The Ruins Read online

  “I wouldn’t have thought that was necessary, here,” I said to call-me-Jonjo, who was fiddling with the leads.

  He looked up and saw what I meant. “You’d be surprised”.

  I’ve often been told I don’t talk enough. And it’s true that if I make an effort to analyse a conversation and calculate my share of the words involved I’m usually on the low side, but when I’ve tried to counter that by being more loquacious the results are worse. Instead, I’ve worked on those things that I understand typify a “good listener”. I try to maintain eye contact, especially with men because it seems that women can find prolonged eye contact intimidating, and I frequently make subtle interjections to indicate that I am following and enjoying the conversation. (Though this can be problematic. In an effort to appear sincere I vary my responses, rotating through “yes”, “I see”, “uh-huh”, “of course” and subtle head-nods. The problem comes when I’m making sure that my responses seem suitably random and I find myself concentrating on a realistic sequence of replies, rather than on what the person is actually saying.)

  And here, in the police station, it was even harder. I wanted to be helpful but I knew absolutely nothing of Brandon’s recent life. Jonjo sounded downbeat about the whole case and I got the feeling that I was another in a line of disappointments for him. I suppose originally it had been a crime with everything going for it, like something from a film, but it was gradually revealing itself to be both prosaic and difficult. And my answers were only annoying him more.

  “What was your brother doing in London?” He was sitting alongside me, at right angles, probably to give the impression that this wasn’t an interrogation.

  “I have no idea, sorry, I didn’t even know he was here.” He looked hangdog.

  “Had he contacted you at all?”

  I’d searched through my emails the previous night. “No. The last time we had any contact was three years ago when he sent me an email on our birthday.” (It was actually four days after our birthday, but I doubted that was important.)

  He looked through his records.

  “He was killed just a couple of streets from your flat?”

  I nodded.

  “Do you think he was on his way to see you? Did he know the address?”

  I’d discussed this with Rae.

  “No. And yes. Or, maybe and yes. He certainly knew the flat; it was our aunt’s before it was mine so he’d been there many times. As for visiting me, I doubt it. It would have been the first time in many, many years, but I suppose it’s possible.”

  “You weren’t close?”

  “No, not at all.”

  “Do you know of anyone else in the area he might have been visiting?”

  “I’m sorry, no. I have no idea who his friends are now.”

  He laid his pen down and scratched behind his ear. He didn’t pick it up to write anything else down.

  “Enemies then? Someone who might want to do him harm?”

  “Like I say, I haven’t seen him for a while, but unless he’s had some kind of mid-life conversion I would say yes, there will be people he owes money to, women he’s cheated on, husbands of women he’s cheated with, and about a thousand other people who he just plain annoyed.”

  This perked him up. “Names?”

  “As I keep saying, I have no idea, I’ve had nothing to do with his life.”

  “What about this girlfriend, Rae?”

  “What about her?”

  “Well, he ran out by all accounts, left her holding the baby.” He turned back a page. “Well, not really a baby. But still she sounded pretty pissed off to me.”

  She hadn’t sounded pissed off to me. She’d seemed more resigned.

  “I really don’t know. Yesterday was the first time I’d even heard her name.”

  He showed me the CCTV footage of my brother’s death. “Strictly speaking, this should wait until after you’ve identified him, but seeing as you two are… y’know… I think we can safely say he’s him and you’re you, if you know what I mean. You’ll still have to go to the morgue though, sign some papers.”

  It took him a couple of goes to get the tape running. “There aren’t too many that run off VHS any more. We should really get this transferred to DVD but we haven’t had the time, sorry.” He didn’t sound particularly sorry.

  The tape showed a set of garages that ran perpendicular to an estate just around the corner from Trellick Tower. I knew them well enough. They were a shortcut through to Portobello that I’d sometimes take if it wasn’t too late in the day. After dark they were populated by dealers and I usually took the long way round. Jonjo fast-forwarded through the footage, the occasional jerky, hooded ghost crossing the screen, until he got about an hour in.

  “Right, just about here.” He slowed the tape.

  I couldn’t tell if the footage was black-and-white or if it had just been a particularly grey day. There were ten seconds of nothing and then Brandon entered the screen from the left. He was probably coming from Portobello or the tube. Even if it hadn’t clearly been him you’d have known that something was off-kilter, like one of those “what is wrong with this picture” games. He was wearing an unlikely cagoule over a suit and tie and carrying a cane which he swung with every step. He looked purposeful, a man with somewhere to go, and he didn’t glance up or around him.

  He was about halfway across the space when a car pulled in, coming from the same direction. A white SUV, very bright on the screen. Brandon looked round. He stopped and peered at the occupants. The car stopped and both doors opened simultaneously. Two men stepped out, their faces obscured.

  “Are those…” I started.

  “Donald Duck masks,” said Jonjo.

  On the screen Brandon looked unconcerned. He stood with hands on hips. Only when the driver pulled something from his jacket did he open his mouth. There was no sound on the recording so all that you saw was the driver raising his hand and Brandon falling backwards onto the ground. There were no histrionics, no writhing, no blood. One minute he was upright and the next he was a bundle on the floor and the two men were going through his pockets. From the way they tilted their faces towards each other it looked as if they were talking. They seemed supremely unconcerned. Then, as quickly as they’d arrived, the two men walked back to the car and drove off. The tape wheezed on and we sat there in silence for a while, looking at the row of garages and a dark smudge that was the last of my twin brother.

  The officer clicked it off.

  “So.”

  “So?”

  “So. The car was bought that morning in Leeds with a fake ID. One man, tall, British, shaved head. That’s all the seller remembers. It was left at the Heathrow long-stay car park a couple of hours later. There were no witnesses of course; anything that has the whiff of drugs or gangs around there goes quiet very quickly.”

  He turned the light back on.

  “You brother had his American driving license in his pocket, a notebook and a couple of grams of cocaine.”

  “A couple of grams? Is that a lot?” I asked.

  The officer looked at me quizzically, as if he was seeing me for the first time. “No, it’s not a lot.”

  “What’s with the masks?”

  “The Donald Duck thing? We wondered that, obviously. It doesn’t mean anything to you?”

  I shook my head, trying to imagine a situation in which Donald Duck had a life-or-death significance. I couldn’t.

  “It’s just his reaction to the men,” said the officer. “Two men jump out of a car in duck masks and start walking towards you. I mean, what would you do?”

  I played it in my mind. “I’d run like hell.”

  “Me too. But Brandon acts unsurprised by it.” That was true. The hands on hips, the tilt of his head.

  “You think he knew them?” I asked.

  “Do you?” He rubbed his face. All at once he looked exhausted. “So we’ve been hampered by not having the faintest clue who this Brandon Fitzroy was, or what he was
doing there. It’s taken us nearly two weeks to find anyone with a connection to him.”

  I was a disappointment to him, I could understand that. To go from no clues to a partner, kid and identical twin in a couple of days must have felt like a breakthrough. He looked frustrated, stuck.

  “OK, OK.” He rearranged his papers. “If you think of anything, call me.”

  I knew this bit from the TV too, so I waited for his card. He stood to go.

  “Don’t you have a card for me?” I asked.

  He made a gesture, palms out. “I’ve run out, just ask for me at the switchboard.”

  If the police station was disappointing compared to TV then the morgue was a major let-down. It was tiny, overlit to the point of migraine, and smelt like a portaloo. It was kept cold so both I and the technician had our coats on, as if we wouldn’t be staying long. He was unaccountably jolly. “I normally ask for some ID at this point,” he said, pulling back the sheet from my brother’s face, “but I don’t think I need to this time.”

  One frustrating thing about being an identical twin is that it’s just not as strange as people assume. I could see the interest in the technician’s eyes. His thought processes were so clear that I could have written subtitles. Is it strange seeing your own face staring up at you from a slab in a morgue? Did you feel some psychic jolt the moment he died? All that rubbish.

  I looked down at Brandon’s face. I couldn’t tell if it was the chemicals in his bloodstream or just that life had caught up with him, but he looked old. There were spider veins cracking across his cheeks and dark half-moons under his eyes. My first thought, before anything else, was that he was beginning to look like our father. It used to annoy me that Brandon’s lifestyle didn’t show on his face. At those rare family occasions where he made an appearance it would be clear he hadn’t slept. He’d be crumpled and nicotine-stained with squally moods and scattergun conversations, but he still looked youthful, at least as youthful as me. I hoped that if his lifestyle didn’t have to be paid for physically then at least it might be karmically (and however he spun it in his sporadic emails from LA it was clear that he’d been driven there as much as choosing to go, which gave me a warm, but guilty glow).

  But here under bluish light he looked every one of his forty-five years. The bags under his eyes looked like permanent features, not the occasional visitors mine were, and his skin was sallow and blotchy. Maybe this is how age comes to you when you’ve lived the life he had: all at once like the bill at the end of a meal. Or maybe I was just being harsh — no one is going to look their best in such circumstances.

  My second thought, I’m ashamed to say, was that he had a really good haircut. We both suffer from thick, pure white hair that stands up at odd angles and constantly threatens to run wild. Somehow he’d managed to tease this mess into a rigid quiff. Even here, after a couple of days zipped inside a bag, it stood as proud as a ship’s prow. I thought I should leave a second or two before I spoke, to give the impression that this process was in any way moving; such things are expected. I forced my mind elsewhere, to a problem with the flow of one of Umbrage’s rivers, and gave it a full ten seconds’ thought.

  “Yes, that’s him.”

  “Do you want a couple of minutes alone?” The technician’s eyes shone.

  “No, no that’s fine.”

  “OK, do you know where we’re to release the body to?”

  “What?”

  “You’re arranging the funeral?”

  “I… I didn’t expect to. I think his girlfriend…” But of course she was in America, and broke, and pissed off with Brandon. “I’ll need to talk to her first.”

  He eyed me dubiously. “OK, but as soon as possible please, we’re backing up here.”

  There was some confusion over his possessions. They’d assumed that Rae was his next of kin, but my arrival, coupled with my twinhood, had apparently trumped that. Three policemen argued behind the counter over which of us had the better claim, more for something to do than out of any real sense of moral dilemma I thought, and eventually they handed over three small see-through bags with his things in. I signed for them.

  “One wallet containing three credit cards in the name of Brandon Fitzroy, one expired. American driving license, same name. One twenty-dollar bill and £85 and change.”

  “One British passport, also in the name Brandon Fitzroy, recently renewed.”

  “Three plectrums… or is it plectra?” one of the policemen asked. He got no reply.

  “One notebook, full.”

  “One key.”

  The policeman looked at me as he handed this over. “Any idea what this might be a key to? We still don’t know where he was staying.” The key was heavy, with some kind of red woven tassel attached. The fabric was etched with a ribbon with letters picked out in gold: ATSOTM.

  “No idea,” I said. It was stuffy and over-bright in the office and I was getting a headache. Two hours is about my limit with strangers without having some kind of cataclysmic withdrawal, and the thought of the sanctuary of my flat was tugging at me. I left with promises to phone them if “I thought of anything”, which sounded needlessly vague.

  Outside on the pavement I felt that relief that even the most law-abiding of us has after contact with the forces of law. It was a blustery day with a constant threat of rain and people hurried by with their heads down. I found an empty doorway from which to text Rae. It was midday — 5am in California — so I didn’t want to risk calling.

  “Do you know what ATSOTM might mean? It’s on a key that was in Brandon’s pocket. Might be to do with where he was staying.”

  Her reply was immediate. “No, but I can search. Skype in half an hour?”

  I took the bus. I was feeling oddly excited about talking to her again. I couldn’t remember the last time someone needed something from me, and the haul of Brandon’s possessions had the pleasing mystery of a video game before you’d worked out the rules. I laid the items on a newspaper on my lap in the back of the bus and studied each in turn.

  The key was heavy and dark, but something about its neatness made me think it was modern. There were three plectrums (or plectra, who knew?). An Oyster card. Credit cards in the name of Mr B. Fitzroy but with signatures as abstract as Pollocks. £85 in notes and some change. And a much-used notebook: one of those Moleskine ones that snapped shut with an elastic strap.

  I started with the notebook right there on the bus. If you read it the right way up it was a jumble. Fragments of what I assumed were lyrics jostled for space with notes and reminders and the occasional deft sketch. On one page you might find CALL SAUL/KASPARs GUY/LP PRESSER transmuting into much-crossed-out poetry and rapid drawings of limbs draped over beds or bird wings. Some pages were nearly empty, some infuriatingly opaque.

  Finding the opaque winning out over the comprehensible, I started to skim through and found that, at the back, the writing changed. At some point he’d turned the book over and upside down and started again, writing what looked like a diary. On these pages his writing was small and neat and it looked unedited compared to the lyric stuff — the text ran for five or six pages without a correction or a hesitation. I started to read. It was typically Brandon: flighty, overblown and unconcerned with anyone else in his life. I felt guilty reading it and snapped the book shut.

  Back at home I risked the lift. The flat was technically my aunt’s, a council home for life due to her disability, but she’d preferred the countryside and I’d been looking after the place for years. When she died I’d packed and waited for the notice of eviction, but it never came, so I kept myself to myself, avoiding the neighbours and coming and going when no one else was around.

  As soon as I got inside I could feel that something was wrong with Umbrage. The sounds that it gave off all had their particular rhythms, and the combination of motor whirrs, ticking clockwork and water pumps gave the city a sound as unique as a fingerprint. I listened carefully until I could pick out what had changed. A snag in the cable-ca
r mechanism that led up through the kitchen hatch meant that something was clicking impotently in the engine room, and I thought it might take a little while to fix. It preyed on my mind as I opened up the laptop.

  I’d used Skype a couple of times before to explain something about Umbrage to modelmaker colleagues, but still it was a shock to see my face on screen. I looked pale and darkly lined, like a photofit. Rae, in contrast, shone from the screen. I tried hard not to stare. She looked healthier than Brandon’s other girlfriends, with a crown of staticky blonde hair that flared white through her laptop camera, and big, loopy features. There was something of the farm girl to her too: that band of pale freckles and a hot flush to her cheeks. Her voice didn’t sound city-ish either.

  “God, thank you so much for doing that. Was it awful? How did he look?” Her eyes darted around the screen and I realised she was checking for differences between the face she saw and Brandon’s.

  I started to say something and then stopped. How had he looked? “It was… it was OK. His face hadn’t been touched in the… incident, so he just looked like he was sleeping. He can’t stay like that for long, apparently, so we’ll need to discuss the funeral at some point.”

  She waved that away. “That can wait. So, ATSOTM. At the Sign of the Magpie. It’s some fancy hotel-stroke-private club out in the East End. Too cool to be on Tripadvisor or anything but there’s a Japanese design blog that Bran was subscribed to. He’s used it for places to stay before so I had a look through and I think I found it.”

  Another window opened on the laptop and I clicked on the link. It was a gallery of low-lit photographs of a place that looked like a Victorian library.