Battle Lines. Will Hill

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      11

      TIME TO GO HOME

      EIGHT YEARS EARLIER

      Johnny Supernova closed the door of his flat behind Albert Harker, then slid the chain into place and turned the deadlock.

      He had been in the company of madness before, of all kinds. He had once helped talk a pop star down from the roof of her house in St John’s Wood when she was threatening to jump with her two-year-old niece in her arms, had been one of the first into the bathroom of a party in Camden in which a teenage boy had carved most of the skin from his arms with a razor blade, babbling about the spiders that were crawling beneath his skin. He had seen paranoia fuelled by drugs and fame, violence and horror and abuse of all kinds, sadism, viciousness and, on one occasion that still chilled him to remember it, the blank, empty eyes of a psychopath as she stood beside him at a hotel bar and talked in a dead monotone about the weather.

      But he had never, in all his travels through the dark underbelly of the world, seen madness as plausible and self-contained as he had in the face and voice of Albert Harker. What the man had told him was nothing short of lunacy, the fantasies of a child or a conspiracy fanatic, but there had been absolutely nothing crazy about the man’s delivery. He had, in fact, been horribly convincing.

      A shiver ran through Johnny as he walked slowly back into his living room and looked at the tape recorder lying on his coffee table. The small black machine seemed disconcerting, almost dangerous, and, for a moment, he considered smashing it to pieces, ridding himself of it, and the story it contained, forever. But something made him hesitate. His last commission had come in almost three months earlier, and the money he had been paid for it was long spent. He doubted anyone would take Albert Harker’s clearly delusional story seriously, but he had learnt never to say never; maybe he could work it up into something about fathers and sons, about brothers and the upper-class obsession with family and tradition.

      Johnny picked up the tape recorder and ejected the tiny cassette. He placed it in one of the two slots on the recording deck that stood on a shelf beside the window, inserted a blank tape into the other, and pressed record. His friends and acquaintances were often surprised to discover that Johnny Supernova was extremely diligent where his interviews were concerned; paper notes were scanned and backed up on his laptop, and tapes were duplicated and labelled with his own code, meaningless to anyone else.

      The tapes whirred inside the high-speed deck, until a loud beep announced that the copy was complete. Johnny ejected the new tape, scrawled an apparently random combination of letters and numbers on its label, and placed it on to a shelf below the deck containing several hundred identical-looking cassettes. He put the original back into his portable recorder, then made his way to his flat’s small kitchen. He brewed a pot of tea and was carrying it back into the living room, intending to listen to the interview again, when his doorbell rang.

      Johnny frowned. He wasn’t expecting anyone, and made a point of keeping his home address a closely guarded secret. There had been too many crazy fans over the years, people who turned up on his doorstep at the end of some weird pilgrimage, wanting to party with him, or in many cases just be in his presence. In the early days, he had invited these men and women in, given them beer and wine, occasionally drugs, and let them hang out for as long as they liked. In later years, he had given them a cup of tea, let them get warm for a few minutes, then sent them on their way. Now he simply told them they had the wrong address and closed the door in their faces.

      He set his tea aside, walked down the stairs and out into the communal corridor that served the whole house. Johnny suddenly wished, not for the first time, that he had an entry-phone system; he could have checked who was outside from behind the safety of two heavy locks. But he didn’t. He reached the front door and leant his face close up against the wood.

      “Who is it?” he shouted, and felt a stab of shame as he heard the tremor in his own voice. “Who’s there?”

      “Metropolitan Police, sir,” replied a flat, metallic voice. “Open the door, please.”

      Johnny paused. It was far from the first time the police had been at his door.

      “How can I help you?” he shouted.

      “We need to talk to you regarding a matter of national security, sir,” replied the voice. “You can help by opening your door.”

       National security?

      Still Johnny hesitated; something didn’t feel quite right. He wracked his brains, trying to identify the source of his unease; when he failed to do so, he took a deep breath and opened the door.

      It was barely clear СКАЧАТЬ