by Paul Finch
Elsie sat down with painful slowness. The mere act of answering the front door appeared to have left her breathless. Her reddened cheeks of earlier had paled to an ashen hue.
“So who is he?” Shirley asked.
Elsie grimaced as she straightened her leg.
“Well?”
“You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”
“Why not let me be the judge of that?”
“Isn’t it obvious?” Elsie snapped. “I mean you’re a smart girl. Haven’t you worked it out?”
“Humour me.”
“You think I’d let just any man in here? Unless I knew him, unless I loved him dearly? It’s my Tommy, isn’t it?”
“Elsie, you know your Tommy’s dead.”
“No. He’s come back to me.”
“How could he have done that?”
Elsie mused on this, her long, thin face looking briefly bemused, though not – distinctly not – troubled. “He just has. When you wish for something long and hard enough, one way or another it’ll find a way. I didn’t believe it at first either, but now I know it’s true.”
“Okay. If it’s true – where is he?”
“Upstairs. He’s had his tea. He’s been working on the allotment all day, and now he’s having a snooze.”
“Can I see him?”
Elsie made an ugly guttural sound, which at first Shirley didn’t recognise as laughter.
“You’d like that, wouldn’t you? Girls like you were always after my Tommy. Always trying to take him away from me.”
Shirley moved to the hall door. “Mrs Dawkins, I’m going upstairs. Okay?”
Elsie remained seated at the table. “Do what you like, dear. When did a girl of your sort ever need permission?”
Shirley walked along the hall until she came to the foot of the stairs. Before going up, she felt into her handbag; she had her mobile with her just in case this business turned nasty – though its battery had been low earlier in the evening, which might be a problem.
Nerves tingling, she started up. She was lithe and fit, and could kick her heels off and run if she needed to; but she’d come this far and she was damned if she was stopping now. Despite this bravado, she was acutely aware of the icy blackness and intense, ear-pummelling silence waiting above. She’d often heard the phrase “a listening silence”, but hadn’t realised what it meant until now.
When she got to the top, she glanced along the landing towards the rear of the house. A sliver of light showed the back bedroom door, which had been pulled to but wasn’t actually closed. Still there was no sound.
Shirley slipped her shoes off, and proceeded in her stocking-feet. Thankfully there was no telltale creaking as she breathlessly advanced. When she reached the bedroom door, she was pretty sure that no-one on the other side could have heard her.
Very cautiously, she pushed at it.
It opened a touch. She still heard nothing from within, but could now see the armchair, which had been drawn to one side. She pushed again. The door opened a little more. She saw that the lamp on the bedside cabinet was switched on. The silence lingered.
She pushed a third time. Now the bed came into view; a shape lay beneath its quilt. Shirley involuntarily shuddered. Somebody was here after all. She wasn’t sure if she’d actually believed that beforehand, even after everything she’d seen and heard. She’d perhaps half-wished that Elsie had invented an imaginary version of her deceased son.
Hardly daring to breath, she shoved the door all the way open.
The figure beneath the quilt was perfectly still, as though fast asleep. Only the side of his head was visible on the pillow. Yet again it was dark-haired, but now – from this close – there was something shiny about it, something slick, something weirdly artificial.
A mask? Was he wearing a mask in bed?
Shirley lost control. She lurched forward, all nervousness forgotten, yanking the quilt aside – and was too stunned to speak at the sight of the grotesque shape underneath.
It was roughly the size of a man and roughly the shape of one, but only in that it had four limbs, a torso, and five fingers on each of its hands. The first actual impression Shirley had was of a monstrous, half-deformed baby lying in an odiously stained romper suit. But then she realised what she was really seeing: a dummy – just a dummy, albeit a crude and horrific one. Its body had been made from some sort of hardwearing material, canvas or sailcloth, with lines of crude sutures denoting its main joints. It had also been stuffed – stuffed so hard that it was bulging, in many places where it shouldn’t be. Most astounding was its head. This had clearly been moulded from heavy-duty plastic, and its humanoid features had once been painted to represent reality, though, with the exception of the black hair, most of the paint had now flaked away, leaving only vague hints of what once had been. Despite this, very briefly, the long, straight nose and squarish He-Man jaw created a remarkable impression. Just for a second Shirley gazed into that blank, lifeless face, and saw a resemblance to the photo in the drawer downstairs, to the photo in the file at the office – to Tommy Dawkins.
And then the illusion was dispelled.
The face was old plastic again: tacky, dotted with faded tinctures.
Shirley surveyed the rest of the object, feeling more than a little mystified. A couple of its seams had split, and what looked like dirt was trickling out. The head had been fixed to the body with thick steel staples, though these were only partly visible because a woollen scarf had been wrapped around the neck. A pair of striped pyjamas were folded on a chair at the end of the bed; the wardrobe stood open on several suits of clothes, including muddy gardening overalls.
“Oh look,” came a voice from behind. “You’ve caught him with no clothes on. But then that’s the way girls like you prefer it, isn’t it?”
Shirley spun around. She was still in a state of mild shock, and only with difficulty managed to focus on Elsie, who had now taken off her mac to reveal the flowery pinafore. Both the old woman’s hands were in its front pocket, but they were visibly knotted into fists. Her pale face was fixed in a feral scowl.
“You little tart,” she snarled. “Coming here dressed like a streetwalker. Just because you knew my Tommy was home.”
“Mrs Dawkins, you know that’s not …”
“You’re worse than the last one. At least she only flaunted herself from her bedroom window.”
“Mrs Dawkins …”
But now Elsie was taking something from her pinafore pocket. It was long and silver and shiny, and for a hair-raising moment Shirley fancied it would be Tommy Dawkins’s old cutthroat razor. It was a monumental relief to see that it was actually a key. But that relief was shattered when Elsie stepped back from the bedroom, slammed the door and turned the key in its lock.
“Mrs Dawkins, don’t be silly!” Shirley called, shaking herself from her stupor. She banged on the wood. “Mrs Dawkins, you’re not going to achieve anything by this. You’re being very, very foolish.”
“Foolish, eh?” Elsie chirped to herself, as she almost skipped down the stairs. “But who’s the bigger fool. The foolish old woman who lived for nearly a century and ended her years with everything she wanted? Or the foolish young girl, who didn’t?”
*
With a feeling of unreality, Detective Superintendent Mackeson walked up the allotment path. He ducked beneath a strip of fluorescent tape and approached the decrepit shed, the door of which had been forced open. A uniformed sergeant, with a huge, sagging belly and bushy, grey moustache, stood there with his arms folded.
Mackeson halted. One glance through the half-open door was sufficient to show him the foetal form, bundled in blood-soaked bed sheets and lying on the dirt floor – just as a similar one had done four decades earlier when he’d been a whippersnapper beat bobby.
“I thought someone was winding me up,” he said.
“If only,” the sergeant replied.
“What’s happening to the world, Bernie?”
“Gets
more crackers each year, guv. But don’t worry. Soon, me and you’ll be golfing every day.”
Mackeson sighed. “Not ’til I’ve sorted this one out.”
He turned, walking back across the road and through the house. From upstairs he could hear the lab team as they photographed the back bedroom, which, thanks to the blood spattering almost every part of it, had been identified as the main crime scene. He exited the house by its rear door and crossed the yard to the alley, where the elderly suspect was waiting in an unmarked car. A young detective constable was standing next to it, engaged in a phone call. He snapped the phone shut as his boss approached.
“Press have already got wind of it, guv,” he said. “They want answers.”
“Let ’em want.” Mackeson chewed his lip. “Any preference for a weapon yet?”
“The bedroom mirror was broken. Could’ve been a sliver of glass.”
“Jesus.”
“Or several. There were quite a few bloodied. We’ve bagged them all.”
“What about the old woman?”
The detective constable shrugged. “Claims she locked the girl in the back bedroom overnight, but insists she didn’t kill her. She admits to moving the body in the morning. Couldn’t very well deny that, could she, seeing as one of her neighbours spotted her?”
“What about the room itself?”
“Not much. Old furniture, dirty cloth, pile of soil.”
“Soil?”
“Yeah. Relatively fresh. Probably from the allotment. There’s an old mannequin’s head too.”
“A what?”
“Like a shop dummy. I’ve bagged it.”
“A mannequin’s head?”
“It’s in the crime report.”
The detective constable handed over a sheaf of handwritten papers with several glossies attached. Mackeson glanced through them, looking increasingly bemused. He focussed for several agitated seconds on an image of the mannequin’s head, before reading the accompanying notes with such attention that he might have been trying to translate a foreign language. When he’d finished, he peered at the image one more time, his left eyebrow arching dramatically (as though he couldn’t quite believe what he was seeing), before finally slapping the whole lot down on the car’s roof, suppressing a shudder, and climbing into the front passenger seat.
The suspect sat in the back, handcuffed to a policewoman. Her expression was neutral. She didn’t look dazed or groggy, just stared at nothing.
“Mrs Dawkins?” Mackeson said. “Can you hear me?”
Her eyes remained distant. He spoke to her again, asking her if she understood the seriousness of the situation.
This time Elsie replied. “I knew he was still around here somewhere. He had to be.” She chortled to herself, as though at some secret irony. “I mean they wouldn’t let him go anywhere else. What did they expect?”
When Mackeson climbed out again, he looked even less happy than before. “Does she seem a likely suspect to you?” he asked his younger colleague.
“Possibly, guv. Obviously mad as a hatter.”
“I mean physically? She’s ancient. You really think she’s got the strength to overpower a healthy young girl, and then take all night cutting her up?”
“Might have jumped her in the dark?”
Mackeson looked unconvinced, but indicated that the prisoner could now be removed. He swiped the crime report from the roof of the vehicle, as it rumbled away.
“Perhaps the real question is what happened back in ’65?” the detective constable said. “Makes you wonder, doesn’t it? Did they hang the right person?”
“No question.” Mackeson leafed through the report again. “We had the right one then. Absolutely. Wish I could be as sure this time …”
“What … why?”
“Nothing. Forget it.” Mackeson smiled without humour. “Must be going bonkers in my old age.”
He handed the crime report back, determined not to look at it again until later, when he’d had a chat with the rest of the team, and trying his damnedest not even to think about those three broken fingernails – bright pink with electric-blue zigzags – embedded in the mannequin’s plastic face.
Hag Fold
Paul Finch
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Hag Fold
On September 12th 1978, the body of a 19-year-old waitress was found wrapped in a carpet and dumped in a railway underpass near to the council playing fields on Hag Fold Avenue, north Manchester. The girl had been raped and beaten, but death had resulted from a single blow to the throat, delivered with such force that it had completely crushed her windpipe.
Every day he heard the children playing on the other side of the wall. Timmy was only very young, himself; so young that he wasn’t even allowed out of his own backyard, but at least he was able to listen – to their giggles and their squeals, to the pitter-patter of their feet as they charged up and down.
Timmy would sit for hours, picking at the moss between the flagstones, wondering who they were, wondering how many of them were over there. It sounded like a lot. To Timmy, who, apart from his mother, only ever saw the coal-man and the rent-man, this seemed incredible. The children’s house never gave him any clues. It was a mirror image of his own: semi-detached, but tall and narrow and built from sooty brick. The curtains in its windows looked slightly shabbier than the ones in Timmy’s, while its paintwork was cracked and flaking. On one occasion he approached his mother about it, asking who the children were and if he could perhaps go round and play with them.
His mother had simply stared at him, the eyes like marbles in her thin, hard face.
“You will do no such thing,” she said. “Isn’t it bad enough that we have to live in a neighbourhood like this without you getting involved with the likes of them! Christ Almighty, that’s the last thing we want!”
*
Once you’ve crossed that essential Rubicon and taken your first life, it’s easy to do it again. All that matters is the planning and logistics.
The first time I killed, it was three or four at once: Argentine soldiers. Raw recruits, I dare say; muddy, terrified, underfed, but still armed with a GPMG and blazing at us from their dug-out as we assaulted their lines at Goose Green in May 1982. May is late autumn in the South Atlantic, so it was pitch-black and driving with bitter rain. I remember pinpointing them by their tracer, which cut across the battlefront in vivid streaks.
It was pandemonium that dawn. Clouds of orange flame ballooned on the horizon; the ground was churned to quagmires; SAM missiles flocked by overhead, screaming like devils. In such a battery of sound and pyrotechnics, the Argie machine-gunners didn’t notice me ’til it was too late. I launched a grenade into the middle of them. They didn’t even notice that. It flashed and roared and minced at least two of them outright. A third staggered out, a ragged, smouldering, inhuman shape; an overhead flare showed him all blood and tatters, clutching the stump of a severed arm. I levelled my SLR and punched him full of holes. The next one came out screaming hysterically, shooting in all directions. A bad time for my clip to run dry. I dived into the mud as he came towards me. He’d totally lost it, and didn’t spot me as I tripped him and jumped onto him from behind. He was shrieking, frothing at the mouth, struggling wildly. I think he thought I was a comrade, pulling him down to protect him. Ironically, that made him fight all the harder, made him determined not to surrender. Not that I’d have accepted it. You see, combat regiments are all about killing. They pick you to serve in them because they know you will kill. They teach you to kill. They encourage you to kill. You become a fully-trained professional killer. That is your job. And until you actually do it – and enjoy it into the bargain – you aren’t part of the club.
So I killed him. Knifed him. Ten or twelve times before he finally lay still.
*
On November 28th 1979, the remains of a 26-year-old prostitute and heroin addict were discovered in a burned-out garage on NCB w
asteland in the Hag Fold district of Manchester. She had died from asphyxiation, having been garrotted with her own bra, but only after violent rape and prolonged torture with a cigarette lighter.
The first time Timmy saw them was from the top of the coal bunker, but it didn’t give him a great view. Far better was to sneak into the entry between the two houses and peep on the children through the planks in their back gate.
By this time he’d found out who they were, or rather what they were.
Orphans. Or kids who might as well be orphans. The Social Services owned that house, and all the children living there were ‘in care’. They’d either been neglected by their real parents, abused in some way or just kicked out. The first time he heard about this, Timmy felt a unique thrill of horror. His own home life, strictly regimented by the awesome figure of his mother, often left him desperately miserable, but, frequent though the strappings were, not to mention the nights without tea or TV, he could never imagine reaching the situation where his parent grew so irate with him that she’d actually show him the door.
So he watched the children through the cracks in their back gate with a new, morbid wonder. At first he’d expected to see them in rags, the way the paupers had been on that film his mother had taken him to see at the cinema, Oliver! But in this respect he was disappointed. Apparently, they dressed much the way other children did; the girls in sandals, socks and flowered dresses, the lads in short pants and t-shirts. Their very ordinariness was the thing that surprised him most. Their hair was always neatly combed and cut; they didn’t seem especially unhappy – the girls skipped cheerfully with their ropes, the boys played football or with toy soldiers.