Did the door close? It doesn’t feel like there’s anyone else here. Did I just dream the door closing?
I can’t move. That intention I had, that I have, somewhere deep inside, to get to Clayton and take him out, myself at the same time, the thing I was thinking about and planning as I sat here drinking neat vodka, is an intention for a different time. A different day. A different me. This me, lying here in abject poverty of spirit, well-being and competency, isn’t doing anything to anyone.
What was I dreaming about? Did a door close in the dream? Maybe someone came in and went to another room. They’re waiting for me in the kitchen or the bedroom.
Lift my head again. Jesus. The nausea races back, a blinding, spurting, gargling tsunami of puke waiting to burst forth. I don’t want to be sick. I hate being sick. But it’s going to happen, and all I can do is lie here, pointlessly drawing out, into as many futile seconds as possible, the period before I throw up.
If only Clayton was here now. If only the sound of the door closing had been Clayton coming in, and he was standing over me, gun in his hand, ready to kill me, saving me from the fucking vomit.
And I’m off the sofa and running for the bathroom, hand clasped across my mouth.
EMERGE FROM THE BATHROOM forty-five minutes later.
I vomited. Sat on the toilet. Cleaned my teeth. Vomited again. Drank a lot of water. Showered. A long shower. Vomited the water. Drank more water. Cleaned my teeth.
Finally, into the bedroom and change my clothes, head starting to get back to normal.
Stomach is empty, I’m hungry, but I don’t feel like eating. Some more water, maybe a cup of tea. That’ll do for now.
Stand at the bedroom window, no thought for whether anyone actually came into the house when I was awoken by the door. Look out on the same view I looked out on earlier. The same street, going about its business in the evening. Slept all day. Almost nine pm.
So what does the rest of the evening and the night hold now? Likely won’t get to sleep, which means I’ll be up forever, staring at the ceiling, staring at the wall, staring into space. Maybe I can just sit on the couch and think about nothing. Let the evening and the night happen, let morning come, let one day end and another begin. Let Clayton do whatever it is he’s doing.
Is he holding Dr Brady’s daughter? Let others find out. Let others go after him. Let others establish the evidence. For now I’ve got nothing. The day, the bollocking, the anger, the drink, the sleep, the puke, it’s all left me completely empty.
Back through to the sitting room, heading for the kitchen. A cup of tea. Do the next thing in front of you, that’s all you can do. And the next thing is to make a cup of tea. The thing after that will be to drink it.
And there I stop. Standing in the sitting room. Total silence.
The door didn’t close by itself. The door didn’t close in a dream. The door that woke me up, was closed by whoever left the small item on the small dining table. It must have been there when I finally flew off the couch to run to the bathroom.
It’s almost a nice touch. Under other circumstances, I might even have appreciated it on some level, tying everything up so perfectly as it does.
It’s a box for L’Oréal Excellence Crème hair dye, number 01, lightest natural blonde. The box is empty.
Hold it in my hands, and then set it back down on the table. Don’t bother looking inside.
Walk to the window, look back down at the street. It’s a calling card, as much as the big fucking bat in the sky. It doesn’t make me angry, however. It doesn’t do anything to me. Much too empty for that.
But fuck you, Clayton, and I’m sorry Eileen, and I’m sorry Dr Brady, but before I do anything, I’m going to have that cup of tea. Might as well try to enjoy it. It’ll be my last.
47
11:27
Darkness has come. Darkness over everything. I stand at Clayton’s door. He knows I’m coming, so what does it matter if I put the door in or ring the bell? But since he’s expecting me, I presume the door will be open and it is for me to just walk in.
Try the door handle, and sure enough, it’s open. Close it behind me. Stand in the silent darkness.
Take a moment. Try to sense the place. Sense where they are. I don’t know what I’m thinking, as I haven’t really thought anything at all since I woke up. Just going through the motions, one thing to the next. Do I expect to feel them? Sense their presence? To be able to go directly to the room they’re in, using some sort of Jedi shtick?
Take another step or two, look for the light switch, turn it on. Nothing.
Jesus, Clayton. Having me walking around the house in the dark. How mundane, how utterly ordinary of you.
My phone pings, the sound shattering in the silence. Despite myself, despite my indifference, despite my determination that this is nothing out of the ordinary, just a matter of my life and death, of Clayton’s life and death, still my heart jumps at the sound.
The message could be from anyone, but I know already. Hardly need to look.
No Sender, that’s who. No Sender.
Open the message. It’s a picture. A woman’s face. A face burned into my head. A face I’ll never be able to forget, one I would never want to forget. That I never deserve to forget.
How could Clayton possibly know about her? Jesus. How could he possibly have got hold of the photograph?
There was me thinking I was dead inside, that the bastard couldn’t get to me. There was me thinking I was going through the motions. And here’s Clayton to let me know I’m wrong, completely wrong. He has total dominion. He knows things about me I would’ve thought he couldn’t possibly know. He knows where I am now. He knows what I’m going to do next. He knows how the next half hour, the next hour, the rest of our lives will play out.
All I had was my calm indifference, and he’s removed that with one impossible picture.
‘Clayton!’
Snapping into life, Sergeant? Pathetic life...
‘Clayton! Where the fuck are you?’
Shouting, but my voice sounds small. Small and empty and pointless. Come on you fuck, show your face. Get on with it, get it over with.
The phone pings again, my shoulders slump further. I can’t keep this up.
I hadn’t been fooling myself in coming over here; I genuinely thought I could do it, that I could take care of it, whatever had to be done, no different from making a cup of tea. My foolishness came in thinking he wouldn’t be waiting for me.
Open the next message.
Dear God, Sergeant, you are so slow! #unbelievable The basement, my good man, the basement!
#unbelievable. Fucking pompous arsehole.
Mental knots, leading me inextricably towards physical knots. I can still see that face, the picture from a minute ago, the face from twenty years ago. But I have to kick the picture into the long grass, throw it out the ballpark, do some sporting analogy or other to it, and just get on with this.
Having been all over the house during the previous investigation – when we felt so sure we were going to uncover an arsenal of smoking guns – I’ve been to the basement before. At the time it seemed disappointingly unremarkable. The basement is where you expect to find the room with the missing Lithuanian nanny, bound and gagged, or the equipment used to lead a life of crime.
Clayton’s basement had been nothing out of the ordinary, home to cobwebs, a folded up table tennis table, and the usual litany of stored, but not discarded, items.
He knows I’m here, he’s leading me on, something’s about to happen, so the quicker I get it over with, the better.
To the far end of the hall, where there’s a door beside the entrance to the dining room on the right, with stairs into the basement. Phone out of my pocket again. Look down at it. Stop to think. A virtual sigh.
Quick text to Taylor. It’ll take him long enough to get here, and it’ll all be over by the time he arrives. It’s all going to be over five minutes from now.
Torch turned on, h
old the phone forward to light the way, find the door, hesitate at the top of the stairs, then start heading down.
Clayton is completely in control. There’s no sneaking up on him, there’s no surprise, there’s no getting the upper hand. Not yet, at any rate. He holds every damn card in the pack, and this thing goes the way he wants it to go. So, there’s no point in walking slowly around corners, there’s no point in hesitation, there’s no point in trying to work out angles and look for signs. Whatever’s going to happen, will happen at a time of Clayton’s choosing.
I’m not here to solve anything, am I? I’m just here to get on with it, get this bloody awful business wrapped up and over with, so that others can get on with their lives and their jobs, and hope the women are all right.
Sgt Harrison and Dr Brady. That’s why I’m here, tonight, right now. For them. Nothing else would likely have got me out the house.
Into the basement, phone held up around me. The table tennis table, the skis, the old set of golf clubs, the workbench. And, against the far wall with the old cabinet pushed to the side, an opening.
I don’t even stop to think about why we didn’t find this previously. Taylor can worry about that later, if it even matters.
Into the darkness of the passageway. Maybe it would help if I thought of this whole stupid business as an episode of Scooby Doo. In the end, however, I don’t think I’ll be pulling Clayton’s mask off and revealing old Mr Watts, the janitor, beneath. I would’ve gotten away with it, if it hadn’t been for you pesky cunt.
The tunnel is clean, walls of stone. It feels safe. Plenty of head room. I wonder who built it? Who is out there who knows Clayton has a tunnel leading from beneath his house?
Did he get a couple of builders in and then get rid of them afterwards? Likely, too messy. Too much chance for something to go wrong, for people to turn up at the last place they’d been known to be working. Unless he picked them off the street.
This is what Clayton does. He makes you think he’s capable of anything. All he might be is some opportunistic fucker, yet in my head he’s the Machiavellian master. He’s every Moriarty that’s ever been portrayed, rolled into one.
I’m not sure how long I walk, because I’m not sure I’m thinking properly anymore, about anything. At some point, thirty seconds later, or ten minutes later, or some time later, a flight of stairs appears out of the darkness.
Stop for a moment, take whatever the opposite of a deep breath is – that thing where you hang you head and just think, oh for fuck’s sake, here we go, this is it – then up the stairs, turn the handle of the door at the top, and walk into the hallway of another house.
48
An ordinary hallway in an ordinary home. Not too dissimilar to the one I just left. I can tell it’s ordinary, because there’s a light on, a large lamp on a table halfway along the hall. The light on here, but no lights in the previous house. Further evidence he’s just having a laugh.
This house smells old and comfortable. I lost track of the direction in which I’d walked, so can’t think which of the surrounding houses I’m in.
A painting of Edinburgh on one wall, one of Dundee and the Tay on the other. An old portrait hangs near the front door.
I close the door behind me, but don’t move. There’s music playing in a room upstairs. Choral, religious possibly. The kind of thing you’d hear at evensong.
Jesus. Well isn’t that mundane from the innovative murdering genius? The final act is to be carried out to a slow, dramatic soundtrack, like every hack movie you ever saw. Surprised it’s not Nessun fucking Dorma.
Stand still. Is this house going to be as clean as the other, or is it possible this is where we’ll find the proof of all Clayton’s misdeeds? If that was to be the case, why don’t I just run? Get out, establish where I am, get the police round, mob-handed?
Clayton the Machiavellian smiles smugly at my thoughts. That’s exactly what he’s wanting me to do.
The phone pings again. Quick look at the message. It’s video, this time, and I don’t hesitate. Might as well take a look. And there I am, having sex. But it’s not with Dr Brady. This one is with her. Jane Kettering. The Plague of Crows. Me lying back, and her on top of me, those small breasts moving frantically in time with her body, and then me reaching up to grab one, taking the other in my mouth.
I watch it for a few seconds, then click off. If I remember correctly it wasn’t too far away from the moment she zapped me with a taser. Been a while since I relived that particular pain.
I turn and look up the stairs. That’s where the music is coming from, that’s where I’m being drawn. Inexorably onwards and upwards. The sense of overwhelming defeat is getting stronger, so that it now feels inevitable. There’s nothing I can do, nowhere else for me to go, no way out.
This guy knows my past just as much as he knows my future. The messages he’s sending are so broad in scope, so humiliating, it seems he knows everything about me. He’s there, whenever I do anything at all, to prick whatever balloon I happen to be flying at any given moment.
He owns me. He owns everything I do, and everything I say.
‘Fuck it.’
Up the stairs, quickly now, two at a time. A bend in the stairs, then up onto the first floor landing. There are five doors off, one of them ajar, and it’s from there the music is coming. Two strides, door open, and then into the room.
There is a small lamp in the corner, and the television is turned on, although the screen is currently blank. The DVD player screen, before play has been pressed.
Three people look at me. Clayton to the side, sitting in an old-fashioned, upright comfy chair. The kind of comfy chair that isn’t very comfortable. Back straight, staring at me, as though his eyes have been looking at the door for some time now, waiting for my entrance.
Then there’s a two-seat sofa, with wooden armrests, directly in front of the television. Sitting together on the sofa are Dr Brady and Sgt Harrison, side by side, bound and gagged. Blonde beside blonde.
They’re looking at me, Brady with fear, Harrison with nothing. Dead eyes. Will be annoyed for allowing herself to be taken. Will apologise when all this is over, if we’re both still around when all this is over. Just as I’ll apologise for having dragged her into this fucking awful mess.
The music plays on. Beautiful and low, foreshadowing Death. Out of place here. Would be perfect in my old church at the top of the town. The church that belongs in my thoughts to me and Mary Buttler, the church to which neither of us will ever go again.
‘Come in, Mr Bond,’ says Clayton. ‘Sit down.’ Then he giggles.
I really look at him for the first time. He’s holding a gun in his right hand, the gun resting in his lap.
‘Look, Sergeant,’ he says, ‘let us not dally. You took quite enough time getting over here. We were all getting rather impatient, weren’t we, ladies? The time for procrastination is over, if ever there was such a time. We’re here to watch a video presentation. This is your life, Detective Sergeant. It’s been so much fun investigating your past, it really has. Sit down, take a load off, and let’s begin, shall we?’
He’s smiling. I hold his gaze, but can barely stand to look at him. Glance at Harrison, who still gives me nothing.
‘Well,’ says Clayton, ‘if you’re just going to stand there.’
My life. A film of my life. I’ve already seen one of the photographs, I’ve heard the stories he told Dr Brady, I know how much digging he’s done, down into the dark, awful pits of my past.
And then the screen flashes into life, and there she is again. The same photo, the same face, the same woman looking back at me. The Bosniak. The one who died. The one who got a bullet in the head while I watched. The woman I was ordered, at gun point, to rape. On whom I lay. Who was desperate for me to fuck her, so she’d be allowed to live. Who lay there helpless. Who got a bullet in the head for my weakness, while I, terrified and impotent, couldn’t get an erection, my pathetic, helpless, useless cock, small and limp and
as terrified as the rest of me.
The film freezes on the picture of the woman.
‘Come now, Sergeant, please sit down,’ says the voice of the snake from the corner. ‘Make yourself comfortable. It’s only twenty minutes. Plenty more interesting tidbits!’
I can barely take my eyes off her, and I almost stumble past the sofa, and slump down into the chair supplied for me.
‘Excellent!’ he beams, and then, with a single clap of celebration, he restarts the film.
And there I am, up on the screen, sitting much like I am now, watching TV, but with my dick in my hands. He had a camera in my television. He was filming me, in my own sitting room, from the TV. And so now I sit here, watching myself masturbate, and immediately I run through all the other things he’s going to have filmed, the other people, and I wonder how long he’s had it there, and if there’s going to be sight of Philo, sitting at the small table, and I know there will definitely be footage of Harrison and me.
And then before I’ve even begun to fathom the depths to which he’ll have trawled into my life, the scene changes to a camera running through a forest, and it could be a forest anywhere, but I know which forest it is, I know what happened in that forest, all those years ago.
Images flick past, one bleeding horrendously into another. Given that he started with the very worst, the forthcoming horror is not that this film will come to a head – it’s not linear, images and scenes and photographs zipping back and forth – but more its overall, cumulative effect.
Me naked, drunk, talking to myself; me talking to Philo’s grave; Philo kissing me goodbye; faces from the past, from Bosnia, from old cases; ex-wives; me and Harrison, naked and coming together; photographs of women I’ve slept with, women I’ve hurt; my children; the recording of me suggesting to Taylor that I kill Clayton; a recording of a phone call between me and Andy, my disinterested son, Andy hanging up the phone.
Clayton has been watching me for over a year, ever since the Plague of Crows business ended. Cameras everywhere. Phones bugged. And he’s coupled the surveillance with raking through the past, digging up so much. And I sit here, forced to watch, wanting to look away, wanting to grab him and take the bullet or put the bullet in him, to finish this all off, but I’m fascinated and horrified, and I can’t take my eyes from it.
DS Hutton Box Set Page 102