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- Herausgeber: Influx Press
- Kategorie: Abenteuer, Thriller, Horror
- Sprache: Englisch
'A poet of misfits, outsiders and the forsaken, his empathy for their suffering ever poignant.' – Adam Nevill, author of The Ritual 'Joel Lane understood and expertly exploited the connection between exterior and interior landscapes like no other.' – Paul Tremblay, author of The Pallbearer's Club
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Seitenzahl: 364
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023
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JOEL LANE
WHERE FURNACES BURN
Influx Press
London
Contents
For Mark Valentine – a true connoisseur of the unknown
An Introduction to Where Furnaces Burn
R.M. FRANCIS
I grew up in the region Joel Lane takes his readers to. I’ve lived here most of my life: the Black Country – real and imagined. I recognise the eerie and weird in its landscapes and mindscapes. Lane’s horrors could only ever come from this place. A place of breakages, borderlands, disjunctions, and displacements.
The Black Country is a strange place. It’s not found on maps and its borders are under constant contestation. A region known for its Industrial heritage; we’re now haunted by the residues and ruins. Old railway lines and bell pits punctuate an off-kilter landscape built of green and grey. Rewilded spoil heaps cosy up next to large housing estates. Wildflowers and rare insects share space with litter, graffiti, and clandestine behaviours. Not a conventionally beautiful place, but one Joel Lane saw the beauty in and helped me reconfigure my love for.
I came across Lane’s work in my early adult years. I’d just finished my English Literature degree and had returned to my homelands. Like most twentysomething dweebs, I thought everything that was interesting in the world happened somewhere other than my neck of the woods. Then I stumbled on some of his stories and poems in Dudley Library. Oh shit! I thought, I’ve completely overlooked this place and completely underappreciated its strangeness. One of literature’s strengths is its unique ability to remind us and give language and image to that which we’d forgotten we knew. Reading Lane taught me that too. He taught it viscerally.
I’m reminded of Jacques Lacan’s psychoanalytical landscapes here. Like Lane’s regions, conflict and ambivalence are at its core. Distinct parts of our selfhood wrestle, lose traction, crack, and then reform. Self is a site of breakages. Lacan refers to the mirror stage, where one recognises their reflection in the process of becoming a subject. We recognise a distinct individual. We also notice an imaginary, perfect self which is then quashed as we become socialised. This imagined reflection of self is something that one wishes to regain, because it is pure self. We’re afraid of it too – it is our pre-socialised unruliness. This unruly yet beautiful thing is Lacan’s Lamella. Lacan says:
Whenever the membranes of the egg in which the foetus emerges on its way to becoming a new-born are broken, imagine for a moment that something flies off, and that one can do it with an egg as easily as with a man, namely the hommelette, or the lamella.
This thing is a part of our self which is constantly around, always chasing but cannot be fixed upon. It is the result of the very act of passing through the mirror stage, jettisoning the abject or orientating our castration complexes – it hides, haunts, seduces, and sickens. Like Freud’s id – it is the primal, unruly part of our psyche. You’ll catch glimpses of this almost-untraceable, infinite and infinitesimal, equally attractive and repulsive being, which is you and not you, throughout Where Furnaces Burn. Like me, you might be reminded of things lost or best forgotten. It might reignite things long repressed in the dank recesses of your mind.
In Stambermill, my five-year-old self raced bikes through housing estates and around the backs of homes where patches of woods make dens for rodents and gangs of naughty kids. Here, the river Stour’s polluted currents meander past scrap yards, small holdings, and old, barren pubs. The waters run under the blue brick arches of a Victorian viaduct where mosses and lichens rhizome and the ghosts of freight still rumble if you know how to listen for them. A similar in-between and off-kilter landscape is found in ‘My Stone Desire’ and ‘Still Water’. In these tales, rural, urban, organic, and machine conjugate to form erotic and abject hauntings. This refrain runs through this collection, tracking the old case notes of a West Midlands police officer, as he charts his own alienated and disquieted career and personal life, full of unusual sex, dislocated experiences, and a strange sense of lack. A lack that springs out of the liminal and the residues of place-identity.
My fourteen-year-old self wanders up the Thorns Road to meet mates on the top of Quarry Bank. No one knows where the borders are here; we are between different subsets of the DY postcodes. Looking up I see Merry Hill Shopping Centre, a hyperreal, indoor town built on the remains of Round Oak Steelworks. Looking down, the industrial estates and webbed terrace streets of The Lye. This is the land Lane called Clayheath in ‘Black Country’, a place revisited from the looping narrative of ‘The Lost District’ in his earlier collection. The hoard of thefts and vile juvenile criminality in this story springs forth in the liminal and the dreamscapes – literally and figuratively. It seems the culprit is a John Doe, built from the layers of lost childhoods and liminal lives that were never allowed to reach out and fulfil anything.
My nineteen-year-old self drives out to the Worcestershire countryside on the edges of my region: Hagley, Kinver, Bewdley. These sites seem natural but are more cultured than first appears. These are spaces where the rural and urban mingle – one threatens to overtake the other. Lane uses these edgelands and plays an explicitly Weird card in ‘A Mouth to Feed’, drawing on the primal critters of Bram Stoker’s Lair of the White Worm or Robert E. Howard’s Worms of the Earth. His Lindworm is the phallic lamella, sitting on the rural edge of the urban and modern; the sleeping threat of an encroaching primal force that might envelope and erase our existence.
My thirty-year-old self stumbles home from Turner’s pub to the Sledmere estate in Netherton. I cut through the allotments and down the canal tow path. I navigate the ruins of an old engine house and the dried-up hole of a now defunct reservoir. Spoil heaps have been rewilded by pollen-heavy weeds. The rust of corrugated roofs from the dark industrial estate puncture the skyline. Netherton tunnel eats through one-and-a-half miles of dolerite hillside. Here, it’s easy to envision the shamanic and erotic machine-god of ‘Wake up in Moloch’. In ‘the unique patchwork of urban villages and gravel meadows’ that mark out Netherton, is something ‘like a giant steam engine turned inside out’ which is the centre for a vampiric and pagan orgiastic worship. At the start of this tale, we’re warned that this place ‘grew out of the Industrial Revolution […] It was inevitable that sooner or later, we’d have to give something back’. Again then, this fusion of organic and machine, animate and inanimate, past and present brings forth some peripheral yet overwhelming and inexplicable threat.
In the final case, our detective discusses his retirement. ‘There isn’t a why,’ he says, ‘There’s just what happened. But everything falls apart, so perhaps it doesn’t need much explanation.’ But there is some explanation – inexplicable as the answer may be. The trouble is, as Morton suggests in ‘Slow Burn’, ‘THEY DON’T BELONG HERE. What belongs here doesn’t belong in the world.’ It’s in the ground itself. It’s in the mineral-rich elements that produced the industrial heartlands of the UK. In the deep time and the geological residues of the place.
My thirty-seven-year-old self walks a Staffie around the damp and desolate grounds of Wren’s Nest Nature Reserve. I lived here for six years and know it in all its tiny details; a quintessentially Black Country space. The nature reserve is a lush and beautiful site of protected flora and fauna, home to fossilised ripple beds and Silurian outcrops. It’s also full of industrial relics – mineshafts and old railway lines. One of Dudley’s infamous council estates wraps around the whole thing. This is a place where domestic, industrial, natural, and geological create strange confluences. We are safe and unsafe here, familiar and unfamiliar, attracted and repulsed. The hallmarks of the abject and uncanny. The story ‘Slow Burn’ deals with this explicitly. In Lane’s hands, these Wren’s Nest confluences produce a harrowing genius loci: ‘It had a thin, spineless body, but its hands were wide and reaching towards us with bloodless fingers. Its face was a swirl, a thumbprint, without eyes or mouth’. This spirit of place hollows the community and the people making this queer space their home.
The land is toxic. Its history is toxic. The Black Country is a country blackened. It diseases the area and its inhabitants. Bodiless beings, broken and lacking, are summoned by this. Now, nearly forty, I taste the bitter brambles that thicket the canal tow paths of my homelands. I’m looking for my own lost districts – I cannot help myself.
Jacques Lacan, The Seminar, Book XI, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1998)
R. M. Francis is a lecturer in Creative and Professional Writing at the University of Wolverhampton. He’s the author of novels, Bella and The Wrenna (Wild Pressed Books) and poetry collections Subsidence (Smokestack Books) and The Chain Coral Chorus (Play Dead Press). His essays have been published in journals and edited collections and he co-edited the book, Smell, Memory and Literature in the Black Country (Palgrave MacMillan). He is reviews editor for the Journal of Class and Culture.
My Stone Desire
Some people join the police force to try and make a difference to society. Some do it to try and keep things the same. Some do it because they like beating people up—and they’re the only ones who don’t end up disappointed. I’m still not sure why I joined the force, or why I stayed in it for twenty-four years. But I think it had to do with needing to understand. Police work was about finding evidence and explaining. There was no room for the unknown, or for the complications that lead from one thing to all kinds of other things. I was young then, of course.
When I started training for police work in Wolverhampton, I left home for the first time and rented a truly dreadful flat in Coseley, a few miles outside the city. It was part of a converted house that had once belonged to a fairly wealthy family. The exterior was still quite impressive, but the interior was largely plasterboard held in place by woodchip wallpaper. The water pipes had the ghost of a murdered child trapped inside them. The fuses regularly blew if two people in the house were cooking at the same time. Not that you could cook much on the tiny, sluggish Baby Belling cooker in the corner of my living room.
In the early days, I spent as much of my off-duty time in Wolverhampton as possible. There was a lot of good live music around at that time; blues and folk as well as the grinding industrial rock that would eventually be called heavy metal. I was on my way home from some gig or other, waiting in a frost-coated bus shelter for the last bus out, when I met a dark-haired girl called Kath. The next weekend, we met again for a drink. Kath lived with her parents in Tipton, a few miles south of Coseley, deep in the estranged heart of the Black Country. She could speak the Tipton dialect, which no-one outside the town understands.
By early spring, Kath was spending the weekends at my place. We’d sit up late, smoking cigarettes and drinking cheap vodka, sleep into the afternoon and make love until nightfall. It was my first experience of intimacy— whether physical or emotional—and I couldn’t seem to get enough of her. The bed stank of tobacco smoke and flesh. What I liked best was the dreamlike recovery from the climax, when we held each other and slowly got our breath back while the shock of joy went on echoing in our veins. At those times Kath seemed like a recently fallen angel, her skin glowing, her eyes filled with a mysterious bitter light.
When we met during the week, there was rarely time for us to go back to Coseley together. We’d see a gig or a film in Wolverhampton, then walk out together along the bus route heading south. Just where the factories gave way to fields and woodland, there was a low railway bridge of blackened stone and criss-crossed iron girders. At night, the underside of the bridge was murky and cold. Young couples went there to smoke dope, drink bottled beer and screw. Sometimes there were people hanging around, and we wouldn’t stay. But often we were alone, holding each other in the blurred half-light and kissing desperately as the cars sped past. Or looking up at the intricate, barely visible iron lattice as if it was a stained-glass window, some kind of design we needed to interpret.
One night when it was raining, we sheltered under the dripping bridge to warm our hands on each other’s skin. Droplets of rain flickered in Kath’s hair. I kissed her closed eyelids, and her mouth twisted with some emotion she didn’t have words for. Her nipples were rigid under her thin shirt. Being quite small-breasted, she often didn’t wear a bra. Our mouths locked together, sharing breath. I felt the distant pulse of an approaching train. Then its passing shuddered through us, and the quiet was torn apart like a tarpaulin over a nail bomb. Kath pressed against me, breathing hard. My fingers found her open.
Kath bit my lips as I shared her with the lime-smeared wall, fumbling to remove the barriers of fabric between us. The air was cold, too cold for this. Kath’s muscles locked me inside her. It felt unreal, or perhaps more real than I was. We struggled, cried out, froze together. The night was suddenly very still. Kath found a tissue and wiped her thigh. I felt as though I had violated her, or something had violated both of us. We walked to the bus stop in silence, holding hands, a little shaky from the violence of it. Thirty years on, I still remember how that felt.
A few weeks after that, Kath told me she was late. ‘I must have forgotten to take the pill,’ she said. We were sitting in a café near the bookshop where she worked. In those days, there were several bookshops in Wolverhampton. She lit a cigarette but stubbed it out after one draw. I noticed that her make-up was clumsily applied, the eyeshadow not quite masking the effects of a sleepless night. Her fingernails pierced the back of my hand. ‘Can I move in with you?’ she asked.
I felt my head shaking before I’d even thought about it. Panic gripped me. ‘You did it on purpose,’ I said. ‘Getting pregnant so you could leave home.’ I apologised almost at once, but the damage was done. Things unravelled quickly after that. A few awkward phone conversations; one more shared night, bitter and restless; then nothing.
As a child, I had a recurrent dream of a hidden place. It was part of a waste ground, not far from my school. No such location existed in my waking life, but each time I dreamed of it the memory was clear. I wandered through brittle ferns and the grey fringes of willow trees towards a ruined wall, on the far side of which someone was waiting for me. When I reached the wall, I could hear traffic going past rapidly on the other side. I remembered that only the road was there.
Kath got another job and didn’t come into Wolverhampton any more. I think she had the baby, but I don’t know if she kept it. More than anything, I felt tired—as if the sleep debt from the past four months needed to be paid off all at once. The rainy spring dried out into a stale, metallic summer. I concentrated on passing the police entrance exams.
By the end of the year, I was a constable in the Missing Persons team. Off duty, I kept to myself for the most part. They built a new expressway going south out of Wolverhampton, and closed down the road that passed under the railway bridge. I walked out there one freezing afternoon and saw the bridge had already deteriorated: a dense black mould was spreading on the walls and blurring the overhead girders. There was a smell of decaying stone, if stone could decay. I never took another girl there.
The Missing Persons work was fairly demanding, though I soon became frustrated by the lack of answers. Almost every week, someone in the region would disappear—and not only loners but young couples, pregnant women, even people with families. My more experienced colleagues seemed to take it for granted that no-one would ever turn up. ‘Either they’re alive and hiding, or dead and someone has buried them,’ my supervisor commented.
The local paper ran a few stories about the missing people, but it made no difference. I began to realise how fragile the links between people really were. Like a necklace that broke at the least strain, scattering beads everywhere. I tried not to think about Kath and the baby. Eventually they became unreal to me. Muddy Waters seemed to have the relationship thing sussed.
One night in early spring, I took a girl back to my flat. She complained about the smell in the bedroom— ‘It’s like there’s something dead in the wall.’ I hadn’t even noticed, but when Susan pulled the mattress back I could see a black skin forming over the woodchip wallpaper. It had crept up from a discoloured piece of skirting board. I touched the mould with a fingertip. It was smooth and yielding, like a bruise.
We took the mattress and blankets into the living room that night and slept with the gas fire on. I dreamt the house was burning down, and woke up sweaty and confused. The orange light glowed through crumpled tissues on the floor. There was a dark shape huddled in the blankets beside me, smelling of blood and perfume. I didn’t want her to wake up.
The next day, I scraped all the mould off the wall and dabbed bleach onto the raw plaster. Then I dried the surface with an electric fan heater. The next morning, it was already growing back. I scraped it off again. Once separated from the wall it became flaky and brittle, like ashes. I moved the bed into the middle of the room. In the morning, the wallpaper in the corner was grey and puffy. By the next evening, the mould was back again.
I stuck a poster over it and went out to phone the landlord, then stopped at the pub on the way back. By the weekend, the poster had split down the middle. I could see the blackened plaster behind it.
I’m not sure what made me go back to the railway bridge that weekend. Perhaps I wanted to be forgiven, allowed back into the past. And I was naïve enough to imagine I could reach it on my own.
As I walked along the disused road in the moonlight, the bridge looked different even from a distance. I thought it was because the streetlights weren’t working any more. But as I reached the bridge and stood just outside its shadow, I could see that the stone and brick of its exterior were entirely covered with uneven black mould. The pale streaks of lime that the rain had leached from the brickwork were no longer visible.
The moonlight revealed another difference too: something the mould had hidden from me before. The structure of the bridge was made up of tightly packed, naked human bodies, twisted together in the warmth of slow decay. They looked as if they were about to move, but they were still. I was close enough to smell them.
My hand reached out, but I was afraid to touch the wall. Afraid that I might not be able to leave. In that moment, I realised they hadn’t been killed and left there. They’d gone there of their own accord. A train ran over the bridge then, and the vibration made me start to shake.
Still Water
It seemed funny at the time, but in retrospect it wasn’t funny at all. A gang of jewel thieves who’d gone missing in Stoke had turned up in the Black Country, hiding in a street with no name. It was the late seventies, and there were quite a few anomalies in the local street map: remnants of lost districts that didn’t belong to anywhere and the council hadn’t given them postcodes or kept track of who lived there. In this case, it was a string of old railwaymen’s houses in the poorest part of Aldridge, uninhabited for thirty years at least. A pearl necklace that had been stolen in Derby turned up in a Walsall pawn shop; we traced it to a prostitute who’d got it from some men living out there. She said it was a derelict house.
At that time, I’d been in the force for a year. I was working from the Green Lane station in Walsall. There wasn’t much going on except drunkenness and domestic violence. This was my first taste of organised crime. We planned a nocturnal raid on the ruined cottages, with at least four arrests anticipated. According to the prostitute, the gang were like a family. They shared everything. Some of what she told us didn’t end up on the interview record. My superior, DI McCann, had a sense of decency that was unusual for a policeman.
Four cars full of police officers descended on the nameless street shortly before dawn. The houses were built on either side of a railway bridge that had been condemned in the fifties, but never demolished. They backed onto a patch of wasteland where old canals had leaked into the soil, giving the landscape a fertile variety of plant growth and a pervasive smell of stagnant water. It made me think of unwashed skin. We’d been told to go to the third house; it looked just like the others, uninhabited and impossible to inhabit. Black lichen and moss caked the crumbling brick walls; the windows were boarded up, the front door covered with rotting planks. Some tree-dwelling bird called to us mournfully in the night.
behind the house, the marshy ground and thick brambles made an approach difficult. The rear windows were unprotected, though no light was visible through them. What first appeared to be a dense curtain was revealed by our torches as a black mould covering the inside of the glass. It was hard to believe that we’d come to the right place. But in the silence before we broke in, a faint sound reached us. A man’s voice, muffled by brick and glass and layers of filth. He was singing: Baby, you’re out of time. So was he.
McCann crashed through the back door, and five of us followed him. The rest waited outside. Our torches made crazy snapshots of the interior: rotting wallpaper, a cracked ceiling, broken chairs. Some new-looking food cartons, bottles and candles on a table were the only sign of occupancy. In all probability, this place had never had electricity. The singing continued in one of the upstairs rooms. Was it a tape recorder? What kind of trap were we walking into? On the staircase, my foot went through a rotten step and I fell, cursing. When I got up I was alone on the stairs. Ahead of me was only the song. The blues.
Apart from police, there was only one man in the upper room. He was kneeling on a filthy mattress, in front of a small suitcase. The lid was up. The suitcase was full of jewels: pearls, rubies, silver, emeralds. Some were strung or inlaid, some were loose. He was running his hands through them, and singing to himself. His hair was knotted and filthy; his once-white shirt was streaked with filth and sweat. He didn’t look away from his hoard or stop singing, even when McCann clamped the handcuffs on his wrists.
We kept him at the Green Lane station for a week. His name was Jason Welles, and he was a member of the Stoke gang. An experienced fence, despite being only twenty. Among the station officers he was known as Mr Pitiful—and not only because of the singing. For two days he did nothing but complain that we’d taken his jewels from him, because ‘She won’t come to me if I don’t have them. She’s an old-fashioned girl. No gifts, no loving.’ His eyes were a pale, tormented blue.
One night, when I took him his dinner, he remarked to me as calmly as if we’d been talking about her all evening: ‘That first time, she came out of the wall. Plaster clinging to her like a shroud. I was holding an emerald bracelet, trying to judge its value. She stood there naked and reached out for it. Then she took me into the garden and showed me where her family live. I wanted to stay with her, but she said it wasn’t time yet. When will it be time?’ The last question was asked as if everyone knew the answer but him. I didn’t know what to say.
Every attempt to interview him produced the same story. He lived in a twilight world of ghosts and angels, a delusional shell that could have made him a cult leader if he’d had a better haircut. It seemed likely that the gang’s adolescent games with drugs and prostitutes had triggered some kind of buried madness in him. Or else there’d been some hallucinogen in the moulds and lichens that decorated the ruined Aldridge house. A search of those houses and the surrounding waste ground had yielded no trace of the other gang members. If he didn’t tell us where they were, we’d probably never find out. But how do you interrogate a madman?
I attended three of the interview sessions. Each time, he sang to himself and muttered random nonsense, ignoring our questions. To be fair, we ignored his. His world and ours rarely seemed to touch. Typically, he’d rock in his chair and run his hands through imaginary jewels—or through the hair of an imaginary woman. He’d sing ‘Out of Time’ or ‘I Can’t Help Myself’, then start talking suddenly, as if resuming a conversation we’d interrupted. The interview tapes and transcripts are doubtless long since thrown away, but I can remember some of his words.
‘As soon as I saw the house, I knew it belonged to a family. A real family, not like my mum and her boyfriends after my dad went to prison. Nathan, Mark and Rich, they brought call girls into the house, but I knew the family wouldn’t like that. Then she came to me one night. Wearing a gown of rotting wallpaper that fell from her and her body glowed brighter than a candle. She showed me where her family sleep under the water. And the thin grey tubes they breathe through, like a baby’s umbilical cord. I gave her jewels to wear in her long dark hair. To hang in the tunnels under the ground.
‘The other three guys… well, they were just thieves. They had no idea what anything was worth. It was just money to them. Money to spend on cars and clothes and cunt. I let her family take them.’ He giggled like a child. ‘Not much left of them after a while. Poetic justice. What they had was stolen. But she never stole from me. I gave her everything. I opened her and wrapped her around me. They say when you come off, it never lasts. But I know how to make it last forever.
‘Then the morning comes, and she’s gone. Baby, you’re out of time… Where are my jewels? The earrings, the bracelets, the necklaces. I need them to give to her. Why have you taken them from me?’ He stared angrily at McCann and me. We said nothing. ‘She can’t reach me here. It’s too far from the water. You’re out of touch, my baby… Why don’t you let her find me? Why’d you put me in a cell with no plaster or wallpaper, so she can’t get through? I’ve nothing to give her now but myself. Why do you always have to break up the family?’
We weren’t getting anything useful from him. And he was a liability as a prisoner. He yelled, kicked at the door, wet the bed, needed a suicide watch. We were glad to get rid of him. The Stoke police thought he was probably unfit to stand trial, but he’d be on a section for quite a while anyway. It was hard to imagine him getting involved in organised crime. He couldn’t even feed himself.
While Jason Welles was dreaming in a secure unit somewhere near Stoke, I took my annual leave. I’d been going out with a girl called Joanna since the previous year, and this was our first holiday together. A self-catering week in Dorset. The days were close and rainy, so we spent a lot of time in bed. I kept dreaming about him reaching up for something he couldn’t touch, saying ‘I opened her and wrapped her around me’. His obsession had convinced me there was something dangerous about love. We split up not long after we came back to Walsall.
Joanna came from Blackheath, and had a rather bleak sense of humour. That was something we shared. She used to repeat bits of Dolly Allen monologues, an elderly comedienne who was well-known in the Black Country at that time. Like the story about the vacuum cleaner salesman. I opened the door, this young fellow in a suit was stood there. He poured a little bag of dirt onto my hall carpet and said ‘If my vacuum cleaner can’t get that dust out of your carpet in one minute, I’ll eat the dust.’ I said ‘Here’s a spoon, there’s no electric in this house.’
One day when the sky was clear, we went for a walk inland. The footpath took us through an abandoned farm. The old farmhouse was in ruins, its roof beams open to the sky. The sun was burning and we needed shelter, so we slipped into the barn. Gaps in the roof showed where the rain had got in and rotted the bundles of hay. Something moved at the edge of my vision—a snake or a mouse. Joanna turned to me and we kissed hungrily in the shadows. We made love with some violence, our fingernails and teeth leaving marks in each other. Afterwards, we struggled for breath and held each other more tenderly than we had all week.
At that moment, I recognised the cold fever-smell of stagnant water. Looking over Joanna’s shoulder, I saw a barrel standing behind the haystack we’d used as a bed. It was nearly full of water. In the dim light, I could just see a number of pale tubes hanging down from the water surface. But I couldn’t see what they were connected to. I reached over and let my fingertips brush the water. At once, the tubes convulsed. They were connected to long, translucent maggots that jerked in the water. My finger touched one of them. I threw myself backwards and stood there, breathing hard and trying not to vomit.
Joanna started at me as if I’d gone mad. ‘What’s wrong with you?’ I gestured at the water barrel. She turned and stared at the murky surface. ‘Oh, some rat-tailed maggots. Horsefly larvae. Not very pleasant, are they?’ Her biological knowledge was more wide-ranging than mine, as I’d noticed on other occasions. ‘The long tubes are for breathing. They live in foul water where there’s no oxygen. If you see them, you know the water’s not fit for anything much.’
I’d been back at the Green Lane station for three hours before DI McCann saw fit to tell me the news. ‘By the way, that nutter of a jewel thief has escaped from the secure unit they were keeping him in. Broke a guard’s leg and ran for it. They said he’d been such a good prisoner, they weren’t expecting it. You think they’d be used to the insane. Anyway, can’t imagine he’ll come back here. There’s nothing for him, now the jewels have been returned to their rightful owners.’
I stared at him. ‘You’re joking, aren’t you?’ He looked confused. ‘Of course he’ll come back here. The house. His woman.’
‘But that’s just madness. There’s no woman there.’
‘To him there is. Look, you interviewed him five or six times. The woman was more real to him than you were.’
It took me another ten minutes to persuade McCann to drive out to the railway bridge. Night was falling, and I wished we’d brought more officers along. This time, we had a key for the back door; but there was no singing inside. The house was empty of life, except for the secondary life of rot and decay. We used our torches to search the waste ground behind the house. He was where I’d known he would be: in the shallow pond close to the back door. There didn’t appear to have been a struggle. He’d used stones to weigh himself down. When we pulled him out, he was curled up, his arms crossed, his knees close to his chest. Like a kid in a school assembly.
Later, we drained the pond and found nothing more, apart from a mass of weeds and insect life. But I wonder about the layers of marsh and silt beneath those houses. How easy it might be to make tunnels, or to close them down. It’s in the nature of life to adapt. If you don’t have food, or oxygen, or love, you find a way. It might not be a good way by someone else’s standards, but it’s a way.
The autopsy confirmed that Jason Welles had died by drowning in shallow, dirty water. The only external damage was some fretting or eroding of the mouth, caused by small fish or water snails. The only other significant detail had no bearing on the cause of death, and was described by the pathologist as ‘demonstrating the feverish reproductive activity of aquatic life at certain times of the year’. When they opened up the dead man’s body to remove the viscera, they found that the wall of the body cavity was lined with thousands of tiny pearl-white eggs.
Morning’s echo
It was the strangest kind of dating I ever experienced. But at the time, I was quite young. I hadn’t been in the police force long, and I’d only just moved to Birmingham from the Black Country. In a way, it was how I got to know the city. Years later, when I was getting serious with Elaine, I told her a little about that. I said Carla had still been in love with her ex. Which was true, but it wasn’t the whole story.
One evening, a girl of eighteen or so turned up at the Digbeth station in some distress. She wanted us to help her find her boyfriend. When we asked where he might be, she said: ‘He’s in the ground.’ Denny was the head of a local teen gang, the Falcons, that had some minor criminal involvement—a couple of my colleagues knew him. He’d recently been threatened by an older and more dangerous gang, the Jackals, about whom we knew a lot more. Now he’d disappeared.
We spoke to the leader of the Jackals, a vicious little scrote who was probably capable of murder if someone else cleaned up after him. He claimed not to know who the missing boy was. We had no evidence. Carla wasn’t able to say where the body might be, though we went round a few parks and waste grounds with dogs. We suspected Denny had done a runner and Carla was covering for him. But we didn’t have the heart to accuse her of wasting police time. She was a thin, dark-eyed girl with spiky hair and a fragile loneliness that encased her like a shell.
A fortnight after we’d stopped looking for the missing boy, I had the first dream. I was with Carla in a ruined factory somewhere, open to the sky. There was a new moon. I dug with a spade through weeds and loose soil, took out a few shattered bricks, found a package wrapped in newspaper. In the moonlight, I began to unwrap it. Carla’s fingernails gripped my arm. I woke up shivering, though it was only October.
That night was the beginning of something for me. I knew that it would be stupid to tell my colleagues about the dream—but at the same time, that I had to do something. Carla’s passive face glimmered at the edge of my vision. The next day, I phoned her. She knew the place from my description: it was in Tyseley, just off the Grand Union Canal.
We went there after midnight. I was living alone, so there was no need for an excuse. Just as I’d dreamt, I dug up a buried newspaper package. This time, I unwrapped it. Thinking of ‘pass the parcel’ games in junior school. It contained the hand of a young man—drained white, but not in the least decayed. Carla took it from me, wrapped it again, and kissed me on the mouth. Then she walked away, leaving me to replace the soil and fragments of brick in the ground.
About a month later, I had a second dream. Another place I didn’t know. Trees on the edge of a flooded running track, behind a decaying wall of red stone blocks. The same pale sliver of moon. Carla watched me dig in the marshy soil and uncover another small package. I felt her breath on my face.
Once again, I called her and she knew where it was. Near the university, behind some tenement houses where students lived. Because the running track was in a valley, the rising water table had made it a swamp. There was a strong odour of decay and unclean growth. But once again, what I found was perfectly preserved: the pale, narrow foot of a boy. Carla’s kiss left me as frustrated as if I had woken up, though I was still in a moonlit landscape that seemed unreal. I wondered if it belonged to her memory.
The next time was a railway bridge in Digbeth: another foot. Then where a narrow river came above ground: a buried arm. It was always an abandoned place, and there was always a new moon. I was so keen to dream that I wasn’t sleeping well, and Carla was in my mind all the time. But she wouldn’t see me except when I’d dreamed about finding more of Denny. I asked her if she was keeping the pieces together. She said: ‘They’re not just pieces. He’s coming back.’
Carla had a baby son she said was Denny’s. I heard him crying a few times when I phoned her, and I saw them together one time when our paths crossed in the Bull Ring market. It was strange to see her so bound up with normality. The only thing that kept my obsession with her in check was how desperately busy we were that year. There was a rising level of street crime, some of it linked to the Jackals. Their leader was killed in a fight, but an even nastier piece of work replaced him. Things seemed to be on the edge of a chaos no police work could unravel.
Every month, another bitter dream. Another date with Carla in a place that she knew and I didn’t. Another newspaper-wrapped part of her boyfriend. Another brief kiss that brought me no closer to her. I thought of something I’d read in college: the hermeneutic circle of learning, how you reached the whole through the parts and the parts through the whole. The hands, feet, arms, calves, thighs, and then a torso with the penis cleanly severed. Almost a year of madness.
Finally, it was October again. She led me through the Vyse Street cemetery to a half-circle of stone ridges that was strangely like a Greek theatre. I could hear water running underground. There was a disused air raid shelter here, I knew. Long rats crept through the grass between headstones. At the heart of the structure, I saw a ruined vault. This time I didn’t need to dig: the package could be reached through a break in the stone. No creature had interfered with it. I peeled away the layers of newsprint from the unblemished face. His eyes were still in place, seeing. This time I walked away. Not wanting to see how Carla looked at her lover’s head. Then I felt her hand on my arm. I turned. She embraced me, pressed her open mouth against mine. We stood together for a few seconds.
Then she said: ‘There’s still one part missing.’
‘I don’t think that’s going to turn up,’ I answered. Carla shrugged. ‘It’s always the way.’
A cloud slipped over the moon like a scarf over a damaged face. ‘What’s going to happen now?’ I asked.
She paused, uncertain. ‘Denny and I will go away together. He’s back now. The balance is restored. But we can’t stay here.’ She looked back to where Denny’s head was waiting in its cradle of local news. Then she turned back to me. ‘You’ll meet him again,’ she said. ‘And he’ll be fair to you. Because you helped.’
At the time, I thought she was talking about the police’s dealings with the Falcons. It wasn’t until years later that I realised she might have meant something quite different. She was, after all, mad. But I think about what she said more and more these days. Sometimes it’s all the comfort I have.
The Hostess
Not long after I moved to Birmingham in the 1980s, a family feud led to one of the worst crimes in my experience. It happened in Digbeth, an old industrial district now taken over by warehouses and wholesale businesses. The narrow backstreets and rotting factories hid a multitude of stolen goods. But most of the actual crimes happened elsewhere. The Digbeth police station was busier with drunks fighting in the Barrel Organ and the Railway Tavern than with professional villains.
