Chapter One
There’s a place further down the street where I work that I can’t figure out at all. From the outside, it looks like your standard Shoreditch warehouse converted into an ‘art space’, the Victorian brickwork decorated in multicoloured swirls and curls, but so many people come in and go out of its heavily fortified black entrance that I think there must be more to it than that.
And there seems to be some kind of door policy too. For every half-dozen people who are admitted, another four or five are turned away. From my desk at the ad agency, I watch the ebb and flow.
‘I reckon it’s a brothel,’ says Anton, breaking from Angry Birds for a moment to look out of the window with me.
‘But there are just as many women visiting as men.’
‘A bisexual brothel, then.’
‘I don’t think it’s a brothel,’ I say, but I’m not so sure he’s wrong. Although the visitors vary wildly in age, sex and appearance, rather a lot of them seem to be dressed to impress. I’ve seen a woman in full rubber body stocking and spike heels go in there with a man in a Savile Row suit. Another time, a man was actually carrying a bullwhip. One gorgeous young guy crawled along the pavement from the corner with a collar and leash attached to his neck. The woman ‘walking’ him looked like a retired librarian. It’s odd and fascinating. My money’s on a private sex club, but it seems to open all hours rather than late at night, and most of the people who enter look no different from the average collection of Joes on my morning commute.
Anton’s attention reverts to his smartphone. ‘Get in,’ he says. ‘Just got a text from Riley – she’s got free tickets to a secret DJ Mentallist gig at the Fish Bowl. You up for it?’
‘Ohhh.’ I half-rise from my seat and then plonk myself back down, glumness personified. ‘Can’t. Really got to finish this campaign. Looks like I’m going to be pulling a late one. Sorry.’
Anton shrugs. ‘No biggie, blood.’
He likes to try and sound like a mockney version of someone out of The Wire, but Anton is actually the privately educated son of a brigadier.
I wave at his retreating figure and gaze down at my chaotic notepad. If I don’t come up with a slogan for this bastard air freshener by the end of the evening, I’m sunk. Maybe ‘This will freshen your bastard air’. It’s better than the crap I’m coming up with at the moment, at least. ‘Give your nose a break’. Ugh.
I hunker down and try to clear my mind, not an easy task when your mental clutter could fill a mental landfill site.
Some time around eight, I happen to look up from the catchphrase nightmare and notice something different about the Building of Enigma.
I hurry over to the window and squint through the blinds. Running along the bottom of the wall, barely above pavement level, are a series of narrow barred windows, slim rectangles with their long sides parallel to the ground. I’ve often tried to peer into them in passing but found them blacked out and impenetrable.
Tonight, one of them glows with light.
Abandoning the bastard air freshener, I grab my bag and head for the lifts, my feet hardly touching the ground.
Outside, the darkened street is deserted – or so I think. Before I can cross to the object of my curiosity, a hand touches my shoulder and I swing around, irritated and slightly nervous. This isn’t the safest area of town, the classic price you pay for being edgy and hip.
‘Scuse me, you have a light?’
The voice is foreign, the speaker dressed in a way that places him somewhere between art student and gypsy, all leather bracelets and ripped jeans. The thing that really captures my attention, though, is his amazing moustache. You don’t see facial hair like that except in yellowed photographs of Victorian military men. I’m so struck by it that I forget to answer for a moment, until he makes a flourish with his hand, drawing my eye to his unlit cigarette.
‘No?’ he says.
‘Um, no, sorry,’ I say, wanting him to go away so I can spy in peace. I feel awkward going over to the building and blatantly rubbernecking in front of a stranger.
‘OK,’ he says. ‘You know where is a bar?’
‘God, there are hundreds round here. Just walk in any direction.’
I turn to cross the street, tense with the idea that somebody might put the blackout blind back down at any moment. Sod this random tourist. I’m going to get my answer to the mystery that has plagued me since I joined Cre8iv back in the spring.
‘Why you are unfriendly to me?’
Oh God, just go away! He is following me across the street, his voice plaintive, his belts jangling. How many does a man need anyway?