot of Julia leaving the house to go to the bar where she picks up the first victim. The second-floor window comprised six lights in a row. For some reason, when rebuilding the house, they’d left out two of the lights and gone with just four, in two pairs. But that wasn’t what was bothering him.

He skipped forward. He kept watching.

Frank and Julia in the second-floor room, top of the house. She’s just killed the guy from the bar and Frank has drained his body. Julia re-enters the room after cleaning herself up and as she walks towards the window we see it comprises four lights in a row. Four windows. Four windows in a row. Not six. Four.

Maddox wielded the remote.

Looking up at the house as Julia leaves it to go to the bar. Second floor, six windows. Inside the same room on the second floor, looking towards the windows. Four, not six.

So what? The transformation scenes, which take place in that second-floor room at the front of the house, weren’t shot on Dollis Hill Lane. Big deal. That kind of stuff would have to be done in the studio. The arrival of the Cenobites, the transformation of Frank, his being torn apart. It wasn’t the kind of stuff you could shoot on location. But how could they make such a glaring continuity error as the number of lights in a window? Six from outside, four from within. It couldn’t be a mistake. It was supposed to mean something. But what?

“Daddy?”

Maddox jumped.

“What is it, Jack?”

“What are you watching?”

Maddox looked at the screen as he thought about his response.

“This film, the one shot in that house.”

“The house with the windows?”

“Yes.”

“Why is it important?”

“I don’t know. No, I do know.” His shoulders slumped. “I don’t know. Maybe it’s not.”

He drove to the supermarket. Jack was quiet in the back. They got a trolley. Maddox stopped in front of the newspapers. He looked at the Independent. Although he’d first met Christine on the Independent arts desk, it wasn’t until they bumped into each other some years later, when they were both freelancing on TV listings magazines at IPC, that they started going out. Although they were equals at IPC, Christine had routinely rewritten his headlines at the Independent and while he pretended it didn’t still rankle, it did. Not the best basis for a relationship, perhaps. Then a permanent position came up on TV Times, and they both went for it, but Christine’s experience counted. They decided it wouldn’t affect things, but agreed that maybe Maddox should free himself of his commitments at IPC. He said he had a book he wanted to write. Together they negotiated an increasingly obstacle-strewn path towards making a life together. If they stopped and thought about it, it didn’t seem like a very good idea, but neither of them had a better one.

Maddox looked around to check that Jack was still in tow, then moved on.

He stood silently in cold meats, swaying very gently.

“Gone,” he said quietly. “All gone. Disappeared.”

“What, Daddy? What’s gone?”

“Wait there, Jack. I’ll be back. Don’t move.”

He walked to the end of the aisle and turned the corner. He walked to the end of the next aisle and then the next, looking at the items on the shelves, familiar brands, labels he’d seen a thousand times. All meaningless. He recognised nothing. What was he looking for? Bread and milk? Where were they? He couldn’t remember. He went back to where he’d left the trolley. It was there, but Jack wasn’t.

He looked up and down the aisle. The brand names that had meant nothing to him a moment ago now leapt out at him, shouting, screaming for attention. It was as if the two sides of the aisle had suddenly shifted inward. Jack was nowhere to be seen.

“Jack!”

Maddox ran to the end of the aisle and looked both ways. He looked up the next aisle, then up the next and the one after. He kept calling Jack’s name. Shoppers stopped and stared, but Maddox moved faster and shouted louder. He looked at the line of tills and wondered if Jack had gone that way. He could already be out of the store, wandering around the car park, about to be run over or abducted. He told himself to calm down, that he would find him, but at the same time another voice suggested that sometimes the worst thing imaginable did happen. It had before, after all. Would this be the next case heard about on the news? A half-page in the paper. London man loses child in supermarket. Brian Maddox, 42, took his eyes off his son for one moment and he was gone. But he hadn’t taken his eyes off him for just one moment. He’d gone to the next aisle, or the one after. He’d gone away. He could have been gone five minutes. Ten, fifteen.

“Jack!”

“Sir?”

A young lad, a shelf stacker, was standing in front of him. Maddox told him his son had disappeared. The shelf stacker asked for a description. Maddox gave him one and the lad said he would start from the far end of the store and advised Maddox to start from the other. They would meet in the middle and most likely one of them would have found Jack. Maddox did as he was told and neither of them found Jack. Maddox was short of breath, dry in the mouth, his chest rising and falling, unbearable pressure being exerted on his temples. He could no longer call out Jack’s name without his voice breaking. More staff were on hand now. They took Maddox’s arms and led him to an office where he was sat down and given a drink of water.

“Maybe the boy’s with his mother?” someone suggested.

Maddox shook his head.

“Do you have a number for her?”

Maddox produced Christine’s number. He was dimly aware of a phone call being made. The office was full of people. Managers, security, cashiers. They swopped remarks, observations. Some expressions hardened. “What did she say?” a voice asked. “There is no son,” another one answered. “No kids at all, apparently.” A security guard replayed videotape on a monitor. Grainy, vivid. Maddox entering the store on his own with a trolley. Standing in front of the newspapers, on his own. Leaving the trolley in cold meats. No unattached children.

They gave Maddox another glass of water while waiting for the police to arrive. The store didn’t want to press charges. “What would be the point?” Maddox was free to go. “Has this happened before?” Shake of the head. “If it were to happen again, the store would have to consider taking action… Very upsetting for other shoppers… You will see someone?”

Maddox sat in the car park, behind the wheel of the car. He hadn’t got what he’d come for. The milk and the bread. Maybe it didn’t matter any more. He sat in the car for a long time and only turned the key in the ignition when he realized the sky over central London was beginning to get dark.

He didn’t go to the house. He didn’t imagine Christine would be there, but it was kind of irrelevant either way. Instead, he drove to South Tottenham. He drove through the top of the congestion charge zone. It didn’t matter any more. It was rush hour. It took an hour and a half to get to N15. The street door was open. He walked up, entered the flat. Thump-thump-thump from downstairs. He took out his phone and sent a text message, then stood by the window for a while watching the street. He left the phone on the window ledge and pulled down the ladder and climbed into the loft, retrieving the ladder and closing the trap door behind him. Stooping, he walked over to the suitcase, which smelled strongly of formalin. He knelt in front of it for several minutes, resting his hands on the lid, then touching the clasps.

He released the clasps and opened the case.

It was empty.

He frowned, then sat and stared at the empty case for some time, listening to the creaks of the beams and the muffled basslines from the downstairs flat. He wondered if Karen would come, how long she might be. He wasn’t sure what he would do when she arrived.

Slowly, he rose, then lowered the upper half of his body into the case, folding his legs in afterwards. Inside the case, the smell of formalin was very strong. He stared at the pine beams, the cobwebs, the shadows clinging to the insulating material. He could still faintly hear his neighbour’s loud music, which Karen had been unable to hear, and then, rising above it, the clear and unmistakeable chime of his phone, down in the flat, announcing the arrival of a text message. He started to uncurl his body and the lid of the case fell forward.

He had twisted his body far enough that the hump of his shoulder caught the closing lid.

He climbed out and lay down next to the suitcase.

A minute later his phone chimed a reminder.

He thought about Linzi. Linzi had been good for him, until things went bad. He wondered where she was. He looked at the empty suitcase again and plucked a long fine strand of fair hair from the lining. He thought about Karen and her need, unacknowledged, to be looked after. He remembered how vulnerable Linzi had seemed when he saw her for the first time.

Karen would be along soon. Probably. She hadn’t let him down yet.

He still had options.