Dancing Towards the Blade and Other Stories Read online

  Mark Billingham has twice won the Theakston’s Old Peculier Award for Best Crime Novel, and has also won a Sherlock Award for the Best Detective created by a British writer. Each of the novels featuring Detective Inspector Tom Thorne has been a Sunday Times bestseller, and Sleepyhead and Scaredy Cat were made into a hit TV series on Sky 1 starring David Morrissey as Thorne. Mark lives in North London with his wife and two children.

  Also by Mark Billingham

  The DI Tom Thorne series

  Sleepyhead

  Scaredy Cat

  Lazybones

  The Burning Girl

  Lifeless

  Buried

  Death Message

  Bloodline

  From the Dead

  Good as Dead

  The Dying Hours

  Other fiction

  In The Dark

  Rush of Blood

  COPYRIGHT

  Published by Hachette Digital

  ISBN: 978-0-7515-5344-4

  All characters and events in this publication, other than those clearly in the public domain, are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Copyright © Mark Billingham Ltd 2013

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.

  Hachette Digital

  Little, Brown Book Group

  100 Victoria Embankment

  London, EC4Y 0DY

  www.hachette.co.uk

  Contents

  About the Author

  Also by Mark Billingham

  Copyright Page

  Dancing Towards the Blade

  Stroke of Luck

  The Walls

  Extract of The Dying Hours

  Part One

  One

  DANCING TOWARDS THE BLADE

  He was always Vincent at home.

  At school there were a few boys who called him ‘Vince’, and ‘Vinny’ was yelled more often than not across the playground, but his mother and father never shortened his name and neither did his brothers and sisters whose own names, in turn, were also spoken in full.

  ‘Vincent’ around the house then, and at family functions. The second syllable given equal weight with the first by the heavy accent of the elder members. Not swallowed. Rhyming with ‘went’.

  Vincent was not really bothered what names people chose to use, but there were some things it was never pleasant to be called.

  ‘Coon!’

  ‘Black coon!’

  ‘Fucking black bastard…’

  He had rounded the corner and stepped into the passageway to find them waiting for him. Like turds in long grass. A trio of them in Timberland and Tommy Hilfiger. Not shouting, but simply speaking casually. Saying what they saw. Big car. Hairy dog. Fucking black bastard.

  Vincent stopped, caught his breath, took it all in.

  Two were tallish – one abnormally thin, the other shaven-headed, and both cradled cans of expensive lager. The third was shorter and wore a baseball cap, the peak bent and pulled down low. He took a swig of Smirnoff Ice, then began to bounce on the balls of his feet, swinging the frosted glass bottle between thumb and forefinger.

  ‘What you staring at, you sooty fucker?’

  Vincent reckoned they were fifteen or so. Year-eleven boys. The skinny one was maybe not even that, but all of them were a little younger than he was.

  From somewhere a few streets away came the noise of singing, tuneless and incoherent, the phrases swinging like bludgeons. Quick as a flash, the arms of the taller boys were in the air, lager cans clutched in pale fists, faces taut with blind passion as they joined in the song.

  ‘No one likes us, no one likes us, no one likes us, we don’t care…’

  The smaller boy looked at Vincent and shouted above the noise. ‘Well?’

  It was nearly six o’clock and starting to get dark. The match had finished over an hour ago but Vincent had guessed there might still be a few lads knocking about. He’d seen a couple outside the newsagent as he’d walked down the ramp from the tube station. Blowing onto bags of chips. Tits and guts moving beneath their thin replica shirts. The away fans were long gone and most of the home supporters were already indoors, but there were others, most who’d already forgotten the score, who still wandered the streets, singing and drinking. Waiting in groups, a radio tuned to 5 Live. Standing in lines on low walls, the half-time shitburgers turning to acid in their stomachs, looking around for it.

  The cut-through was no more than fifteen feet wide, and ran between two three-storey blocks. It curled away from the main road towards the block where Vincent lived at the far end of the estate. The three boys that barred his way were gathered around a pair of stone bollards, built to dissuade certain drivers from coming onto the estate. From setting fire to cars on people’s doorsteps.

  Vincent answered the question, trying to keep his voice low and even, hoping it wouldn’t catch. ‘I’m going home.’

  ‘Fucking listen to him. A posh nigger.’

  The skinny boy laughed and the three came together, shoulders connecting, forearms nudging one another. When they were still again they had taken up new positions. The three now stood, more or less evenly spaced across the walkway, one in each gap. Between wall and bollard, bollard and bollard, bollard and wall.

  ‘Where’s home?’ the boy in the cap said.

  Vincent pointed past the boy’s head. The boy didn’t turn. He raised his head and Vincent got his first real look at the face, handsome and hard, shadowed by the peak of the baseball cap. Vincent saw something like a smile as the boy brought the bottle to his lips again.

  ‘This is the short cut,’ Vincent said. ‘My quickest way.’

  The boy in the cap swallowed. ‘Your quickest way home is via the airport.’ The smile that Vincent had thought he’d seen now made itself very evident. ‘You want the Piccadilly line to Heathrow, mate.’

  Vincent chuckled softly, pretending to enjoy the joke. He saw the boy’s face harden, watched him raise a hand and jab a finger back towards the main road.

  ‘Go round.’

  Vincent knew what he meant. He could walk back and take the path that led around the perimeter of the estate, approach his block from the other side. It would only take a few minutes longer. He could just turn and go and he would probably be home before they’d finished laughing.

  ‘You heard.’ The skinny boy leaned back against a bollard.

  He could easily turn and go round.

  ‘Now piss off…’

  The edges of Vincent’s vision began to blur and darken and the words that spewed from the mouth of the boy with the shaven head became hard to make out. A distant rhythm was asserting itself and as Vincent looked down at the cracked slabs beneath his feet, a shadow seemed to fall across them. A voice grew louder, and it was as if the walls on either side had softened and begun to sway above him like the tops of trees.

  The voice was one Vincent knew well. The accent, unlike his own, was heavy, but the intonation and tone were those that had been passed on to him and to his brothers and sisters. It was a rich voice, warm and dark, sliding effortlessly around every phrase, each dramatic sentence of a story it never tired of telling.

  His father’s voice…

  Looking out from his bedroom window, the boy could see the coffee plants lying like a deep green tablecloth across the hillside, billowing down towards the canopy of treetops and the dirty river beneath. If he raised his eyes up, he saw the mountain on the far side of the valley, its peaks jutting into th
e mist, the slopes changing colour many times a day according to the cloud and the position of the sun. Black or green or blood red. Other colours the boy had no name for.

  A dozen views for the price of one, and he’d thought about all of them in the time he’d been away. He’d tried to picture each one during the bone-shaking, twelve-hour bus ride that had brought him home from school five days before.

  ‘Hey! Stand still, boy. This is damn fiddly.’

  Uncle Joseph, on his knees in front of him, his thick fingers struggling with the leather fastenings, as they had every morning since they’d begun. It was hard to tie the knots so that the strings of beads clung to the calves without slipping, but not so tightly that they would cut into the flesh.

  When he’d finished with the beads on the lower legs, Uncle Joseph would move onto the thick bands of dried goatskin, each heavy with rows of bells and strapped around the thighs. These were expensive items, hand-made like everything else. Lastly, Joseph would wrap the dark highly-polished belt around the boy’s waist. On three out of the last four mornings, much to the boy’s amusement, he’d sliced a finger on one of the razor-sharp shells sewn into the leather.

  Behind him, Uncle Francis worked on attaching the beads that crossed his back and chest in an X, like brightly-coloured bandoliers. Francis was always cheerful, and the boy imagined that he too looked forward to that moment when Joseph would cry out, curse and stick a bleeding finger into his mouth. It was always Francis and Joseph that dressed him. The rest of his uncles waited outside. He’d been amazed at quite how many uncles he had, when they’d gathered on the night after he’d got back; when the family committee had met to organise it all.

  There had been lots to decide.

  ‘Do we have drummers?’

  ‘Of course. This is important. He is important.’

  ‘Grade A. Definitely Grade A.’

  ‘These drummers are not cheap. Their damn costumes alone are a fortune.’

  ‘I think they should come with their costumes. It isn’t fair. We shouldn’t have to pay for the costumes separately.’

  ‘We should have lots of drummers!’

  And on and on, deep into the night, arguing and getting drunker while the boy listened from his bedroom. Though he didn’t understand everything, the passion in the voices of these men had caused excitement to swell in his chest. Yes, and an equal measure of dread to press down on it, like one of the huge flat stones that lay along the river bed at the bottom of the valley. He’d lain awake most of that night thinking of his friends, his age-mates in the other villages, wondering if they were feeling the same thing.

  ‘All set, boy,’ Uncle Joseph said.

  Uncle Francis handed him the head-dress, rubbed the back of his neck. ‘Feeling fit?’

  Outside, he was greeted with cheers and whoops. This was the last day of gathering and there was more noise, more gaiety than there had been on any day previously. This was the eve of it all; the final, glorious push.

  He took his place in the middle of the group, acknowledged the greetings of his brothers, of uncles, and cousins whose names he could never remember. Though no one was dressed as extravagantly as he was, everyone had made the necessary effort. No man or boy was without beads or bells. The older ones were all draped in animal skins – monkey, zebra and lion. All had painted faces and strips of brightly coloured cloth attached to the edges of their leather vests.

  A huge roar went up as the first drum was struck. A massive bass drum, its rhythm like a giant’s heartbeat. The smaller drums joined then, and the whistles, and the yelps of the women and children, watching from the doorways of houses, waving the gatherers goodbye.

  The boy cleared his throat and spat into the dirt. He let out a long, high note, listened to it roll away across the valley. The rhythm became more complex, more frantic, and he picked up his knees in time to it, the beads rattling on his legs and the shells clattering against the belt around his waist.

  He began to dance.

  The procession started to move. A carnival, a travelling circus, a hundred or more bare feet slapping into the dirt in time to the drummers. A cloud of dust rose up behind them as they picked up speed, moving away along the hard, brown track that snaked out of the village.

  The mottled grey of the slabs was broken only by the splotches of dog-shit brown and dandelion yellow.

  Vincent looked up from the floor of the walkway.

  The eyes of the two taller boys darted between his face and that of their friend. It seemed to Vincent that they were waiting to be told what to do. They were looking for some sort of signal.

  The boy in the cap raised his eyes up to Vincent’s. He took a long, slow swig from his bottle, his gaze not shifting from Vincent’s face. Then, he snatched the bottle from his lips, wiped a hand across his mouth and glared, as if suddenly affronted.

  ‘What?’

  Vincent smiled, shook his head. ‘I didn’t say anything.’

  ‘Yes, you fucking did.’

  The boy with the shaved head took a step forward. ‘What did you say, you cheeky black fucker?’

  The smaller boy nodded, pleased, and took another swig. Vincent shrugged, feeling the tremble in his right leg, pressing a straight arm hard against it.

  ‘Listen, I don’t want any trouble. I’m just trying to get home.’

  Home.

  Vincent blinked and saw his brother’s face, the skin taken off his cheek and one eye swollen shut. He saw his mother’s face as she stood at the window all the next afternoon, staring out across the dual carriageway towards the lorry park and the floodlights beyond. He saw her face when she turned finally, and spoke.

  ‘We’re moving,’ she’d said.

  One more blink and he saw the resignation that had returned to her face after a day doing the maths; scanning newspapers, and estate agents’ details from Greenwich and Blackheath. As the idea of moving anywhere was quickly forgotten.

  ‘I’ve already told you,’ the boy with the bottle said. ‘If you’re so desperate, just go round.’

  Vincent saw the face of his father then. As it had been that day when his brother had come home bleeding, and then, as he imagined it to have been twenty-five years before. In a country Vincent had only ever seen pictures of.

  The boy sat at the back of the house, beneath the striped awning that his father had put above his bedroom window. Rose rubbed ointment on to his blisters. They stared across the valley at the sun dropping down behind the mountain, the slopes cobalt blue beneath a darkening sky.

  He knew that they should not have been sitting together, that his uncles would not have approved. Contact with young women was frowned upon in the week leading up to the ritual. He would regret it, his uncles would have said, in the days afterwards, in the healing time after the ceremony. ‘Talk to young women,’ Joseph had told him, ‘let them smile at you now, and shake their hips, and you will pay.’

  He didn’t care. He had known Rose since before he could walk and besides, Joseph, Francis and the others would be insensible by now. They had sat down around the pot as soon as they had finished eating supper. Talking about the day, filling in the elders on how ‘the boy’ was doing, and getting slowly drunker. Sucking up powerful mouthfuls of home-brew from the pot through long, bamboo straws.

  The boy had watched them for a while, no longer jealous, as he would have been before. Once it was all over, he would have earned the right to sit down and join them.

  ‘Fine, but not yet you haven’t,’ Rose had said when he’d mentioned it to her.

  It had been a hard day and the boy was utterly exhausted. He reckoned they had danced twenty miles or more, visited a dozen villages, and he had sung his heart and his throat out every step of the way. He was proud of his song, had been since he’d written it months before. Even Rose had been forced to concede that it was pretty good. He’d practiced it every day, knowing there was prestige and status attached to the best song, the best performance. He’d given that performance a hundred t
imes in the last week and now his voice was as ragged as the soles of his feet.

  It had been a successful day too. Uncle Philip had not announced the final tally, but it had certainly been a decent haul. Relatives close and distant in each homestead had come forward dutifully with gifts: earthenware dishes piled high with cash; chickens or a goat from cousins; cattle from those of real importance. Philip had made a careful note of who’d given what, in the book that was carried with them as they criss-crossed the district, each village ready to welcome them, each able to hear them coming from a mile or more away.

  Everyone had been more than generous. By sundown the following day, the boy would be a rich man.

  ‘Are you scared?’ Rose asked.

  He winced as she dropped his foot to the floor. ‘No,’ he said.

  The boy wasn’t sure why he lied. Being frightened was fine, it was showing the fear that was unacceptable, that would cost you. He remembered the things that had scared him the most that day, scared him far more than what was to come the following afternoon. He had been sitting with the elders in the village where his father had been born. Squatting in the shade, stuffed full of roasted goat and green bananas, with barely the energy to nod as each piece of advice was given, each simple lesson handed out.

  ‘You will not fear death.’

  ‘You will defend your village against thieves.’

  Then he’d been handed the baby.

  ‘There are times when your wife will be sick, and you must look after yourself and your children.’

  ‘You will learn to cook.’

  ‘You will learn to keep a fire burning all day.’

  They roared as the baby began to piss on his lap, told him it was good luck. They were still laughing as the boy danced his way out of the village. All he could think about, as he began his song again, was how being unafraid of death and of thieves sounded easy compared with taking care of children.

  He thought about telling Rose this, but instead told her about what had happened in the first village they’d visited that day. Something funny and shocking. A distant cousin of his father’s had been discovered hiding in the fields on the outskirts of the village. Trying to dodge the handover of a gift was a serious matter and not only had the offering been taken from him by force, but he had brought shame upon himself and the rest of his family.