9
STAG NIGHT
The sifting silver rain had not managed to dampen anyone’s spirits. Most of the partygoers had made their way along the broad, empty road to the club as if taking a stroll on a summer’s night. Certainly many seemed dressed for hiking, in boots and jeans, browns and greys, baggy woollen sweaters and padded jackets. The idea of donning outrageous outfits at the start of the weekend was losing its appeal in the capital, as if the young were too worried about their places in the world to appear frivolous. Besides, it was considered provincial to be seen wandering about in white-feathered angel wings and bare midriffs, which better belonged on teenagers from unfashionable towns. London’s nightclub denizens associated dourness with sophistication, although they still bellowed into the dawn sky and woke whole neighbourhoods after a night of dancing and a few happy pills.
Among the drifting clusters a small handful were fancy-dressed: a droopy-looking chicken, some Playboy bunny-types and cavemen, groups on obligatory hen and stag nights determined to see out their last moments of unmarried freedom in tests of alcoholic endurance. As the two women left, they passed a girl dressed in a St Trinian’s school outfit sitting on the kerb, oblivious of the rain, trying to heave up the last of her fried chicken while her friends held her hair out of her face.
Sometimes Meera Mangeshkar studied her peers and regarded them as an alien race. She felt no connection to other women of her age. Meera had not marked her teenage birthdays by hiring a white stretch limo and driving around the West End screaming from the windows. A third-generation Asian Londoner, she often felt stranded between cultures, too sensible for England, too eccentric for India. She had agreed to come out with Sashi to prove that she could still have fun.
The Keys club hosted Friday night specials in a Victorian train shed at the rear of King’s Cross Station. Those who left it on foot were forced to walk back along the desolate S-bend of York Way to one of the termini, but the route had been further twisted by ongoing construction work, taking them onto a makeshift tarmac path that curved over a field of churned earth. On either side, yellow earthmovers stood beneath tall spotlights with rain sparkling on their steel canopies. A thin river of brown mud was creeping across the path as if trying to obscure it.
‘I can’t see where I’m going,’ said Sashi, staring down at her shoes. ‘My feet are soaked. Couldn’t we have got a minicab?’
‘This evening has already cost a bloody fortune,’ Meera replied. ‘I won’t be going back there in a hurry. Twenty quid entrance fee, just to have the bouncer run a light over my arse and joke about me with his mates.’
‘Did he do that?’ asked Sashi. ‘You should have told me; I’d have threatened him with harassment.’
‘I think that’s my job,’ said Meera. ‘I’ve still got the badge, if nothing else.’ The young detective constable had come clubbing with her old schoolfriend, but had hated every minute of the evening, which had mainly consisted of queuing for the entry stamp, the cloakroom, the toilets and the bar. She had forced herself to come out and be sociable, if only to prevent herself from thinking about the PCU and how it had screwed up her career. Her sister had called to suggest a part-time job in her coffee shop, but Meera had so rudely refused the offer that she had upset both of them. If things got bad she would have to sell her Kawasaki, but for now she was determined to hold onto the motorbike until something decent came along.
‘It’s only half past one,’ said Sashi. ‘They don’t shut until six a.m. Everyone else is still inside. Look, there’s no-one around now.’ She was right; the streets outside the club were suddenly deserted.
‘You could have stayed. You didn’t have to come with me.’ Meera sulkily stomped around a water-filled ditch. ‘I’m capable of seeing myself home.’ She suspected that Sashi had taken something earlier, because she hadn’t stopped talking for the past half hour. Meera enjoyed a few beers but drew the line at taking recreational drugs, which meant that she gained no pleasure from watching those around her jabber into each other’s ears while their limbs tightened and their pupils dilated. She knew Sashi thought she was no fun, but Meera cared too much about her career to risk it for so little.
She wanted to hate the PCU, but never thought she would miss it so much. She had spent the week hanging out with old friends with whom she now shared nothing in common. Watching Sashi cut loose on the dance floor tonight, flirting with guys who stared at her breasts as if they were fillet steaks, she felt like she had turned the clock back five years. She tried to understand how she had come to leave so much of her former life behind. Bryant and May had encouraged her to observe the world with a kind of detached amusement. In doing so, they had shown her another way of living. The unit had changed her; she had gone too far now to change back.
‘Damn, I’ve broken my heel. Hold on, I can’t see.’ Sashi raised her foot and examined it.
‘Don’t take your shoe off, there could be glass around.’ Practicality came naturally to Meera. She waited while the damage was assessed. Sashi hopped and squinted and complained. They were in the centre of the city, but could have been in the heart of the English countryside. The canal ran nearby, and a gaggle of ungainly Canadian geese shook themselves as they passed, making her start.
‘Come on, Sashi, I’m getting drenched here.’ She set off again, moving from the circle of dim light that fell across her path.
Sashi hobbled up behind her. ‘There was this guy, right, the tall one with the tied-back blond hair? He wanted to tell my fortune.’
‘It looked like he was trying to do it by staring down the inside of your shirt.’
‘What’s wrong with that? Honestly, Meera, ever since you joined the police you’ve become so boring about men.’
‘Maybe that’s because most of the ones I see are drunk, abusive, vomiting and in handcuffs.’
‘That’s exactly what I mean. Don’t take this the wrong way, but maybe you’re a lesbian. Hey!’ Meera looked back. Sashi had come to a sudden halt. ‘What’s he doing?’ She pointed to a low ridge of turned earth on her right. About fifty feet away a man stood beneath a spotlight in the drifting rain, his head down, his legs braced.
‘Is that a sculpture or something?’
‘No,’ said Meera, ‘that’s a guy.’
He seemed abnormally tall and thick-legged. There was something odd about his legs; the trousers were low-slung and made from a strange kind of furry brown material. Something on his head glittered in the overhead light. For a moment she was reminded of the Highwayman, the murderous figure they had tracked across London, because this man too was dressed up in some kind of weird outfit. Not a historical costume filched from a fancy dress shop, though, but something rough and hairy, so that he looked oddly mythical, like a large animal standing on its back legs.
Slowly he raised his head and studied them. He was wearing a black mask like a bandanna across his eyes. Long metallic branches sprouted from above his ears, catching the light. ‘Oh, I get it,’ said Meera. ‘He’s dressed as a stag. It’s his stag night. He looks really drunk.’
‘Well, he’s creeping me out. Come on.’ Sashi grabbed at her arm and paced faster, but the path took them further toward him, and the two young women were not prepared to scrabble up the muddy bank that now rose at the sides.
He turned his head to watch them. His muscular arms were bare, his chest and thighs covered in some kind of coarse fur. They had almost passed him when he abruptly dropped from the ridge and loped toward them. Sashi screamed.
Meera turned as the stag-man came alongside, reaching down and looping his arm around Sashi’s waist to lift her easily off the ground. The detective constable was about to kick out at his knees when she saw that he was playing with Sashi, swinging her from side to side. Sashi’s shrieks were fearful but flirtatious, like those of a girl at a funfair.
The stag-man swung her onto his hip and Sashi started to laugh. His shining eyes were deep-set above a short-haired snout. In the lamplight Meera could see that the brown-and-white fur on his chest and shoulders rose seamlessly to his thick neck and headpiece, on top of which was a magnificent pair of glittering steel antlers. They must be heavy, Meera thought vaguely as she stood by, miserable in the rain. ‘Come on, Sashi, stop—’
But then the stag-man swung his captive high above his right shoulder and let her go, so that she tipped and fell into the surrounding vale of mud, landing heavily on her side. Sashi’s yelp of laughter turned to anger and confusion as Meera ran forward, first pulling her friend up to her feet, then slamming into the stag-man. He’s stoned, he’ll go down, she thought as she struck out, kicking him in the stomach, but it was like hitting rock. As that didn’t work her next kick aimed lower. This time he cried out. As he dropped his head at her, she saw that the steel horns were not made of sticks and tinfoil, but comprised the blades of dozens of kitchen knives bolted together. That’s why the headpiece is so light, she remembered thinking, that’s how he can keep his head up, but by that time he had slashed at her, slicing open the material of her leather sleeve and cutting through to the skin of her right arm.
By the time she looked back he had disappeared over the ridge, and Sashi was left kneeling in the mud, crying.
Meera sat on an orange plastic chair in a cubicle of the A&E department at University College Hospital, watching dispassionately as a nurse placed sutures across the cleaned wound.
‘You were lucky,’ said the nurse, tapping her forearm. ‘He just missed the artery here.’ She had a strong Irish lilt in her voice that most patients would have found comforting.
‘Yeah, right, lucky me,’ said Meera, who was not comforted. She had sent her mud-spattered friend outside for a smoke. Sashi was probably on the phone by now, telling everyone what had happened. Meera was surprised she hadn’t managed to film the attack for her Web page.
‘Why did you have a go at him, love?’ asked the constable who had accompanied her to UCH.
‘You mean apart from the fact that he was assaulting my friend?’ She found it hard to keep the sarcasm from her voice.
‘You said he was on his stag night, so he was probably a bit drunk.’
‘No, I said he was dressed as a stag—there’s a difference.’
‘So why did you have a go at him?’
‘Because I’m trained to react like that,’ she told him, reaching across into her jacket with her free hand and flipping open her badge wallet.
‘Bloody hell,’ complained the constable. ‘Peculiar Crimes Unit? You lot have given us some grief in the past, you know.’
‘Don’t start with me, PC—what’s your name?’
‘Purviance, Darren.’
‘You’re from Camden nick, Purviance Darren.’
He wasn’t wearing his jacket, which had identifying epaulettes. ‘How d’you know?’ he asked.
‘You’ve got the look.’ She didn’t mean it nicely.
‘Hasn’t your unit just been disbanded?’
‘Placed on hiatus,’ Meera corrected. ‘Don’t you want a description of the bloke who attacked me?’
‘I thought you attacked him. You didn’t go after him, then.’
‘It was dark and muddy, I couldn’t see where he went. There’ll be plenty of prints, though. He was holding onto the spotlight pole.’
PC Purviance seemed less interested in the culprit than the victim. He’d heard a lot of wild stuff about the PCU, how they looked down on the Met and behaved like a law to themselves. ‘So, what’s your official status, then?’ he asked.
‘I was off duty, okay?’
‘What’s happened to old Bryant and May? Finally been made to retire, have they? They were a right pain in the arse, both of them. Drove the lads down at the station mad. We always said they should leave police work to the professionals.’
‘That’d be you then, would it?’ Meera winced as the last suture was put in place. ‘So what are you going to do about catching this guy?’
‘Come on, Mangeshkar, be realistic. You know how it works. The bloke was obviously out of order, but look at the situation. You were outside a nightclub in a dodgy neighbourhood, he was on the sauce and having a bit of fun before the old ball and chain gets clamped on him, you two overreacted, that’s all.’
‘I thought attempting to stab someone might fall under your initiative to prevent knife crimes in the area.’
‘He wasn’t carrying a knife, he was wearing them on his head, according to you.’
‘What do you mean, according to me? Sashi saw him too—she was right there.’
‘Yeah, well, your mate’s dropped a couple of pills by the look of it, so who knows what she saw? Don’t get smart with me, love. Just file your report and leave it alone, okay?’ Purviance took a call on his radio and rose to leave.
‘Don’t take no notice of him,’ said the nurse wearily. ‘It’s already been a long night.’
‘Do you get a lot of trouble in this area?’ asked Meera, rolling down her sleeve.
‘You’re joking, aren’t you? We’ve had a dozen Cat A’s in since my shift started and God knows how many Ambers—mostly hypervents, overheats and panic attacks. Not bad for a Friday, considering the EOC’s main computer is playing up again.’ The Emergency Operations Centre dispatched London’s ambulances, assigning each job a number. Yesterday, there had been over 3,600 calls logged to the emergency service; a fairly typical figure.
The nurse threw away the tetanus needle and snapped opaque white gloves into the disposal bin. ‘There are at least a couple of dozen nightclubs within a quarter mile of here and we’re not even in the West End. Half the kids in them seem incapable of enjoying themselves without ingesting some kind of stimulant. There are fifteen-year-olds out there tonight sucking low-coke wraps up their nostrils without the faintest idea of what they’re ingesting.’
‘Low-coke? What’s that?’
‘Oh, haven’t you heard? The dealers are expanding their markets by creating a two-tier price structure for their drugs, thirty-pound rubbish quality for the kids, purer fifty-pound stuff for the white-collar workers. Thoughtful of them. Low-coke is cut with anything the dealer can find in the cupboard under his sink. Funny, when you think kids are so picky about what they eat.’
‘And I thought I had a tough job. Why do you do it?’
‘Honestly? I heard doctors were really good kissers.’
Meera found herself laughing.
The nurse rose. ‘Go on, off with yourself. You’re good to go, but don’t put any pressure on that arm for a few days. The sutures will get itchy before they dissolve, but don’t pick them off. And don’t forget to do us all a favour and file a report on the gentleman who did this. Bollocks to what your man over there says.’
Meera had already decided that it was pointless going back to PC Purviance. Instead she decided on more direct action.