Acid Lullaby

by Ed O'Connor

  Another issue had been troubling Underwood. Jack Harvey had appeared to be living well beyond his police salary. Underwood knew Rowena was from a wealthy farming family but the thought still niggled at him. Had Jack been moonlighting? Had it got him into trouble? He considered the notes that he had taken at Dexter’s meeting. Leach’s analysis had intrigued him. The victims had been injected with organic poisons, similar to those found in magic mushrooms.

  Psychoactive drugs in concentrated doses.

  Underwood felt as if he was fumbling for a torch in a power cut. He was missing an obvious point. ‘Concentrated doses.’ Why had the killer taken such elaborate preparations to inject Stark and Harvey with these drugs? There were far more effective and straightforward ways of killing people. There were also more stimulating ways of making people suffer. If the motive behind the drugs wasn’t to inflict pain or death, then what was it? Underwood paused for a moment. His mind liked to flip problems over. It was like turning the lights on and off: in the dark, your other senses become more finely attuned.

  What then if the drugs were designed to have the opposite effect? To bring pleasure not pain, life not death. He continued to play with the idea: light instead of dark, understanding instead of ignorance. Understanding of what?

  He was tired but knew that he wouldn’t be able to sleep. The empty bed taunted him. Loneliness drove him on.

  32

  It was a night of bad dreams and fear.

  Alison Dexter dreamed of the baby she had made and killed.

  Mary Colson woke again from the dream of the dog-man in a cold and terrible sweat. The whispering kept her awake. At 4a.m. she went to the toilet. At 6a.m. she returned and poured water all over the seat and the bathroom floor for Doreen.

  Mark Willis stared at the blue door of Alison Dexter’s flat imagining the horror that awaited him if he failed to deliver £100,000 by Saturday. After an hour, he headed back to the anonymous security of his hotel room on the outskirts of New Bolden.

  For Max Fallon it was a night of frustration. He was exhausted but sleep eluded him. The structure of his memory was crumpled. It had been an eventful day. He remembered taking Rowena Harvey and securing her to a bed that afternoon. He had marvelled at her beauty but decided to leave her at peace and expel his furies elsewhere.

  He recalled a light omelette lunch followed by an unsatisfactory molestation of the spitting, writhing policewoman on the floor of the library. Her violence had irritated him. Decapitating her had been a blessed relief. Max had then driven to London to reacquaint himself with his old colleague Simon Crouch. There had been some sort of struggle. Max could remember an old lady, standing across the road with her shopping, watching them brawl in Crouch’s crappy little garden. A screwdriver into Crouch’s windpipe had eventually settled the dispute. The journey back had been even more stressful: roadworks on the M11 delayed Max’s return to Cambridgeshire until nearly three in the morning. Aching and hard eyed, Max sat in his library admiring his handiwork.

  As he drifted in and out of consciousness, the dilapidated manor house became a confusing, creaking terror. His mind had unexpectedly thrown him back to his former life at Fogle & Moore. He was a child playing on a slag-heap of facts and terminology that he no longer understood.

  ‘A bond is a stream of cash flows,’ he told his empty library. ‘Price and yield have an inverted relationship.’ Frustrated at the silence that greeted his announcement Max grew angry. He hated silences in business. Silences meant ignorance. This was basic stuff. He squinted into the library to see who was listening to his seminar. There was Liz, some crouching monkey from Settlements, some faces he didn’t recognize.

  Silence.

  ‘This is so basic,’ he screamed. ‘As price goes up yield goes down and vice fucking versa. This is easy stuff. You people couldn’t trade sausages, never mind bonds.’

  There was a question from the floor. There was someone out there.

  At last, a question!

  He tried to make sense of a shape that was neither an arm nor a lamp. ‘If eurobonds pay annually why do we price sterling bonds semi-annually?’ said a voice he thought for a second was his own before realizing that it couldn’t have been. He was stunned at the ignorance of the question.

  ‘Because of the fucking gilt market!’ he shouted. ‘Gilts pay semi-annually so you price sterling bonds on the same basis and then convert to an annual yield.’

  He stared angrily out of the window expecting to see Canary Wharf’s sea of lights before him. All he could see was darkness.

  ‘The sterling interest rate curve,’ he said deliberately and slowly as if speaking to a difficult child, ‘is inverted. Rates are higher in the short maturities reflecting …’ he stopped, unable to remember what it reflected. He knew the sterling curve looked like a slide, though. He had played on a slide on the compound in India. His mother had waited at the bottom to stop him sliding off the sterling yield curve into her arms. He was dressed in a hat of plastic jewels and a belt of moonlight glitter. She had been so proud. He had won the prize.

  His parents had always disappointed him. His mother had died and deserted him: his father had stayed alive and encumbered him. The old man’s first visit to his new country house three months previously had been particularly disappointing.

  Robin Fallon had sat in a wooden chair, shocked by the disintegration of his son. Max was laying stretched, pale and exhausted across a sofa. Books and strange sketches lay strewn across the floor. Robin had picked up a couple of the drawings and tried to decipher some logic through the scrawled obscenities, the souvenirs of his son’s terrible journeys into the back of his own head. Robin screwed some of them up and then vainly looked around Max’s dilapidated drawing room for a waste paper bin.

  ‘This has gone far enough, Max,’ he observed sternly.

  Max was fiddling with a Rubik’s Cube, marvelling at its strange colours and intricate possibilities.

  ‘What is all this stuff?’ Robin gestured at the mess that sprawled across the ancient carpet.

  Max giggled to himself but didn’t look up. ‘Try to imagine the bible before it was copy-edited.’

  Robin Fallon had looked at the rotting wood panelling on the walls of the drawing room, the broken bookshelves, the smashed electricity sockets and the fireplace stuffed with papers and rubbish.

  ‘I want you to listen to me, Max,’ he said angrily, ‘this has to stop. Whatever it is you are doing to yourself – these drugs –it must stop now. If you aren’t strong enough to stop by yourself, I will get someone professional to help you. You promised me after you left your job in London that you’d see someone. I insist that you see a psychiatrist.’

  ‘You can’t possibly understand what I am about to become,’ muttered Max as he rotated the squares on his cube. He toyed with the idea of showing his father his research on the Soma; his identification and locating of the divine Soma plant itself. The moment died as two lines of red squares clicked together on his Rubik’s Cube.

  ‘No. I don’t understand. You had a fantastic job and you managed to get sacked. You spent a fortune on a listed building that frankly should be condemned. As far as I can see, all you are becoming is a tramp.’

  ‘Typical!’ Max had fumed at the Rubik’s Cube. He had completed four sides of the conundrum but still had a single blue square and a single red square in the wrong locations. ‘Fuck it. That happens every fucking time.’

  Robin Fallon sat in a filthy armchair. ‘Would you like me to speak to Richard Moore? Perhaps I could get your job back. He owes me some favours.’

  ‘You speak to that puffed up arsehole and I’ll never forgive you,’ Max hissed with rage.

  Robin felt a cold wave of despair crash down upon him as Max hurled the incomplete Rubik’s Cube into the fireplace.

  ‘Someone keeps changing the stickers around,’ Max grumbled. ‘It’s the only explanation.’

  ‘What are you talking about? Who?’

  ‘Someone comes in here and
switches the coloured stickers around. The thing is fucked now. It’s like a lobotomy.’

  ‘A lobotomy?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Max warming to his theme. ‘Like someone cuts a cube out of your brain then puts it back in the wrong way. It looks like it should work but all the connections get mixed up.’ Max stared through the lights at his father. The old man’s head had become a swirling mass of blues and greens that had erupted from nowhere. Like clouds rotating around a planet. It reminded Max of something, a scrap he had read. It was a provenance. A revelation. The cube of brain had been slotted back correctly. Suddenly, beautifully, everything made sense. He decided to keep his epiphany to himself.

  ‘All I need,’ said Max, blinking away the strange colours that swam across his field of vision, ‘is understanding.’ Max had a bottle of his elixir in the pocket of his soiled jogging bottoms. ‘I can make you understand but you won’t like it. Memory is knowledge. I can help you make the transition. Then you’ll see for yourself.’

  Robin saw an opportunity. ‘Max, if it’s understanding that you want, I have a friend who can help you.’

  Max turned his back on his father and stooped to retrieve his Rubik’s Cube from the fireplace.

  ‘Did you ever meet Jack Harvey?’ Robin continued. ‘He’s a police psychiatrist. He works in Huntingdon.’

  Max laughed hysterically. ‘A policeman! That’s fantastic. What’s he going to do? Wheelclamp my cerebellum?’

  ‘He’s a psychiatrist. A very good one. He helped me after your mother died. Maybe he could understand you – what you are becoming – better than me.’

  Max went quiet for a second.

  Perhaps this policeman was Brihaspati, the sage of the gods. Perhaps he could be a mouthpiece, translate the teachings of the Soma into a language mortals could understand, refract the divine light into some sort of obvious fucking rainbow.

  ‘Okay, I’ll see him.’

  Robin Fallon was relieved. ‘I’ll arrange it. Jack isn’t supposed to do private consultations but I’ll sort something out.’

  ‘Chequebook psychiatry. That’s a fucking riot!’ Max was laughing again.

  ‘Believe what you want.’

  Max watched as the lights danced away from his father’s face and the turquoise clouds began to dissipate.

  ‘Here endeth the lesson,’ he shouted as his father left the room.

  Max stopped the playback in his mind. It was disturbing him now. He knew that he no longer had to deal with such contempt masquerading as paternal concern. Pain was surging up behind his eyes like a building electrical charge. He looked around the derelict room and wondered whom he had been talking to. He couldn’t see anybody. He lifted Jack Harvey’s head from his lap and considered it for a moment. The sage of the gods had disappointed him. Fallon blinked in discomfort. The lights had become more aggressive, more persistent. The memory of his father’s visit had awoken them. They had started to assume forms. There were terrible shapes and demons. He tried to swat them away as they ghosted across his field of vision. He sank to the floor as they nibbled at his head. They were the Assura: demons bent on sucking him dry of the divine Soma juice. Harvey’s head fell to the floor with a dull thud.

  Max sank to his knees and then rolled in agony on the dusty floor of the library as they tore holes in his head and swam into his throat and down into his stomach. The pain was everywhere. He shuddered and retched as he felt the demons laying eggs under his skin; as they writhed and stung at his stomach like a bellyful of electric eels. His skin bubbled and itched as the eggs hatched and the larvae scratched and wriggled through his flesh, feeding on the blood of the Soma. The fluid would make them immortal. He couldn’t let that happen. He had to fight them now before they became too powerful.

  Max screamed and bellowed in fury, trying to tear the irritations from his body. Suddenly, the demons were gone and the lights retreated to the edge of his field of vision. He began to relax. He would piss the eels out of his system later.

  Max collapsed into an armchair and waited for dawn.

  33

  2nd May

  Alison Dexter was working at her desk by 7a.m. The night had been long and tortuous. She was glad when it was over. She wanted to fill her head with information to blot out the memory. She read through Ian Stark’s papers, his diary and his mobile phone bills. Dexter justified this by reminding herself that Stark had been murdered and that checking through his records was a legitimate investigative procedure. However, the more time she spent, the more she came to focus on Mark Willis’s phone number. The same way she had stared at her mobile phone for six months of her life waiting for the same number to appear.

  Mark Willis was a blister on her soul that stung. In her mind, she had tried to turn him into an abstraction: an example of what can happen when you let your guard down. Now he had become a reality again. She had to get a clearer understanding of his relationship with Stark, figure out exactly why he had come to New Bolden. That was another legitimate investigative procedure, she told herself.

  Dexter picked up her phone and called the number of CID at Leyton Police Station in East London. She knew the number well. She’d been on the other end of it for three years.

  ‘McInally,’ grunted a hard London voice.

  ‘Early start, Guv?’

  ‘Who’s that?’

  ‘Alison Dexter.’

  There was a brief pause as Chief Inspector Paddy McInally absorbed the information. ‘Fuck me!’ he boomed eventually.

  ‘I don’t do charity work.’

  ‘Sexy Dexy! I don’t believe it.’

  ‘Don’t call me that, please.’

  ‘How’s life up in bandit country?’

  ‘The usual. Cattle rustling, sheep shagging, ritual decapitations.’ Dexter smiled. Her old boss had a curious knack for cheering her up.

  ‘Read about that,’ McInally observed. ‘Nasty. Some junkie?’

  ‘It’s early days, guv,’ Dexter replied.

  McInally laughed out loud. ‘In other words, you haven’t got a Scooby!’

  ‘Learned from the master, didn’t I?’

  ‘You are a cheeky bastard!’ McInally’s voice softened. ‘Ah. We miss you, Dexy. When are you coming back to civilization?’

  ‘No time soon.’

  ‘That’s a crying shame.’

  ‘Guv. I need some information. You could be the man.’

  ‘Ask the oracle.’

  Dexter took a deep breath. ‘Mark Willis.’

  ‘Go on.’ The humour had gone from McInally’s voice. Willis was a running sore for him too.

  ‘I’ve heard a whisper up here that Ian Stark – the first murder victim – was mixed up with Willis. Drug shit. I’m trying to tie up some loose ends.’ It was only a slight lie.

  McInally slurped some coffee. ‘You sure that’s all? I’m not a dating agency.’

  ‘Do me a favour, guv. He’s nothing to me.’ That was a bigger lie. Whenever Willis became entangled in her life, Dexter always found herself becoming entangled in deceit.

  ‘Mark Willis,’ McInally sighed. ‘Why won’t that name just go away?’

  ‘Tell me about it.’

  ‘Well, Alison, he’s become the professional toe rag that he always showed the potential to be. Willis has become quite a big fish since you went rural.’

  ‘How so?’

  ‘Pills. Ecstasy. Smack. You name it. He’s made some heavy-duty connections in London and overseas. He supplies drugs in bulk to club pushers. We’re talking big numbers. All over the East End and into Essex and Kent. At least until recently.’

  ‘I don’t understand.’ Dexter was making notes.

  ‘Dexy, I like you and I trust you. This goes no further. Right?’

  ‘Understood.’

  ‘Willis is in trouble and has gone AWOL.’

  Dexter bit her lip anxiously. It bled slightly.

  ‘You heard of the Moules?’ McInally continued.

  ‘Of course. Casinos and shit?’ />
  ‘Casinos, money laundering. The list’s as long as the Romford Road.’

  ‘And Willis is involved.’

  McInally snorted. ‘You could say that. He owes them. Owes them big apparently. Word is up to a hundred thousand.’

  ‘Jesus.’

  ‘He always liked to talk the big game. Well, it’s blown up in his face large style. Gambling debts.’

  ‘Idiot.’

  ‘Dexy, I’d crucify that bastard with blunt nails for what he’s done. But even I wouldn’t wish Eric Moule on him.’

  Dexter agreed. ‘Nasty.’

  ‘That may be the understatement of the new century.’ McInally was beginning to sense that Dexter wasn’t playing entirely straight. ‘Alison, if that wanker turns up on your patch I want to know about it. I need to have a long, intimate chat with him about a number of issues.’

  ‘You’ll be the first to know, guv.’

  ‘Come home soon, Dexy,’ McInally shouted. ‘There’s a cup of tea and a bacon sandwich waiting here for you.’

  ‘You’re a gentleman.’

  ‘Only where you’re concerned.’

  Dexter put the phone down. She felt herself welling up with tears. Only Paddy McInally could make her nostalgic for Leyton High Street. She looked up and noticed Underwood was standing in her doorway.

  ‘You okay, tiger?’ he asked uncomfortably.

  ‘Fine.’ Dexter was surprised to see him and checked her watch. ‘I thought I was picking you up at eight?’

  ‘Couldn’t sleep.’

  Dexter suddenly looked very small in her chair. ‘Sleep would be nice,’ she said quietly.

  ‘Do you want to hear about these coins, then?’ Underwood entered the room.

  ‘Coins?’

  ‘The coins found on Stark, Harvey and in Jensen’s car.’

  Dexter remembered. ‘Sorry, I’m being dense. Three ten-pence coins on Stark, three found next to Jack and two on Jensen’s car seat.’

  ‘The killer’s signature.’

  ‘Calm down, John!’ Dexter reached into her pocket and pulled out a handful of coins. ‘I’ve got six tens and twenty here. No ones chopped my head off. Could be just coincidence.’