The Fountain in the Forest Read online

  That was when his phone rang.

  ‘King,’ he said.

  ‘Hello. Detective Sergeant King? This is Gertrude Bisika, from this morning. Is this a good time to call?’

  ‘Yup. No problem at all,’ he said, picking up the remote with his other hand to turn down Newsnight. ‘What can I do for you, Mrs Bisika?’

  ‘Well, you said that I should phone you any time if I thought of anything else.’

  She had his full attention. ‘Absolutely,’ he said. ‘Thank you for getting back to me. What is it?’

  ‘Well, Iris, one of the other cleaners, who lives here too, but on the third floor, she said—’ She paused. ‘Oh, I don’t know. You’ll think we are being silly.’

  ‘Not at all, Mrs Bisika,’ said King, clicking a biro and opening his notebook. ‘Anything could help; really.’

  5: DORONIC (LEOPARD’S BANE)

  As he walked towards Rex along the sixth-floor corridor, DS Eddie Webster lifted a hand in greeting, then thumbed back at the swing doors he had just come through. ‘You, me, coffee?’

  ‘Sid’s?’ asked Rex.

  ‘Nah. Downstairs,’ said Webster. ‘Shop talk.’

  ‘Yeah, go on, then,’ said Rex, pushing through the doors, their footsteps on the polished concrete suddenly amplified by the space and height of the stairwell. Might as well take the bull by the horns, he thought: ‘How’s it going, Eddie? Helen and the kids?’

  Through all of their day-to-day dealings, Detective Sergeants Rex King and Eddie Webster had somehow managed to studiously avoid the subject of Helen for a decade or more, possibly nearer two, but Rex was no longer sure what had been the point. Pride? Possibly. It wasn’t what you’d choose to happen, was it – your girlfriend having a whirlwind romance with your workmate and getting married six months later. It was not ideal, especially in a work situation. It had been complicated too. Certainly more complicated than Eddie knew. Lately, though, Rex had found himself sometimes wondering what all the fuss had been about. Helen and Eddie had found each other and realised that they both wanted a particular kind of life that Rex didn’t; not at the time, anyway. Why wouldn’t she grab that with both hands? They would have been fools not to. If you looked at it another way, Eddie had done them both a favour. He’d saved Rex and Helen’s so-called relationship from a painful and lingering death.

  He was still a twat, though.

  ‘Everyone’s good, thanks, mate,’ said Eddie. ‘Helen’s gone back to teaching—’

  Rex, turned, surprised. ‘Really? I thought she’d—’

  ‘Yeah, I know. But primary this time. She prefers it. Wanstead Church, if that means anything to you; over Snaresbrook way.’

  ‘…’

  ‘Well, it’s the best primary school in the borough by a long fucking chalk. Loving it, she says. The girls are both at the Beal now too, so she can drop them off on her way to work.’ Webster shook his head. ‘Fuck me! This time last year it was looking as if Rachel would have to go to Chadwell Heath, which is closer to fucking Romford than Woodford, but luckily—’ He stopped himself. ‘Anyway, Rex, mate, you don’t want to hear what we had to do to swing it, but what a bloody relief. You’d think it’d get less fucking stressful the older they get, but it’s the other bloody way round.’

  ‘How old are they now?’ Rex asked

  ‘Jennifer’s coming up for GCSEs next year.’

  ‘You’re joking!’ said Rex, but of course she was. Fifteen! Bloody hell. That had gone quick.

  ‘It’s not bloody Eton,’ said Eddie, ‘but it’s second in the old league tables, and it’s got a good sixth form, so Rachel will have her older sister there for a few more years, which is good.’

  ‘Nice one,’ said Rex. ‘Good for them. Give Helen my best.’

  ‘Yeah, course I will,’ said Eddie, but Rex knew he wouldn’t.

  ‘No, it’s my treat,’ said Rex, a few moments later, as he paid for both of their coffees. ‘Glad I bumped into you, Eddie. Lollo probably told you I was in that Tennyson briefing all day, so I missed your meeting. How’d it go?’

  ‘Well, if I tell you that we’ve got fuck-all, and we’re drawing a blank every-fucking-where we look, you can probably imagine the rest. You don’t need me to spell it out,’ said Webster, before taking a slurp of coffee. ‘Bunch of clueless wankers, honestly!’

  ‘That bad?’

  ‘For fuck’s sake. Please tell me that you and me were smarter than those fucking uniform-carriers when we started out, Rex. Talk about plod! I don’t even want to glorify the twats by calling them policemen, some of them.’

  Rex laughed. It was good to see a glimpse of the old Eddie.

  ‘It’s only been a couple of days, though, Eddie,’ said Rex. ‘Par for the course, mate.’

  ‘S’pose so,’ said Webster. ‘Anyway, how was Tennyson? Not much in it after all, I suppose, since it wasn’t on the news. Nothing in the papers this morning either.’

  ‘No, they brought forward publication of that ACPO thing; keep Newsnight busy, just in case. But no, whoever it was, this was probably just a shot across the bows. Nothing new in there at all, they reckon. Nothing that’s not already in the public domain.’

  ‘No clue?’

  ‘No. Lawyers think it’s someone angling for a retrial, and this was just their first move, just to let us know they’re there. Whoever “they” are. Not the family or the usual campaigners, far as we know. Whatever it is, it makes me uncomfortable.’

  ‘Understandable,’ said Webster. ‘Listen. About your mate.’

  ‘Terry?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘What about him?’

  ‘Well, I don’t know. You probably think he’s been right set up, no? Onus on you to exonerate or whatever?’

  Rex nodded. ‘Tel wouldn’t hurt a fly, far as I know.’

  There was a pause.

  ‘Yeah, but it wasn’t a fucking fly that we found with his fucking nose cut off and hung up to dry in Terence Hobbs’s studio, was it, though, eh?’ said Webster. ‘And now the sudden, unexplained absence. I don’t want to paint a picture, but it’s pretty fucking classic, isn’t it?’

  ‘You reckon it was him, then?’ Rex asked.

  ‘Unless you’ve got a better idea, mate.’

  Rex shrugged. ‘Maybe you’re right.’

  ‘Well, I don’t know,’ said Eddie. ‘He’s your pal. Where would he be likely to go? Boyfriend in the country or something?’

  ‘Eh? No, Tel’s not gay, Eddie. I don’t think he is, anyway.’

  ‘Maybe that’s just because he didn’t fancy you? Can’t say I blame him.’

  ‘Never came up, I suppose, but I’m pretty sure.’

  ‘Well, we’re looking at that as a possibility. That our Terence picked his victim up somewhere and took him back to the studio for a bit of S and M that went badly wrong.’

  ‘No, I can’t see it,’ said Rex. ‘Have you even got any—’

  ‘“DNA”?’ laughed Webster. ‘Not yet, no. Putrefaction might be too far gone. No evidence of penetration neither.’

  Rex shook his head. ‘See? I think you’re barking up the wrong—’

  ‘Well, fuck’s sake, mate,’ said Webster. ‘It’s the best we’ve got at the moment, that Terence was a bum pilot on the pull. I mean, you know what they fucking say. If it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck, chances are it is a fucking duck.’ Webster seemed pleased with this prejudice masquerading as common-sense analysis, but then he noticed the expression on Rex’s face. ‘Oh, come on, Kingsy! You know what these theatrical types are like. Powder puff country, innit.’

  ‘Eh? No, I fucking don’t know.’

  King was incredulous. He knew that Webster was a twat, but every time he proved it – like with this homophobic outburst – was still a shock, an anachronism. Is that what living out in the sticks did for you? Christ, this wasn’t a 1970s school playground. And suspect or not, this was Rex’s friend that Eddie was talking about. The theatre world might well be a significantly mo
re tolerant community than the average police force, but that wasn’t hard, and even Rex knew that it didn’t mean everyone working in the dramatic arts was gay – but then again, so what if it did! What business was that of an old git like Webbo?

  ‘Christ, Eddie!’ Rex continued. ‘D’you miss out on diversity training or something? Off sick that week, were we? Jesus! You can’t fucking go around making sweeping statements like that in this day and age!’ He looked over his shoulder as if to check for eavesdroppers, ‘Fucking hell! The wrong person hears you and you’re out. Besides, all that showbiz magic and stardust is smoke and mirrors. You do know that, don’t you? Most of the crew are big fucking hairy-arsed technicians: gaffers and sparks, chippies. Fuck’s sake! Tinkerbell’s not really a fairy, you know! She’s a fat biker up at the back with a fucking half-ton shuttered followspot.’

  Rex had discovered the rough-hewn realities of backstage life as – duh – a moronic seventeen-or eighteen-year-old. He had learned this lesson in shabbier venues – if you could even call them that – than the Royal Palace Theatre, Drury Lane, but the same principle had applied: the trapeze artist’s apparently gossamer wings were made of coarsest hessian stiffened with coat hangers and glue, the leotard from smelly old velvet padded with horse hair.

  Detective Sergeant or not, Rex King can’t have been the only man of his age whose teenage years seemed not only more than a single lifetime ago, but the province of another person altogether. And yet, despite this distance, or perhaps because of it, he occasionally found himself reflecting upon the unlikely consequences of some of the unthinking decisions he had made at that time. It was only with the benefit of hindsight that he could even begin to see how little he had understood just what had been at stake, or to see quite how narrow some of his escapes had been.

  It wasn’t the most traditional of educations for a career in the police, and certainly not something that he bragged about these days, for obvious reasons, but in his teens the boy-who-would-be-Detective Sergeant Rex King had had a bad case of festival fever – a kind of Glastonbury romance. In 1984, he and a sixth-form mate called Andy had hitch-hiked up to Wiltshire for what they had had no way of knowing would be the last ever Stonehenge Free Festival, not to mention possibly the last truly free music festival of its kind ever to be held in the UK. It was, then, not so much an opening of the doors of perception, as a close the door on your way out, please. Less a brave new world, more the end of an era.

  In both concept and reality, a free festival was so far beyond either of their till then severely limited life experiences that neither of them had had much of a clue what to expect. Although, once they had got there and been faced with a familiar-looking fly-blown field of khaki tents, ramshackle old coaches and burned-out cars, with red distress flares going off, police helicopters hovering low above the crowd, and wah-wah waves of psychedelic music being carried on the wind from all directions, King had realised – if not in quite so many words – that he and his friends’ enthusiastic multiple viewings of a VHS of Apocalypse Now had laid a certain amount of the visual groundwork.

  Together with a hitherto half-baked interest in the idea of an anarchistic, temporary and spontaneously self-regulating community – a place where nothing was true and everything was permissible, to paraphrase a popular catchphrase of the time – it was a burgeoning fascination with psychedelics that had been the dominant reason for their going to Stonehenge in the first place, but the teenagers had still been amazed by the open selling of recreational drugs. One of the first things they’d seen had been a tent advertising ‘hot knives’ – a particularly lung-punishing way to take a hit of hash – as well as numerous painted signs for LSD and ‘Afghan black’, or ten-pound deals of cocaine. Having little or no interest in the produce of Bolivia, they had bought some ‘Smiley Mushrooms’ LSD, and a bag of sensimilla, which in those pre-‘skunk’ days was the name generally given to strong and supposedly Jamaican marijuana, especially when the weed comprised mainly seedless buds.

  If the vibes had not exactly been – in the words of the great reggae singer Sugar Minott – ‘level’, but had seemed, in the event, a little heavier than expected, what the adult Rex knew now, both from police intelligence and from more recently published anecdotal reports, was that 1984 had also seen the emergence of a fairly heavy crew from Bristol who’d been dealing a substantial amount of heroin at Stonehenge on the quiet. Supposedly it was this crew’s cars that had been overturned and burned out. Alas for our pals, who were completely oblivious to any heroin scene, even the sensi had been much stronger than anything they’d smoked before, and had quickly overwhelmed young Master King’s limited tolerance. He had grown pale and faint, felt both nauseous and anxious, and knew above all that he needed to assume some roughly horizontal position as soon as might be humanly possible. Which is what he had done.

  He was near a small stage, that was obvious, but, disorientated and struck with the horrors as he was, he’d had absolutely no idea which band was playing behind the sparkly strip-blind curtain that was hung between two tent poles at the back of the stage. There was almost nothing about the music – whether the rhythms or the sounds that the instruments were making – that he’d recognised.

  Propping himself up on his elbows, once he’d been able, and looking around, he’d found himself lying on duckboards behind some speaker stacks, surrounded by cabling and crates of electrics, painted flats, and buckets. The whole place had seemed like a big dressing-up box, with piles of old clothes lying around, assorted costumes and props strewn everywhere, jumble sale-stylee. If anything, the strangeness of the music had made him feel even more baked.

  It was in this still slightly disembodied state that he had suddenly seen a vision of beauty parting the curtain, and she – making eye contact and smiling – had evidently seen him. Glittering under the lights as she waded through the dry ice and stepped off the stage was a posi-punk princess, if that wasn’t a contradiction in terms, in purple lipstick and sparkling face paint. Sporting a grown-out Mohican and wearing torn fishnet tights under some sort of sequinned tutu, she had seemed the epitome of cool and glamour, and not only that, but she was now making a beeline towards him. She appeared to be holding a giant violin.

  King had wondered if he might be in love. ‘That looks like a giant violin,’ he’d said, awkwardly.

  ‘It’s a viol,’ she’d said, puzzled – the word had sounded like ‘vile’ – ‘or viola da gamba! Weren’t you just watching our gig? I just saw you out front, didn’t I? You and your mate? I only play on a couple of songs. That’s me done. They’ll be on for hours yet. What are you doing?’

  ‘…’

  Kneeling at his side, she had put her lips to his ear and half-sung, half-whispered a couple of verses of ‘I Wish’ by The Mob. Seconds stretched out into minutes as this became the most erotic chat-up that King had ever heard. The combination of the earnestly nihilistic lyrics, the smell of her skin – sweat, with a slight chemical note – and the feather-light percussion of her breath on his cheek was electrifying. It made his skin tingle and his cock hard. Almost as delirious with desire as he was stoned, but not quite, the young King had turned his face and kissed her, and as they’d kissed she had slipped a hand into his pocket to find and caress his knob.

  Oh, yes.

  Oh, no! He had moved too quickly. With a wave of nausea, the THC reasserted its control of his bodily systems. ‘Sorry, I—’ he’d spluttered. ‘Stoned.’

  If he even had been ‘on a promise’, as the saying went, he certainly wasn’t any more. The spell had been broken.

  ‘Not interested?’ she’d said, taking her hand from his pocket. ‘Oh well. See ya!’ Standing up, she’d quickly located her things, put the viol back into a flight case, then picked up a tatty-looking leopard-skin-patterned jacket and left.

  Half an hour or so later, covered in midge bites and with the sensi rush finally subsiding, King had got to his feet. The band were still playing, the music now recognisable as a kind o
f synthy, bluesy, space-rock jam. The backstage area was a mess. He’d looked out front, but where was Andy? More importantly, where could he get some food? Perhaps a beanburger or something.

  It was then that the young King had put his hand in his pocket. Where earlier there had been a ten-pound note, which had been most of his budget for the few days they’d been planning to stay, there was now precisely nothing. His pocket was empty. He’d looked on the floor where he’d been lying. There was nothing there either, so it hadn’t simply fallen out.

  Oh, no.

  Oh, yes. He couldn’t say for sure, but – face burning with embarrassment – he’d not been able to help wondering if he’d just been played. He had thought she liked him, but perhaps, like some latter-day Becky Sharp, the viol player had just been out for herself. Or perhaps, disappointed, she had found a way to penalise him for his apparent lack of motivation. Mortified, King had quickly decided that he wouldn’t tell Andy, and if pressed he’d just say he must have lost it. At least he’d still had a fiver and the two tabs of ‘Smiley Mushrooms’ in his other pocket. Maybe, he’d reasoned, he should go to the stones – the stones! – their rendezvous point, and find Andy, and they should just drop the acid.

  Pleasantly stoned now, and with a pressing case of the munchies, King had stepped off the duckboards and out into the crowd. The early-evening sun had begun to lend a golden cast to everything it touched. There would be a beautiful sunset in a couple of hours, and at least if they were tripping, he’d figured, they wouldn’t need much money for a day or so—