by Jay Stringer
She laughed at that. “You taken a look around lately? Half the midlands is standing empty.” Then she pointed at a sign in the driveway, posted by a local housing association. “But you’re right. They want to build houses here.”
“See? I think my plan was better.”
“Drive around in the hope we find the perfect old mine shaft, dump the bodies, and then run away? Yeah, good stuff. No, listen, they want to build here, but the older parts of the hospital are listed buildings. They’re historic. Protected. They’re not going to be able to knock them down. They have to convert or refit them, or try and get them delisted, bend the rules. You know what that means?”
No.
“No.”
“Delays. It’s going to be a long time before anyone gets to touch the innards of this place.”
“Sure, but they still will, eventually.”
“Eventually is fine. Look, we don’t need to get rid of these bodies forever. We just need to get rid of them right now. They won’t be found for a long time, and when they are, what connects us? We don’t live in this town, this isn’t the scene of the crime, and they won’t have any of their clothes with them.”
“DNA?”
“On the current budget? These guys have no family, right? Nobody’s going to report them missing. Even if they were found soon, and DNA was run, what would it be checked against? The only way the CSO would link us to the crime would be to work backward, already knowing that we were linked. Won’t happen. Besides, where’s your sense of humor? We’d be hiding two dead bodies in a morgue. That’s pretty funny.”
Her eyes flashed as she said that, and she did the little flick with her eyebrow that I associated with Gaines. Laura was a very different person these days.
I couldn’t see a way into the hospital grounds, and the traffic was too heavy on Tipton Road for us to break in without being seen, even though it was late. Laura told me to turn around, and we drove back the way we had come. But at the junction with the main road, she pointed me away from Castle Hill and gave directions until we turned out of traffic and into a cul-de-sac with a dozen or so modest homes and a patch of grass in the middle. A few of the living rooms were lit up with the flicker of televisions, but nobody opened the curtains at the sound of our arrival. In the darkness behind the houses, I could see the hospital buildings.
“See that dirt road?” Laura pointed out her window and I spotted a dirt road that ran beside the nearest house. I nodded and turned the car onto it, going slowly to make as little noise as possible. We passed through a large gap in an old rusted metal fence, perhaps where a gate had once been, then crossed a small patch of muddy grass and onto a tarmac road that wound toward the old hospital. I parked at the rear of the closest building.
I sat in the darkness of the newly silent car and waited the moment out before asking Laura how the hell she’d known about this way in.
“Urban exploration,” she said as if it was the most obvious answer in the world.
“What?”
“It’s a thing. People exploring abandoned buildings, taking pictures. There are message boards on the web where people compare notes and share their photos.”
“So, basically, people break and enter, take pictures of themselves doing it, and then post this evidence online.”
“Nobody gets in trouble. It’s always places like this—old hospitals, theaters, public buildings, things like that. It’s harmless, so nobody gets in trouble.”
“And you know about this because?”
“Well, after we broke up I went a little—well, a lot, well …” She laughed, and it was a slightly nervous laugh that seemed to cover a lot of ground. “Well, I went through a lot of different phases, trying to figure myself out. This was one of them. I had, uh, a friend, and we would come and look around places like this.”
“Including this one?”
“Yes.”
“Take anything?”
She wiggled a little in her seat, in a way that said yes. Then she nodded. “Just a sign from one of the wards. ‘No mobile phones beyond this point.’ It’s on my bathroom door at home now.”
Okay, I had to admit that one was funny.
“But if this is such an easy site to explore, surely other people will come here and find the bodies? Maybe there’s people in there right now?”
“It’s old hat. This place is too easy now. The popular thing is all the police stations that are being closed down.”
This Laura was different. She wasn’t the person I’d been married to, or the version of her I’d always held in my head. If I’d known this version, maybe we would still be married.
“You’re different.”
She nodded and got out of the car, calling over her shoulder, “You have no idea.”
I got out of the car and followed her. She stopped in front of an old fire exit and stared at the closed door. There were no handles on the outside. It looked just like the one at the hotel, which meant it would be opened from a push-bar on the inside.
“Wait here,” Laura said, and she walked around the side of the building.
I sat on the front of my car, my eyes adjusting to the darkness. The car park was empty and carried a sense of menace. Empty spaces out in the country feel fine; to be totally alone and silent in a field, or a wood, or on top of a hill, that feels natural. But to be in a deserted hospital parking lot in absolute silence, staring at a dark building beneath streetlights that were no longer working felt like being in a horror movie. In this case, I was one of the monsters.
The fire exit opened outward, and Laura waved at me from the doorway.
“Look what I found.” She pulled out a gurney, then another, and pushed them both toward the car.
We wrestled the two bodies out from beneath the carpet and lay them on the gurneys, taking one each. Then we wheeled them over to the fire exit and discovered a gap of a few inches between the tarmac outside and the bottom of the door. It took both of us to get each gurney inside. I pulled the door shut behind us, and we were plunged into darkness.
I heard Laura moving ahead of me, messing around in her pockets, then there was the faint click of a button and her smartphone lit up like a torch.
The feeling of unease I’d had outside doubled as we walked through the corridors. What I could see around me, thanks to the beam of light, looked eerily normal. There was no graffiti on the walls, no water or shit on the floors. The notice boards still had posters and pictures on them, and as we walked past the entrance to one of the wards, the nurses’ desk still sported a coffee cup perched on top of a folder. It looked as if everyone had simply switched off the lights and hidden behind their desks. It resembled the set of a zombie movie, and the childish paranoid part of my brain was bracing to hear the inevitable groan and shuffle of the undead coming from around one of the corners.
My fears ran deeper than Hollywood horror movies. My father had scared the shit out of me as a child with stories of Mullo. His family had raised him old school Romani, and they had strong beliefs about how to treat the dead. When a person died, they took everything of theirs with them. To keep anything of theirs was theft and would bring you bad luck or, worse, the attention of the Mullo, a creature risen from the grave to exact revenge. My father said that hospitals didn’t know how to treat the dead, and that there was always something left lingering. It didn’t matter if he’d only made up these stories to scare me or if he’d believed them, because right then in the darkened hospital all I could think about was the two dead bodies in front of me. I had kept Tony’s wallet and given Jelly’s money to the woman. If someone was keeping score, I was fucked.
Fear and guilt ate away at my stomach, and I felt the familiar pains rise up, my guts crawling like a snake. In the shadows I could slip a couple of pills without Laura seeing me, and my fears took a few steps away at the thought, but then she looked back to see why I’d slowed down.
“You okay?”
“Spooked.”
She nodded. “Well, this is the place for it.”
It wasn’t until we passed through the reception area that we found clear signs of the hospital’s decay. The main doors, where once there had been glass partitions, were now covered with tarpaulin and plastic sheeting, with black tape holding it all in place. The floor tiles were peeling up around us, and the reception desk was cluttered with cobwebs, dust, faded newspapers, and signs of a bird’s nest. Laura walked on and I followed as she headed through a set of swinging double doors, pushing the gurney ahead of her as the battering ram, and then into a small dark corridor beyond. We walked past an elevator, and I asked if the morgue was in the basement.
“Yes. It’s right below us, if I remember right.”
“Then how do we—” I was trying to wave at the dead body in front of me, but she couldn’t see in the dim light. “How do we get them down? I don’t fancy any more stairs.”
“There’s a ramp just down here. The elevators are newer than the building.”
Soon we were taking a hard turn into a narrow doorway, and then the ground started to angle down away from me and I had to hold on to the gurney to stop it from slipping down the ramp ahead of me and into Laura’s back. The floor leveled out before another sharp turn, then began angling down again until we were on the basement level. The corridor was narrow and the ceiling was low above our heads, the light fixtures brushing my hair as we walked below them. The light went out for a second and Laura said, “Sorry,” before fiddling with her phone and bringing it back on.
“Battery’s low. We need to dump these now if we’re going to have the light to get out.”
She led the way through a large metal door that reflected the light from her phone and into a large room with a high ceiling. A partition of wood and glass split the room in two. The section where we stood looked like an office. The paint job screamed of the seventies but a computer on the desk, with its large monitor, didn’t look more than a few years old. Beyond the partition was an almost-empty room with three metal tables in the center and, on the far side, a series of small metal doors built into the wall.
It looked like the morgue from every hospital drama everyone had ever seen on TV.
Complete with a dead body on one of the tables.
“Looks like somebody else had the same idea,” I said.
We left the gurneys in the outer office while we went in for a closer look at the body. Laura didn’t want to shine her light on it, but I waved for her to direct the beam my way while I leaned in for a look.
The body was wrapped in bed sheets, a white bundle with only one side of the face and some hair exposed where the sheets had come loose. The skin had the same look as Tony and Jelly, the pale marble, with dark lines starting to creep across the surface. Recent death. Someone else had dumped a fresh kill here. The dead eye was open and staring at Laura.
In the cold beam of the phone’s light Laura’s face was a taut mix of emotions. She was a cop and this was a murder victim, but to look into this crime meant owning up to the ones we’d come here to hide. We had to let one victim slide in order to cover up the other two. Laura’s eyes burned at the corpse, and I thought this was one more thing I’d done to fuck her up. One more thing for her to add to my list of screwups.
I’d once seen a man die with no name, and when no family had come forward to identify or claim him, it had broken me. I’d taken a long time to come back. But as I stared down at the nameless victim before us, I didn’t feel the same anger or rage. I didn’t feel like I was about to break. Not for the first time I wondered, had I ever really come back?
Laura blinked—once, twice—and if there were any tears I couldn’t see them in the darkness. “Feels colder in here than upstairs, doesn’t it?”
She was right. There would have been no refrigeration since the power was shut off, but still somehow the room felt ice cold. I told myself it was some trick of the mind, rather than ghosts of the three corpses nearby or a Mullo or any of the other things my father had made up to scare me. Even still, I didn’t want to be in here a minute longer. Laura pulled two of the metal doors open and slid out the trays, and we heaved the two new bodies onto them. Then we shut them away, out of sight.
The light on Laura’s phone flickered, and we quickly retraced our steps back to the car before the battery ran out and left us fumbling in the basement in darkness.
We drove back to Wolverhampton in near silence. Neither of us wanted to mention the third body or how it had gotten there. We stopped only when we passed an office building that had a large metal dumpster out front, full of furniture. We moved a few chairs aside and dropped the carpet and clothes into it, hiding them mostly from sight by putting back the furniture. I pulled a newspaper off the backseat of the car, set it alight, and dropped it into the dumpster. The yellow and amber flames were just starting to fight with the furniture in my rear view mirror when I had to turn off the road and lost sight of it.
We passed a twenty-four-hour supermarket, and Laura tapped my hand and told me to stop. She was gone five minutes, and when she came back she had a shopping bag full of cheap men’s clothes and a newspaper.
“Thought you might want to read this.” She showed me the front page of the paper. It was a shot of a burning caravan blocking a road, and the headline read, War Declared At Hobs Ford.
Hobs Ford was a Romani settlement in Shropshire that was under an eviction notice. The camp had been barricaded by the settlers and protesters, with police and bailiffs waiting for their chance. I knew I should care, but I’d been trying to ignore it. I tossed the paper into the back.
Back at the hotel things had settled down. The manager was keeping the third floor closed off but it was business as usual in the lobby. We took the stairs back to the now-carpetless room and scanned the area to make sure we hadn’t missed anything obvious. Then I used my master key to let us into one of the other rooms. I stripped down to my underwear and sat on the bed while Laura showered. When she stepped out of the bathroom she was dressed again in her black clothes, but this time her damp hair was tousled like some old-school rock chick’s. My gut tightened in a way it hadn’t for a long time at the sight of her, and I excused myself as quickly as I could.
In the bathroom, I locked the door behind me and let the room fill up with steam. I took a couple pills that I’d lifted from my pocket on the way in. By the time I’d relaxed in the hot water and washed away all the blood splattered on my forearms, a familiar cold feeling was creeping down my spine.
I lost track of time as I floated in there.
Afterward, I dried off as I looked through the clothes that Laura had picked out for me at the supermarket. Nothing special. Black underwear, blue jeans, and a black shirt. She’d bought a pair of cheap imitation leather shoes, which would do until I got home.
When I finally stepped out of the bathroom, I half expected Laura to have gone, but she was sitting on the edge of the bed, looking bored. She didn’t need to mention how long I’d been in there; the empty coffee cup in her hand did it for her. We put our soiled clothes into the supermarket bag. Then Laura said she’d meet me in the car park while I talked to Rich. He didn’t bat an eyelid when I told him that new carpet needed laying in the room. He was more interested in whether he could get the master key back from me and open the floor up for business.
Out in the car park, I found Laura sitting on the front of my car. She stuck out a thumb like a hitchhiker and said, “Drive me home?”
What I wanted to say was, Where the hell is your car?
What I said was, “Of course.” Followed after a pause by, “But where the hell is your car?”
“When you called, I got a taxi.”
I stewed that over as we drove, wondering again what she’d thought when I’d called her to the hotel. Maybe she’d thought it was for a drink
, and she hadn’t wanted to risk driving home drunk. I looked across at her and tried a smile, but caught between pills and the events of the last few hours I had no idea what it looked like.
Laura lived in a modern apartment building on the corner of Key Gardens and Jeremiah Road. It was one of the many housing developments that had sprung up just before the credit crunch, meaning it had been built for people with good money but had sold to people with slightly less. Between her DCI wage and what she made from Gaines, Laura could probably have afforded it even at pre-crunch prices.
I pulled up outside but didn’t kill the engine. We both sat there trying to figure out the best way to say good-bye after all we’d just done. But Laura took a different tack. “You look like you need a drink.”
I tapped the steering wheel. “The cop trying to entrap me?”
“I have a sofa if you don’t feel up to driving.”
My ex-wife offering me her sofa to sleep on felt like we were living through Glasnost all over again. I’d only been in her apartment once before, and that had been the day I found out she was corrupt.
Get.
Out.
Of.
Your.
Own.
Head.
The inside of her flat was nothing like I remembered. Before the walls had been either beige or white, and the whole place had captured the kind of Ikea-catalogue blandness that I associated with our marriage. Now there were actual colors on the walls—soft reds and purples, a deep blue in the kitchen—and black leather furniture. There were framed posters of foreign films on the walls, with Isabelle Adjani, Eva Green, and Juliette Binoche staring down at me in a variety of haircuts from the eighties and nineties. This was news, because when we’d been together I’d been banned from putting film posters on the walls.
I pointed to them as she stepped into the room from the kitchen, carrying two glass tumblers. “More changes.”
She took it in stride, walking past me and handing me one of the tumblers without looking at the posters, saying, “We all change, Eoin.”