Your Deepest Fear

by David Jackson

  Grace stares down at the bundle of tissues clutched in her fist. ‘Who else knows about this? About the clowns coming back?’

  ‘Nobody.’

  ‘Nobody? Not even Megan?’

  ‘Not even Megan. You’re the only one, Grace.’

  ‘This means a lot to you, doesn’t it?’

  ‘No. It means everything to me. To be honest, I’m already on the verge of losing my job over it.’

  Grace shakes her head. ‘Please don’t say that. You’re the best detective on the force.’

  Cody smiles, and he sees how Grace blushes at her own remark.

  He says, ‘That’s kind of you, but I’m not sure it’s anywhere near the truth. I seem to be making a lot of fundamental errors lately.’

  ‘You need help. You can’t do this alone. Maybe . . . maybe I could help you?’

  Cody takes hold of Grace’s hand. ‘I’ve asked too much of you already. I can’t put you at risk again. I couldn’t live with myself if anything bad happened to you.’

  And now Grace is burning up furiously. But Cody means every word of it, and he needs her to know that.

  ‘Compared with what you go through in your job, I suppose tonight was nothing, really. A man in a mask – so what?’

  ‘Don’t put yourself down. He came into your house. He had a knife. That’s enough to scare the bejesus out of anyone. Actually, I think you’re coping surprisingly well.’

  For the first time, Grace finds a smile. ‘Okay,’ she says.

  ‘Okay what?’

  ‘Okay, I won’t tell anyone about tonight.’

  ‘Grace, I—’

  ‘Don’t say any more. Just put the kettle on.’

  63

  Sara isn’t convinced.

  Something about this place doesn’t feel right. Why would Metro be told to come here?

  Of course, one option is that he wasn’t. He could have been lying through his teeth. In which case Sara will be paying him a return visit at the gym, and she won’t be happy. In fact, she will be downright livid. Perhaps livid enough to start blasting holes in those lockers.

  On the other hand, how could this be a trap? Metro didn’t know he was about to be hijacked at the gym, so how could he have set something up at this address? And now that he has been stuffed into a locker without his phone, how could he warn anyone of her imminent arrival?

  The remaining alternative is that he was telling the truth when he said he was instructed to come here tonight to discover what precious item Matthew had in his possession. If that’s so, any trap that might be in place here would be for Metro, not Sara. That could give her an advantage.

  To be on the safe side, she still has Ozone’s gun, with a lot of rounds left in the magazine, and she’s fully prepared to use it if she has to.

  But still this choice of venue seems curious.

  She gets out of the car. Pats the gun that is in the waistband beneath her hoody.

  She goes for a short walk first. Up and down the street, checking out the geography, working out escape routes. She doesn’t expect a firefight, but who knows?

  Finally, she makes her move.

  She ascends the few short steps leading up to the front door. Studies the intercom system. The address Metro gave her was for the top floor, but there is no name against the bell-push for that floor.

  What seems really odd to her is that the other floors are occupied by an orthodontal and dental practice.

  And Rodney Street seems a very strange part of town to arrange a meeting with a murderer.

  *

  She thumbs the button. Waits.

  She expects a voice, a brief interrogation at least. Instead, the intercom buzzes back at her and the door clicks open.

  She pushes the door. It swings smoothly aside. Beyond, the lobby is black.

  Sara steps inside. She finds a light switch and puts it on before closing the door behind her. Then she takes out her gun and heads towards the staircase.

  She moves silently and cautiously up the stairs, constantly checking ahead for surprises. At the top of the stairs she steps through a doorway onto a landing. She finds another light switch and puts it on. There are doors here that lead to dental surgeries, but also one that looks as though it will take her up to the top storey. She creeps towards it, the gun stretched out ahead of her. She gets to the door. Reaches for the handle.

  ‘Hello, Sara.’

  She whirls. Sees the figure that has mystically materialised behind her. A man, yes, but also something more than a man. He is a presence, and all that he represents is depicted in his mask of pure evil.

  ‘Congratulations, Sara,’ he says, his voice eerily metallic. ‘You win.’

  She wants to shoot, but she also wants answers. His words have thrown her.

  I win? What do I win?

  But she has no time to voice her question, because something hits her hard in the side of the head, and she goes down and the gun flies from her grasp, and she feels hands on her, strong hands that hold her down while something sharp pierces her neck.

  And it seems to her, before her world turns black, that she has not won. In fact she has lost everything.

  64

  It seems to Cody that he has lost everything.

  He is about to be declared unfit for duty and kicked out of his job, and his chances of laying his hands on Waldo have diminished to near zero.

  What’s left? Where do I go from here?

  He expects the worst for his mental state. If his career really is coming to an end, and all hope of catching Waldo is gone, then he foresees a spiral of depression and instability. He will have nothing left to live for.

  He locks up his car. This time of night, Rodney Street is quiet, peaceful. The various practices are empty, their windows black with lifelessness.

  He wonders what people would say – how the media would react – if the news ever broke that a serving police officer was keeping another man shackled in his basement. What a story that would be.

  And that’s another problem, of course. What to do about Keenan. Torture him? Kill him? Release him? None of these choices is palatable to Cody, but isn’t that what Waldo intended all along? This is what the discussion of the trolley problem was all about: a choice between impossible alternatives.

  Cody opens his front door, as he has done thousands of times. He would normally head straight upstairs, to his cosy apartment with its books and his guitar and his solitude. The rest of the building he usually sees as merely a pair of shoulders supporting his fortress of thought and reflection.

  On this occasion he continues straight to the rear of the house, his fingers caressing the keys he has kept with him ever since this saga began.

  He unlocks the cellar door, snaps on the light, descends the wooden staircase. He moves to the door on his right – the makeshift prison with its solitary chained and hungry inhabitant, like something out of the dark ages.

  Did I really do this? Cody thinks. Did I really go along with this whole charade?

  He takes out the next key. Unlocks the door. Turns on the light switch.

  The differences scream out at Cody.

  Keenan is not sitting on the floor, hunched and miserable. Not this time.

  Keenan is standing in the middle of the room. He stands tall and unmoving, facing Cody.

  That’s if it is Keenan.

  Because the biggest difference of all right now is that Keenan is wearing his clown mask again.

  What stares back at Cody is a face of pus and blood and rotting flesh containing a needle-toothed smile that chills Cody’s blood.

  And what it takes Cody too long to realise is that when he first encountered this apparition, he removed the mask and threw it to the far side of the room.

  Out of Keenan’s reach!

  And what it also takes Cody’s exhausted mind far too long to comprehend is the implication of this. Which is that Keenan – or Clueless, or whoever else this is now – is no longer wearing the chain around his ank
le.

  All of this crowds into Cody’s brain at once, defying him to make sense of it, challenging him to react accordingly.

  But it is too late.

  The clowns are upon him.

  They come up from behind, sneaking out from the other rooms of the basement. They attack him in force, wrestling him to the ground, putting a sack of rough cloth over his head, tying his hands behind his back. He cries out, and they respond with clownish giggles. They strike him – fierce punches and kicks to his abdomen, his ribs, his kidneys. It feels as though his internal organs might burst with the pummelling.

  Someone sits on his back. The sack covering his face is lifted, just enough to let him see, and his head is yanked back by the hair. An iPad is pushed in front of his face. It shows him a video feed of Sara Prior, and he cannot for the life of him understand what she has to do with any of this. And yet there she is: she appears unconscious, and a gun is being held to her temple. And when the iPad is taken away, Cody gets a view into the room again. He sees Keenan on his knees. He is holding a large white envelope bearing the words, ‘HERE’S WALDO!’ Standing behind Keenan is another of the clowns. He has a knife to Keenan’s throat.

  Cody knows then that he is being presented with a choice. It’s the trolley problem again, but now for real human stakes.

  The hood is pushed back in place and Cody is dragged to his feet. They begin tossing him from clown to clown, each one punching or kicking him again before sending him on his way to the next. He spins blindly, taking his punishment, his ears bombarded by the eerie high-pitched squeals of glee.

  ‘What’s your decision, Cody?’

  It’s Waldo’s synthesised voice. Cody has no way of knowing whether he’s here in the basement or elsewhere.

  Another punch into his side. Cody groans.

  ‘Everything about me is in that envelope, Cody. You can have it. But the trolley is on its way. It’s heading towards Sara Prior. You’re at the lever. Pull it and you save her, but lose me. What do you do?’

  A kick to his knee. A sharp jab into his stomach. He drops to the floor and is pulled back up.

  ‘She’s going to die if you don’t do something. You can save her life. The lever, Cody. Pull it or not?’

  More blows. He wants to throw up inside the sacking.

  ‘It’s almost too late, Cody. She will die in the next few seconds. Decision time! Save her or catch me. What’s it to be?’

  Another fist lands on his left side.

  ‘Last chance, Cody. Pull the lever or—?’

  ‘YES!’

  Everything stops. The noise stops. The hurting stops.

  ‘Yes!’ Cody repeats. ‘I’m pulling the lever.’

  More silence for several seconds. And then a sudden flurry of movement. Heavy footsteps going up the wooden staircase. The slam of a door.

  Cody waits. Listens to his own panic-filled breathing and the pounding in his ears. Wonders if the game is still on, if the coup de grace is about to be administered. Waits for Waldo’s final pronouncements.

  But nothing happens.

  ‘Hello?’ he says. ‘Are you there?’ He raises his voice. ‘Keenan? Are you still here?’

  He gets no answers.

  He bends forwards and shakes his head from side to side in an attempt to remove the suffocating hood. When it doesn’t come off, he sinks to the floor and tries to push his head far enough forward to grip the cloth between his knees, but finds he can’t quite manage that either.

  Realising he will have to free his hands first, Cody spends several minutes navigating his way to the staircase. He gets there after twice bouncing off walls. His plan is to make his way to the dental practice kitchen on the first floor, find a knife, and cut through the ropes binding his hands.

  Climbing rickety stairs blind and without the ability to put out one’s hands is both tricky and worrying. Cody blows out air in relief when he gets to the top. Putting his back to the door, he takes hold of the handle and turns it.

  The door has been locked. And, to make matters worse, Cody can’t get to the key in his pocket.

  He traipses downstairs again, which is even scarier than coming up. When he is certain his feet are on solid concrete again, he slides down the nearest wall and begins working on the cord around his wrists.

  It takes him almost an hour of straining and pulling and chafing to get free. When he finally yanks off the hood, he sees that his wrists are red raw.

  What he also sees is that the door to the room that contained Keenan is wide open, and that there is no longer any sign of its inhabitant.

  Cody gets up, goes into the room. No clowns, no masks, no chains. Even the crisp packets, water bottle and bucket have disappeared. There isn’t a single minuscule clue that anyone has been in this room recently.

  Except . . .

  It’s small, but red stands out clearly against white. His arms clutched across his burning ribcage, Cody hauls himself to the spot on the wall.

  It’s a single fingerprint. In blood. Cody doesn’t know who it belongs to – Keenan himself? Waldo? – but he knows it will match the one found at Matthew Prior’s place.

  Everything is connected. Waldo’s game is bigger than anything Cody ever imagined, though there is much he still does not understand.

  He digs out his mobile phone, then finds a number. He dials it, making sure first of all to withhold his caller ID.

  ‘Hello? Who is this? Who is this?’

  He ends the call. Sara Prior is safe. Upset, by the sounds of it, but safe.

  Waldo stuck to the rules. A real-life trolley problem. He put Cody in front of a lever that allowed him to save Sara Prior. But Cody knows full well that in pulling that lever, he diverted death into the path of James Keenan.

  He’s not sure how he feels about that.

  65

  When the insistent ringing of his phone eventually grabs the attention of his consciousness, it seems to Cody that he has been in a zombie-like existence for a period of time that could have been minutes or hours. All that went before that no longer feels real.

  His caller puts paid to that.

  ‘Hello, Cody. You managed to accomplish a Harry Houdini act, then?’

  ‘Fuck you,’ Cody says.

  ‘That’s no way to treat a friend. Because I think we can regard each other as friends now, don’t you? We’ve been through so much together lately.’

  ‘Fuck you.’

  ‘If your needle is stuck in that groove, Cody, I’ll hang up now, but I thought you might like a word or two of explanation.’

  ‘Explain what? Explain why you killed James Keenan? I assume he is dead by now.’

  ‘Oh, yes. Very much so. You chose to pull the lever.’

  ‘Don’t try to put his death on me. Are you at least going to own up to the murder of Matthew Prior?’

  ‘Ah, so you figured that out, then?’

  ‘I figured it out. Prior was a clown too, wasn’t he?’

  Cody hears a slight intake of breath. ‘Very good, Cody. I’m impressed.’

  ‘It’s the only thing that makes sense. You didn’t pick Sara Prior at random to show me on that iPad. She was somehow a key player in this all along. And then there was the bloody fingerprint at Prior’s house and my basement. You want to explain that?’

  ‘All in good time. But yes, you’re right. Both men were there at our little get-together when you lost your toes and your friend lost a bit more than that.’

  The confirmation of Cody’s suspicion still comes as a shock. They were there, he thinks. Both of them. Prior and Keenan. They formed half the team that practically destroyed me.

  ‘Why?’ he asks. ‘Why would they do that? One worked for the tax office and the other was a financial advisor. How did you get them involved in killing people?’

  ‘You see, there are things you want explained. But that’s the fun of it. Where would be the challenge in recruiting psychopathic killers to do my bidding? Far more interesting to push Mr or Mrs Average in
to doing things they would never normally consider.’

  ‘And how did you find your two Joe Averages?’

  ‘The way tech-savvy people like me find most things these days: I went internet shopping. I went looking for people who were letting it be known that their lives were dull, and who craved a little more excitement. They wanted someone who could take them by the hand and lead them into situations they never dreamed they could cope with. I offered them the opportunity to go into dangerous and unknown territory, and yet remain perfectly safe.’

  ‘There’s a big leap from that to torturing and killing cops. Why not just take them bungee jumping?’

  ‘That wasn’t quite the experience they craved. Matthew and James were social misfits. Good at their jobs, but not brave with other people. They took their aggression out on computer games and social media, but wouldn’t say boo to a goose in real life. What they needed was to be shown how to find their courage in the midst of other people.’

  Cody considers what he was told about Matthew Prior. He certainly fitted that mould: a man afraid of others, ashamed of his inability to be more like his own wife.

  ‘Okay, but cop killing?’

  ‘It took a while to get to that stage. I was a patient teacher. We started with smaller things, like beating up a drug addict who had robbed a pensioner of her savings. You should have seen the pleasure on their faces after they had landed their first blows. They were truly liberated. By the time it came to you and your colleague, they were completely gung-ho. Admittedly, I had to bend the truth a little.’

  ‘How so?’

  ‘I didn’t tell them you were working undercover. I told them you were bent cops, making money through drugs and gun-running. They loved the thought of putting a stop to that.’

  ‘If it was all going so well, why kill them?’

  ‘We hit a snag. A crisis of conscience. When Prior and Keenan discovered the truth about you, they decided they were going to hand themselves in to the police. Naturally, I couldn’t allow that to happen.’