by David Mark
So he killed her.
Watched her run from the house in her bare feet and wedding gown. The red stain, spreading from her midriff, somehow a portent of what he would do.
He followed her.
Stood in the alleyway, the knife in one hand, his exposed dick in the other.
Remembered past glories.
Other times.
Other snotty slags.
Saw her coming back. Her tears glistening in the shadowy yellow light. Her face cold and raw from the wind.
And he stepped out.
Gave her a wink.
Then bared his teeth.
Enjoyed the moment of recognition. Her understanding of what he intended.
Then he showed her the blade.
Let her scream.
Then took what he wanted. Scared himself with the ferocity with which he attacked her.
He hadn’t realised until then just how much he wanted this one. Just how angry he was with her for being so fucking pretty.
Slag.
Slag.
Slag.
Then she was dead. And he was taking great, exhausted breaths. Bathed in blood which was growing cold from the gale.
And somebody was coming. A hulking lad that Tony would later dub The Chocolate Boy.
So he ran.
Rode his luck.
Got away with it.
Tony ducks into the street and heads for the car. It’s mid-afternoon and the story’s changing by the minute. More and more national reporters are arriving on his patch, and he’s in two minds about going and joining the pack outside Owen’s flat, where forensics investigators are picking over the mutilated bodies of two unnamed men. There might be something juicy for him to pick up, but if the TV crews catch him on camera, he fears there’s always a chance some old lag will recognise him as the flasher from E-wing, and burst the bubble, like last time. When he had to get the fuck out of Birmingham and head north, for another fresh start. It’s one of Tony’s constant regrets that his journalistic star will never shine on a national scale, because his face has just a little too much history in it.
He climbs inside the car and feels a vibration in his pocket. Smiles with smug contentment as he realises it’s the Bat-phone, and somebody’s about to tell him something excusive and delicious.
He looks at the screen, and his leg starts to jiggle with shock and excitement as he takes in the number.
Fucking hell…
“Well, well, well,” says Tony, as he opens the phone. “The man of the hour.”
62
I can’t hear his voice at first, over the rushing of blood. It’s like driving too fast with the window down. I force myself to sound right. To keep it together. I chew the end of my cigarette. Taste blood and tar.
“What are the headlines?” I ask.
Tony gives a snort of laughter. “This is something of a surprise, Owen,” he says. “I mean, I appreciate the call, but I figured you’d have pressing engagements. Like fucking off.”
“I’ve always got time for you, Tone. Least I could do, after all the loyalty you’ve shown me.” I say it sarcastically, keeping the anger out of my voice. I can’t give too much away.
“Now, now,” he says, jokily, and I hear his soft exhalation as he lights a Hamlet. “You know the job. What was I going to do? Sit on it? I didn’t enjoy it, if it makes you feel any better.”
Now it’s my turn to laugh. “Yes you did. You loved it, mate. I can picture you, tumescent with fricking glee.”
He gives a giggle, and we’re suddenly two old friends again. “Maybe a bit,” he concedes. “Still, it’s the job, isn’t it? Worse to come tomorrow too. Last call I took from Roper and some lass has come forward saying you and her have been meeting up regular as clockwork at that same spot in the Country Park. One of Roper’s tame informants, no doubt, but she’ll stick to the story if it gets her in his good graces. He’s got it sewn up, mate, unless you’ve any bright ideas. After what happened at court, he’ll need a result.”
“At court?” I ask, unable to help it. “Cadbury?”
“The Scottish detective – looks like an advert for Quaker Oats and always seems to be about to burst into tears. Went back on his statement, didn’t he? Said he had grave misgivings about Cadbury’s guilt. If he survives the night he’s definitely worth having a dig-around. I’d heard there was a copper married to some Pikey princess but it sounded too outlandish. I reckon we need to bring it all into the light, eh?”
I shake my head, unable to find the right words. Then: “Leave him be, Tone. He’s doing his damnedest. Can you imagine what it took to do the right thing?”
Tony laughs, full and throaty. “Of course I can’t,” he says. Then: “Where are you?”
“Million dollar question,” I say, drily. “Apparently, a few people are quite keen to have a chat with me. It seems they’re under the impression I’ve killed half of Hull.”
“Dunno where they got that idea,” he says. “Maybe the bodies all over the city?”
“Aye, maybe.”
“So what’s the plan?” he asks, genuinely fascinated to know what I’m going to do next.
I turn my head and the picture before me slows down and comes apart. Suddenly my vision is full of purples and reds. Claws. Tails. Talons. Faces. Each one uglier than the last, intertwining, conjoining, twisting, building, growing: a writhing throne on which she sits, golden and serene.
“I’m coming in,” I say, quietly. “There’s nowhere to run. Nowhere to go.”
“Roper will be pleased,” he enthuses.
“Last thing I fucking want,” I growl. “That’s what I need you for. He can’t get the credit if he’s fuck all to do with the collar. And he can’t have me fall down the stairs if you document the bruises that are on me before I go in. You can orchestrate the lot. Have the whole pack there, if you like. There to see me, getting out of your car. I’ll give you chapter and verse.”
“Fuck.”
“Fuck indeed.” Then, to seal it: “Despite everything, you’re the only one I can trust not to sell me out.”
There’s a pause, heavy with excitement and desire. I can hear Tony's brain whirring. Working in headlines. Opening paragraphs. Images of celebrity. The solidification of his legend. And then the obstacles. The pitfalls of being seen. Of stepping out from behind the byline and into the glare of the media with the country’s most wanted murderer on his arm.
Greed wins.
“Where do you want to meet?”
63
McAvoy chews on a cardomon seed, and holds a handkerchief, containing a crushed spring of lemon thyme, to his nose. Breathes deep, his eyes closed. Roisin gave him one to settle his stomach, the other to mask the stench of rotting meat that seems to be again spilling up from his throat and into his mouth.
The smell of Ella Butterworth’s body.
Fetid and decomposing.
Headless, but still somehow accusatory in its stare.
He sits at the kitchen table and listens as his wife fusses over their child in the playroom upstairs. It is a happy sound. Roisin’s songs. Fin’s laughter. Footsteps, unusually heavy and thudding for such a small frame, thudding on the hardwood floors of the blue-painted room.
Here, in the house they are renting until they save for a future. Three-bedroomed, thin-walled, and characterless. An interchangeable landmark in an ocean of bland housing. Utterly unremarkable.
He stares at the phone, tasting the bitter seed, breathing in the herbs, concentrating.
In.
Out.
Soft.
Slow.
The nervousness bubbling in his stomach.
The gun on the table.
You’ve done it, he tells himself. No going back now.
He makes a fist and hears the thyme rustle through the cotton. The smell grows stronger, and the retch of decay seems to recede.
Perhaps it isn’t the herbs, he thinks. Perhaps it’s having somebody to give them to you. To stroke your
hand. To tell you to do what you must. That she believes in you. That you’re a good man.
He tries to stop shaking: the adrenaline, still rich in his body.
He’s made the call.
Said what he must.
And they’ve said they’ll come. Hear what he to say.
Help him.
He crosses to the window. There’s little view, save the houses across the street and the fly-curtains of rain. No children playing. No cars swishing by. Just homes, like a bleak Lowry, and a sky the colour of his father’s hair.
HIS TELEPHONE RINGS, and he composes himself. Wonders if it’s them. Ringing back. Confirming details of their appointment. Checking he hasn’t lost his nerve.
He answers it to a hysterical female voice.
Shouting, against the sound of a storm.
He can pick out only a smattering of words, as she snotters and cries.
“He’s going to kill him!”
And then, as he asks her to say it again ….
“Tony H. He killed Ella Butterworth. And Owen knows!”
64
The Humber Bridge Country Park.
Back where it all began.
Owen Lee Swainson, leaning against a silvery tree.
Watching…
The gale pulls at the tails of the fluttering garrotte, yanking it tight around the trunk of the half-dead sycamore. It is a noose of blue and white police tape, and it seems ravenous as it chews through the rotten bark and into the living flesh of the tree.
I force myself to look away. It makes no difference. I can still visualize the tightening knot; the bubbles of oozing sap.
Breathless, fingers making fists, I snatch a glance at my watch, wiping rain from its face and my own. Jerk my head skywards. Damp leaves and rotten branches form a ragged canopy above this patch of woodland where the ground is too rocky for the trees to grow. Beyond, the sky is all ripped tissue and hard slate.
I look down, the smell of blood inside my face.
Amid the mulch of timber and twigs, there is evidence that this place has seen violence. Polythene evidence bags. The page of a notebook, littered with crossings-out. The prints of size-ten shoes, forming fish-shaped hollows in the mud. They took pictures. Maybe one of the men and women in white suits asked why they couldn’t find anything. More likely they didn’t care.
EVEN NOW, even at the last, I don’t know what I intend. I don’t know what I want to happen. I don’t know how far I’m willing to go. I’ve done terrible things but I still don’t know if I’m a bad man. I just know I’m not a good one, and that there are people so very much worse.
Through the trees comes a charcoal figure: skinny and small, as if made of twists of tarred, knotted rope. He’s hunched up inside a dirty, camel-coloured raincoat and the thin cigar at his lips is unlit. He sucks on it anyway, turning the stub into a mulch of tobacco, brown paper and spit.
“Fucking hell, Owen,” shouts Tony, as his feet slurp at the path. “This is bloody horrible. Where you planning for the summer? Self-catering in Helmand?”
I look at him as if seeing him for the first time.
Tony has never been attractive. He’s a rat in a raincoat; all bad skin and yellow teeth. His whole being seems to have taken on the hue of a chain-smoker’s fingers. Here, now, I finally see the truth of him. Tony is more than ugly. He has a feral quality to him. His movements are those of a half-mad animal, a thing raised on violence and nourished on scraps of rotten meat.
And I’m thinking: Do it now! Grab him. Smash your fist into his nasty little face. Make it make sense…
I smile. Wave.
Tony comes closer, seemingly a little unsure whether to stick out his hand. He settles on a smile and a gesture at the Heavens.
“Lovely day for it,” he says.
“You alone?” I ask, quietly.
“Who the Hell else would be out on a day like today?”
“All quiet again, eh? You’d never know it had happened, would you? Never know there were two bodies laid out over there a day ago.”
He shrugs, sucking spit and raindrops through his teeth. “The world keeps turning, lad. There’ll be flowers, soon enough. Your sister will probably bring a wreath.”
I shake my head. “She won’t. Dead. OD’d.”
He looks genuinely sad to hear it. “Bad week you’re having, innit?” he says, trying to lighten the mood. “Got a trick up your sleeve to put things right?”
I nod and feel the rain run down my face.
I force myself to meet his eyes. Stare into him. Through him. Through Tony H. Through the man who killed her. Ella. Who killed them all. For a moment it feels that if I just stare hard enough, I’ll see it playing out in the little man’s eyes. See his confession. His fantasies. His memories of what he did.
I shiver. Feel myself coming apart inside my skin.
“We gonna get under a tree or something?” Tony asks. “Got a few questions for you. Weird place to meet. I’d have chosen somewhere with fewer memories.”
“I’ll bet,” I say, and I can barely hear the words.
“You’re not looking well,” Tony adds. “You okay?”
Then I begin. I say the thing that I need to say – to make the accusation so at least he knows what he has done to deserve all that is about to happen.
“You killed Ella Butterworth,” I say, in a spray of mist. Then, more forcefully: “I know, Tone. I know what you’ve been doing.”
“What?”
“How many more?”
“What are you talking about?”
“Your old number. It was in her phone. Messages about watching her. Liking what she was wearing. You killed her. How many more?”
Tony’s face, so practised in deception, twists into a mask of confusion. He looks baffled. Hurt.
The words come spilling out now. I can’t stop myself. Don’t even try to.
“Was it because she wouldn’t go near you? She looked at you and saw a dirty ugly bastard and decided not to let you near her? You were freelancing in every city where they died. You couldn’t resist it. I’ve seen the aliases you used for the bylines. I’ve seen the addresses where the cheques were sent. It was you, you fuck. She was beautiful, Tony. But you couldn’t just look, could you. You had to have her. And when she said no you started hating her, like so many others. You stalked her. You sent her anonymous messages from a phone that only a few people know you own. And you hunted her down. You never thought I’d put the pieces together. But I know. That copper – the big one, McAvoy - he showed me her mobile phone history. He doesn’t believe Cadbury killed her any more than I do. I recognised the number, you prick!”
I’m grinding my teeth, now. Pressing my nails into my palms so deeply that I score through the skin: crimson trickles over my fingers and wrist as Stigmata.
“She’d done nothing,” I spit. “Nothing!”
I glare into his eyes: inkwells filled with a darkness that doesn’t just swallow the light but seems to deny its very existence. I see myself, staring back. See the swaying trees and the warring branches and the tumbling, tumbling rain…
“Owen, wait...”
“You dirty, dirty bastard.”
“Easy now...”
“You didn't deserve to touch her. To breathe the same air. For you to be the last thing she saw...”
And then Tony unleashes the killer within. Drops of red explode like dying stars in his eyes, as blood-vessels burst with the enormity of his fury.
He thuds into my bruised ribs with a strength that he does not look as though he possesses. Tony’s body is a pestilent, fragile thing; all tissue and twigs. But there is a venom inside him that makes him strong. The breath escapes from my lungs in a rush. My hands fly up. I bite my tongue and taste old coins. The gun lands wetly on the sodden path as we thump onto the ground; my head smacking back with a dizzying thud.
Tony is astride me, forearm beneath my chin, pushing down on my wind-pipe, staring into me.
Then deeper.
> A more terrible aspect to his face than anything my mind has ever conjured.
Spitting poison, spraying rage.
“You're right you soft cunt! I didn't deserve to touch her. Didn't deserve to touch any of them. Not like you. Not like a handsome bastard who doesn't know what he's got. Not worth fucking trying because I can already see it in their eyes. That knowledge that they're better than me. They think it's a game. Winding me up. Getting me going. Slagging around in their short skirts with their tits out, begging the world to look at them. Well, I looked. I fell for it, time and again. And then I ended it. Became something more important than a fuck. Whatever happens, the most important thing anybody will remember about these pretty girls is the way they died. And every time their deaths are spoken of, they'll be talking about me. Nobody else can ever have that. Nobody!”
Spit froths from Tony’s purplish, blubbery lips and lands among the raindrops on my face as hands tighten around his throat and squeeze the breath from my body and the thoughts from my mind. Thunder roars in my skull.
My vision dwindles to a point, like an old TV being switched off; everything spiralling down into one tiny blob of colour.
Desperately, I reach around on the forest floor, fingers scrabbling for a branch. For something solid.
Tony slams his spare hand down on my forehead.
Again.
Again.
It seems as though my own tongue is halfway down my throat, as though my eyes are going to explode. I desperately try to get an arm free but there’s nothing to hit. Tony’s all bony elbows and sharp fists, wet clothes and loose skin. It’s like fighting a long-dead corpse.