Sympathy for the Devil

by Howard Marks

  ‘The rumour is that’s Angel Jones, it’s the same man.’

  She snorted a low, derisive laugh, tightened her grip again. ‘That’s bullshit, impossible. Jones is a lifer, his sentence is indefinite.’

  ‘I know,’ he said quietly. ‘But they’re saying Jones was de-sectioned, released after an appeal a couple of years back. The whole thing was hushed up by the Home Office, one of those secret releases, like the Jamie Bulger killers, no press coverage.’

  Catrin didn’t believe this for a moment, it sounded like some crazy rumour that had got a grip on everyone, had made them all hysterical with fear. She knew things happened like this in small communities. She also knew it wasn’t possible. Jones was about as likely to have been appealed as the Yorkshire Ripper. She moved her face close up to the doctor’s, her tone soft now, tender. ‘But they must’ve got that wrong, the evidence against Jones was airtight. They got him on the drugs he’d used to spike the girls he held in his cellar. I know the officer who busted his dealer, that’s how he came to bust Jones.’

  ‘They say that officer retracted his testimony at the appeal. Then Jones was cleared by the Broadmoor psychiatric panel and walked.’

  ‘What?’ She was trying to keep the fear out her own voice now. There was a certain disturbing logic in what the doctor had just said.

  There had been positive IDs of the tattoo from every one of Jones’s victims. But it was the drugs that had made the case airtight: the exact chemical footprints on all the vics’ tox reports were in Jones’s spiking agents, only Jones’s DNA on the drug kit. That’s why Rhys’s evidence, the linking of Jones to the drugs, had been crucial.

  She bent closer to the doctor. ‘This orderly from Broadmoor, is he credible or like those other stoners in the canteen?’

  The doctor said nothing so she exerted a little more pressure. ‘He’s left,’ he said quickly. ‘He didn’t want to work here with Jones around.’

  Her thumb dug into his windpipe. ‘Any proof this man is Jones, apart from this rumour?’

  The doctor was moving his wrists, trying to loosen the wire. She reached down to tighten it.

  ‘Ever see this man with anyone from outside?’

  ‘No one sees him much.’ He said nothing more. She waited, her face close to his, gently released her other hand’s grip on his throat again. ‘He’s with a girl sometimes, looks like a club girl, she has tattoos and that.’

  ‘Always the same girl?’

  ‘Seems so, I’ve never seen her up close. She doesn’t live in the village, maybe in the woods somewhere. They say she’s his regular sub from way back, a seriously hardcore case she must be to stick by him all these years.’ The doctor seemed to be trying to get her trust now. Catrin could see it in his eyes, he was begging her to let him go, but she had to stay strong.

  Catrin turned all he’d said round in her mind. Her first thought was that this girl sounded rather like the one Della had met on the BDSM site, the spaced-out one who was into Seerland. She remembered how Della said the girl had Jones in her thrall. Jones having a girlfriend had never been mentioned in the press. It still seemed unlikely he could have had one and that all this time she’d remained out of sight. Huw had said the girl was no more than a ghost who existed in Della’s mind. ‘They say what Jones’s connection to this area is, why he’s come here?’ she asked.

  ‘No.’

  Catrin took a deep breath. She looked back at the door, listened. The men were still pacing outside. Soon they’d begin wondering why the doctor hadn’t come out. There wasn’t much time. She glanced up at the mirror, thought she saw vague shapes behind the glass, the outline of something low and long. She eased the paper back into the doctor’s mouth and pulled him gently into the corner. What he’d just said had confirmed her worst suspicions. But elements about the story were still bothering her. Surely Jones’s release would have reached the press? Even with a Home Office shut-down, a closed court throughout the proceedings, gagging orders, the whole shebang. Then after the verdict anonymity orders, a new identity, new National Insurance number, new past, new everything, like Maxine Carr. Even then, word still usually crept out. But in this case it hadn’t.

  It was just the sort of dirt Della usually got hold of. This story would have been a big scoop for her. Della had a network of sources throughout the criminal justice system. That was why everyone left her alone. Maybe that was what Della had tried to reach her about that final morning before the fire. Then she thought about Rix, about Thomas: both must have known Jones was out. It would have been flagged for Rix’s attention as chief of the neighbouring force to where Jones had been released. Yet he’d kept it quiet. And Thomas was part of the original case team. He must have been called as a witness at the retrial, or at least known about it. Yet he’d told her nothing. It felt all wrong. Like all along a lot of people, powerful people, had been protecting Jones. But why protect a monster?

  Catrin attached the flex binding the doctor to the radiator, which she checked was cold. His eyes still pleaded with her, but she looked away. The doorknob turned. One of the orderlies was calling something. She didn’t have much time. She looked at the mirror again, the shapes inside it. It must be a two-way, she thought. They used them to watch disturbed patients in the old days. She worked her fingers under the rim, made a small gap and got a glimpse of a dark space on the other side.

  The mirror was now loose in its moulding, and she was able to squeeze head first through the gap. She dropped down into the darkness on the other side, and peered around her in the half-light. The space was much larger, higher than she’d expected. She couldn’t see the full extent of it. The object on the floor looked like a long sofa. Behind it were more chairs on a stand as if in a small theatre. In the corner was a door, ajar. Light was seeping through the doorway and across the floor.

  She crept over and looked out. The corridors and the stairwell were deserted. There were no sounds from the floors above or below. At the far end, she could see a long passage, and a nurses’ station.

  She moved tight against the wall towards the nurses’ cubicle. Beyond it were stairs covered in some sort of thick rubber. Below them another passage veered off into darkness. According to the diagram, officially Jones was in charge of security, but she felt his connection to the place must be much deeper. It seemed that all the time she’d just been stepping through Jones’s labyrinth. All she really knew for sure was that she had to get to him before he got to her.

  One of the doors ahead was wedged open by a flat-bed trolley. The stairwell had been covered with a wire mesh, where a number of small objects had collected, shards of broken plates, papers and tin cans. Behind the wire were several rows of strip lights, some old and flickering.

  She heard the muted sounds of trolleys being pushed along the passages above, and a low keening sound.

  She edged forward to the edge of the nurses’ station. Partitions of reinforced glass enclosed two office chairs and a desk, on top of it a computer screen, phones, mugs. She could see no signs of photographs, postcards or other personal touches, but what looked like a site map was stuck on the glass.

  There was a floor plan for a ward of twelve beds surrounded by four service passages, a series of bathrooms and consulting rooms. Slowly Catrin moved up the stairs and saw the layout was similar. A nurses’ station, connecting service passages and a ward beyond. It all looked conventional enough.

  She looked around: most of the wards appeared hardly occupied. A few gaunt, lethargic-looking men in dressing gowns were sitting round tables, playing cards and watching television. They looked up at her briefly without interest, then lowered their heads.

  It must be a break between shifts, she thought, no sign of any staff. As she went down the stairs again, she stopped at each nurses’ station, glanced at the drug charts. Every rectangle represented a patient, and the grid of lines within contained the types of drugs administered, dosages and dosage times.

  The first lines showed entries for Ultram, naltrex
one and a series of other opiate agonists routinely used in the detox of heroin and methadone addicts. The second line showed dosages for standard SSRI antidepressants, Librium and other long-acting tranquillisers. The rest of the chart was given over to the results of daily saliva, nebuliser and urine tests for the main drug types – opiates, cocaine, amphetamines, benzodiazepines.

  All the medications listed were of the type that would be given to patients with conventional addictions. None seemed to relate in any way to the more extreme hallucinogen-induced conditions alluded to by the doctor on their way into the building. Most of the patient profiles looked like those of standard long-term addicts referred on by the local NHS trusts, just as the doctor had first told her.

  As she put back the charts Catrin thought she could hear from deep in the building again the high, keening sound, like the sound of a long-abandoned child crying. At the same time she was aware of a slight shuffling noise much closer at hand, a reflection moving, in the glass – something behind her.

  She felt a large hand cover her mouth, pull her head back. Her head began spinning. She closed her eyes, tried to get to her feet. But the figure was strong, pinning her down against the side of the cubicle so she could not kick out.

  Then the hand brought her head down out of the lights and its fingers prised open her eyelids. Looming over her she saw Huw’s face.

  ‘Don’t move,’ he said softly. ‘Those cameras are motion sensitive. We’re in a blind spot here – rise above a certain height and we’ll trip the alarm.’

  Catrin squeezed his hand, to show him she understood. Then she followed him back along the edge of the room and down into a narrow gap between some trolleys. He put his arms around her narrow shoulders now, stroked her damp hair.

  Huw smiled. ‘I bribed them. It wasn’t cheap. They were scared half out of their wits. But in the end they came round.’ He gestured down at the fading light. ‘They dropped me at the gates, then ran like bats out of hell.’

  He was wearing walking boots, and a padded green jacket. His binoculars rested against his chest.

  As she told him she was looking for the man the orderlies believed was Jones, she saw a look of bewilderment cross his face, felt him grip her shoulders. ‘It seems there was a mistrial,’ she said. ‘Rhys retracted his evidence against Jones in an appeal held in closed court. Looks like the whole thing was kept under wraps. One of those executive decisions by the Home Office? It seems some powerful elements have been protecting Jones. He’s been here all this time on one of those secret release programmes, covered by an anonymity order.’

  ‘Anything else not right about this place?’

  ‘The doctor mentioned patients who have conditions resulting from extreme hallucinogens, the ones who never come back from their trips, but I haven’t seen any.’ Catrin held his hand tighter, more for his benefit than hers. She sensed a potential link with the extreme trance drugs in the Heath Park lab, and those in the grow-sheds. If Jones had been the elusive figure behind it, if all along he’d had political or criminal justice protection, this would explain how he’d evaded arrest for so long.

  She pointed up at the smoked-glass dome. ‘All these cameras. There has to be a central monitoring room that covers the entire complex.’

  Catrin led him to the window and pointed to the high gable looming above them, its windows facing the mist-shrouded outline of the escarpment. ‘That’s the highest point. It has sightlines over the entire area,’ she said. ‘The monitoring room should be up there under that gable.’

  She told him that the route there would be through the service passages, that when the place had been a private house those had been the routes the staff used. The staff always slept in the attics, so these passages would lead to the spaces under the gables.

  As they moved beyond the wards, the corridors became narrow and shadowy like a passage backstage in a theatre. In places there was not enough room to walk two abreast, and Catrin led the way using a torch.

  Along the inner side of the passage were unused offices, most of which now served as storage rooms. She noticed a row of old gurney beds, some lounge chairs covered with twists of stuffing. Through the windows on the far side of these rooms she could make out figures in white coats, following them at a distance.

  The way ahead had been blocked off; they had no choice but to descend by a narrow back staircase. The glimpses through the windows showed an inner yard stacked with rusted railings. To its left were the windows of what looked like a long refectory or staffroom, more figures in white inside, the tables scattered with styrofoam mugs and spent coffee filters.

  She looked up again at the jagged crenellations along the rooftops. Before Huw could stop her, she took off her coat, wrapped it around her hand and picked up a length of rusted railing. Crouching, she moved nearer to the wall.

  The hallway was lit with strip lights wedged below lengths of chipboard casing. At certain points the boards had come loose, warped by the damp sea air, and through the gaps she saw coils of heavy cabling.

  Lifting the bar above the strip lights, she forced it through the half-perished rubber, sparks flying back into the darkness as the circuits fused.

  ‘We’ve probably got less than a minute before the emergency generators kick in,’ she called back to Huw. ‘Follow me.’

  Catrin ran across the dark hallway and up the flight of stairs. The banisters were thick, knotted with elaborate carvings. The shapes of the carvings snagged on her jeans, but within seconds she’d reached the upper landing.

  Through the open door she saw the silhouette of a man with a shaven head. Running down into his collar were the leads of earpieces, his head was bobbing to a trance-like beat. He rose from his seat, moving with muscle-bound steps across the room.

  His arms outstretched in front in the dark, he was feeling his way to a door in an inner wall. As he half turned, she recognised him as the man they had sat next to in the canteen, the table-watcher.

  ‘He doesn’t exactly look on the ball,’ Huw whispered at her shoulder. ‘But we’ll need to move fast, get out before he returns.’

  The emergency power had come on in the stairwell. On the desk were monitors, several baggies, over-full ashtrays and crumpled twists of silver foil. The monitor opposite the chair was showing footage from a porno webcam, in grainy black-and-white, pale limbs pulsing in a staccato rhythm across the screen.

  The screen was partly hidden by the coils of a water pipe. Huw shifted it out of the way. His head was bowed now over the image on the screen. Catrin approached until the image became clearer.

  A man and a woman were lying on a black, plasticated sheet, their bodies shiny with oil. The man was bending over some attachment on the back of the woman, who was out of shot. He wore a black leather mask and on his chest was a tattoo, a raven’s beak. Strands of grey hair came out of the back of the mask. She knew immediately the man was Jones.

  In the lower left-hand corner of the screen was a digital clock which showed that what they were watching was happening in real time. Emerging from off-screen, hands were pushing the woman’s buttocks wider apart. Further up her back was a black shape, another raven. The rest of it was covered with welts and bruises. As they skewed to one side of the bed, the sweat-matted hair that hung down over the woman’s face parted for a moment. Catrin caught a glimpse of young bruised eyes, half senseless, staring vacantly out ahead of her.

  Then they moved out of view. Catrin was left looking at the empty, ruffled sheet, the heavy wooden panelling around the bed carved with satyrs.

  ‘That girl,’ she said, ‘I’ve seen her before.’

  ‘In one of the misper searches?’

  ‘No, more recently.’ It didn’t take her long to get it. It had been on the BDSM site, one of the girls among Fransis’s contacts. She recognised the features from photos of several of his other contacts. He’s been using the same girl, she thought, to model for the profiles he’d invented, just altering the make-up and camera angles: that was clever
– safer than scanning images from other sites.

  ‘That’s Jones’s girl, I’d bet on it,’ she said. ‘His willing sub, his accomplice.’ The camera stayed on the elaborate carvings around the bed. Some showed warped grotesque faces, ancient deities, horned beasts. In the background was a larger space, almost in darkness. From some points deeper in came a flickering that might have been an arrangement of candles on the floor. Catrin felt she was looking at something familiar.

  ‘Let’s see if we can find that place on other cameras. That way we can get a sense of where he might be,’ she said.

  Huw sat in front of the bank of screens, his hand on the control that worked the cursor. Each of the eight screens divided into grids of eight smaller pictures, so they now had sixty-four distinct views of the complex above their heads. Most showed stretches of empty corridor, half-lit hallways and landings, the storerooms and yards they had passed through earlier. Occasionally orderlies could be seen crossing the empty spaces, sweeping torch beams along the passages and into ventilation shafts.

  ‘They’re out looking for us,’ Catrin said.

  On one screen were images of the wards she’d just visited. Huw scrolled through several of the first ward, then the others lower down. The men in their dressing gowns were still slumped in front of the television. The rest of the images showed the outside of the clinic, seemingly endless shots of barbed-wire fences and black wooded hillsides.

  ‘There’s nothing else here.’ Huw moved back to the original shot. Unlike in other cameras, the lens position was fixed. The subdivisions in the screen merely showed the same flickering space. It was windowless, empty, just the old panelling, the bed in the centre as in a film set, the cave-like space receding into blackness.

  He slid the cursor down the sidebar until he found the zoom function. The image of the panelling expanded and a small section of the wall now filled the entire screen.

  Under the surface of the paint Catrin saw tiny craters and crevices, but she could not see a single hair or speck of fluff on the dark surface.