Now for something new...

Or, a re-read of something old

I wrote The Lion and The Unicorn between 2017 and 2021. Then, the world and Britain in particular, seemed a hopeless place. Republishing the book in print and on kindle at the end of 2025, it seems not much has changed. Tech overlords rule the country, everyone seems a bit more intolerant, and things are generally a bit dystopian. The perfect time, then, for a bit of crime fiction. Here’s a bit of spiel about the book, followed by the first chapter. If you like it, you can check out the entire thing at the link above.

London, 2054. After a devastating global pandemic and a bloody revolution, Britain’s new government imposes peace by stringently dictating the nation’s cultural intake. In the quest to create better citizens, everything from the television we watch to the clothes we wear is strictly policed.

As part of the unit tasked with upholding these so-called ‘Bad Taste Laws’, H. and his partner, Bagby, have their work cut out. When former reality TV star Caleb Jennings is found murdered, some suspect it could be a simple vigilante slaying. But, as H. digs deeper into the killing, Bagby’s association with old revolutionary figureheads is called into question.

With the help of Caleb’s estranged sister, the museum curator Kate Faron, H. must navigate a Britain in which paranoia and suspicion of the unknown are rife, all the while dealing with the mysterious tech behemoth Vangelis, new revolutionary murmurings, and the legacy of Kate’s biologist parents.

Compelled by what he uncovers, H. begins to question his loyalty to the state at a time when national stability couldn’t be more precarious.

‘An inventive, vivid and assured debut’ Alison Moore, author of The Retreat

‘A brilliantly inventive spin on the police procedural which shines an uneasy spotlight onto an all too imaginable near-future. Five stars’ Lucie McKnight Hardy, author of Water Shall Refuse Them

‘A gruelling tale of dodgy cops, invasive tech and dictatorship sold as freedom. This Britain feels just over the horizon if not already forming in the threads of Westminster WhatsApp groups, or the fine print of legalese that regular people don’t get to see. The Lion and the Unicorn is gritty, violent and meticulously realised; a vision of British dystopia that feels far too close for comfort.’ Harry Gallon, author of Small Rivers

1

The Unicorn

It used to be that we called murders ‘Bag Jobs’ after the black morticians’ bags the recently deceased were taken away in once we’d taken our pictures, and our hair samples, and set out our small flags denoting anything of interest around the body. Like a shell casing. Or a bone fragment.

For the most part, a Bag Job is easy to spot from the off, arriving, as they often are, drenched in the aftermath of violence. It was clear from the beginning that, lying face down in a trashed flat with his hair matted and syrupy, a hole in the back of his head large enough to fit my fist in, Caleb Jennings was a Bag Job.

‘Vigilante Hit,’ a kid in uniform said, pointing to where the body lay sprawled on its front by the window, one arm reaching as though crawling towards an escape, even in death.

‘VH. Any money. Case closed,’ the kid said, looking pretty smug.

‘Don’t count on it yet,’ I told him, making a sign with my thumb that he should go and re-join his partner on the landing outside.

‘Maybe the kid’s on to something,’ Mercer said, peering down at the body while the crime scene geeks moved around in their white space suits, snapping this and collecting that. Somewhere in her fifties, DSU Judith Mercer – my superior – looked like she could do with a healthy spell at The Farm. To put it politely, she looked absolutely flattened.

The crime scene geeks pushed past. The flat was small; a standard high-rise unit with a kitchen off the lounge and a bedroom and bathroom off a corridor that led out onto the landing.

‘Looks like our boy’s a star,’ Mercer said, pointing to the television with a gloved hand.

The victim had one of the old, eighty-inch 8K TV units mounted on the wall. On the screen was a video of one of the pre-Reformation talent shows playing on a loop. Judging by the glitches on the image it had been much watched in the fifteen years since such material was deemed illegal. Thankfully, the sound was muted.

The boy singing on stage – 5’8”, late teens, brown ponytail – bore an uncanny resemblance to the man in the framed photographs beside the television. It didn’t take a genius to work out that once we turned the deceased over onto his back we might be looking at the same star, only a decade and a half older, and no longer shining as brightly.

‘This, too,’ Mercer said, handing me a glossy sheet of A5 paper. ‘A whole stack of them in the other room.’

I took the photograph and saw the same man staring back from his professional headshot. His hair was short but tousled and his lips were set in a grim pout presumably meant to portray mystery, and possibly danger. The cheekbones were sharp and would have been startling were it not for the eyes – each one a different colour – that seemed to follow you about the room like the Mona Lisa. He wasn’t alive in the photo, either. Something in the corner of the eyes, the edge of the smile, seemed about to give way at any moment. It was a look I was seeing more and more those days.

Across the picture he’d written his name in a flowing hand.

‘Caleb Jennings,’ I read out loud. The name rang the very slightest of bells. Before the Reformation, televised singing contests had been considered the height of entertainment. After the Reformation, Britain was supposed to have been ‘refocused’ into an enlightened and socially conscious nation with lofty ideals of cultural and moral perfection. Of course, Britain was supposed to have been like that all along, it turned

out we just needed a revolution to remind ourselves of the fact.

In order to ensure the need for another revolution never arose, the post-Reformation government had put a premium on high-brow culture. Such material, the official line went, would improve our minds, and make us the best citizens we could be. Remove meaningless distractions, make highbrow, thought-provoking art the only art available, and we would all become more engaged and intelligent citizens, talking our problems through instead of hiding our heads in the sand until the country’s problems blew up in our faces, as they had fifteen years earlier. Do this, and we might just avoid another revolution. So far it seemed to have worked.

In line with this thinking, low-brow ‘entertainments’ like reality TV, along with particular books, films, artworks, certain styles of clothing, alcohol, cigarettes, other unhealthy habits, and anything else that might sow dissent and division, were banned. In other words, for the past decade and a half, Low Culture had been deemed Bad Taste. And Bad Taste was illegal.

As I examined his professional headshot, a brief recollection came back to me. Caleb Jennings had had his fifteen minutes of fame as a child star just before the curtain came down; there had been the TV appearance, then a single hit song before he disappeared back into obscurity, his chosen career soon to be outlawed before it had even really begun.

It certainly fit the bill; I’d been called to the flat because of a noise complaint, nothing to do with a dead body. Over the last few weeks neighbours had reported a man busking around the flats, belting out old pop songs popularised by the pre-Reformation TV talent shows. It was a serious allegation, and in violation of Section A4000204, the so-called ‘Bad Taste’ law. Which just so happened to be my unit’s purview.

Unfortunately, uniform hadn’t been able to catch anyone in the act. Then, tonight, a call came through complaining of the same tunes coming from this flat. The old woman who had made the call directed me along the corridor. I arrived to find the door open, the body on the floor, and suddenly the situation evolved from an investigation into Bad Taste infringements to a murder.

I put Caleb’s photograph down and examined the coffee table. An ashtray held two cigarette butts. One burned down to the filter, one half-smoked but stubbed out, as though he had got up to get a drink, or answer the door, in the middle of it. The best part of a bottle of Vinosynth had been polished off, too. The cork was still twisted onto a corkscrew beside a half-full glass. A bag of Health Chips had been scattered over the table, along with a few cheap silver rings, a pack of guitar strings and a guitar pick. It was a mess, but it looked of his own making, rather than collateral damage from the ransacking that had occurred. The entire living space had taken a thrashing. Chairs had been overturned. Ornaments knocked off shelves. Scuff marks on the floor. On first inspection, it didn’t look like the place had been turned over, only that the struggle had been animated.

‘Cat piss,’ Mercer said, tapping the bottle of Vinosynth with her pen. ‘He should have gone for a ‘48.’ She turned to the body, tapping her pen against her teeth. ‘Look like a VH to you?’

I held up Caleb’s photograph. ‘He’s reliving his glory days, trying to get a singing career off the ground again, someone finds out, decides to do their civic duty, shows up pretending to be a fan, he lets them in, a struggle ensues, bad move, he ends up dead, killer flees the scene?’ I said.

‘Could be,’ Mercer shrugged. ‘Either that or he killed himself and tried to make it look like a frame job. Or, you know, a bit of police work might reveal a third option…’

‘Just might,’ I said, crouching by the body.

There’s always a smell, like burned bits of bolognese that have stuck to the pan, around gunshot victims. And this boy was burning, all right. Judging by the spray against the far wall, he’d twisted around after he’d been shot, on his way to the ground. Death would have been instantaneous. Any notion that the hand stretched towards the window was searching for help – or a weapon – was simply romantic. The death was clear-cut. What concerned us was what came before. The pink, grazed flesh of his knuckles and the bruising on the part of his cheek that was visible told us that what had preceded death had not been pretty

‘Excuse me,’ a crime geek said, crouching beside me as he sprayed a fine misted powder over the body. It was a new form of cadaver varnish they were using, designed to keep everything fresh until they got the body to the morgue. There, the fun could start without any evidence deteriorating or becoming contaminated en route. It smelled like pine needles and childhood sick days.

I stood up and got out of the way. I let myself into the bathroom. It was small, and neither clean nor dirty, with coffee table art books piled beside the toilet, a scented candle, and a two-in-one shower and bath with a polka dot shower curtain pulled neatly back. A collection of different coloured shampoo and soap bottles stood in a corner beneath the shower head, and a damp bath mat lay on the floor. The mirror on the front of the medicine cabinet had been polished clean. Standing in front of it, I saw a framed photograph on the wall behind me. I only had to turn and lean slightly to bring my face up close to it. It was a framed snapshot of the victim on stage. Expensively done, but old and sun-damaged.

The cabinet itself would be where anything of interest was to be found. Pulling the edge of my coat over my fingers, I popped it open, expecting a crime scene geek to run in at any moment, chastising me and brandishing a spare pair of blue plastic gloves. When none came, I took out my pen and started rummaging around, moving the bottles about so I could read the labels. All the usual suspects were there: Wellness Pills,

multivitamins, anti-pollutants, omega 3s, magnesium, zinc, B-vitamins for hair, calcium caps, melatonin pills, omega 1250s, moisturiser, charcoal tablets, three loose condoms, a packet of teeth whitening acids, a tube of Beroccas, and not much else. I closed the cupboard and headed through to the bedroom.

This too was small, with a single bed pushed up against the wall under the window. The curtain was pulled back, revealing the lights of the opposite tower block. There was a cheap, tasselled green rug on the floor, a flimsy-looking desk with a lamp, a small, ceramic Alsatian, and some books (the usuals here, too: Dostoyevsky, Bulgakov, Vonnegut, Shakespeare –none of which looked like they’d been opened recently). The cupboard was open and hung with t-shirts, a few jackets and the odd pair of trousers. A few pairs of socks were on the floor, pushed under the bed beside a sweater, and an old plate. The posters on the wall fit the bill as well. There was a David Shrigley print, an Edwina Sandys of a couple in the bath and beside it, Georgia O’Keeffe’s Abstraction Blue. Next to that was an A1 print of Bowie’s last album cover. You could purchase all of these from the shop at the Tate Modern, and I wouldn’t have been surprised to find any of them in any bedroom in the country.

I didn’t buy it.

I listened to the geeks moving about in the corridor then crossed to the Bowie poster. It was pristine and unwrinkled, except for one frayed corner. I took hold of the corner and pulled. The whole thing came down, folding in on itself with a noise like tearing paper.

‘What’s going on?’ one of the geeks said, sticking his head around the door.

I shrugged. ‘It just came down.’

The geek muttered something and stormed out. I let Bowie lie on the floor. In the space where he had been was a smaller poster, depicting one of the old boy bands. Four members, leaning forward on stools as they sang into microphones, their gelled hair sticking up like radio antenna.

I whistled. The poster and what it represented was certainly Bad Taste. The crime scene boys would photograph it, bag it up, and when the case was stamped ‘closed’, it would go off to the kilns north of Islington to be incinerated. It was evidence of a crime, but whether it played into his murder was still to be uncovered.

I walked back through to the lounge. Mercer was chewing on her pen, clearly itching to get outside for a vape.

‘Contraband,’ I said, indicating the bedroom.

‘A flat like this, I’m sure we’ll find more than our share,’ she said. ‘In the meantime, uniform are out canvassing the tower block. These walls are thin. Someone heard what went on here.’

Outside the window the streetlights hummed against the night. I scratched my cheek, trying to stifle the yawn that was coming.

‘You and Bagby go and check his Video Disk file against the banned list, see what you can dig up.’

I nodded. The body was still lying there. It hadn’t moved.

‘Just where is Bagby?’ Mercer asked, enquiring after my wayward partner.

I moved towards the door. ‘He comes and goes.’

Just then the smart-arse uniform kid came back in, a look of excitement on his face.

‘Have you cracked it?’ I asked.

‘Ma’am, there’s been an incident,’ he said, ignoring me.

‘Another one?’ Mercer sighed.

‘We’re getting reports of gunfire at the Diamond Club, in Soho. A police officer was involved, Detective Chief Inspector Bagby.’

I can’t remember if I grabbed the kid by the collar, but I do remember Mercer shouting at me for something.

‘Bagby, is he all right?’

The kid dropped his act. ‘The report said he’s fine, sir. Just a bit shook up and erm…’ his eyes darted to Mercer, ‘very inebriated.’

‘Go get him,’ Mercer said. ‘For god’s sake, we can do without Bagby causing us more trouble, especially tonight.’

There was not much I could say, so I headed towards the door. Something made me pick up the dead man’s photograph and fold it into my pocket. There was no need to take a final glance at the body; that image would be coming with me, in one form or another.

Mercer called after me as I stepped outside. I’d almost gotten away with it, but nothing escaped her. Even after fifteen years.

‘Don’t think I’ve forgotten,’ she shouted. ‘Happy birthday. Now go rein in your partner.’

Outside, London was all bright lights and drizzle. I’d almost forgotten myself.

ENDS