by Haywood, RR
Tears sting the backs of my eyes and my throat feels constricted. A young girl, no more than eight or nine years old. Three men. High definition with audio. Full colour. Graphic beyond description. She cried and begged until she fell silent as her mind shut down from the horror of what they did to her.
Elizabeth was right. The evidence is beyond question, beyond anything. I couldn’t watch it all and I had to use my hand to shield the view of what they did to the girl so I could get clear sight of their faces. Lars Verhoeven, Phillipe De Smet both apparently Belgian and John Williams. Seeing him again after all this time stirred old emotions and memories and I stared so hard at the screen it seemed to flicker with static and my mind played tricks as I saw him glance up to the camera and grin wolfishly like he knew it was there. He held that gaze for several long seconds while the other two were absorbed in their torturous behaviour. Then, a split second before he turned away he mouthed something, a word, one word. It could be a trick of the light or a nonsensical muttering but it bloody looked like he muttered “Get Mike”. That was the extra thing Elizabeth said she had to show me
Only when I had all three did I race from the room to break down in the corridor with loud sobs that echoed throughout the building. Elizabeth gave me a few minutes then led me back into the armchair room where she gently gave me the instructions, the passport, the documents and the bank cards. After that I was offered a new wardrobe and a chance to wash, shave or rest.
I declined and we were on the road within an hour of watching the footage. I open the bit of paper held tight in my hand and stare at the three names, two of which mean nothing but one means everything.
John Williams. As plain a name as you can get but that name was printed alongside mine in every newspaper in the country. Mike Humber. John Williams. Mike Humber the detective. John Williams the child rapist. Those headlines ensured he’d never face a fair trial and not only did he get a pay-out from the police, he also sued several tabloids for the stories they ran, and won.
He moved to France within a week of being discharged from hospital. Paris then down to the south and after that he disappeared. Rumours were mentioned about Spain and Thailand until The Carlisle Group tracked him down to Belgium, to Bruges. An old medieval town made famous by a movie.
I know I’m being played. Manipulated and used as the trigger guy. People far higher up the food chain and with much greater intelligence have played me like a puppet, but unless they’ve got access to Hollywood film editing software then I don’t care, because that footage was factual. It was uncut, without variance of pitch, colour, hue or saturation. I’ll do what they ask not for them, not for me, but because it has to be done.
‘Make it newsworthy…’ was the last thing Elizabeth said to me.
The pilot doesn't even glance at me but operates his controls with the efficiency of the well-practised. We climb steadily higher and head south and over the channel following what I can only assume is a direct path.
To distract from the images flashing through my mind, I open the passport and stare hard at the details, reciting them back over and over. Mike Howell, aged thirty-nine years old, born London. The date of birth is quite close to mine so easy to remember. Using a fake name is a skill and the best ones are the ones closest to your own so they don’t feel unnatural when you say them. Mike Howell. The picture was taken in the offices and some clever bastard in an unseen part of the building got the documents done within minutes. My DNA will still be on record from my days in the police, so will my fingerprints. The Belgium police won’t have them but any prints they lift will be checked locally then nationally then internationally. Forensic awareness will be needed. Gloves and the prevention of losing body hairs at the scene. Maybe I should have shaved my beard off after all. Fuck it.
Mike Howell. They’ve even given me an unregistered mobile phone pre-loaded with minutes and a number to call when I’m ready for the pick-up. The rest is down to me.
‘Coming into land,’ the pilot speaks through the headset, the only words spoken during the entire flight. I don’t reply but watch as another grass strip looms up towards us and then we’re down, bouncing along as he applies the brakes before turning in a wide semi-circle to taxi back to the hangars.
‘Thanks.’ I tug the headset free and climb down from the too close confines of the tiny aircraft. A taxi is already waiting which is a mistake as taxi drivers have bloody good memories by virtue of their jobs.
‘Mister Owl?’ The cabbie leans out of his door nodding at me. I nod back, head over and get into the back. He gives me a big grin and sets off, driving slowly through the airfield and out onto a country lane before navigating onto the motorway or whatever the Belgian people call their motorways.
Another surge of grief twists me up. I screw my eyes closed and plead with my mind to take away the images I saw. Fingernails dig into my palms and my knuckles go white with the strain of making fists. I’d never forgotten what he did and I remember the accounts of the victims and the medical reports of the injuries, but seeing footage of the acts being committed is something so appalling, so abhorrent that words cannot describe it.
The cabbie is well briefed and drops me on the outskirts of the city. I alight in a residential street while he points down the road, giving me the direction to travel. When I try and pay him he waves a hand at me, shakes his head and drives off.
This morning I was unemployed and picking a fight with a lorry driver. Now I’m in Bruges, hired to kill three men and in so doing, send a signal to every other perverted fucking creep.
Funny how life goes.
Five
Elizabeth offered to arrange accommodation but I insisted I would do it myself and thereby be in a position to make in the field assessments. Which is a Gucci way of saying I would find my own hotel.
Walking is a natural relaxant. One foot after the other with your eyes constantly moving side to side, up and down. It can reset the stresses of the mind and allow the rationalising chemicals to balance out. Done after a period of high stress, trauma or grief and it’ll buy you time to think.
So I walk. I walk without conscious concern of where I am going. The general direction is towards Bruges but my route is unspecific and unplanned. I need time to calm and get my head back in the game but burning fury settles into a cold core within my gut that will only be satiated by causing those men untold pain. I want them to suffer. I want to look in their eyes and see that fear, that pain and that utter degradation of life in the same way they dished it out. I want them to know what it feels like to be at the mercy of someone stronger, someone harder and someone able to dominate them without mercy, anything less than that will not do. I’ll bathe in their fucking blood and sing a hymn to the lord almighty while I do it. I’ll cut them, hurt them, break bones and dance a fucking jig.
Think, Humber. Think clearly. Assess the facts and make an informed decision. It’s late in the day. Early summer and the weather is mild, warm even. I need a hotel, food and rest.
The hotel cannot be anything over a three star and it cannot be part of a chain. The chain hotels have good CCTV and keep records. They want to see passports and identification and even take a scan copy in case you end up shitting in the sink or setting fire to the curtains.
That’s no good. I need a seedy rundown heap of shit where people pay in cash without questions, the kind of place you can rent a room for an hour. The city centre is instantly ruled out. City centre business rates are too high and the taxes too steep. A mile or so out will be perfect so I start scouting about, looking for signs of a rundown area covered in graffiti, litter, rubbish, homeless, hookers, stalls selling crap and cheap cafes.
I almost miss it. Crossing a busy intersection, I casually look left down a side street to make sure one of the millions of crazy cyclists isn’t about to run me down when I spot the giddy view of a young lady wearing a very short skirt and a very tight boob tube. She could be going to a fancy dress party of course, and I shouldn’t judge but f
uck me backwards if that isn’t a hooker.
I stop at the edge of the road and start rolling a cigarette. An ordinary man occupied with his hands, nothing that will draw the eye. A car drives into the side street and heads down until the red brake lights show as it slows up next to the woman. She stops, says something. Shakes her head then nods her head with an apparent language difficulty as she uses her fingers to indicate something and finally sticks a finger up as the car drives off.
Perfect. My kind of place.
The green neon sign hangs broken and tattered. The windows are grimy and covered in a thick layer of dust. The building itself was once grand in that gothic architectural kind of way but the years of neglect are evident on every level.
Where once a name board adorned the wall to the side of the door, there is now just a variance of shade outlining the perfect shape of the missing sign. A nameless hotel in a rundown backstreet. The woman with the mini skirt eyes me up and I can see her own threat assessment being carried out. Am I a threat? Am I a potential customer? The constant danger these women face is staggering and beyond comprehension. Forced to ply their trade on dangerous streets simply because governments refuse to acknowledge the reality of the world we live in.
The reception desk in the lobby looks more like a security kiosk with a high counter and narrow opening. The jaded woman glances up as I walk in. Blinking slowly she sighs with the presumption that I’m here for a room to share with a woman of the streets.
‘Room?’ I speak the one word. She nods. ‘How much?’ She taps a sign fixed to the side of the kiosk that lists the prices per week, per day and per hour and in bold italic lettering at the bottom are the words discretion guaranteed printed in several languages. I pay for two nights, forty euros a night plus a forty euro tip which I hand over while tapping the bold italic words printed in the several languages. She takes the tip and nods curtly to show understanding before handing me a key. No registration, no documents, no questions.
First floor, front of the building and the room is surprisingly clean. There can’t be that many rooms like this so I guess the forty euro tip boosted my status. A double bed with what looks like clean sheets and a small bathroom with a shower cubicle. An old television on the dressing table with a twisted wire coat hanger stuffed into the back.
The lack of complimentary coffee, towels, shampoo and hermetically sealed toothbrush is a bit disappointing and I’ll be sure to mention that on Trip Advisor.
I turn the shower on and test the water flow which after some gurgling and straining comes out hot. It looks clean in the sense that it doesn't look brown. Fuck it, as long as I don’t swallow any it should be okay.
I strip off and catch sight of myself in the bathroom mirror. A wild man of the mountains with a shaggy brown beard streaked with grey and brown hair tangled and too long. My body is taut with stomach muscles that show clearly and the contrast between my head and body is quite weird. I don’t recognise myself. I’ve never had a beard before or let my hair get this long. My fitness was quite good but never like this but the achievement has come from hours of intense pain causing exercise completed as a form of self-harm. I deny myself the Vodka I crave. I deny myself the sleeping pills and every day, sometimes twice a day I punish myself with a gruelling regime that only gets harder and longer. I hardly sleep and that shows from the shadowed bags under my eyes. I hardly eat and that too shows from the defined stomach bordering on being emaciated. Veins down my arms stand proud from the sinewy muscles underneath.
Lowering my eyes I avoid the mirror and clamber into the shower. No soap or gel but hot water and a good scrub washes the stale sweat away.
The drumming of the water on the back of my neck brings my racing mind down a few notches, enough to apply my thoughts to the task in hand.
How do you kill three men?
Killing is easy. A gun, knife, bat, rope, poison, car, something sharp and pointy or even big and heavy will do it. Strangulation isn’t as easy as the movies make out. It takes minutes to kill someone that way and the surge of adrenalin they’ll get at facing imminent death will make them incredibly strong. Beating someone to death is possible and done every day across the world. Sever an artery and they’ll bleed out. Pump their system full of carbon monoxide and they’ll die slowly. That used to be a favourite method of suicide, by putting a hosepipe from the exhaust into the car. Sit back with the engine on and the radio playing and fall asleep gently. Modern engines produce much less carbon so the process takes longer which means you’ll get a bloody great big headache and feel sick as shit before you finally pass out.
Hanging is a good one and depending on the drop experienced by the body it either breaks the neck instantly or they strangle to death. The old hangman used formulas of body weight against height of the drop to establish the exact distance needed for an instant kill.
No. Making it look like suicide is not what we’re after. Elizabeth said I’m to make it newsworthy and suicides, as horrible as they are, are too commonplace to make the news. Even the other paedophile rings connected to them would probably just see it as a suicide pact brought on by shame and remorse.
Jesus. What have I become? Who am I to stand in a running shower and coldly calculate the best methods of bringing death? I was a police officer under oath to uphold the virtues of society, to protect life and limb, to bring offenders to justice. The law has to stand, it has to be seen to stand. The law is a cold calculating monster that defies emotion. It shows we are above the animal kingdom by the nature of leniency and the respect for life.
Then I remember the girl’s face and the faces of the victims I dealt with in the past. I remember the scream she gave in the footage, the begging and pleading and I remember how she fell silent and withdrew into herself, becoming a shell used for the pleasure of monsters that high fived and whooped.
The law should stand but those men have forsaken any right to trial by jury. Shower over and due to the lack of complimentary towels I have to drip dry. The weather is warm but not that hot so it takes a little while. Standing naked in the bedroom I pull the mobile from my jeans on the bed and find the contacts. The phone is pre-loaded with fake numbers and names giving the appearance of normalcy. I scroll to mum and press the green button.
‘Hello?’
‘Hi, mum, I’m here.’
‘Oh that’s great honey, is it nice?’
‘Very nice, the accommodation is er…a bit rough…’ I peer round the dingy room with a grimace, ‘and there’s no towels so I’m drip drying.’
‘Now? You’re drip drying now?’
‘Yes.’
‘So you’re naked?’
‘Yes, mum.’
‘Naked on the phone to me?’
‘Yes, mum.’
‘I understand,’ Elizabeth takes a breath which she lets out slowly, ‘your uncle called, he said to meet him tonight…I’ve got the address here…’
‘Oh that’s great, hang on,’ I root about the dressing table in the vain hope of finding a pen, ‘no pen, fuck it, I’ll remember it…go on.’
‘Don’t swear at your mother.’
‘Sorry, mum.’
‘In the main square which is called Market Square, or more precisely Markt Square…it’s where they did some of the filming for that movie with that nice Irish man.’
‘Brendon Gleeson?’
‘No, the other one, the handsome one.’
‘You think Colin Farrell is handsome?’
‘He is handsome.’
‘Really? I wouldn’t have thought he’d be your type.’
‘Why not? What type did you think I’d go for?’
‘I dunno, maybe bearded ex-police officers with a penchant for self-destruction but also very alluring and charismatic.’
‘Er…no…I don’t know anyone like that. I do know a misogynistic narcissist ex-police officer with a beard.’
‘I’m not misogynistic. I hate everyone not just women.’
‘Misanthropic then.’
‘Alright wordy, where am I meeting my uncle then…mother,’ I over pronounce the last word with mock bitterness.
‘He’ll be in one of the cafés that border the square, you know what he looks like so…’ she trails off expectantly.
‘I’ll find him.’
‘Your uncle will be able to tell you how to find your other relatives.’
‘I understand.’
‘Listen, Mike. I was thinking.’
‘That’s always a prelude to something bad in my experience.’
‘I’d like to meet your uncle too.’
‘No.’
‘This isn’t a choice, Mike.’
I hang up and drop the phone on the bed. Ten seconds later the thing chirrups with an incoming call.
‘No.’
‘Mike, listen…’
‘No.’
‘I saw that footage too,’ she hisses down the phone, ‘and I went through that. Do you hear me? What happened to that girl happened to me too.’
I screw my eyes shut and take a deep breath. The raw emotion in her voice makes me want to say yes, yes come and kill three men with me but every ounce of common sense and decency left in me screams that this is a bad idea.
‘Listen,’ I say softly, ‘you’ll have vicarious closure knowing what will happen. You don’t need to do it. It will not…’
‘Vicarious closure? I’ve had vicarious closure my whole life but now I’ve got a chance to…’
I cut her off the same way she cut me off, both of us speaking low with voices loaded with emotion. ‘I’m going. I’ll call you when I’m done.’
‘Mike!’
I should hang up and switch the phone off but instead, like the fucking twat I am, I keep it pressed to my head.
‘You still there, Mike?’
‘Yeah. Have you…er…have you done…’
‘No,’ she breathes into my ear, ‘never.’