PRETTY GIRLS MAKE GRAVES: a gripping crime thriller (Camden Noir Crime Thrillers Trilogy Book 1) Read online

  I finished up and took a walk along the high street. The sun broke through the clouds and set the wet pavements a-dazzle. Eurogoths studded, quiffed and decked out in leather, tartan and orthopaedic footwear paraded up and down carrying record bags. Young men solicited me with offers of “Hash” and “Skunk”, and the professional punks on the lock-side begged under a banner of “Let’s be honest. We’re going to spend it on beer.” Pure Camden.

  I walked up to the bridge where I’d arranged to meet Dani. It was getting warmer so I took off my coat and rolled up my sleeves and tried to catch some sun. I was lighting a cigarette for one of the punks just as Dani came round the corner wearing a summer dress and cut-off jeans. Her long-lens Nikon was hanging around her neck. She ran up to me and gave me a hug. She held onto me for some time, her body pressed up against mine, the camera jutting into my ribs.

  It’d never been clear to me where I stood with Dani. Two years ago when she first turned up at Free Press (or FP to those in the know) as a rookie journalist of 22 years old, she was a pale-faced Welsh girl with a shaved head and hardly a word to say. Brent, the Editor, had hired her on the strength of her photographic portfolio, which contained, among other things, 30 or so black and white portraits of grim young men in tracksuits sitting on the bonnets of stolen cars. During her interview, sitting in her oversized parker and baggy jeans, she’d deflected Brent’s praise for the photos with shy smiles and obvious discomfort. In her first year at FP, she remained tight-lipped and was often met from work by similarly shaven-headed women with similarly oversized clothes, who never acknowledged our greetings, but instead, stared warily at us like mistreated pets.

  Brent and I gave Dani lots of space, admiring her photos and thoroughness as a researcher from a distance. The transition had been gradual. The clothes got smaller. The hair got longer. A year down the road, she started coming along to drinks after work. She opened up and we became good friends. We never reminded her of what she used to be like in case she reverted back in the style of Wile E. Coyote suddenly realising he was running on thin air.

  Dani was on a different sensory level to most people. She experienced the world at a level of emotional intensity far beyond the norm. One day after a lot of alcohol, I asked her what it was like being her, so very self-aware; how did she live with it? She laughed and told me how once she’d set about de-sensitising herself by watching violent films, which at first made her sick with nerves. Having conquered celluloid, she’d then sought out similar over stimulation in dodgy pubs, watching underground cage fights and even joined a martial arts group. She also scoured the newspapers for the most shocking and depressing stories in the belief that through compassion fatigue she could function as a normal member of society. She’d come out of her shell and wrapped herself in an enabling shroud of twenty-first century functional narcolepsy. I’d loved her explanation, but wasn’t sure if it was meant to be taken as a true story, or an oblique critique on the way, post-9/11, we’d all begun to live.

  Back in the sunshine, Dani finally loosened her embrace and, brushing back her long raven hair with her hand, stood back to take a look at me. She obviously didn’t like what she saw, slanting her head with concern, fixing her green eyes on my face.

  “Lishman, you look awful. Like you’ve already had a weekend. It’s Saturday morning. What is it? Drinking?”

  I tried to remember the last night I hadn’t gone out drinking. Friday night had started as a hangover cure but became an alcoholic rollover, ending at some stage at the Jazz Cafe and then another black out.

  “Drinking and women,” I said, truthful but unrepentant.

  “Ugh, I don’t want to know,” her mood darkened a little when usually she would have laughed. I sensed it wasn’t going to be a day of light-hearted fun.

  “Let’s go,” I said, anxious to change the mood.

  “Can we get coffee afterwards? I want to talk to you,” said Dani.

  “I’m meeting a good friend tonight. Marty. So I was planning on sleeping this afternoon.”

  Dani was quiet. She looked disappointed.

  “Why don’t you join us? We can talk a little beforehand,” I added. I dreaded the announced ‘talk’ without knowing what it was going to be about. I’d much rather a conversation either happened or didn’t.

  “No, I want to talk to you properly. Anyway, who’s this Marty? You’ve never mentioned him before.”

  “He’s my oldest friend from Newcastle. We fell out about five years ago, but, he came to the funeral and, well, we made up. Met him for drinks on Thursday night.”

  “So you weren’t out with a woman?” she accused mischievously, perhaps lightening up because I’d mentioned the funeral and she knew she shouldn’t be giving me a hard time.

  “The girl came later. There’s quite a story attached to that. One I’ll probably never tell you,” I said and gave her a wink.

  “Sometime next week then for the talk,” she said definitively, “if it’s not too much trouble.”

  “I’ll come to find you on Monday afternoon about two o’clock. It’s a bank holiday.”

  She nodded her assent and started fiddling with her camera.

  As I lit a cigarette, I considered Dani and her borderline possessive behaviour. Every friendship had its pros and cons, I thought. And Dani wasn’t usually such hard work, so there must be something on her mind. Something not easy to talk about. But why talk to me? I’m hardly the kind of well-rounded individual that you tell your problems to. I’ve got quite a few of my own to be getting on with. I looked at my watch, we were late for the first interview of the morning.

  * * *

  Opposite Chalk Farm station was The Imperialist, an old free house pub, now “the hub of Camden’s vibrant music scene” as we were fond of writing at FP. On our approach, we could hear a bass line thudding from the upstairs of the pub, shaking the windows and ornamental lamps. A deep voice sang out:

  FIGHT THE POWER

  BITE THE HAND

  FIGHT THE POWER

  BITE THE HAND

  CANONISE CRIMINALS

  CANONISE CRIMINALS

  It was EgoFunk in action. Playing their radical punk reggae at a volume the whole of Camden could hear.

  There was no bell so I knocked on the door, but there was no chance they were going to hear us above the noise. I found the number of EgoFunk’s manager on my mobile and pressed call. A few seconds later I heard my tinny mobile phone speaker project the same bass line that was swimming all around us through the brickwork and glass. I couldn’t hear a word she was saying so I hung up and texted:

  We’re downstairs. Let us in. FP

  A few minutes later a black girl dressed like a rasta-pirate opened the door. Her slender arms were covered from top to bottom in intricate tattoos, spider-webbing and overlapping with schizoid intensity.

  “You must be Lishman.”

  I nodded and introduced Dani.

  “I’m Kari. EgoFunk’s manager.” She stepped out onto the pavement. “Let’s grab a coffee before you meet the band.”

  Dani motioned for Kari to pose under The Imperialist’s sign and snapped a photo. Kari raised a fuck-you middle finger and smiled a crooked smile.

  After getting coffees to go, the lead singer of EgoFunk came downstairs to meet us in the empty bar of The Imperialist. Tall and slim, he was naked from the waist up and showing off his pale skin covered in similarly overlapping thin spidery tattoos. He had mid-length blonde dreadlocks and wore no shoes. His feet were black with dirt.

  “What’s up? I’m Judas,” he said in a strangely ironic Jamaican accent, patting me warmly on the arm.

  “Lishman,” I said, trying to shake his hand and instead being offered a fist, which, catching on, I met with my own.

  “Lish-mon! I like your interviews. You take a back seat. Let the artist express themself.”

  “Thanks, Judas,” I said, bemused. Was it his way of telling me to shut up and let him speak?

  I started my Dictaphone and a
sked, “Why does EgoFunk so openly venerate criminals in their songs?”

  Judas smiled. This was obviously his kind of question.

  “My parents were travellers in the 80s. I was born in a campervan on a Devon field surrounded by policemen with riot shields. My first seconds on this Earth were serenaded by the slow beat lullaby of batons on shields as the police taunted a travelling community because it had chosen a different way of life. You see, any successful alternative method of living will be crushed by capital interests. We’re being homogenised like factory milk. Governments are always working to monopolise decisions. A successful alternative lifestyle isn’t tolerated, because it isn’t part of their plan and they can’t collect the taxes. Travellers are hard to control and assimilate. The criminal – and we’re not talking about sex cases here – is free from cultural hegemony. The criminal is an existential hero. As all alternative lifestyles are considered criminal to some extent, we embrace the term. We reclaim it for the class war...”

  I let the Dictaphone run on and only occasionally interjected. I would edit in some clarification questions later. The band would get the chance to approve the quotes. Most bands didn’t want to change anything.

  An hour later, with plenty of outrageous quotes and photos in our bags, we said goodbye to Kari and Judas and walked up towards the Roundhouse where AmizFire was located. Dani took photos of renovated factory buildings on the way.

  * * *

  AmizFire Productions was housed in an old Victorian match factory with tarnished red bricks and a free-standing chimney that had been converted into a stainless-steel obelisk.

  Dani was blown away by the obelisk. She held up her Nikon and began snapping.

  “Lishman, stand in front of this huge silver dick. It will give people an idea of scale.”

  “I don’t know if I like the implication – a measure for dicks.”

  Beyond the slick sliding doors, the reception was, like the website, fashionably minimalist: greys, whites and inverted triangles cleverly giving the illusion of pyramid forms through the lights and the shadows.

  Incongruous in the sea of geometric forms was the placing of a black-marble winged goddess as the centrepiece of the large entrance hall.

  “I think it’s Isis, an Egyptian goddess,” said Dani, studying the statue.

  “She’s covered in scales.”

  “True. Part reptile, part bird, part human. She’s not always like that.”

  I looked around in the hope of seeing Natasha, but there was no sign. I walked over towards the reception and gave my name. We were pointed towards the lounge area. I sprawled out on one of the leather sofas and tried to catch a few minutes’ siesta. Dani picked up a stack of art magazines from the triangular coffee table and flicked through them while we waited.

  There was a loud ping as the lift doors opened. A heavily built man in a well-tailored suit walked out. As he got closer, I could see he was tanned, in his late fifties with thick grey hair and gleaming, intelligent eyes.

  “You from Free Press?” he said in an accent that I couldn’t quite place – an unconvincing BBC accent with a hint of East London.

  “Yes, that’s right.”

  “The girl who usually deals with this kind of thing hasn’t come into work today, so I thought I’d meet you myself. My name’s Mr Burns. To whom do I have the pleasure?”

  “Lishman. And this is Dani.” I guessed ‘the girl’ he was referring to was Natasha and wondered whether I should have just called her directly. I could call her tonight, after my night out with Marty. Girls generally didn’t like booty calls, but something told me Natasha would be different.

  “Have we met before, Lishman? You remind me of someone,” said Burns. “I can’t quite put my finger on it.”

  “No, I’ve quite a common face, Mr Burns.”

  “Ha. I would say it was uncommon if anything. Look, the artist, Diane, won’t be here for half an hour. Why don’t I take you up to the gallery first? See a bit of her work. Then you can do the interview.”

  We followed Burns into the lift. There were a lot of floors. He pressed a button marked AmizArt.

  “What exactly do you do here at AmizFire Productions, Mr Burns?”

  “Please, it’s Tommy. We have everything from film and video production to art galleries and exhibition spaces. AmizFire Productions is a cultural experiment. We’re constantly charting new waters. In fact, yesterday I signed a soul band from Camden, AmizMusic Studios is in the basement. Something that might interest Free Press in the future.”

  Dani was very quiet. She was brooding over something. The lift doors opened and we stepped out into a large white room.

  “This is called The White Room,” said Mr Burns, “no prizes for guessing why. Now, I have to make a phone call so I’ll leave you two to look around.”

  “Thank you, Mr Burns.”

  “My pleasure, Lishman. Write a good story about us or we’ll know where to find you.” He smiled in a way to signal it was a joke, but humour didn’t seem to come naturally to him. He got back in the lift and disappeared.

  Dani was on her haunches fixing her camera for indoors. I took out my notebook and pen and squatted down beside her.

  “What’s wrong, Dani? You seem pissed off about something?”

  “Couldn’t you feel it?” she said in a whisper.

  “Feel what?” I whispered back.

  “When he’s around,” she said, pointing to the lift doors, “his aura”.

  “I have to be honest. I felt nothing,” I said. I had little time for the New Age myself. It was too anti-Enlightenment. I feared if they ever came to power, they would ban coffee.

  We moved over to the first piece. It was called Lice and contained a scale model of Trafalgar Square with images of tiny lice projected onto the ground, milling around in their thousands. There was a telescope available to the visitor. I pointed it at a crowd of lice and pressed a button. I got a close-up of a louse standing upright dressed in an overcoat, its louse-head poked out of the top but its hands were human. Every time I pressed the button I got a different louse in a different outfit. The first one was holding a newspaper. The second, an umbrella and a mobile phone. Dani was unable to get a clear photo of the installation, so she got a shot of me looking through the telescope.

  “A louse, looking at a louse,” she quipped.

  “Thanks.”

  “Just suggesting a caption.”

  The second piece was called Look-In Glass. This time there was a viewer box that you put your head into. I pressed the button and a film began. It was as if I was seeing through the eyes of someone else. Two arms in front of me swung in camera shot as the person walked. It was not clear if they were male or female limbs. The film suddenly cut to a breakfast scene. One hand held a cup of tea while the other turned the pages of a newspaper that was on a table. The screen cleared and then resumed. I saw a bathroom. The tiles were splattered with blood. The camera panned towards a bath. In there was a dead body with a petrified look on her face. The same arms appeared in screen shot, instead of a cup of tea, this time the hand was holding a large blood-covered knife. The camera turned towards the mirror and I saw my own face projected on the mirror.

  “Jeez, how did they do that?” I jumped back with the shock. When I’d gathered myself together to look again, instead of my face was the face of a primitive man, a Neanderthal, then an ape. Each stage in man’s evolution morphed slowly into the next, backwards and forwards.

  We were moving onto the next installation when I felt my mobile begin to vibrate. I clicked answer. It was Tommy Burns telling me that the artist wouldn’t be coming after all but that we could do an email interview with her later. I thanked him and told him we would be leaving AmizArt in about ten minutes. A throbbing had begun in my head and I was ready to take a pill and get some sleep.

  * * *

  In a chrome electric bar off Old Street, the throb of German machine music made talking difficult. It was gone midnight. We’d met early
and started on beer, progressed to whisky, and now it was cocaine. Marty handed me another wrap. I never usually indulged, but my stance on drugs had made Marty nervous. To him it was like refusing the peace pipe. I slipped off to the toilets for the seventh or eighth time. I did a line then went back to the table.

  “You’re not going to like this,” Marty said.

  “What?”

  “Three psychos at two o’clock. Staring.”

  I turned and saw danger in the shape of three outsized men wearing jeans and heavy boots. He was right. They were looking at us as if they wanted us dead. It was hard to misread those signs.

  “Let’s go,” I urged.

  “No can do. I come here all the time.”

  “Yeah, but they don’t.”

  I looked to see if any of the windows would open onto the street, but they were blacked out and nailed shut.

  “Too late, mate. They’re waiting by the only exit,” said Marty as if reading my thoughts. “We have to accept what’s coming.”

  “I’m really buzzing. What’s in that coke, PCP?”

  “Testosterone. I’m trying to grow you a pair.”

  “So they can be ripped off by some ‘roid heads?”

  “Okay, let’s do it. Don’t try any of your amateur judo shit. It gets in the way. Go primitive. You’ll need to find a weapon. These guys are killers. Look at them.”

  “Promise we’ll just walk out of here. I’m not ready. This has come out of nowhere.”

  “Just when you least expect it. It’s always the case. Look, if we don’t fight, we won’t be walking anywhere. Attack is our only defence.”

  My hands were trembling. I lit a cigarette, took a quick drag and stood up. Marty was in his element. He pushed his palm against my chest, holding me back, “Me first,” he said.

  I turned to see three shadowy figures quickly approaching Marty through the reds and blues of the neon. The ringleader, suede-headed and shorter than the other two, leapt up and landed a head-butt on Marty sending him crashing backwards. But Marty was back up in a flash, smashing a bar stool into Suedehead’s gut. He went down. Marty ducked a bottle from the guy wearing a bomber jacket while taking out the third man with a sharp kick into the side of his knee – you could almost hear the joint pop. Marty turned his attention to Bomberjacket, palm-punching his face and kicking at his kidneys then dodging back to a safe distance. But suddenly he was in trouble again, Suedehead was back up, pinning Marty’s arms from behind, so Bomberjacket could take free punches. As the beating ensued, Marty’s eyes found me, imploring me to act, but I was caught in the headlights of ultra-violence, over-adrenalised with coke and fear. I looked up and down the bar, no police, no bouncers. I knew I had to act or lose Marty forever, either by death or cowardice.