King Rat

Chapter Five

Fabian was trying to call Natasha but he could not reach her. She had taken her phone off the hook. The news about Saul’s father was spreading among his friends like a virus, but Natasha had immunized herself for a little while longer.

It was just after midday. The sun was bright but as cold as snow. The sounds of Ladbroke Grove filtered along the backstreets to the first floor of a flat on Bassett Road. They slid through the windows and rilled the front room, a susurrus of dogs and paper sellers and cars. The sounds were faint; they were what passed for silence in the city.

In the flat a woman stood motionless in front of a keyboard. She was short and her face was severe, with dark eyebrows that met above a scimitar nose. Her long hair was dark, her skin sallow. Her name was Natasha Karadjian.

Natasha stood with her eyes closed and listened to the streets outside. She reached out and pressed the power button on her sampler. There was a static thud as her speakers clicked into life.

She ran her hands over the keys and the cursor. She had stood motionless for a minute or two now. Even alone she felt self-conscious. Natasha rarely let people watch when she created her music. She was afraid they would think her precious, with her silent preparations and her closed eyes.

She tapped out a message on a clutch of small buttons, twisted her cursor, displayed her musical spoils on the LCD display. She scrolled through the selection and plucked a favourite bassline from her digital killing jar. She had snatched it from a forgotten Reggae track, sampled it, preserved it, and now she pulled it out and looped it and gave it another life. The zombie sound travelled the innards of the machine and out through wires, through the vast black stereo against her wall, and burst out of those great speakers.

The sound filled her room.

The bass was trapped. The sample ended just as the bass-player had been about to reach a crescendo, and expectation was audible in the thudding strings as they reached out for something, for a flourish… then a break, and the cycle started again.

This bassline was in purgatory. It burst into existence with a recurring surge of excitement, waiting for a release that never came.

Natasha nodded her head slowly. This was the breakbeat, the rhythm of tortured music. She loved it.

Again her hands moved. A pounding beat joined the bass, cymbals clattering like insects. And the sound looped.

Natasha moved her shoulders to the rhythm. Her eyes were wide as she scanned her kills, her pickled sounds, and she found what she wanted: a snatch of trumpet from Linton Kwesi Johnson, a wail from Tony Rebel, a cry of invitation from Al Green. She dropped them into her tune. They segued smoothly into the rolling bass, the slamming drums.

This was Jungle.

The child of House, the child of Raggamuffin, the child of Dancehall, the apotheosis of black music, the Drum and Bass soundtrack for a London of council estates and dirty walls, black youth and white youth, Armenian girls.

The music was uncompromising. The rhythm was stolen from Hip Hop, born of Funk. The beats were fast, too fast to dance to unless you were wired. It was the bassline you followed with your feet, the bassline that gave Jungle its soul.

And above the bassline was the high end of Jungle: the treble. Stolen chords and shouts that rode the waves of bass like surfers. They were fleeting and teasing, snatches of sound winking into existence and sliding over the beat, tracing it, then winking away.

Natasha nodded her satisfaction.

She could feel the bass. She knew it intimately. She searched instead for the sounds at the top, she wanted something perfect, a leitmotif to weave in and out of the drums.

She knew the people who ran the clubs, and they would always play her music. People liked her tracks a lot, gave her respect and bookings. But she felt a vague dissatisfaction with everything she wrote, even when the sensation was shot through with pride. When she finished a track she did not feel any purgation of relief, only a slight unease. Natasha would cast around, ransacking her friends’ record collections in an attempt to find the sounds she wanted to steal, or would make her own on her keyboard, but they never touched her like the bass. The bass never evaded her; she needed only to reach out for it, and it would drop out of her speakers complete and perfect.

The track was nearing a crescendo now: Gwan, exhorted a sampled voice, Gwan gyal. Natasha broke the beat, teasing the rhythm out, paring it down. She stripped flesh from the tune’s bones and the samples echoed in the cavernous ribcage, in the belly of the beat. Come now… we rollin’ this way, mdebwoy… She pulled her sounds our one by one, until only the bass was left. It had ushered the song in; it ushered it out again.

The room was silent.

Natasha waited a while until the city silence of children and cars crept into her ears again. She looked around at her room. Her flat contained a tiny kitchen, a tiny bathroom and the beautiful big bedroom she was in now. She had put her meagre collection of prints and posters in the other rooms and the hall; the walls here were quite bare. The room itself was empty except for a mattress on the floor, the hulking black stand which housed her stereo, and her keyboard. The wooden floor was criss-crossed with black leads.

She reached down and put the receiver back on the phone. She was about to wander into the kitchen, when the doorbell sounded. Natasha crossed the room to the open window and leaned out.

A man was standing in front of her door, looking straight up at her eyes. She had a brief impression of a thin face, bright eyes and long blond hair, before she ducked back into the room and headed down the stairs. He had not looked like a Jehovah’s witness or a troublemaker.

She walked through the dingy communal hall. Through the rippled glass of the front door she could see that the man was very tall. She pulled the door open, admitting voices from the next house and the daylight that was flooding the street.

Natasha looked up into his narrow face. The man was about six feet four, dwarfing her by nearly a foot, but he was so slim he looked as if he might snap in half at the waist any moment. He was probably in his early thirties, but he was so pale it was difficult to tell. His hair was a sickly yellow. The pallor of his face was exaggerated by his black leather jacket. He would have looked quite ill were it not for his bright blue eyes and his air of fidgety animation. He started to grin even before the door was fully open.

Natasha and her visitor stared at each other, he smiling, she with a guarded, quizzical expression.

‘Brilliant,’ he said suddenly.

Natasha stared at him.

‘Your music,’ he said. ‘Brilliant.’

The man’s voice was deeper and richer than she would have thought possible from such a slender frame. It was slightly breathless, as if he were rushing to get his words out. She stared up at him and her eyes narrowed. This was much too weird a way of starting a conversation. She was not having it.

‘What do you mean?’ she said levelly.

He smiled apologetically. His words slowed down a little.

‘I’ve been listening to your music,’ he said. ‘I came past here last week and I heard you playing up there. I tell you, I was just standing there with my mouth open.’

Natasha was embarrassed and amazed. She opened her mouth to interrupt but he continued.

‘I came back and I heard it again. It made me want to stand dancing in the street!’ He laughed. ‘The next time I heard you stop halfway through, and I realized someone was actually playing while I listened. I’d thought it was a record. It was such an exciting thought that you were actually up there making it.’

Natasha finally spoke.

‘This is really… flattering. But did you knock on my door just to tell me that?’ This man unnerved her with his excited grin and breathy voice. It was only curiosity that stopped her shutting the door. ‘I’ve not got a fan club yet.’

He stared at her and the nature of his smile changed. Until that moment it had been sincere, almost childish in its excitement. Slowly his lips closed a fraction and hid his teeth. He straightened his long back and his eyelids slid halfway down over his eyes. He leaned his head slightly to one side, without taking his eyes off her.

Natasha felt a wave of adrenaline. She looked back at him in shock. The change which had come over him was extraordinary. He stared at her now with a look so sexual, so casually knowing, that she felt vertiginous.

She was furious with him. She shook her head a little and prepared to slam the door. He held it open. Before she could say anything, his arrogance had gone and the old look was back.

‘Please,’ he said quickly. ‘I’m sorry. I’m not explaining myself. I’m flustered because I’ve… been plucking up courage to talk to you.’

‘You see,’ he continued, ‘what you’re playing is beautiful, but sometimes it feels a little bit — don’t get angry — a bit unfinished. I sort of feel like the treble isn’t quite… working. And I wouldn’t say that to you except I play a little bit myself and I thought maybe we could help each other out.’

Natasha stepped backwards. She felt intrigued and threatened. She always stonewalled about her music, refusing to discuss her feelings about it with any except her very closest friends. The intense but inchoate frustrations she felt were rarely verbalized, as if to do so would give them form. She chose to keep them at bay with obfuscation, from herself as much as from others, and now this man seemed to be unwrapping them with an unnerving casualness.

‘Do you have a suggestion?’ she said as acidly as she could. He reached behind him and picked up a black case. He shook it in front of her.

‘This might sound a bit cocky,’ he said, ‘and I don’t want you to think I reckon I can do better than you. But, when I heard your playing, I just knew I could complement it.’ He undid the clasp of the case and opened it in front of her. She saw a disassembled flute.

‘I know you might think I’m crazy,’ he preempted hurriedly. ‘You think what you play is totally different to what I play. But… I’ve been looking for bass like yours for longer than you could believe.’

He spoke earnestly now, his eyebrows furrowed as he held her gaze. She stubbornly stared back, refusing to be overawed by this apparition on her doorstep.

‘I want to play with you,’ he said.

This was stupid, Natasha told herself: even if this man was not arrogant beyond belief, you could not play the flute to Jungle. It was so long since she had stared at a traditional instrument she felt a gust of déjà vu: images of her nine-year-old self banging the xylophone in the school orchestra. Flutes meant enthusiastic cacophonies at the hands of children or the alien landscape of classical music, an intimidating world of great beauty but vicious social exclusivity, to which she had never known the passwords.

But to her amazement, this lanky stranger had impressed her. She wanted to let him in and hear him play his flute in her room. She wanted to hear him play over some of her basslines. Discordant indie bands had done it, she knew: My Bloody Valentine had used flutes. And while the result had left her as dead cold as the rest of that genre, surely the alliance itself was no more unlikely than this one. She realized that she was intrigued.

But she was not simply going to stand aside. She had a reputation for being intimidating. She was not used to feeling so disarmed, and her defences flared.

‘Listen,’ she said slowly. ‘I don’t know what you think qualifies you to speak about my tracks. Why should I play with you?’

‘Try it once,’ he said, and again that sudden change flooded his features, the same curled smile on the edge of the lips, the same heavy-lidded nonchalance about the eyes.

And Natasha was suddenly furious with this pretentious little art-school wanker, livid where a moment ago she had been captivated, and she leaned forward and up on tiptoes, until her face was as close to his as it would go, and she raised one eyebrow, and she said: ‘I don’t think so.’

She closed the door in his face.

Natasha stalked back up her stairs. The window was open. She stood next to it, close to the wall, looking down at the street without putting herself in view. She could see no sign of the man. She walked slowly to her keyboard. She smiled.

OK, you cocky fucker, she thought. Let’s see how good you are.

She turned the volume down slightly, and pulled another rhythm out of her collection. This time the drums came crashing out of nowhere. The bass came chasing after, filling out the snare and framing the sound with a funky backdrop. She threw in a few minimal shouts and snatches of brass, looped a moment of trumpet, but the treble was subdued; this was an offering to the man outside, and it was all about rhythm.

The beats looped once, twice. Then, sailing up from the street came a thin snatch of music, a trill of flute that mimicked the looping repetition of her own music, but elaborated on itself, changed a little with every cycle. He was standing below her window, his hastily assembled instrument to his lips.

Natasha smiled. He had made good on his arrogance. She would have been disappointed if he had not.

She stripped the beat down and left it to loop. She stood back and listened.

The flute skittered over the drums, teasing the beat, touching just enough to stay anchored, then transporting itself. It suddenly became a series of staccato flutterings. It lilted between drum and bass, now wailing like a siren, now stuttering like Morse code.

Natasha was… not transfixed, perhaps, but impressed.

She closed her eyes. The flute soared and dived; it fleshed out her skeletal tune in a way she could never achieve. The life in the live music was exuberant and neurotic and it sparked off the revivified bass, the very alive dancing with the dead. There was a promise to this tension.

Natasha nodded. She was eager to hear more, to feed that flute into her music. She smiled sardonically. She would admit defeat. So long as he behaved, so long as there were not too many of those knowing looks, she would admit that she wanted to hear more.

Natasha paced silently back down the stairs. She opened the door. He was standing a few feet back, his flute to his lips, staring up at her window. He stopped as he saw her, and lowered his hands. No trace of a smile now. He looked anxious for approval.

She inclined her head and gave him a sideways look. He hovered.

‘OK,’ she said. ‘I’ll buy it.’ He finally smiled. ‘It’s Natasha.’ She jerked her thumb at herself.

‘Pete,’ the tall man said.

Natasha stood aside, and Pete passed into her house.

Chapter Six

Again Fabian tried Natasha’s number, and again she was engaged. He swore and slammed his receiver down. He turned on his heel, paced pointlessly. He had spoken to everyone who knew Saul except for Natasha, and she was the one who mattered most.

Fabian was not gossiping. As soon as he had heard about Saul’s father he had got on the phone, almost before he was aware of what he was doing, and begun to spread the news. At some point he had rushed out to buy a paper, before starting again on the phone. But this was not gossip. He felt a powerful sense of duty. This, he believed, was what was needed of him.

He pulled on his jacket, tugged his thin dreadlocks into a ponytail. Enough, he decided. He would go to Natasha, tell her in person. It was a fair journey from Brixton to Ladbroke Grove, but the thought of the cold air in his face and lungs was beguiling. His house felt oppressive. He had spent hours on the phone that morning, the same phrases again and again — Six floors straight down… The filth won’t let me talk to him and the walls had soaked up the news. They were saturated with the old man’s death. Fabian wanted space. He wanted to clean out his head.

He shoved a page of newspaper into his pocket. He could recite the relevant story by heart: News in brief. A man died in Willesden, North London, yesterday, after falling through a sixth-floor window. Police will not say if they are treating the death as suspicious. The man’s son is helping them with their enquiries. The screaming accusation of the last sentence stung him.

He left his room for the filthy hall of the shared house. Someone was shouting upstairs. The dirty, ill fitting carpets irritated him always; now they made him feel violent. As he struggled with his bike, he glanced at the unwashed walls, the broken banisters. The presence of the house weighed down on him. He burst out of the front door with a sigh of relief.

Fabian treated his bike carelessly, letting it fall when he dismounted, chucking it against walls. He was rough with it. He yanked himself onto it now with unthinking brutality, and swung out into the road.

The streets were full. It was a Saturday and people were thronging the streets, coming to and from Brixton market, determined on their outward journey and slow on the way back, laden down with cheap, colourful clothes and big fruit. Trains rumbled, competed with the sounds of Soca, Reggae, Rave, Rap, Jungle, House, and the shouting: all the cut-up market rhythm. Rudeboys in outlandish trousers clustered around corners and music shops, touched fists. Shaven-headed men in tight tops and AIDS ribbons made for Brockwell Park or The Brixtonian cafe. Food wrappers and lost television supplements tugged at ankles. The capricious traffic lights were a bad joke: pedestrians hovered like suicides at the edge of the pavement, launched themselves across at the slightest sign of a gap. The cars made angry noises and sped away, anxious to escape. Impassive, the people watched them pass by.

Fabian twisted his wheels through the bodies. The railway bridge passed above him; some way ahead the clocktower told him it was mid-morning. He rode and walked intermittently past the tube station, wheeled his bike across Brixton Road, and again over Acre Lane. There were no crowds here, and no Reggae. Acre Lane stretched out wide. The buildings that contained it were separate, sparse and low. The sky was always very big over Acre Lane.

Fabian jumped back onto his bike and took off up the slight incline towards Clapham. From there he would twist across into Clapham Manor Street, wind a little through backstreets to join Silverthorne Road, a steep sine-wave of minor industrial estates and peculiarly suburban houses tucked between Battersea and Clapham, a conduit feeding directly into Queenstown Road, across Chelsea Bridge.

For the first time that day Fabian felt his head clear.

Early that morning a suspicious policeman had answered Saul’s phone, had demanded Fabian’s name. Outraged, Fabian had hung up. He had rung up Willesden police station, again refusing to give his name, but demanding to know why policemen were answering his friend’s phone. Only when he acquiesced and told them who he was would they tell him that Saul’s father had died, and that Saul was with them — again that disingenuous phrase — helping with enquiries.

First he felt nothing but shock; then quickly a sense of a monstrous error.

And a great fear. Because Fabian understood immediately that it would be easy for them to believe that Saul had killed his father. And, as immediately, he knew without any equivocation or doubt that Saul had not. But he was terribly afraid, because only he knew that, because he knew Saul. And there was nothing he could tell others to help them understand.

He wanted to see Saul; he did not understand why the officer’s voice changed when he demanded this. He was told it would be some time before he could speak to Saul, Saul was deep in conversation, his attention wholly grabbed, and Fabian would just have to wait. There was something the man was not telling him, Fabian knew, and he was scared. He left his phone number, was reassured that he would be contacted as soon as Saul was free to speak.

Fabian sped along Acre Lane. On his left he passed an extraordinary white building, a mass of grubby turrets and shabby Art Deco windows. It looked long deserted. On the step sat two boys, dwarfed by jackets declaring allegiance to American Football teams neither had ever seen play. They were oblivious to the faded grandeur of their bench. One had his eyes closed, was leaning back against the door like Mexican cannon-fodder in a spaghetti Western. His friend spoke animatedly into his hand, his tiny mobile phone hidden within the voluminous folds of his sleeve, Fabian felt the thrill of materialist envy, but battened it down. This was one impulse he resisted.

Not me, he thought, as he always did. I’ll hold out a bit longer. I won’t be another black man with a mobile, another troublemaker with ‘Drug Dealer’ written on his forehead in script only the police can read.

He stood up out of his seat, kicked down and sped off towards Clapham.

Fabian knew Saul hated his father’s disappointment. Fabian knew Saul and his father could not speak together. Fabian had been the only one of Saul’s friends who had seen him turn that volume by Lenin over and over in his hands, open it and close it, read the inscription again and again. His father’s writing was tight and controlled, as if trying not to break the pen. Saul had put the book in Fabian’s lap, had waited while his friend read.

To Saul, This always made sense to me. Love from the Old Leftie.

Fabian remembered looking up into Saul’s face. His mouth was sealed, his eyes looked tired. He took the book off Fabian’s lap and closed it, stroked the cover, put it on his shelf. Fabian knew Saul had not killed his father.

He crossed Clapham High Street, a concourse of restaurants and charity shops, and slid into the back streets, wiggling through the parked cars to emerge on Silverthorne Road. He started down the long incline towards the river.

He knew that Natasha would be working. He knew he would turn into Bassett Road and hear the faint boom of Drum and Bass. She would be hunched over her keyboard, twiddling dials and pressing keys with the concentration of an alchemist, juggling long sequences of zeros and ones and transforming them into music. Listening and creating. That was what Natasha spent all her time doing. When she was not concentrating on source material behind the till of friends’ record shops, serving customers in an efficient autopilot mode, she was reconstituting it into the tracks she christened with spiky one-word titles: Arrival; Rebellion; Maelstrom.

Fabian believed it was Natasha’s concentration which made her so asexual to him. She was attractive in a fierce way, and was never short of offers, especially at clubs, especially when word got around that the music playing was hers; but Fabian had never known her seem very interested, even when she took someone home. He felt blasphemous even thinking of her in a sexual context. Fabian was alone in his opinion, he was assured by his friend Kay, a cheerful dope-raddled clown who drooled lasciviously after Natasha whenever he saw her. The music was the thing, Kay said, and the intensity was the thing, and the carelessness was the thing. Just like a nun, it was the promise of what was under the habit.

But Fabian could only grin sheepishly at Kay, absurdly embarrassed. Amateur psychologists around London, Saul included, had wasted no time deciding he was in love with Natasha; but Fabian did not think that was the case. She infuriated him with her style fascism and her solipsism, but he supposed he loved her. Just not in the way Saul meant it.

He twisted under the filthy railway bridge on Queenstown Road now, fast approaching Battersea Park. He was riding an incline, racing towards Chelsea Bridge. He took the roundabout with casual arrogance, put his head down and climbed towards the river. On Fabian’s right, the four chimneys of Battersea Power Station loomed into view. Its roof was long gone, it looked like a bombed-out relic, a blitz survivor. It was a great upturned plug straining to suck voltage out of the clouds, a monument to energy.

Fabian burst free of South London. He slowed and looked into the Thames, past the towers and railings of steel that surrounded him, keeping him snug on Chelsea Bridge. The river sent shards of cold sunlight in all directions.

He scudded over the face of the water like a pond skater, dwarfed by the girders and bolts ostentatiously holding the bridge together. He hung poised for a moment between the South Bank and the North Bank, his head high to see over the sides into the water, to see the black barges that never moved, waiting to ferry cargo long forgotten, his legs still, freewheeling his way towards Ladbroke Grove.

The route to Natasha’s house took Fabian past the Albert Hall and through Kensington, which he hated. It was a soulless place, a purgatory filled only with rich transients drifting pointlessly through Nicole Farhi and Red or Dead. He sped up Kensington Church Street towards Netting Hill and on through to Portobello Road.

It was a market day, the second in the week, designed to wrest money from tourists. Merchandise that had cost five pounds on Friday was now offered for ten. The air was thick with garish cagoules and backpacks and French and Italian. Fabian cussed quietly and inched through the throng. He ducked left down Elgin Crescent and then right, bearing down on the Bassett Road flat.

A gust of wind stained the air brown with leaves. Fabian swung into the street. The leaves boiled around him, stuck to his jacket. Pared-down trees lined the tarmac. Fabian dismounted while still in motion, walked towards Natasha’s flat.

He could hear her working. The faint thumping of Drum and Bass was audible from the end of the street. As he walked, wheeling his bike beside him, Fabian heard the sound of wings. Natasha’s house teemed with pigeons. Every protuberance and ledge was grey with plump, stirring bodies. A few were in the air, hovering nervously around the windows and gables, settling, dislodging their peers. They shifted and shat a little as Fabian stopped at the door directly below them.

Natasha’s rhythm was loud now, and Fabian could hear something unusual, a clear sound like pipes, a recorder or a flute, bursting with energy and exuberance, shadowing the bass. He stood still and listened. The quality of this sound was different from that of samples, and it was not trapped in any loops. Fabian suspected it was being played live. And by something of a virtuoso.

He rang the bell. The electronic boom of the bass stopped cold. The flute faltered on for a second or two. As silence fell, the company of pigeons rose en masse into the air with the abruptness of panic, circled once like a school of fish and disappeared into the north. Fabian heard footsteps on the stairs.

Natasha opened the door to him and smiled.

‘Alright, Fabe,’ she said, reaching up to touch her clenched right fist to his. He did so, at the same time bending down to put an arm around her and kiss her cheek. She responded, though her surprise was evident.

‘Tash,’ he whispered, in greeting and in warning. She heard it in his voice, pulled back holding his shoulders in her hands. Her face sharpened in concern.

‘What? What’s happened?’

‘Tash, it’s Saul.’ He’d told the story so often today he’d become an automaton, just mouthing the words, but this time it was difficult all over again. He licked his lips.

Natasha started. ‘What is it, Fabe?’ Her voice cracked.

‘No no,’ he said hurriedly. ‘Saul’s fine. Well, I guess… He’s in with the pigs.’

She shook her head in confusion.

‘Listen, Tash… Saul’s dad… he died.’ He rushed on before she could misunderstand. ‘He was killed. He was lobbed out of a window two nights back. I… I think… I think the police reckon Saul did it.’ He reached into his pocket and brought out the scrunched-up news story. Natasha read it.

‘No,’ she said.

‘I know, I know. But I suppose they heard about him and the old man having arguments and that, and… I dunno.’

‘No,’ said Natasha again. The two of them stood quite still, staring at each other. Eventually Natasha moved. ‘Look,’ she said, ‘come in. We’d better talk. There’s this bloke here…’

‘The one playing the flute?’

She smiled slightly. ‘Yeah. He’s good, isn’t he? I’ll get rid of him.’

Fabian closed the door behind him and followed her up the stairs. She was some way ahead of him and, as he approached her inner door, he heard voices.

‘What’s happening?’ It was a man’s voice, muffled and anxious.

‘A friend’s in a bit of bother,’ Natasha was saying. Fabian entered the sparse bedroom, nodded in greeting at the tall blond man he saw over Natasha’s shoulder. The man had his mouth slightly open, was fingering his ponytail nervously. In his right hand was a silver flute. He looked up and down at the two in the doorway.

‘Pete, Fabian.’ Natasha waved her hand vaguely between the two in a cursory introduction. ‘Sorry, Pete, but you’re going to have to split. I have to talk to Fabe. Something’s come up.’

The blond man nodded and hurriedly gathered his things together. As he did so, he spoke rapidly.

‘Natasha, do you want to do this again? I felt like we were… really getting into it.’

Fabian raised his eyebrows.

The tall man squeezed past Fabian without taking his eyes off Natasha. She was clearly distracted, but she smiled and nodded.

‘Yeah. For sure. Do you want to leave me your number or something?’

‘No, I’ll come by again.’

‘Do you want my number, then?’

‘No. I’ll just come by, and if you’re not in, I’ll come by again.’ Pete stopped in front of the stairs and turned back. ‘Hope I see you again, Fabian,’ he said.

Fabian nodded abstractedly, then looked into Pete’s eyes. The tall man was gazing at him with a peculiar intensity, demanding a response. The two were locked for a moment, until Fabian acquiesced and nodded more pointedly. Only then did Pete seem satisfied. He descended the stairs, followed by Natasha.

The two were speaking, but Fabian could not make out any words. He frowned. The front door slammed shut and Natasha returned to the room.

‘He’s a bit of a weirdo, isn’t he?’ Fabian asked.

Natasha nodded vehemently. ‘Strue, man, do you know what I mean? I threw him out at first, he was kind of getting leery.’

‘Trying it on?’

‘Kind of. But he was going on and on about wanting to play with me, and I was intrigued, and he started playing outside. He was good so I let him back in.’

‘Suitably humbled, yeah?’ Fabian grinned briefly.

‘Damn right. But he plays… he plays like a fucking angel, Fabe.’ She was excited. ‘He’s the original nutter, you’re right, I know, but there’s something very right about his playing.’

There was a short silence. Natasha tugged at Fabian’s jacket and pulled him into the kitchen. ‘I need a coffee, man. You need a coffee. And I need to know about Saul.’

In the street stood the tall man. He stared up at the window, the flute limp in his hand. His clothes twisted in the wind. He was even paler in the cold, in front of the dark trees. He was quite motionless. He watched the tiny variations of light as bodies moved in and out of the sitting-room. He cocked his ear slightly, pulled his fringe out of his eyes, twisted a lock of hair in his fingers. His eyes were the colour of the clouds. He raised the flute slowly to his lips, played a brief refrain. A little group of sparrows wheeled out from the branches of a tree, circled him. The man lowered his flute and watched as the birds disappeared.

Chapter Seven

Two eyes stained yellow by death gaped stupidly. All the imperfections of the human body were magnified by utter stillness. Crowley ran his eyes over the face, took note of the wide pores, the pockmarks, the hairs sprouting from nostrils, the patch of stubble under the Adam’s apple that the razor had missed.

The skin folded up under the chin and became a tightly wound coil, a skein of flesh wrung out to dry. The body was chest-down, limbs uncomfortable, and the head was facing the ceiling, twisted round nearly 180 degrees. Crowley stood and pushed his hands into his pockets to disguise their trembling. He turned and faced his entourage, two burly officers whose faces were identical portraits of disbelieving revulsion, scarcely more mobile than their fallen comrade’s.

Crowley paced through the small hall to the bedroom. The flat was full of busy people, photographers, pathologists. Fingerprint dust sat in the air in flat layers, like geological strata.

He peered round the frame of the bedroom door. A suited man crouched on the floor before a figure sitting with splayed legs, leaning against a wall. Crowley looked at the seated man and made a small disgusted noise, as if at rotten food. He stared into the ruinous mess of the other’s face. Blood was smeared across the wall. The dead man’s uniform was saturated with it, stiff like an oilskin coat.

The suited doctor removed his tentative fingers from the bloody mess, and glanced behind him at Crowley. ‘You are…?’

‘DI Crowley. Doctor, what happened here?’

The doctor gestured at the slumped figure. His voice was utterly detached, exhibiting the defensive professionalism Crowley had seen before at unpleasant deaths.

‘Ah, this chap, Constable Barker, yes? Well… he’s been hit in the face, basically, very fast and very hard.’ He stood, ran his hands through his hair. ‘I think he’s come here to the front of the room, opened the door and been walloped with a… a bloody piledriver which sent him into the wall and onto the floor, at which point our assailant has borne down on him and cracked him a few more times. Once or twice with his fists, I think, then with a stick or a club or something, lots of long thin bruises across the shoulders and neck. And the line of damage here…’ He indicated a particular trough in the bone-flecked pulp of the face.

‘And the other?’

The doctor shook his head, and blinked several times. ‘Never seen that before, to be honest. He’s had his neck broken, which sounds straightforward enough, but… well, my God, you’ve seen him, yes?’ Crowley nodded. ‘I don’t know… do you have any idea how strong the human neck is, Inspector? It’s not so very difficult to break a neck but someone has turned his the wrong way round… And they’ve had to dislocate all the vertebrae completely, so that tension in the flesh doesn’t send the head back round to the front. So they didn’t just turn his head round, they pulled upwards while they were doing it. You’re dealing with someone very, very strong, and, I shouldn’t wonder, with some sort of karate or judo or something.’

Crowley pursed his lips. ‘There’s no real sign of struggle, so they were fast. Page opens the door and has his neck done in half a second, makes a little noise. Barker moves to the door of the bedroom, and…’

The doctor looked at Crowley in silence. Crowley nodded his thanks and rejoined his companions. Herrin and Bailey were still staring at the implausible figure of Constable Page.

Herrin looked up as Crowley approached. ‘Jesus fucking Christ, sir, it’s like that film…’

‘The Exorcist. I know, Constable.’

‘But like all the way round, sir…’

‘I know, Detective, now give it a rest. We’re leaving.’

The three ducked under the twists of tape which sealed the flat, and made their way down through the bowels of the building. Outside, a large patch of grass was still surrounded with the same tape that closed off the flat above. Vicious droplets of glass still littered the earth.

‘It doesn’t seem possible, sir,’ said Bailey, as they approached the car.

‘What do you mean?’

‘Well, I saw Garamond when he came in. Quite a big bloke but no Schwarzenegger. And Jesus, he didn’t look capable of…’ Bailey spoke quickly, still deeply shocked.

Crowley nodded as he swung the car round. ‘I know you’re never supposed to let yourself make judgements about who’s "the type" and who’s not, but I’ve got to admit, Garamond’s shocked me. I thought, "Fine, no problem. Argues with the dad, struggle, shoves him out the window, in shock, goes to bed." Bit odd that, I admit, but when you’re drunk and freaked out, you do odd things.’

‘But I certainly didn’t have him down for the little Houdini he turned out to be. And as for this…’

Herrin was nodding vehemently.

‘How did he do that? Door open, cell empty, no one sees him, no one hears a thing.’

‘But all this,’ continued Crowley, ‘this is a real… surprise.’ He gobbed the word out with disgust. He spoke slowly, his quiet voice halting momentarily between each word. ‘What I interviewed last night was a scared, confused, fucked-up little man. Whatever escaped from the station was some sort of master criminal, and whatever killed Page and Barker was… an animal.’

He thinned his eyes and gently thumped the steering-wheel. ‘But everything about this is weird. Why did none of the neighbours hear anything going on between him and the dad? His camping story checks out?’ Herrin nodded. ‘We can put him in Willesden at about ten, Mr Garamond hit the ground at about ten-thirty, eleven. Someone should’ve heard it. How’s it going with the rest of the family?’

‘Series of blanks,’ said Bailey. ‘Mum’s long dead, you know, and she was an orphan. His dad’s parents are dead, there’s no uncles, an aunt in America no one’s seen for years… I’m moving on to his mates. Some of them have already been calling in. We’ll go chase them up.’

Crowley grunted assent as they pulled in at the station. Colleagues slowed as he walked past, gazed at him unhappily, wanting to say something about Page and Barker. He pre-empted them by nodding sadly, then moved on. He had no desire to share his shock.

He returned to his desk, sipping the crap from the coffee machine. Crowley was losing his grasp on what was going on. It was disquieting him. The previous evening, when he had discovered that Saul had walked out of his cell, he had been filthy angry, livid — but he had made the right noises, done the right things. There’d been some major fuck-up obviously, and he would have serious words with a few people, just as the governor had had words with him. He had sent men out delving into Willesden’s darkness; Saul could not have got far. As a precaution, he had sent Barker to join Page in the boring task of watching over the crime scene, just in case Saul should be so stupid as to return home.

Which it seemed he had done. But not the Saul he had interviewed, he would not believe that. He accepted that he made mistakes, could misjudge people, but not like that, he could not believe it. Something had demented Saul, given him the strength of the unhinged, and changed him from the person Crowley had interviewed into the devastating assassin who had brought such carnage to the small flat.

Why had he not run? Crowley could not understand. He shoved his fingers into his eyes, kneaded them till they ached. Saul had returned, he pictured it, disorientated and stumbling, to the flat; to atone, perhaps, to try to remember, perhaps; and when he opened the door on the men in uniform he should have run, or fallen to the floor crying, denied all knowledge, snivelled.

Instead he had reached out towards Constable Page, taken his head in his hands and torn it around in less than a second. Crowley winced. His eyes were closed but that was no respite from the brutal image.

Saul had quietly dosed the door behind him, had turned to Constable Barker who was surely gazing at him in momentary confusion, had punched him back five feet, following the suddenly limp body, and beaten his face systematically into a broken, bloody, shattered thing.

Constable Page was a stupid stocky man, quite new to the force. He was talkative, forever telling idiot jokes. They were often racist, although his girlfriend, Crowley knew, was of mixed race. Barker was a perpetual footsoldier, had been a constable for too long, but would not get the message and change his career. Crowley had not known either of the men well.

There was an unpleasant sombreness about the station: not so much shock as a tentative uncertainty about how to react. People were unused to death.

Crowley put his head in his hands. He did not know where Saul was, he did not know what to do.

Chapter Eight

Greasy-looking clouds slid above the alley in which King Rat and Saul sat digesting. Everything seemed dirty to Saul. His clothes and face and hair were smeared with a day and a half’s muck, and now dirt was inside him. As he drew sustenance from it, it coloured what he could see, but he looked around at his newly tarnished world as if it were a cynosure. It held no horror for him.

Purity is a negative state and contrary to nature, Saul had once read. That made sense to him now. He could see the world clearly in all its natural and supernatural impurity, for the first time in his life.

He was conscious of his own smell: the old acridity of alcohol splashed on these clothes long ago, the muck from the gutter of the roof, rotting food; but something new underneath it all. A taste of animal in his sweat, something of that scent which had entered his cell with King Rat two nights ago. Maybe it was in his mind. Maybe there was nothing beyond the faint remnants of deodorant, but Saul believed he could smell the rat in him coming out.

King Rat leaned back against the rubbish sacks, staring at the sky.

‘It occurs,’ he said presently, ‘that thee and me should scarper. Full?’

Saul nodded. ‘You’ve got a story to tell me,’ he said.

‘I know it,’ said King Rat. ‘But I can’t exercise myself on that particular just yet. I’ve to teach you to be rat. Your eyes aren’t even open yet; you’re still such a mewling little furless thing. So…’ He got to his feet. ‘What say we retire? Grab a bit of tucker for the underground.’ He pushed handfuls of leftover fruitcake into his pockets.

King Rat turned to face the wall behind the rubbish sacks. He moved to the right-angle of brick where the wall met one side of the narrow alley, wedged himself within it in his impossible way, and began to scale the wall. He teetered at the top, twenty feet up, his feet daintily picking between rusting coils of barbed wire as though they were flowers. He squatted between them and beckoned to Saul.

Saul approached the wall. He set his teeth and jutted out his lower jaw, confrontational. He pushed himself into the corner space, as hard as he could, feeling his flesh mould itself into the space. He reached up with his arms. Like a rat, he thought, squeeze and move and pull like a rat. His fingers gripped the spaces between bricks and he hauled himself up with a prodigious strength. His face ballooned with effort, his feet scrabbled, but he was progressing up the wall in his own undignified fashion. He let out a growl, and heard an admonitory hissing from above him. He pushed his right arm up again, the dank smell of rat-sweat more evident than ever beneath his arms. His legs failed him, he quivered and fell, was caught and pulled into the thicket of crumbling wire.

‘Not so bad, ratling boy. Isn’t it a marvel what you can do with a scrap of decent grub in your belly? You were right up near the top.’

And Saul felt pride at his climbing.

Below them was a little courtyard hemmed in on all sides by dirty walls and windows. To Saul’s new eyes the robust dirt of the enclosure was almost too vibrant to look at. Every corner teemed with the spreading stains of decay; this weak spot of the city had been convincingly annexed by the forces of filth. A disconcerting line of dolls gently mouldered where they had been placed, their backs to the wall, eyes on the pewter-coloured plug in the corner of the courtyard. A manhole.

King Rat exhaled through his nose triumphantly.

‘Home,’ he hissed. ‘Into the palace.’

He leapt from the top of the wall, landing in a crouch over the manhole, surrounding it. He made no sound as he came to rest on the concrete. His coat drifted down around him, surrounding him like oily puddle. He looked up and waited.

Saul looked down and felt the old fears. He steele himself, swallowed. He willed himself to jump, but his legs had locked into a fearful squat, and he grew exasperated as he readied himself to land beside uncle. He breathed in, once, twice, very deeply, to stood, swung his arms and launched himself at the shape waiting for him.

He saw greys and reds of bricks and concrete lurct around him in slow motion, he moved his body, prepared his landing, as he saw King Rat’s grin approached him at speed; then the world jolted hard, his eyes and teeth juddered in his face, and he was down. His knees pushed all the air out of his stomach, but he smile with exhilaration as he overcame his spasming belly and sucked air into his lungs. He had flown, had I landed ready. He was shedding his humanity like an old snakeskin, scratching it off in great swathes. It was so fast, this assumption of a new form inside.

‘You’re a good boy,’ said King Rat, and busied himself with the metal in the ground.

Saul looked up. He saw figures move behind the windows above, wondered if anyone could see them.

King Rat’s London snarl had assumed a didactic tone. ‘Pay attention, ratling. This here is the entrance to your ceremonial abode. The all of Rome-vill is yours by rights, you’re royalty. But there’s a special palace, the rat’s own hidey-hole, and you bing a waste there through these portholes.’ He indicated the metal cover. ‘Observe.’

King Rat’s fingers scuttled over the iron disc like a virtuoso typist’s, investigating its surface. He turned his head from side to side, cocked it briefly, then suddenly tensed his body and slipped his fingers into infinitesimal gaps between the seal and its shaft. It was like sleight of hand: Saul could not see what had happened, or how the fingers had fit, yet they were there, pulling, in the gaps.

The manhole cover twisted with a yelp of rust. There was a rush of dirty wind as King Rat pulled it free.

Saul stared into the pit. The swirling winds of the courtyard yanked at the rich-smelling wisps of vapour emerging from the hole. The sewer was gorged with darkness; it seemed to overflow, seeping out of the open concrete and obscuring the ground. The organic scent of compost billowed out. Just visible, a ladder driven into the subterranean brick plunged out of sight. Where it was riveted to the wall, metal had oxidized and leached out profusely, making the sewer bleed rust. The sound of a thin flow of water was amplified by the yawning tunnels, making for a bizarre booming trickle.

King Rat looked at Saul. He clenched his hand into a fist, extended a pointing index finger, and his hand described an elaborate twisting path through the air, playfully circling, till it spiralled down and came to rest pointing into the sewer. King Rat stood at the edge of the thin circle. He stepped out over the hole and dropped through the pavement. There was a tiny echoing damp sound.

King Rat’s voice emerged from underground.

‘Down you come.’

Saul squeezed his hips through the hole.

‘Tut a lid on it,’ said King Rat from below, and laughed briefly. Saul fumbled with the metal cover. He was half in, half out of the sewer. He sank under the weight of the metal. He held it above his head and descended. The light disappeared.

Saul shivered in the cold of the sewer. His feet clapped on the metal. He stumbled as his feet hit wetness. He backed away from the ladder and rubbed himself in the darkness. Air gusted and hissed; freezing water flooded his shoes.

‘Where are you?’ he whispered.

‘Watching,’ came King Rat’s voice. It moved around him. ‘Wait. You’ll see. You’ve never tried this, laddie, so hold your horses. The darkmans is nothing to you.’

Saul stood still. His hands were invisible before him.

Shapes moved in front of him. He thought they were real until the corridors themselves began to emerge from the darkness and he realized that those other fleeting, indistinct forms were born in his mind. They were dispelled as Saul began to see.

He saw the muck of the drains. He saw the energy it contained spilling out, a grey light that showed no colours but illuminated the damp tunnels. Before him a study in perspective, the shit-and algae-encrusted walls of the shaft meeting in the distance. Behind him and to his right more tunnels, and everywhere the smell, rot and faeces, and the pungent smell of piss, rat piss. He wrinkled his nose, his hackles rising.

‘No worries,’ said King Rat, a figure saturated in shadows, drenched in them, a mass of darkness. ‘Some cove’s staked a claim and made a mark, but we’re royalty. His territory doesn’t mean fuck to us.’

Saul looked about him. A thin rivulet of dirty water seeped by at his feet. His every movement seemed to set off an explosion of echoes. He stood in a twisting brick cylinder seven feet in diameter. From everywhere came the noises of streaming water and falling stones, and organic sounds of squeaks and scratches, peaking, dying out and being replaced, sounds far away being written over by those nearby, a palimpsest of noise.

‘I want to see you leg it, staying mum as you like,’ said King Rat. He startled Saul. His voice wandered through the tunnels, exploring every corner. ‘I want to see you shift your arse, climb sharpish. I want to see you swim. School is in.’

King Rat turned to face the same direction as Saul. He pointed into the charcoal grey.

‘We’re off that away. And we’re off sharpish. So pull your ringer out and keep up. Ready, my old lad?’

Saul shivered with excitement, the cold irrelevant now, and crouched in a starter’s position.

‘Come on, then,’ he said.

King Rat turned and bolted.

Saul did not feel his legs moving as he followed. The rapid, faint beat of footsteps he heard was his own; King Rat was soundless. Saul could feel his nose twitching and he felt like laughing.

He panted with exhilaration. King Rat was an ill defined blur before him, his coat flapping vaguely in the noisome wind. Tunnels passed by on either side, water spattered him. King Rat disappeared suddenly, cutting sharply left down a smaller tunnel where the water pressure was greater, swirling insistently around Saul’s legs. He pulled his legs up out of the stream.

King Rat turned his head for a second, a flash of pale flesh. He crouched as he ran and pulled to a sudden halt. He waited briefly while Saul caught him up, then ducked into a claustrophobic shaft barely three feet high. Saul did not hesitate, but dove in after him.

Saul’s breath and the sound of his flesh on the brick came bouncing back at him, as loud and intimate as if they existed only in his head. He stumbled, mud smearing his legs, careering along the tube in a messy, effective fashion.

His nose hit wet cloth. King Rat had stopped suddenly.

Saul peered over King Rat’s shoulder.

‘What is it?’ he hissed.

King Rat jerked his head. He raised his hand, pointing perfunctorily.

Something moved in the flat, leaden light. Two small creatures edged backwards and forwards uneasily in the brick warren. They crept a few ineffectual inches in one direction, then in another, without once taking their eyes from the figures before them.

Rats.

King Rat was quite still. Saul hovered, bewildered.

One rat stood on either side of the dirty water. They moved in concert, forward together, backwards together, a tentative dance, staring at King Rat.

‘What’s happening?’ whispered Saul.

King Rat did not answer.

One of the rats scuttled forward and sat up on its hind legs, six feet in front of King Rat. It paddled its front legs aggressively, squeaked, bared its teeth. It returned to all fours and crept a little further forward, baring its teeth, clearly afraid but apparently angry, contemptuous.

The rat appeared to spit.

King Rat suddenly barked in outrage and lurched forward, his arm outstretched, but the two rats had bolted.

King Rat picked himself silently out of the muck and continued along the tunnel.

‘Hey, hey, hold on,’ said Saul in amazement. King Rat kept moving. ‘What the fuck was that all about?’

King Rat kept moving.

‘What’s going on?’ shouted Saul.

‘Stow it!’ screamed King Rat without turning. He crept on. ‘Not now,’ he said more quietly. ‘That’s the seat of my sorrow. Not now. Just you wait till I get you home.’

He disappeared round a corner.

Saul became lulled by the sewers. He kept King Rat in his sights, losing himself in the damp brick convolutions. More rats passed them, but no more taunted them as the first two had seemed to do. They stopped when they saw King Rat, and then quickly ran.

King Rat ignored them, winding through the complex at a constant quick trudge.

Saul felt like a tourist. He investigated the walls in passing, reading the mildew on the bricks. He was hypnotized by his own footsteps. Time passed as a succession of brick tributaries. He was ignorant of the cold and intoxicated by the smell. Occasional growls of traffic filtered through the earth and tar above, to yawn through the cavernous sewers.

Presently King Rat stopped in a tunnel through which the two explorers had to crawl. He turned to face Saul, a trick which looked impossible in the tiny space. The air was thick with the smell of piss, a particular piss, a strong, familiar smell, the smell which permeated King Rat’s clothes.

‘Righto,’ murmured King Rat. ‘So have you clocked your whereabouts?’ Saul shook his head. ‘We’re at the crossroads of Rome-vill, the centre, my very own conjunction, under King’s Cross. Hold your tongue and prick up your ears: hear the trains growling’ Got the map in your bonce? Learn the way. This is where you’ve to get to. Just follow your I Suppose. I’ve marked out my manor nice and strong, you can sniff it out from anywhere underground.’ And Saul felt suddenly sure that he could find his way there, as easy as breathing.

But he looked around him, and could see only the same bricks, the same dirty water as everywhere else.

‘What,’ he ventured slowly, ‘is here?’

King Rat pushed his finger against his nose and winked.

‘I set myself down anywhere I bloody fancy, but a king wants a palace.’ As he spoke, King Rat was busying himself with the bricks below him, running a long fingernail between them, creating a rising worm of dirt. He traced a jagged square of brick whose uneven sides were a little less than two feet long. He dug his fingernails under the corners and pulled what looked like a tray of bricks out of the floor.

Saul whistled with amazement at the hole he had uncovered. The wind played over the newly opened hole like a flute. He looked at the bricks King Rat held. They were an artifice, a single concrete plug with angled edges under the thin veneer on brick, so that it sat snug and invisible in the tunnel floor.

Saul peered into the opening. A chute curved away steeply out of sight. He looked up, King Rat was hugging the lid, waiting for Saul.

Saul swung his legs over the lip of the chute, and breathed its stale air. He pushed himself forward with his bum and slid under the tight curve, greased with living slime.

A breakneck careering ride and Saul was deposited breathless into a pool of freezing water. He spluttered and gobbed, emptying his mouth of the taste of dirt and squeezing his eyes clear. When he opened them, he stopped quite still, water dripping from his open mouth.

The walls stretched out away from each other so suddenly and violently it was as though they were afraid of one another. Saul sat in the cold pool at one end of the chamber. It swept out, a three-dimensional ellipse, like a raindrop on its side, ninety feet long, with him dumbstruck at the thin end. Reinforced brick ribs striped the walls of the chamber and arched overhead: cathedral architecture, thirty feet high, like the fossilized belly of a whale long entombed under the city.

Saul stumbled from the pool, took a few short steps forward. To either side the room dipped a little, creating a thin moat drawing its water from the pool into which the chute had deposited Saul. Every few feet, just above the moat, were the circular ends of pipes disappearing, Saul supposed, into the main sewer above.

Before him there was a raised walkway, which climbed an incline until at the opposite end of the chamber it was eight feet from the floor, and there was the throne.

It faced Saul. It was rough, a utilitarian design sculpted with bricks, like everything under the ground. The throne-room was quite empty.

Behind Saul something hit the water. The report leisurely explored the room. King Rat came to stand behind Saul.

‘Ta very much, Mr Bazalgette.’

Saul turned his head, shook it to show that he did not understand. King Rat scampered up the walkway and curled into the chair. He sat facing Saul, one leg thrown over a brickwork arm. His voice came as clear as ever to Saul’s ears, although he did not raise it.

‘He was the man with the plan, built the whole maze in the time of the last queen. People owe him their flush crappers, and me… I can thank him for my underworld.’

‘But all this…’ breathed Saul. ‘This room… why did he build this room?’

‘Mr Bazalgette was a canny gent.’ King Rat snickered unpleasantly. ‘I had a few whids, burnt his lugholes, told him a few tales, sights I’d seen. We had a conflab about him and his habits, not all of which were unknown to me.’ King Rat winked exaggeratedly. ‘He was of the opinion that these tales should remain undisclosed. We came to an arrangement. You’ll not find this here burrow, my cubby-hole, on any plans.’

Saul approached King Rat’s throne. He squatted on all fours in front of the seat.

‘What are we doing here? What do we do now?’ Saul was suddenly weary of following like a disciple, unable to intervene or shape events. ‘I want to know what you want.’

King Rat stared at him without speaking.

Saul continued. ‘Is this about those rats?’ he said. There was no answer.

‘Is this about the rats? What was that about? You’re the king, right? You’re King Rat. So command them. I didn’t see them showing any tribute or respect. They looked pretty pissed off to me. What’s this about? Call on the rats, make them come to you.’

There was no sound in the hall. King Rat continued to stare.

Eventually he spoke. ‘Not… yet.’

Saul waited.

‘I won’t… yet. They’re still… narked… with me. They’ll not do what I tell them just yet.’

‘How long have they been… narked?’

‘Seven hundred years.’

King Rat looked a pathetic figure. He skulked with his characteristic combination of defensiveness and arrogance. He looked lonely.

‘You’re… not the king at all, are you?’

‘I am the king!’ King Rat was on his feet, spitting at the figure below him. ‘Don’t dare talk to me like that I’m the King, I’m the one, the cutpurse, the thief, the deserter chief!’

‘So what’s going on?’ yelled Saul.

‘Something… went… wrong… Once upon a time. Rats’ve long memories, see?’ King Rat thumped his head. ‘They don’t forget stuff. They keep it all in the noggin. That’s all. And you’re involved, sunshine. This is all tied up with the one that wants you dead, the cove that bumped off your fucking dad.’

Fucking dad, said the echoes for a long time afterwards.

‘What… who… is it?’ said Saul.

King Rat looked balefully at him with those shadow-encrusted eyes.

‘The Ratcatcher.’