‘Okay, so just two sets of prints then.’
‘I said we were expecting to find two sets. Fact is, we only found the vic’s.’
It could never be simple.
‘Could the killer have been wearing gloves?’ I asked.
‘It’s possible.’
‘Or maybe he wiped the scene down before he took off.’
Stronge returned a head wobble. ‘And only removed his own dabs?’
Fair point.
Cath arrived with a serving of undercooked eggs, a scattering of anaemic chips, and a slice of blood sausage. She delivered it to the table with a cacophonous clatter that put my teeth on edge, then sloped off to the kitchen without making eye contact. The phrase “customer satisfaction” had never been high among Cath’s watchwords.
‘Okay, so no dabs. What about blood?’ I asked.
‘Only the victim’s.’
‘Any other DNA?’
‘How do you mean?’
‘The girl was an escort.’
‘I know that.’
I cocked my head. Stronge wasn’t getting it, but then she had been up all night combing a crime scene.
‘What I’m saying is, were there any other… deposits left at the scene?’
It clicked. ‘Oh. No, we swabbed, but the vic was clean.’
That struck me as peculiar. I mean, why hire an escort if you didn’t plan on having sex?
At the risk of catching the rough side of Stronge’s tongue, I said, ‘So what you’re basically telling me is you’ve got bugger all.’
She hoisted a razor-thin eyebrow. ‘Did I say that?’
‘You might as well have. Look, you and your boys did your thing, but I have some tricks of my own. The sooner I get a look-see at that crime scene, the better.’
‘If you hadn’t interrupted me, you’d know I wasn’t finished talking.’
I stared at her a while. ‘Okay, I’ll bite. What have you got?’
She leaned back in her chair. ‘A mirror, taken down off the wall and left on a tabletop with traces of powder on it.’
‘Coke?’
‘No, this wasn’t some cheap gack you can pick up anywhere. This was a rare designer drug, street name: “clad”, short for “ironclad”. Extremely hard to come by and extremely dangerous.’
‘So what are you thinking? The suspect banged some up his snout to get himself in the killing mood?’
‘Maybe, maybe not,’ said Stronge. ‘Honestly, we don’t know what the stuff does besides make dead bodies. We’ve had our tox boys look into it but all we get back is Unknown Compound.’
‘Could there be an Uncanny element to it?’
‘Could well be.’ She tucked into her black pudding. ‘God, this tastes like a dog’s back.’
‘You’re eating congealed blood, woman, what did you expect?’
Stronge shrugged and returned to the case. ‘Here’s an idea: what if it wasn’t the perp snorting the powder? What if it was the vic? A lot of users in her profession, a lot of damaged people. Drugs help them blot out the pain.’
I had a muse on that. ‘I don’t think so. I offered her a drink back at the office and she turned me down.’
‘What does that have to do with anything? Any woman with a brain in her head would turn you down.’
Stronge was missing the point, but willfully so.
‘I’m saying she didn’t strike me as an addict. Too in control. Too collected. No, that gear belonged to our man, I’m sure of it.’
While Stronge thought on that, Frank sought to seize on the distraction and attempted to sneak some black pudding off her plate, black pudding being one of the few things he eats beside brains (no doubt because of its offal-like quality). His thievery was met with a sharp slap to the back of the hand. He recoiled from Stronge wearing a face like a dog caught with a chewed-up slipper in his mouth, head hung with guilt, eyes askance.
‘I thought you said that food tasted bad,’ I put in.
‘It does,’ Stronge replied, plugging a mouthful of pudding into her gob and barely managing to talk around it, ‘but I didn’t say I wasn’t hungry.’
While she chowed down, I cogitated on the drug clue. Tali never said anything about her killer huffing dust, and she would have mentioned it if she’d seen it. I had her give me a blow-by-blow of the evening after I agreed to take her case, and nothing like that came up. My thinking: the killer must have broken out his stash after he put a bullet in her head but before her soul exited her cadaver. So he wasn’t amping himself up for the murder, he was rewarding himself for a job well done. Except… why would he stick around at the scene of the crime after he fired the shot? Who could celebrate a job well done with that much heat coming around the corner? Something didn’t add up, but since the drug was the only lead on offer, it needed chasing down.
‘This ironclad stuff; we need to find out who dealt it to the suspect and lean on them. Get them to tell us everything they know about the bloke.’
If the drug was as rare as Stronge said it was, that meant the supply of it was limited, and the number of outlets to purchase it from was scarce. So long as there were only a few people slinging the stuff, there was a good chance our guy was no stranger to his dealer. Maybe even more than that. Could be the two had built up trust and traded some personal information. The kind of information I had a real yearning for.
As usual, Stronge was a step ahead of me. She produced a slim manilla envelope from her handbag.
‘What’s that?’ I asked.
‘Our dealer.’ She emptied out the envelope and placed a stack of paperwork in front of me. It was a rap sheet, thick as my thumb. ‘The only source of ironclad in London, far as we can tell.’
‘Hang about, if you’ve brought along a grubby little dossier on this bloke then you already know he was dealing to the perp, not the vic. So what was all that stuff about, “damaged people blotting out the pain”?’
‘Just testing to make sure you had your eye on the ball.’
I could have railed against that, but I chose to take it in the spirit it was intended. ‘Always happy to show you a keen mind in action.’
Stronge tipped me a well-natured nod then removed a paperclip from the corner of the stack of paper. She spread the leaves out across the table so I could get a better look, and I leaned forward to examine them closer. Among the notes I saw mugshots of a short, unsightly man with a bulbous, bald head. When I say “short”, I mean he looked like he was kneeling on his shoes. And by bulbous, I mean absolutely huge: a sniper’s dream.
‘Eaaaaaaves,’ groaned Frank, jabbing a stiff finger at the ugly mug on the table (the photo, not the chipped crockery Stronge was drinking from, which—on closer inspection—had lipstick on the rim that didn’t match the colour she was wearing).
‘What’s he on about?’ asked Stronge.
‘He’s saying your man there is an eaves.’ I waited for a reaction but got nothing. ‘They’re a race of information gatherers. They look like this feller—like a man and a mole-rat were in a car wreck and got mashed together. Gobs full of itty-bitty fangs.’
Stronge gave me a withering look. ‘I’ve been in this game long enough to know what a bloody eaves is, thank you very much. That’s not what my silence was in aid of. What I’m saying is, if the bloke we booked had a mouthful of razor-sharp teeth, don’t you think we’d have picked up on that?’
Again, a fair point. An Uncanny selling gear to another Uncanny made a certain kind of sense, but their needle-like fangs did leave a definite impression, both in the mind and in the flesh of anyone unfortunate enough to cross them. No way there wouldn’t be a record of that on his blotter.
‘Okay, forget the eaves thing. Why don’t you save me some reading and tell me what you’ve got on this shitehawk?’
Stronge necked a bolt of coffee and filled me in. ‘The drugs squad booked him a couple of months back for slinging ‘clad, but couldn’t get a conviction. We know he’s dirty, though, and we know he’s up to his old trick
s. We also know where he’s operating from.’
‘Okay, now we’re motoring. We find this dealer, grill him, and see what he knows about our perp. So where’s his spot?’
Stronge didn’t need to consult the rap sheet for the answer, she already had it committed to memory. ‘He works out of a hardcore fetish club called F*I*S*T.’
That rang a bell. A loud one. ‘I know that place.’
Stronge’s eyebrow kicked up for the second time.
‘Don’t give me that look,’ I cut in quick. ‘I was there for a job, that’s all.’
A smirk slithered through her lips. ‘Whatever you say, friend. Whatever you say.’
Frank laughed his dumb laugh again and received another slap to the head for his trouble.
Chapter Five: Nocturnal Safari
‘Tell me again why we need to have your warmed-over corpse with us,’ Stronge whispered, shuffling uncomfortably in Frank’s shadow as we waited our turn in the heaving queue outside F*I*S*T. ‘No offence,’ she added, giving Frank an apologetic pat on the back of his hand.
‘Me and him are partners now,’ I replied, hovering invisibly by her side, ‘the brains and the brawn. I’m good for the sneaky stuff, but if we’re going to walk into a place full of perverts with whips and chains, I’d sooner go in heavy.’
Frank grunted in agreement and ground his hands together, one a pestle, the other the mortar.
The queue lurched forward a step and we followed. It would be a while before we made it to the door. Thankfully, the rain had taken the night off, so my companions were spared a drenching. Me, I dance between the raindrops.
‘What if someone figures out there’s something wrong with him?’ said Stronge, nodding at Frank. ‘Again, no offence.’
When I inhabit Frank, his skin takes on a rosy glow and his muscles behave better, which has the effect of straightening up his gait and stopping his face looking like he suffered a stroke. Working in tandem, we look, to all intents and purposes, alive. Separated, Frank looks like what he is: a walking dead man.
‘No one freaked out when they saw him in the café this morning, did they?’ I pointed out, ‘and the strip lights are so bright in there it’s like getting an X-ray. This is London, Kat. No one cares about anyone but themselves. Besides, Frank’s hardly going to raise eyebrows in a place where people are openly having it off and torturing each other. No one’s looking this way now, and you’re basically standing under a streetlight having an argument with yourself.’
Stronge cast a look around at the assorted weirdos and deviants we were shuffling in line with, none of whom gave the bloke in the trenchcoat with the spidery black veins showing through his raw chicken skin a second look. ‘Fair enough,’ she said, conceding the point.
‘The bigger issue here is how we handle this once we get inside. Assuming the dealer’s home, we need to think about how we get him to spill the beans.’
‘How do you mean?’
I gave her a flinty look. ‘The bloke we’re after is dangerous. If the dealer knows him, he’ll know that too, and he won’t want to get in his bad books.’
‘You get that I interview criminals for a living, right?’
‘Yeah, under lab conditions, but this little chat ain’t happening in a police interrogation room. We can’t be working to the letter of the law here. We’re going to have to colour outside the lines if we want to bring this killer in, because we both know he’s not going to stop at one dead hooker.’
Stronge didn’t like the sound of that, I could see it written all over her face.
‘Yes, we have a killer on our hands, but that doesn’t mean we get to go rogue.’
I laughed. ‘You’re working with a ghost and an upright corpse, mate. I reckon the boat’s already sailed on that one.’
Stronge rubbed her temples, a sure sign that she was reaching her limit with me. ‘I intend to play by the book in there, and I need to know that the both of you will do the same. So?’
Frank nodded like a pigeon pecking at a hunk of fresh bread. Stronge turned her attention to me, convinced that I was ready to cut corners if it meant getting to our killer faster, which, of course, I was. Thankfully, I was spared having to admit that by the sudden appearance of the club’s doorman. It seemed we’d finally shambled our way to the front of the queue.
‘Two?’ asked a corned beef statue with a samurai topknot and the jawbone mic, looking to Stronge and Frank, his eyes passing right through me.
‘Yes,’ said Stronge, taken by surprise but adjusting quickly.
She’d chosen not to announce that she was police in case the bouncers were aware of the dealer’s activities and were willing to usher him out of the back door at the first sign of trouble. It wasn’t uncommon for club staff to turn a blind eye to dealers operating on their premises in exchange for a cut of the profits.
The bouncer sized Stronge up. ‘You know what kind of place this is, sweetheart?’
‘Yes,’ she replied curtly.
‘You don’t look the type.’ And she really didn’t in her sensible trousers and practical shoes.
‘Sorry to disappoint.’
The goon squared his impressive shoulders as he gave Stronge and her companion a look like a scientist peering through a microscope at a particularly troubling specimen. ‘Is he all right?’ he asked.
Frank returned a crooked grin. ‘Hiiiiiii,’ he groaned, one eye swivelling unnaturally in its socket.
‘He’s fine,’ said Stronge, snaking an arm around Frank’s waist and pulling him close.
Must be nice, I thought, a bit of actual human contact. Some guys get all the luck.
The bouncer looked like he might have more to say on the matter, but the night was young and the line was long.
‘Go on then,’ he said, forgoing a pat down and waving them in.
No doubt he assumed Frank was off his nut on something, which, going by some of the gurning faces we’d seen on our way in, was par for the course at this place. It also made Frank a potential customer if we were right about the dealer being on site, which probably meant a nice bung for the bloke at the door.
I followed Stronge as she headed inside, paid for two tickets, and led Frank to the basement. The noise coming up the stairs was a kind that didn’t exist back when I was pulling air: an ear-mangling bedlam that sounded like a gunfight in a bell factory.
The stairs bottomed out into a cavernous room crammed with bodies squeezed into leather and rubber. A grey blanket of dry ice hugged the ground, and up above, a mirror ball shaped like a human skull swarmed the scene with pinpricks of silver light. A heaving dancefloor writhed with porn stars and drug fiends and performative Satanists, all of them letting loose like the end was nigh, like demons were marching on the streets of London and hellfire had boiled the Thames away. Bodies nuzzled and licked and grinded, packed together like some insane meat puzzle. I’m telling you, Buffalo Bill could have crafted a Milan fashion parade out of the amount of skin on show.
Seeing these people made me glad they’d found one another. Not because I was being community-spirited, but because I liked the idea of them all being contained in one place. This was where they belonged. Not out there in the wider world, but here in this sordid den of iniquity where they could only hurt each other.
If that sounds prudish, I’m sorry. You have to understand, a lot has happened to the world since I died: technologically, politically, and especially culturally. I’ve only been dead since 2007, but to me it feels like a century ago. Sometimes I look at the things going on around me and I don’t even know where I am. I’m still on this earth, but I’m not really a part of it anymore, not the everyday life part, anyway. I don’t mingle with normal people now, and even if I did, I doubt any of our preoccupations would overlap. I’m a ghost who hunts killers for a living; that’s something not many folks can relate to. And so, soon enough, I gave up trying. I lost touch. I let the world slip away and buried myself in my work.
But I’m trying. Trying really h
ard to become a better, more open-minded ghost. To stow away some of my more enduring prejudices and get with the times. I don’t want to wind up on the scrap heap, some knackered old relic. I refuse to go out that way: expiring at a rate of inches, a slow, creeping extinction. A death inside a death. And besides, who am I to judge these people? Sure, the woman in the pig mask gyrating around a stripper pole wasn’t the conventional sort, nor was the bloke in the nappy snorting cocaine off the back of his pet boa constrictor, but in a lot of ways, I had more in common with these freaks than I did the people outside. I was a phantom, a doomed soul, a creature of the night. That made me more like the patrons of this club than it did the buttoned-down souls on the street above, checking their socials and hurrying to their appointments.
Together we took a recce of the club, pushing through—or, in my case, passing through—the throng, trying to lay eyes on the bulb-headed pusher man. We covered every inch of the dancefloor and its surrounding area, probed every corner, nosed our way into every nook, booth, and annex. The tour came to an end in the last place anyone would want to be: the blokes’ lav.
The bogs were just what you’d expect of a nightclub convenience: walls covered in ugly graffiti and a floor that was more swamp than tile. The sound of a couple going at it hammer and tongs leaked out of a nearby cubicle, but that was nothing unusual, it was that sort of place. The only thing that really stood out was the toilet attendant in a waistcoat who stood in front of a row of miniature aftershaves and a tip jar. An attendant who was a dead ringer for the mugshots Stronge had shown us back at the café.
We had our dealer. Posing as a bathroom attendant seemed like an odd choice for a pusher of high-end product, but on second thought, it was the perfect disguise. I mean, who looks twice at the toilet guy? He could work this place, scope out clients in an intimate setting, and remain completely invisible. At least, that was the idea. At the moment we walked in on him, his presence was anything but discreet. In fact, he was the most noticeable thing in the room besides the couple going at it in the toilet cubicle, being as he was engaged in a tense disagreement that had turned physical.
Deadly Departed: A Supernatural Thriller (Fletcher & Fletcher, Paranormal Investigators Book 2) Page 4