An Empty Death Read online

  To Freeway, basset hound and beloved

  friend, 1998–2008

  ‘A man’s alter ego is nothing more than his favourite image of himself.’

  Frank W. Abagnale, Catch Me If You Can

  ‘The version of ourselves we present to the world bears no resemblance to the truth. There isn’t one of us who could afford to be caught. That’s all life is. Trying not to be found out.’

  Willie Donaldson’s Diary

  Contents

  Part I

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-One

  Chapter Forty-Two

  Chapter Forty-Three

  Chapter Forty-Four

  Chapter Forty-Five

  Chapter Forty-Six

  Chapter Forty-Seven

  Chapter Forty-Eight

  Chapter Forty-Nine

  Chapter Fifty

  Chapter Fifty-One

  Chapter Fifty-Two

  Chapter Fifty-Three

  Chapter Fifty-Four

  Chapter Fifty-Five

  Chapter Fifty-Six

  Chapter Fifty-Seven

  Chapter Fifty-Eight

  Chapter Fifty-Nine

  Chapter Sixty

  Chapter Sixty-One

  Chapter Sixty-Two

  Chapter Sixty-Three

  Chapter Sixty-Four

  Chapter Sixty-Five

  Part II

  Chapter Sixty-Six

  Chapter Sixty-Seven

  Chapter Sixty-Eight

  Chapter Sixty-Nine

  Chapter Seventy

  Chapter Seventy-One

  Chapter Seventy-Two

  Chapter Seventy-Three

  Chapter Seventy-Four

  Chapter Seventy-Five

  Chapter Seventy-Six

  Chapter Seventy-Seven

  Chapter Seventy-Eight

  Chapter Seventy-Nine

  Chapter Eighty

  Chapter Eighty-One

  Chapter Eighty-Two

  A Very Brief Note on Capgras Syndrome

  Acknowledgements

  Part I

  One

  June 1944, Fitzrovia: the night was bright – a bombers’ moon – but the planes were far away. The other side of London, the man thought. He glanced round the rubble-strewn site. Five or six houses must have been knocked out, because all around him were crumbling interior walls with tattered wallpaper, torn-out fireplaces with weeds sprouting in hearths now for ever cold, and window frames, some with the grey remnants of slashed curtains, the harshness of their destruction softened by the pale light. The edges of ill-secured tarpaulins flapped in the light breeze, and nettles pushed their way through mounds of plaster, glass and broken woodwork. The man could even make out the looming bulk of the Middlesex Hospital across the way.

  It was time to die again. That was how he thought of it – dying and being reborn, at the same time. He always felt a sense of loss at such times, although he couldn’t have said what it was that he was losing. He’d been relieved – delighted – to walk away from his first life, to cease being the useless, despised failure who got everything wrong. The selves that came after, personas of his choosing, had been more successful, but it was never enough. This one would be different. He’d wanted to be a doctor ever since he was a child, and now he had a name – a life – ready and waiting for just this opportunity. This was simply the penultimate step in his plan. He hadn’t expected it to happen quite like this, but that did not matter.

  He stared at the corpse at his feet. The blood on the face had congealed. The body had, simply and with silent finality, stopped working. He’d seen hundreds of cadavers since he’d started his job in the hospital mortuary, but as most of them had been dug up from the ruins and carted in, they hadn’t been fresh. Good job he’d made the most of the chance to study anatomy at first hand, even if a lot of the specimens were pretty mangled – crushed, or with missing limbs, or even, in some cases, decapitated. He’d pieced his knowledge of anatomy together with each human jigsaw, and, once acquired, such information was never wasted. He was already well prepared, but there was a great deal of work still to be done. He’d start tonight.

  Best not hang about. If anyone saw him, his new life would be over before it had even begun, and this one, he knew, was going to be the best yet. ‘Goodbye,’ he murmured to the body. It was no longer a man in the sense of being a person; it was merely a vacuum, a space that he would fill. The original owner had no use for it, or – more importantly – for his job any more, so what he was about to do wasn’t stealing; it was simply retrieving something that had been discarded. True, the discarding hadn’t been voluntary, but it was too late to worry about that now. After all, he couldn’t bring the bloke back to life, could he? Nevertheless…‘Thank you, Reynolds,’ he muttered with a moment’s awkward reverence. ‘Much appreciated, old chap.’

  Then he turned away, entirely indifferent to everything but the inward surge of excitement and certainty that told him he was, once more – as he had planned all along – the sole controller of his fate. Buoyed with a new sense of purpose, he walked, as quickly as he dared, across the rubble and down the moonlit street. In the distance – somewhere north-east, he thought – bombs were falling.

  Two

  Tottenham: the siren woke them at nearly two. Stratton, startled from sleep, sat up too quickly and whacked his head on the low ceiling of the cage-like Morrison shelter that sat in the middle of their front room. ‘Bloody—’

  ‘Sssh…’ said Jenny, his wife.

  ‘Sorry, love, I didn’t mean to—’

  ‘No, really, sssh…Lie down. Listen.’

  It was the tell-tale chugging noise – two-stroke engine gone wrong – of one of the new flying bombs. ‘It’s coming here,’ whispered his wife, grabbing his hand and squeezing it. ‘It’s right on top of us,’ he heard her mutter. ‘Keep going, don’t stop, don’t stop…’

  Stratton held his breath. Chug-chug-chug – And then it cut out. There was a second’s silence, into which he heard Jenny murmur, ‘Oh, God.’ Stratton held her hand as tight as he could and turned towards her, shielding her rigid body with his – the thought for all the good it will do flashed through his mind but if they were going to go then at least—

  The enormous bang rattled the doors and windows as the house seemed to shiver, rock, then settle back once more. There was a crash from the kitchen – plates, perhaps – and Stratton saw a white haze, like November fog, overtake the blackness in the room as plaster drifted down from the ceilin
g.

  Stratton and Jenny remained where they were, silent, for a couple more minutes. ‘Lucky,’ said Stratton, disengaging himself from his wife and stroking her cheek with the back of his hand. ‘Looks like we’re still here.’

  ‘That means somebody else probably isn’t,’ said Jenny, grimly. Then, turning to him, she clutched his shoulder. ‘What about Doris? It could have been over there.’

  ‘Wait.’ Doris was Jenny’s favourite sister. ‘I’ll see if I can see anything.’

  Stratton slid out of the Morrison and fumbled in the dark for his torch, which he took to the front door. It was a clear night and, a couple of streets away, he could see a column of smoke rising through the dark blue sky. ‘Looks like Larkin Avenue.’

  ‘That’s close. We’d better go and see. Come on.’ Jenny got up and started banging about trying to find her slacks and jumper. ‘Put some trousers on, at least. You can wear them over your pyjamas. And take your coat…’

  There was a tense silence while they pulled on their clothes, and then they were through the front door and into the street. They could hear people arriving at the incident, vehicles and running feet, the distant clang of bells. The air was full of the raw, brutal stink of destruction – a mixture of high explosive, coal gas, brick dust and burnt earth.

  Stratton held Jenny by the hand and they walked as fast as they could, following the torch beam, to the end of their road. Rounding the corner, they passed the end of another street, then another, and then—

  ‘You were right,’ said Jenny.

  The two houses at the end of Larkin Avenue had disappeared. In their place was a mountain of debris and a crater some thirty feet across that stretched into the road itself, where there was a scattering of lumps of clay mixed with macadam surface, and, here and there, a piece of kerbstone. The third house down now consisted only of a front door and half a passageway, a gaunt, bare chimneybreast, and ugly, tileless rafters jabbing skywards. An Anderson shelter, which must have been in one of the gardens, had been uprooted at one side, and its curved, corrugated iron roof was split open so that the ragged ends made it look like a huge sardine tin peeled open by a giant key. In front of it, a broken gas main flared, sending little rivulets of fire along the ground. ‘Watch where you’re treading,’ Stratton said, as they went over to join the band of onlookers who were being held back by several wardens.

  The clanging noise grew louder and then stopped abruptly as a fire engine pulled up and AFS men jumped off and began scrambling over the rubble, shouting to each other as they tried to locate the source of the gas leak.

  ‘Ted!’ Jenny’s sister, Doris, and her husband Donald appeared, looking dishevelled.

  ‘You two all right?’

  ‘Fine. That was a near one. We thought it might be you.’

  ‘We thought the same,’ said Stratton. ‘Who got it?’

  ‘I don’t know who lives at One or Five,’ said Doris, ‘but it’s the Lightollers in the middle. You know her, Jen. Big woman. Works in the bakery.’

  ‘Yes. And they’ve got a son. He was—’

  ‘Quiet, please!’ All chattering ceased as the rescue party appeared and began scrambling and tapping their way up the mound of debris, pausing in their ascent to listen for the voices of survivors under the rubble. One of them had a searcher dog, who was scrabbling about, zigzagging through the muddle, pulling its trainer unsteadily behind it as it sniffed for bodies. Recognising a local bobby, Stratton presented himself and asked if he could help. ‘Best wait till the dog’s done its stuff, sir,’ said the constable. ‘Let’s hope it’s quick,’ he added, grimly.

  Stratton, who had seen more than his share of mangled, broken and suffocated bodies, nodded. ‘Do you know how many people are under that lot?’

  ‘Four. That house,’ he pointed to the ruin, ‘was empty. We’re checking the rest of the street.’ He pointed further down to where a couple of wardens, identifiable by the glint of moonlight on their white tin hats, could be dimly seen knocking on doors and chalking walls if the occupants were present and unharmed. Stratton wondered about the efficacy of this – most of the street appeared to be gathered around the crater – but said nothing. Donald appeared at his elbow.

  ‘A Mrs Ingram at the end, apparently. Neighbour said she’s not been there long. Can we do anything?’

  ‘Wait for the dog, they said.’

  Just then, there was a single, sharp bark.

  ‘Down here!’

  ‘They’ve found someone. They’ll have to dig a shaft,’ said the constable, ‘and bloody quick, too.’

  The dog was removed, and the rescue squad retreated from the rubble to fetch baskets before forming a chain. Some of them, on the opposite side to the crowd, didn’t bother with the baskets, but simply threw the bits of debris back between their legs, as rabbits do. There was a tense silence, broken only by the thud of bricks hitting the earth and the panting breath and curses of the men as they worked.

  Stratton went to find Jenny, who was standing with Doris. ‘Do you know a Mrs Ingram, love?’

  Jenny shook her head. ‘The people down there,’ she whispered. ‘They’ll die, won’t they? They’ll be crushed.’

  ‘Don’t, Jen…’ Doris laid a hand on her sister’s arm. ‘They will save them, won’t they, Ted?’

  ‘If they’re quick,’ said Stratton. Not wanting to pursue the subject, he said, ‘Do you know Mrs Ingram, Doris?’

  His sister-in-law shook her head. ‘Someone must, though.’

  A stout, elderly woman standing behind them, wearing a shawl and, bizarrely, a straw hat, said, ‘She’s only been here a couple of months. Husband’s in the army. Very quiet – not seen much of her.’

  ‘He’s away now, is he?’ asked Stratton.

  ‘I think so. Tell you the truth, I’ve never seen him. She was on her own when she came here.’

  Donald weaved his way through the crowd and clapped Stratton on the shoulder. ‘Come and give a hand. They need to widen the hole at the top of the shaft,’ he explained, as they went to collect picks from the rescue squad truck, ‘so the weight doesn’t cave it in.’

  Stratton got stuck in, chipping steadily at the strange mixture of brick and plaster rubble, shattered joists and beams, pieces of broken furniture and crockery, rugs and curtains, all pressed together, until it was loose enough to be shovelled away. It was easy at first, and they made good progress, but then they began to hit London clay – the subsoil, thrown up by the blast, was mixed in with the rest of the mound, making it harder to shift. Picturing what was below all too clearly – crushing weight caving in fragile human ribcages so that they punctured the lungs beneath – he redoubled his efforts. His back and arms soon began to ache as if they were on fire, and he was glad of the brief break every time the man at the bottom of the shaft yelled for quiet.

  Eventually, he heard, ‘That’s enough! I’ve got something down here. Hold that bloody torch still – I can’t see bugger all.’ The crowd, who had been talking amongst themselves, were quiet. ‘Right,’ said the man. ‘This one’s had it, but I can hear someone else further on. Faint, but it’s there.’ Stratton put down his pick and went to look down the shaft. It had been dug to about eight feet, and he saw, by the light of a torch, that it would have been impossible to use a pick or shovel down there – there wasn’t enough room, and joists and other woodwork criss-crossed the narrow space. The man who had wormed his way down there was kneeling, pointing to what appeared to be the end of a stair post.

  The foreman beside Stratton asked, ‘You sure?’

  ‘Course I’m bloody sure!’ Then Stratton saw that what he thought was a knob was actually a plaster-coated fist and an arm, bare to the elbow, protruding from the side of the rubble.

  ‘Right, start tunnelling.’ The foreman turned to Stratton and looked him up and down. ‘You got a long reach – get down there and help Smithie clear the stuff out.’ He appeared not to have noticed – or, if he had, not to care – that Stratton wasn’t a rescue worker
.

  As Stratton took the proffered hard hat he heard shouts behind him and turned to see Jenny scrambling up the mound, her eyes wide with panic. ‘Ted! Please…’

  ‘It’s all right, love.’

  ‘But what if it all falls on top of you? You could be buried, you could—’ She was silenced by a bellow from the bottom of the hole as an avalanche of earth and bricks, loosened by their feet, plummeted downwards.

  ‘It won’t,’ said Stratton. ‘It’s under control. I’ll be fine.’

  Jenny shook her head rapidly, blinking, and Stratton could see that she was trying not to cry. ‘It’s all right,’ he repeated. ‘I’ll be back in no time. There’s people down there, love.’

  Jenny shook her head again. Then, standing on tiptoe, she gripped him fiercely round the neck and, kissing his cheek, whispered, ‘Be careful. Please…just be careful.’ Letting go abruptly, she picked her way back down to Doris and Donald on the pavement, her nightdress flapping beneath the hem of her coat.