The Horse You Came in On Read online

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  Contents

  Part 1

  CIDER ALLEY

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Interlude

  Part 2

  NICKEL CITY

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Interlude

  Part 3

  GIN LANE

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Acknowledgments

  To

  LAURA SCOTT PERRY

  a friend in Nickel City

  Civilized, and gay, and rotted, and polite.

  —F. SCOTT FITZGERALD, on Baltimore

  Part 1

  CIDER ALLEY

  1

  The blind man smelled something new in Cider Alley, a new scent mixed with the old ones of urine and sweat, beer and whisky, coming from some doorway (he imagined) where a little cluster of men liked to gather. Often when he cut through this narrow street there would be tentative greetings—a tap on his shoulder, a hand on his arm, a shouted hello. He resented and resisted pitying gestures and lachrymose words. For he did not regard himself as on the same level as the other homeless: he had, through tenacity and a sharpness of mind and tongue, held on to his own place for over a year. His spot, his grate. People knew him.

  The blind man loathed being approached unless he himself sought help with directions or the time. He refused to fan the pavement before him with a white cane, but he did have a briar walking stick, and he was not averse to using it if anyone started any funny business—or just plain annoyed him.

  It wasn’t the walking stick but the toe of his shoe that hooked into a pliable, unfamiliar obstacle that nearly toppled him. But he was used to obstacles and had become quick at regaining his balance.

  What his foot struck was the source of the unfamiliar smell. He knelt and ran his hand over rough cloth and softer skin.

  A man. Fallen, drunk, probably. He felt carefully; his sense of touch was even better than his sense of smell. What he touched was familiar, a kind of rough cross that his friend had always worn around his neck. John-Joy. His fingers ran over, first, the familiar topcoat and then went to the suit jacket beneath. Before he could fight with his conscience, he quickly removed the jacket and exchanged it with his own. John-Joy’s was infinitely better; it was fine wool, expensive, and he’d always wondered who would ever throw such a garment in the rubbish. Now John-Joy would wake up, come to, find he was wearing Milos’s old gray seersucker. Not the best thing for a night in January. But he could take a joke, John-Joy could.

  Or could he?

  For drink wasn’t the smell. Quickly Milos ran his hand from head to feet. The air was clotted with the smell; he did not have to feel the stickiness on his hand to know.

  His tongue, his mouth formed what he knew was an audible cry, though he himself heard nothing. “Police!”

  One of his hands scrabbled against the cold stone of the building; the other thrashed with his cane as he put more force behind the word: “Police! Police!”

  What surprised people (and he revelled in their surprise) was that, although almost totally deaf, he could speak perfectly clearly. The accident which had caused his gradual loss of sight and hearing had happened only ten years before. If someone trumpeted directly in his right ear, he could sometimes make out what they were saying, but that was the extent of it. He shouted again.

  Then he felt a presence; he felt someone there, and he wondered if the someone was joining in his shouts. He told this person he was deaf and that he must go for the police, but there was no movement. He did not know what was happening. He thrust out his hand and said, “Write on my hand!” He felt an arm. “Write on my hand!” he said again. This was his one means of communication. He felt the touch of the other person’s finger, but the finger was moving too quickly, the finger on his palm. Stupid bastard! he thought, furious. What did they think he was, a fucking computer? “Slower, slower! I can’t understand what you’re telling me!” he shouted.

  The finger drew the letters “I A M.” Then there was no movement, only a rustling. He could feel the other person go down, rise up again, as he himself was forcing breath out and yelling, “What? You goddamned fool! ‘I am’ what? What’s ‘I am’?” The blind man had never been known for so much as a shred of patience.

  The other hand grabbed at his. Now, very slowly, a finger formed the letter “I.” Then “AM.” Then “POL.” There was a pause. Goddamned fool was taking his time—but at least the bastard had the sense not to write home to his mother. “Then ICE.”

  Angry—Milos was always angry, often mutely angry, always had been, even before the accident—he shouted: “What the fuck’s that? ‘Ice’? What the hell’s that?”

  Again, the other hand held his and wrote, more quickly this time:

  “I AM POLICE.”

  “Goddamned motherfucker!” shouted Milos. “Why didn’t you say that before?”

  2

  I

  The girl’s name was, ironically, Beatrice. And her skin was pale and her hair red, but not Rossetti-red, not the diaphanous red of the Beata Beatrix on the wall before her.

  The girl and the boy, even in the face of the immortal paintings that surrounded them, could not keep their mortal hands away from each other. They clung and kissed, regardless of the people nearby who looked at them with vague disgust. They were too self-absorbed to care for anyone else in the gallery and too selfishly young to care that they presented a picture no artist would give a damn to paint. Purplish-red hair and black leather (the girl), a band of purple through brush-cut brown hair and black leather (the boy) suggested they could have been twins; but their groping hands suggested otherwise.

  One felt, glancing at these two, that they were not in the grip of worldly or otherworldly passion; not even, really, of lust. Their public display was simply for its own sake, something that would convey to the world that they didn’t give a flying fuck for the sensibilities of others, not the ones walking about, or standing to gaze at these marvellous paintings, or sitting near them on the bench.

  One such patron of the museum sat nearly shoulder to shoulder with the girl, who was at the moment pronging her tongue into the mouth of the boy and moaning unconvincingly. When she felt the woman slightly behind and to her right, felt the burden of the woman’s shoulder against hers, she moved sharply (still tongue-in-mouth with her boyfriend), trying to shrug off the unwelcome burden. The burden, however, grew heavier and heavier as the woman listed farther into the g
irl’s back, until the girl turned and told her to stop it, the stupid old cow.

  But the woman, middle-aged, very richly and tastefully dressed, did not stop. Her weight grew heavier, and she might have been seeking refuge for her head on the shoulder of the girl.

  “Hey—!” the girl began, wrenching away from the boy. Her movement put a distance between herself and the dozing woman. “La-dy!” she said with searing impatience.

  The lady didn’t answer, simply fell slowly sideways, onto the bench.

  “Bloody ‘ell,” whispered the girl, suddenly rising.

  II

  Her name was Bea and his was Gabe, and the irony of this was not lost on Richard Jury, though it must have been on the guards at the Tate Gallery.

  The girl hadn’t stopped chewing gum for even a minute. The red hair was teased and spiky; the black leather skirt barely covered her rump. If anything, she was the underground version of Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s Beatrice.

  It was the boy, Gabe, who was doing the talking at the moment, though Bea cut across his guttural vowels with her own. “ ’Ow was we t’know, then? Coulda been pissed, couldn’t she?”

  “Or on the needle,” said Gabe, in his worldly wisdom.

  Richard Jury assumed these two couldn’t imagine the mind’s light flickering out in any other way. Dead, pissed, stoned—it was all the same.

  The dead woman had been trundled away on a stretcher across the polished floor. Her going had been overseen by Inspector Marks of C Division, who was now talking (and clearly relieved to be doing so) to Scotland Yard CID, represented by Superintendent Jury. He had got to the room before Marks and, with the help of the gallery guards, had kept the people—about a dozen of them—from leaving.

  Jury had been in the Tate, coincidentally, to see the Swagger Portrait exhibit, which was closing. He felt himself to be dull-witted about art and thought perhaps he could educate himself in the differences between Reynolds and Gainsborough. More than any other gallery in London, Jury loved the Tate. And his favorite room was the one he was now standing in, the one in which Bea and Gabe had made their dreadful discovery. Rossetti, Burne-Jones, William Holman Hunt, Millais’s Ophelia—he found them indescribably romantic. The boy and girl had been sitting on the end of the bench, opposite the Rossetti painting; the dead woman had been sitting on the side of the same bench, across from the famous painting of Chatterton.

  “Mrs. Frances Hamilton,” said Inspector Marks, looking at his notes. “Warminster Road, Belgravia. She had ample ID—six credit cards, checkbooks. No driver’s license, though.”

  Why did the address sound familiar? Jury frowned, unable to place it. He had been standing to one side while the crime scene people and then the medical examiner took their photographs and prodded the body of Frances Hamilton. The ME said it was probably a stroke, but he couldn’t be certain. The late Mrs. Hamilton appeared to be a middle-aged woman, early sixties, in good health. He could not, until a more thorough examination, tell them more.

  “Any of them see what happened?” Jury nodded towards the nervous little knot of gallery-goers at one end of the room. They were being questioned by Marks’s men.

  “No. Only the two kids. And they didn’t actually see anything—not until the body slumped. Funny about these kids, how they act like they’ve seen it all, like nothing can jar them; but just let somebody peg out, let there be an emergency, and they completely lose it.”

  III

  Chatterton, skin like blue ice, lay with his arm draped over the edge of his narrow bed, his fingers barely touching the floor, as if he might retrieve the fragments of manuscript pages that looked, in the painting, like confetti tossed across the bare boards. The pages the poet had torn up before he drank the fatal draught.

  The marvellous boy. Wasn’t that what someone had called him? wondered Jury. He was sitting on the same bench, in about the same place, that the dead woman had sat little more than two hours before.

  Jury had always thought the life of Chatterton to be one of the saddest lives ever lived. At seventeen, most of the kids Jury had run into were shooting up, or joyriding, or else charging on their parents’ Barclaycards. It all depended on whether he was operating in W1, SW4, or EC12.

  By the age of seventeen, Thomas Chatterton had dazzled the literary world with his cycle of poems. And Jury doubted very much that anyone had really given a damn that the “Rowley poems” were a deception except for Horace Walpole, who’d been taken in by them, to his embarrassment—everlasting embarrassment, apparently. Despair and death by the age of seventeen. Jury shook his head. A life without visible reward, without money, without enough to eat, and then betrayal by his benefactor. Chatterton hadn’t even been guilty of literary theft; he’d orchestrated the entire production, imagined the whole thing. What had he done to deserve such an end?

  Jury wondered why he of all people was thinking of life in terms of justice. He looked now at the young woman in the Holman Hunt painting, rising from the knees of the lover who would almost certainly abandon her. Jury was particularly fond of the inscription Hunt had painted on the frame: “As he that taketh away a garment in cold weather, so is he that singeth songs to an heavy heart.”

  He passed the Rossetti; the Burne-Jones; Millais’s Ophelia; the three-part painting of the hapless end of an unfaithful wife; and the painting, a print of which he held in his hand, of a wife and mother mourning the sailor drowned at sea. A Hopeless Dawn: every imaginable shade of gray washed over this painting—the morning light at the window, the waves beyond, the pewter candlestick with its guttered candle, the shadows, the color of the clothes. Their world was one drained of color. He had come back to the point at which he had started his stroll of the Tate, and sat down again on the bench. The death of Chatterton, he supposed, was his favorite. A wall of woe.

  He had been on leave for two weeks now, had been to Leeds and decided no, he wouldn’t be able to stand permanent removal to Bradford. His next stop would be Stratford-upon-Avon, and after that, Northampton. He was fairly certain Superintendent Pratt would welcome him; provincial CID units were always overworked. And he knew Sammy Lasko of the Warwickshire police would. But of all the men he could imagine working with, the irascible, arrogant, determined Macalvie topped the list. Sitting on the bench in the Tate, he recalled the telephone conversation.

  “Exeter? Devon-Cornwall? Me?”

  “Right three times in a row. That’s a record even for you, Macalvie.”

  “I don’t know, Jury. I don’t know if you’d fit in. No one else that works here can tell the difference between sexual asphyxiation and strangulation. Pardon?”

  This last word was apparently addressed to the owner of the voice that was there with Macalvie, chirruping away in Exeter police headquarters.

  “I take it,” said Jury, “Gilly Thwaite just imparted one of those two bits of information to you?”

  “One of those two bits, yes. So which is right?”

  “I’m not there, for God’s sake.” Jury laughed.

  “So what?”

  “Is this a test?”

  “Sure . . . why not? You want a job here, don’t you?”

  Jury smiled. “Asphyxiation. Plastic bag over head?”

  “Right.” Macalvie turned away from the phone again.

  Jury heard the already high-pitched voice of Gilly Thwaite—at least, he assumed it was Macalvie’s scene-of-crime expert—escalate even more, and then something that sounded like a sideboard falling, and then what sounded like a lot of glass breaking, and then a wail that segued into an awful scream.

  “She says hi. Listen, you’re hired.”

  “I was just guessing.”

  “So was I.”

  In Exeter, the receiver fell into its cradle. Macalvie’s way of saying goodbye.

  Jury sighed. If he was tired of London, he must be, as Dr. Johnson had predicted, tired of life.

  Chatterton certainly had been.

  Jury left the Tate.

  3

 
“I really think, Mr. Jury,” said Mrs. Wassermann, pressing her anxious fingers hard against her black bag, “that Mr. Moshegeiian is making a mistake allowing Carole-anne to be in charge of renting our first-floor flat.” Her fingers whitened against the black leather, and her face beneath the black hat was pale. Mrs. Wassermann was dressed for one of her rare outings to her cousin’s in Bromley. She was about to leave for the Angel tube station. Right now she was in Jury’s flat, one of the four in the terraced house, but her eyes were trained on the ceiling—the floor of the first-floor flat in question.

  “I wouldn’t worry about Carole-anne letting to someone unsuitable, Mrs. Wassermann. You know her—she’s fussy.”

  Carole-anne Palutski lived on the top floor, in the smallest and cheapest of the flats, made still cheaper by her understanding with the landlord; she’d take the management of the empty flat off his hands for a reduction in rent. Mr. Moshegeiian, a Latvian or Lithuanian, was clever enough to realize that if Carole-anne was showing people round the flat, it was a dead cert it would get rented, especially if the viewer was male. But that aside, he would still have succumbed to the blandishments of Miss Palutski.

  “And Mr. Moshegeiian is nobody’s fool,” Jury added.

  “Slum landlords never are,” Mrs. Wassermann said sweetly.

  Jury laughed. “I’d hardly call this place a slum, Mrs. Wassermann.” He inspected a sock he was about to stuff into his bag. Hole you could put an elbow through. He tossed it into the rubbish bin. “And Carole-anne’s extremely particular.” That was certainly no exaggeration, although “particular” in this case took on a special Carolinian tincture.

  “But that’s exactly the trouble, Mr. Jury. Now, there was a sweet young couple just the other evening who came to see it. All the way from Wandsworth. They’d just got married and said it was just what they were looking for. But no. Credit rating not up to snuff, she told me.” Mrs. Wassermann looked stricken, as if her own credit rating were snuff-less.