by Tom Pollock
“No,” I told Bel. The bulging plastic-wrapped cocoon squeaked as she dragged it over the floor. “Not that close. Shield it behind that piping.”
“Why?”
“There’ll be a blast,” I said. “A shock wave.”
I thought of Hiroshima. 66 kilos, 1.38 percent, 18 atmospheres, 2 miles, 66,000 people dead. There was maths for everything.
“We need it to burn. The last thing we want is for identifiable body parts to be distributed all over South Kent.”
And I heard how matter of fact I was, and I felt sick, and I looked at Bel and forced the nausea back down my throat.
Get through this. Get her through this.
My fingers hesitated over the pump’s release valve, but it only took one look at Bel’s face to stiffen my resolve. I twisted it and heard the hiss. We fled, chased by the echoing trickle of petrol from the open can Bel was trailing behind her. Out the door and up the hill, Bel at a run, me at a stumbling, hobbling skip, lungs burning, flailing with my arms and my head for extra speed. From the slope, I could see the security shed on the other side of the compound. A lance of torchlight stabbed the darkness. It was closing, but still far enough away.
“Now,” I whispered.
A tiny arrowhead of flame illuminated Bel’s fingertips. The glow caught her face, enraptured by the fire.
“Quick!”
She didn’t respond. The torchlight drew nearer and suddenly, sickeningly, I wondered if I’d worked the blast radius out wrong. I had an image of a dumpy, bleary-eyed security guard; hot shrapnel tearing through his cheek, his brain. The torchlight advanced and above the beam, a cigarette glowed.
“BEL!” I yelled.
The flame fell, became a bright streak racing away ahead of us, and I slammed my hands over my ears for the bang.
NOW
“Eat, Etep, Peat. Peter!”
Two syllables. A name. My name. Sound is the first thing to come back. Then light. Everything’s out of focus. A cream-and-yellow blob hovers in front of me, making concerned noises. I blink, my eyelashes like flies’ feet on my cheeks, and water . . . tears clear from my eyes.
The blob resolves into Ingrid, her face pinched and even paler than usual.
She saw it all.
I swallow stale tears. I squint into the shaft of sunlight from the kitchen window. The weather’s cleared. How long have I been sitting here, hunched over the table, fingers gouging my thighs? A long string of drool connects parched lips to a spot of wetness on my groin. I try to spit it away, but I can’t dislodge it. I try to stand, but my muscles are like rubber and they don’t answer . . .
I must have had an attack, an avalanche of memories that overwhelmed me before I even knew it was coming. No time to count, no time to speak, no time to fight. I feel the frantic trip of my heart begin to slow. Ingrid’s lips move and it takes me three of its exhausted beats to make out what she’s saying.
“Jesus, Pete.”
And I know. She saw everything.
“B . . . but . . .” It takes me a couple of tries as it dawns on me. “You already knew, you had to know . . .”
“Pete.” Ingrid’s eyes are huge. “I had no idea.”
“But . . .” I run my hand through the air over my face, a clown’s mime, applying makeup. “With your thing. You must have read it off me before now.”
“It happened two years ago,” Ingrid says. “I’d only known you for a handful of months before that. I told you, I had to get to know you incredibly well before I could read you that fully. I mean, I could sense something was wrong, but you didn’t talk and I had a rapport to build. I didn’t want to push you too hard too early.”
“But . . .” My brain seems stuck on that word. “But since then . . .”
“Peter.” Her brown eyes are troubled. “I honestly don’t think you’ve thought about it since then.”
I sag back in my chair like a defeated boxer. Can that really be true? I have to grip the chair arms to push myself to my feet.
So, this is what it feels like to suppress a memory.
No fanfare, no ostentatious gap in my past, just a total absence of attention. ARIA, I think. Christ, what a thing: a creature of self-extending memory, and not just self-extending, but self-selecting. Able to take up a scalpel and excise any part of itself it deems too shameful, too dangerous.
I feel like a drain’s opened up in my stomach.
What else have I forgotten? What else have I done?
“Do you need to rest?”
I shake my head.
“I really think you should . . .”
“No.” I bite my lip and taste metal on my tongue. “I need to get working. I need to, to fix . . .”
I don’t even finish the thought it’s so inadequate.
Ingrid doesn’t look convinced, but she turns the laptop around to face me anyway.
“Okay, then. The data pull’s complete. Do what you have to do.”
I begin by flicking through files, page after page of the faces and fates of strangers: bludgeoned, stabbed, strangled. It forms a gory nursery rhyme in my head, twisting itself around rhymes I learnt as a kid. Bludgeoned, stabbed, strangled, divorced, beheaded, survived!
Alongside these top three all-stars of the cause-of-death world, there were other, more exotic ways to snuff it. A middle-aged man in pyjamas was found locked in an eighteenth-century tea chest with a hole bored into the side, his skin cherry pink from carbon monoxide poisoning. There were close-ups of the splinters under his fingernails. The coroner speculated that the assailant (still unknown) had drilled through the box, backed their car exhaust up to the hole, and (Jesus) turned the key while the victim clawed and hammered at his impromptu coffin. Then there was the body of a young girl, hands, head, and feet missing, dismembered at the joints, each piece individually shrink-wrapped and shoved into an industrial butcher’s freezer in Hammersmith alongside the pork legs and the beef ribs. Her right calf and her left forearm were still missing. The investigator was resigned to them having been bought, and in all likelihood served by one of the butcher’s high-end restaurant clientele. And then there was one where . . .
Concentrate, Pete, I berate myself. Don’t get lost in the details. Stick to the stuff that matters.
“I didn’t think there would be so many,” I say.
“Official unsolved murders are relatively rare,” Ingrid replies. She’s flicking through a Jilly Cooper novel she found on a shelf in the front room. “But I pulled in the accidentals, the suicides, and the unexplained ones too. Figured if your sis is as good as you say, she might have disguised her work.”
“What a comforting thought.” I open up a blank spreadsheet and start to fill it in.
Each row is a death, neatly encapsulated inside the flickering tramlines. In the columns I put any characteristic I can find in the reports that I can link to a number: victim’s age, height, weight, income, hours between death and discovery, minutes it took them to die, number of plausible suspects, size of immediate family . . .
I’m encoding, translating these drily bureaucratised stories of death into a language I can work with. In a sense I’m encrypting. All translation is encryption, after all. There’s no such thing as plaintext; there are only codes you understand and codes you don’t.
I work until my eyes feel like marbles in my head and dusk cloaks the world beyond the windows. At some point Ingrid taps me on the shoulder and takes over, taking the laptop to the basement, where neighbours won’t see the light from the screen. I go upstairs but can’t bring myself to get into any of the beds. I feel like I’d be stealing: a fairy-tale demon thieving nights of rest from innocents simply by lying in their beds.
I curl up on the sofa in the darkened front room, starting each time headlights sweep through the gauze curtains, in case this is the time they stop and I hear footsteps on the gravel and a
key in the lock or, worse, a boot hammering through the door.
To take my mind off it, I study the bookshelves in the near dark and recognise the covers of a bunch of Terry Pratchett books I have at home. On the mantelpiece an Indian family smiles at me from a photo: a husband, a wife, and two daughters. I recognise the older one—Anita: a face glimpsed in school corridors and assemblies and on the cork noticeboard in reports about the jiujitsu team. I never thought of her as someone who read Pratchett. I never thought of her as anyone in particular at all.
An ankle, I think, pale as death, a body lying stiff under my fingers, shrouded in a mould-specked carpet and covered in sterile plastic. He was someone in particular too.
I close my eyes and see all those faces from the files. Their expressions have the blankness of the morgue. They were all someone in particular.
I practised.
Christ, Bel, what have you been doing?
It’s still dark when Ingrid wakes me. I stumble down to the basement, wiping grit from my eyes. My clothes feel crusted onto me and my teeth are too big inside my mouth; my healing gums taste septic. The cellar is bare concrete, relieved only by six dusty wine bottles in one corner. The laptop sits in the middle of the floor. I drop myself cross-legged in front of it and get back to work.
Ingrid’s come a long way while I slept. Running regressions, finding coefficients, looking for patterns—any thread in the data we can pull on. I pick up where she left off, charting time of death against hair colour, minutes of travel to hospital against sexuality.
Before long, the whole thing looks like one those Buzzfeed memes: These seventeen charts about the graphic slaughter of innocents will blow your mind! Or perhaps: He came at her with a meat cleaver—you’ll never guess what happens next!
Well, on second thought, you probably will.
I work. I find nothing. I keep working. I keep finding nothing.
“Random’s hard to fake,” I whisper to myself like a mantra.
Hours pass and Ingrid relieves me. I sleep fitfully and tag her out again. I lose all track of time; my world is one endless twilight, eyeballs aching in the light of the screen.
On the second night, I’m stumbling back up the cellar stairs when the bare bulb above my head starts strobing—on-off-on-off-light-dark-light-dark—creating and obliterating my shadow on the concrete steps. I hear a hitched gasp and it’s Ingrid, flicking the switch over and over, tears of frustration flowing down her cheeks.
“Hey,” I say softly. “What is it?”
“I just . . . they might, someone might see it. A little glow. A little tiny one, sneaking through a window . . .”
“Okay, so just leave it off.”
“I know, I just . . .” Dark-light-dark-light-dark. “I . . .”
God, Ingrid, look where I’ve led you to.
“Do you miss it?” I ask. “57?”
“I was born into the company, Pete. I never had a choice.”
“I know, but they’re still your friends, your family.”
She shakes her head. “You don’t understand. I’m saying, I never had a choice, but that wasn’t true for most of them.”
“So?”
“We’re spies, Peter.” Her lips whiten as she smiles tightly. “We lie and betray and seduce others into lies and betrayal, twelve hours a day, fifty-two weeks a year, for hilariously inadequate government pay. Do I miss them? The question you ought to be asking is: who looks at that job description and thinks, ‘Yeah, that’s me’?”
I snort a stifled laugh and then she does too. The strobing slows—light-dark-light—and comes to a rest . . . dark. She exhales into the gloom.
“You okay?” I ask.
“Yeah, that was no big deal.”
“You lying to me right now?”
“Very much so, yeah.”
“You don’t need to do that.”
“I know.”
In the amber wash from the streetlight outside, I see her set her jaw.
“I can feel myself shrinking,” she says at last. “Every time I flick the switch, or soap my hands or whatever, I feel like a little more of me disappears.”
She snorts again and shakes her head.
“Ignore me. I’m just tired.”
“Then go back to sleep,” I tell her. “I’ll carry on, do a double.”
“Pete . . .”
“It’s okay, I want to. I’m kind of on a roll anyway.”
This is a lie. I’m nowhere. I couldn’t be more nowhere if I was standing naked and rolled in salt in the middle of the Atacama Desert at midday with no water and a busted compass. But the light’s off, so she can’t tell, can she?
“You sure?”
“Yeah, she’s my twin sister. Give me a little more time with her.”
Maybe it’s just fatigue—I’ve had a total of four hours and thirteen minutes of sleep over two nights (the answer to the question “But hey, who’s counting?” is always “Me”) and the screen is blotting in front of my eyes like a Van Gogh painting. But every now and then I get a flicker.
I’ve never been a savant, one of those lucky bastards who can get the numbers to speak to them, someone for whom 3 feels like 729, or who sees all primes as blue. I worked to make myself a mathematician. I had no innate talent for it; I sweated at it because the clean, hard-edged answers it yielded were all that eased the fear that squeezed my heart.
And now, as I scan the numbers, I sense . . . something. Not a pattern exactly; more like a shape where the pattern isn’t. Like the image on the inside of your eyelids after looking at the sun.
Excitement flickers in the back of my throat like a pilot light.
Finally, the numbers are talking to me.
But no, I realise, that’s not quite right. It’s not the numbers. It’s Bel. I feel like I can almost see the Red Wolf they named her for, bloody-furred, bounding behind the black digits on the screen as though they were barren trees on a snowfield. There is something of Bel in these equations, something familiar that—even though I’m reading about decapitations and hangings—I can’t help but be comforted by. The numbers are just a language, but it’s my sister doing the talking, and I’m soothed by the cadence of her voice.
But . . . I still can’t quite out make out what she’s saying. The pattern’s too obscure. I think of ARIA—all those hours I spent trying to uncover my own pattern, while all the while Bel was labouring just as hard in rivers and graveyards and rainy alleyways to cover hers up.
She is my inverse, my opposite, my counterpart. Without her, I’m incomplete.
I miss you so much, Bel.
“Random’s hard to fake,” I whisper again as I scroll back, hunting for that flicker of familiarity, that glimpse. I follow the wolf deeper and deeper into the wood.
“How’s it going?” Ingrid asks—I don’t know how much later. She’s a silhouette at the top of the stairs, her hair a dandelion haze, framed in the doorway by the dawn.
“I think I have something.”
She stumps down the stairs. I indicate a scatter chart on the screen. The points look as random as fly specks on a windscreen.
“What is it?”
“Bodies, all male, plotted by the dates they were found. There was no sign of foul play, but there was basically no sign of anything. In each case the coroner noted that the body was so badly decayed that it was impossible to establish the cause of death.”
“So?”
“So, the reason it took so long to find the bodies is that no one was looking. None of these men were ever reported missing. They all lived alone and were either jobless or self-employed. No search, no manhunt. Their rotting corpses were stumbled over by members of the public.”
“Okay.” Ingrid seems nonplussed. She indicates the mess of specks on the screen. “But there’s no pattern there. It’s just noise.”
> “Ah, but noise is the key, right?” I can hear the excitement bleeding into my voice, and I try to dampen it. “I mean the key to this whole thing.”
Ingrid looks at me like I’m deranged, but I point at the screen.
“There is noise here—a random element—the time it took for some stranger to just happen across the body in the river or forest or bedsit or park or wherever they were found.”
You’ve come a long way, Bel, from the girl who couldn’t work simple number codes if you’re using statistical noise to cover up multiple murders.
On second thought, I probably shouldn’t be so proud of you for that.
“If you filter out that noise,” I say, “using the estimated time since death in the coroner’s reports to work out the dates they died, and then adjust further for the margin of error . . .”
I hit another button. The data points arrange themselves in a neat flat line, evenly spaced over time.
“Whoa,” Ingrid breathes.
“One kill every nine weeks, regular as clockwork. Except here, and here”—I point to breaks in the line—“where I’m guessing the body hasn’t shown up yet.”
“Fine.” Ingrid eases herself down against the wall with an aah noise. “So someone’s offing loners. What makes you think it’s her?”
“Just a hunch,” I reply. I can hardly say These kills just feel like my sister, can I? “Can you see if there’s any more info in that police database on each of those victims?”
It takes her exactly seven minutes to find the connection.
“They’ve all been arrested for assault. Looks like . . .” She frowns. “Looks like there was enough evidence to make a case for all of them, but they never went to trial—huh. Their victims wouldn’t press charges. Every one of them refused to testify.”
“And who were they?” I ask, even though I’m sure I know the answer. I see Mum’s exhausted eyes. I hear the tremor in her voice as she says, It was no big deal.
“Their wives. Not one of them pressed charges, but it looks like all of them separated later.”