Disturbia Read online

  Disturbia is a work of fiction. Names, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  2017 Hydra Ebook Edition

  Copyright © 1997 by Christopher Fowler

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Hydra, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  HYDRA is a registered trademark and the HYDRA colophon is a trademark of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Originally published in the United Kingdom in a print edition by Warner Books, London, in 1997 and in a digital edition by Transworld Digital, a division of Penguin Random House UK, London, in 2016.

  Ebook ISBN 9780399180446

  Cover art: Martin Butterworth

  randomhousebooks.com

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  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Introduction

  Part One

  Prologue

  Chapter 1: The Brigands

  Chapter 2: The Assignment

  Chapter 3: The Elite

  Chapter 4: The Meeting

  Chapter 5: Friends

  Chapter 6: Q & A

  Chapter 7: The Barrier

  Chapter 8: Research

  Chapter 9: Playing Games

  Chapter 10: Background Information

  Chapter 11: Breaking the Bond

  Chapter 12: The Academic

  Chapter 13: Weighing In

  Chapter 14: Background Information

  Chapter 15: Ceremony

  Chapter 16: Civilised Men

  Chapter 17: Approval

  Chapter 18: The Gesture

  Part Two

  Chapter 19: The Challenge

  Chapter 20 First Clue

  Chapter 21: West End Farce

  Chapter 22: Mr Pink

  Chapter 23: To the Tropics

  Chapter 24: Blood Island

  Chapter 25: Chasing Ghosts

  Chapter 26: Trick Question

  Chapter 27: Walking into Trouble

  Chapter 28: The Reaches

  Chapter 29: Steel and Stars

  Chapter 30: Inside the Hive

  Chapter 31: The Escort

  Chapter 32: The Source of Barbarism

  Chapter 33: Stitches, Sequins and Sex

  Chapter 34: Clue, Cat and Tortoise

  Chapter 35: Persuading George

  Chapter 36: The Fail-Safe

  Chapter 37: No Witnesses

  Chapter 38: Nonconformists

  Chapter 39: Captive Love

  Chapter 40: Old Bones

  Chapter 41: The Elf King

  Chapter 42: Aqua Mortis

  Chapter 43: Night and Day

  Chapter 44: The Trickster

  Chapter 45: Monkey Business

  Chapter 46: Spine

  Chapter 47: Departures

  Chapter 48: The Final Paradox

  Part Three

  Chapter 49: The Never-Ending Game

  Chapter 50: The New Brigands

  Epilogue

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  By Christopher Fowler

  About the Author

  Introduction

  A working-class journalist is challenged by an upper-class adversary (and the young woman whose love they share) to solve a series of hourly puzzles and survive the night in storm-swept London.

  I had been working at an insane rate for years, running a company, writing novels and film scripts, and I was exhausted. I wrote a novel, Darkest Day, that suffered a lot of editorial interference and bombed. I needed to write something that was fun again. I’d been collecting trivia about London for years, and now I saw a way of incorporating it all into one novel, a race-against-time thriller. By now, one particular theme had emerged—doppelgängers. I found myself creating opposing pairs of characters (something I still do). Vincent and Sebastian are opposites with a common bond, a love of London. So when a wager is proposed between them, at first it feels like a bit of fun. But as the stakes are raised it becomes obvious that Sebastian is going to win at any cost. The tasks he sets are arcane puzzles that send Vincent from one side of the city to the other. If you did it now, Vincent would be googling the answers and be there ahead of time.

  I came up with the idea for this after going on an extraordinarily elaborate overnight treasure hunt organized by a guy named Adam Wide, who ran such things for a living. The idea of the hunt was that you were an investigative journalist and had to uncover an international scandal by dawn from clues that had been hidden all over the city. The search involved station lockers, passwords, actors hidden in public buildings, clues that I had no idea how he had arranged (one was hidden in the music playing in a public loo), and a gigantic illuminated crossword as a tie-breaker. By morning, the contestants had to write and print a newspaper breaking the story we’d uncovered. There were extra points if you got yourself photographed while entrapped in a scandal on the way, preferably nude. In some ways the real event was even crazier than the book that came from it.

  I had great fun writing this. Most of it was fast and easy, until my editor insisted that I perform the tasks myself in the correct order, to time the events of the novel accurately. Looking back, I think they were just having a laugh.

  It gave me a chance to put lots of weird-but-true London lore and larger-than-life characters into one book (I still love the dog and the one about the telephones). Some time later I developed a screenplay based on the novel for a production company and ramped the whole thing up even further, adding more twists. I always hoped that someone would be brave/mad enough to film it, because so many sequences are visual. It wasn’t to be—too expensive, perhaps—and the script languishes in a cupboard somewhere in my flat.

  —Christopher Fowler, 2016

  Part One

  ‘Si monumentum requiris, circumspice.’

  —Wren’s inscription for St Paul’s

  (‘If you seek a monument, look around.’)

  Prologue

  ‘All That Mighty Heart Is Lying Still.’

  —Taken from the Foreword of City of Night and Day by Vincent Reynolds

  No living person has seen London. Its meadows and pastures are buried beneath layers of concrete, brick and bone, its topography and history crushed by the sheer weight of events. Within an ever-changing circumference is concentrated such a tumultuous deluge of life that the palaces of the Bosporus seem dull in comparison.

  London is a city of myth. Its buildings hold and hide legends. Its rivers are lost underground. Its backstreets vanish into fable. Its characters are blurred between fact and fiction. Truths have been twisted by fantasy. Tourists are rendered blind, stepping around beggars to photograph the past, and sit in parks reading of a city that only springs to life in the mind, for in reality only the faintest outline traces now remain.

  London is a cruel city. Beneath the rosy veils of lore and imagery its architecture is at best grand and callous, at worst patched, shabby and vulgar. It gives no guidance to the lost, no comfort to the lonely, no help to the abandoned. It has no truck with sentiment, and no interest in its own mythology. Its buildings, like its people, are often defined by the negative shapes they leave on the retina. They lack both the florid invention of the French and the bland utility of the American. London is muddling through and unavoidable, like a garrulous drunk making uncalled-for conversation. Whereas its form once sprang from a collective energy of purpose, it is now defined by the manufacture of money. If its parks were not protected, they too would now be built upon, and out to the very edge of the street, in order to maximise office s
pace.

  Its residents are divided: secretive and arrogant, briskly condescending, or confused and gentle, slightly disappointed. For some it is still a sanctuary of civilisation, to others a living Satanophony. There are no glitzy show tunes written about this city, only a handful of rumpty-tumpty music hall dirges.

  Once, though, it was a living, breathing thing, its buildings homogenously palladian and baroque, its roads spacious, its parks tranquil. This is the London of collective memory: warm solid buildings of dirty white stone, dingy soot-streaked stations with a curiously sharp metallic smell, children trudging through wet green parklands, low sunlight in narrow streets, and people, people everywhere. A city traversed by railway cuttings and canals, and at its heart the curious silence of a broad grey river, glistening like dulled steel.

  The war, the developer, the councilman, the car, each has taken a turn in London’s destruction. It is a city scoured by perpetual motion. All that is left now are pieces of brilliant brittle shell, the remnants of a centuries-long celebration of life, fractured glimpses and glances of what was, and what might once have been.

  And yet…

  There are places that still catch the city’s fleeting spirit. Little to the west, and not much in the centre, where only visitors stroll on a Sunday in the Aldwych. But there’s Greenwich Park at early evening, the river mist settling below the statue of General Wolfe. The silver glow of St James’s Park after dark, gothic turrets beyond the silhouettes of planes and chestnuts, above lakeside beds of tulips and wallflowers. Charing Cross Road beneath early morning drizzle. Bloomsbury in snow. The dolphin-entwined lamps of the Embankment, when a Hesperidian sun ignites the Thames and the lights flick on like strings of iridescent pearls. St Paul’s at daybreak, stark and unforgiving, less barren than Trafalgar Square but just as immutable. Sicilian Avenue, ornately silent on a hot, dead afternoon. The arches of Regent Street like stone sunrises, sweeping across side roads. These and a thousand other points of brightness remain, skin-prickling intersections on a vast spiritual grid.

  And there are its people: resilient, private, wilful, defiantly odd. There’s little can be changed in them. Their ability to trust is the city’s greatest strength—and its most devastating curse.

  London is a city only halfway in light. Not all of its walls are bounded in brick and stone. Its mysteries are diminished but not gone. Its keys are well hidden because the key-holders are invisible to the public. A few last selfish truths still remain here, cushioned and sheltered by power and class and money. They are protected by nothing more or less than the will of the landowners to survive for one more century. Nothing you can do will ever bring them out into the light, for the enemy is too elusive. He shape-shifts among the buildings, daring you to find him, knowing your task is quite impossible.

  ‘Dear God! The very houses seem asleep, And all that mighty heart is lying still!’ wrote William Wordsworth at Westminster Bridge early one morning.

  Perhaps one day, some brave Prometheus will carry the light into the city, and bring the sleeping giant fully back to life. Then, reader, beware.

  Chapter 1

  The Brigands

  Apart from one niggling annoyance, Sebastian Wells felt at peace with the world. He had just ignited a particularly fine cigar of Cuban extraction, and had drunk the decent portion of a magnum of Bollinger, albeit from a plastic cup. He was leaving one pleasurable venue, a box at the Royal Festival Hall where he had been attending a charity recital of Offenbach arias, and was heading for another, the Palm Court at the Waldorf Hotel. The violet dusk had settled into a late-summer night that was warm and starless. Ahead of him, confident couples fanned across the walkways of the South Bank and awkwardly climbed the stairs to Waterloo Bridge to collect their cars. Others strolled in evening dress beside the river, transforming the barren concrete embankment into a set for a champagne commercial. There was an air of gentle joviality. Sebastian felt unusually stately and benevolent, willing to be swayed in his argument, although perhaps not ready to concede it.

  ‘The point, my dear Caton-James, is that the man was successful before he was twenty years of age.’ He flicked the ash from his cigar and blew on the end until it was glowing.

  ‘Not wealthy, though,’ said Caton-James, searching the crowd.

  ‘What do you expect? He had five children, and he lived extravagantly. His music was throwaway, full of topical parody, and yet here we are one hundred and twenty years later still listening to it.’ Sebastian located the source of his annoyance and pointed his cigar to the figure emerging from one of the Hall’s entrance doors. ‘I think the gentleman we’re looking for is there, at the back. He’s alone.’

  ‘Opera was invented for a closed society,’ said St John Warner. He had the misfortune of speaking in a high, strangled voice that irritated everyone in earshot. ‘It was never meant to be understood by the proles, but Offenbach made it accessible to all. I thought you’d be against that sort of thing, Sebastian.’

  ‘Not at all,’ Sebastian replied magnanimously. ‘It doesn’t hurt to give your workers some little tunes to hum. Besides, I defy anyone to resist La Périchole’s “Letter Song”.’ He pointed in the direction of the entrance doors again. ‘Look, will somebody stop this chap before he simply wanders off?’

  Caton-James eased his way through the last of the departing audience and slipped a friendly arm behind the startled man’s back.

  ‘I wonder if we might have a word with you.’ He attempted a pleasant smile, revealing a rictus of grey pegs that could make a baby cry.

  His hostage, a smart, dark-complexioned man of twenty-two or so, checked the firm fist at his waist with an outraged ‘I’m sorry?’ and shorthanded such a look of violated privacy that he failed to see the others closing about him.

  ‘Not that the working classes could comprehend such music now,’ said Sebastian testily as he joined them. ‘They make a sort of mooing noise in their public houses when Oasis comes on, wave their cans of Hooch and busk along with a few of the words to “Wonderwall”, but ask them to remember the chorus of “Soyez pitoyables” from Les Brigands and see where it gets you.’

  Moments later their victim found himself separated from the concert stragglers and forced into a litter-strewn alley at the side of the Hall. The area seemed to have been designed for the facility of brigands. In front of him were five imposing young men in Edwardian evening wear. Alarmed and confused as the shadows closed over him, he was still considering the correct response when Caton-James punched him hard in the stomach. To everyone’s surprise, the boy instantly threw up.

  ‘Oh God!’ squealed St John Warner, jumping back. ‘All over my shoes!’

  ‘Hold him still, will you?’ asked Sebastian. ‘Where’s Barwick?’

  ‘Over here.’

  ‘Keep an eye out. There’s a chap.’

  Caton-James waited for the thin string of vomit to stop spilling from the young man’s mouth onto the concrete, then punched him again, watching dispassionately as he folded over, moaning. Sebastian drew back his shoe and swung it hard at the frightened face beneath him. The shoes were new, Church’s of course, and the heels still had sharp edges, so that his first kick removed most of the skin on the boy’s nose. He was haematose now, his eyes dulling as he kicked and kicked, his mind in another place. The body beneath him fell back without resistance. Even from his position at the alley entrance, Barwick could hear the sharp cracking of bones, like explosive caps being stamped on. Sebastian lowered his leg and bent forward to study the cowering, carmine-faced figure. Blood was leaking from his ears.

  ‘Looks like you’ve fractured his skull,’ said Caton-James. ‘We’d better go.’

  ‘You’re right. We’ll lose our table if we don’t get a move on.’ The light returned to Sebastian’s eyes as a chorus from La Chanson de Fortunio forced its way into his head. Nodding along with the melody, he reached forward and pulled the young man’s cracked head up by his hair, then gently blew on the tip of his cigar. Forcing his v
ictim’s mouth open, he pushed the glowing stogie as far into his retching throat as it would go.

  ‘Christ, Sebastian.’ St John Warner grimaced, turning away.

  With the annoyance taken care of, Sebastian rubbed the toecaps of his shoes against his calves until they shone, and straightened the line of his brocaded waistcoat. The Offenbach chorus rang on in his head, unstoppable now.

  ‘I’m famished,’ he said, glancing back at the convulsing body with distaste. ‘Let’s eat.’ He led his men from the alleyway towards the bridge as Barwick attempted to lighten the mood, regaling the group with a scurrilous story about Sir Thomas Beecham. As they left the dying man behind, their dark laughter was absorbed in the gaiety of the dissipating crowds.

  Chapter 2

  The Assignment

  ‘Because I saw you trying to nick it, smartarse,’ shouted the stallholder. The name of his stall was Mondo Video, and supposedly sold cult trash/rock/horror items on VHS, but these days his stock had been decimated by the need to conform with tougher censorship restrictions. It didn’t help being sandwiched between a woman selling second-hand children’s jumpers and a falafel takeaway, either.

  ‘I wouldn’t be caught dead nicking anything from this stall,’ Vince countered, waving one of the video boxes in his hand. ‘Check out the picture quality of this stuff, it’s burglary.’