by Matt Drabble
Danny gripped the edge of the large oak desk. His knuckles turned white as he squeezed the hard wood in barely suppressed anger. “No, you sack of shit, I think that you’re forgetting just who you’re talking to.”
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Jane was cleaning out her work locker when she felt eyes staring at her from behind. Her morning had started badly and gotten worse very quickly thereafter. Her face had been splashed across a national newspaper and was now beginning to pop up on TV news bulletins. She had never wanted any sort of fame to be associated with her gift and now her worst fears were coming true.
The photo that the TV was using was barely recognisable to her and she had to admit that she looked like a criminal on screen. She was blissfully devoid of immediate neighbours but her narrow lane had already been overstocked with press intrusion. Her quiet seclusion had been shattered forever and her family home would never be quite the same again.
She had dressed comically with a large overcoat and baseball cap that was pulled down low on her head, teamed with sunglasses. She knew that if they had her address then they would also have her car details. The woodland around her property was thick and dense and had allowed her to hike into the next village over. From there she had called a taxi firm which had driven her into Faircliff and to a car rental outlet where she’d reluctantly paid for a small hatchback, immediately missing her 4x4.
There were very few people in her life that she cared enough about, but Jessica Nelson, her boss at “Best 4 Pets”, was someone that she owed an explanation to at the very least.
The store had only just opened when she arrived and she slipped in quickly and unobserved. She headed for Jessica’s office by the stockroom at the rear of the store, only to find it empty. She detoured towards the staffroom and towards the small locker that she had there to remove her few personal belongings. It wouldn’t take the press long to find the pet store and soon Jessica and the other staff would be bombarded with flashbulbs and questions.
She spun around, hoping to see Jessica but found only Marty Kline instead. “Marty,” she said as her eyes darted towards the door as he was currently standing between her and the exit.
“Jane,” he replied sadly but said no more.
“How’s the head?” she asked lightly.
He only shrugged in a non-committal answer.
The kid had never struck her as anything other than a love-struck teenager before, but now she felt an air of unease, as though really seeing him for the first time. A horrible feeling started to grow and squirm in the pit of her stomach; there was something suddenly all too familiar about Marty Kline.
“Have you seen Jessica this morning?” she asked, trying to keep the tenseness out of her voice.
He only stared at her with his head slightly tilted to one side as though he was listening to an internal tune that was sound tracking his thoughts.
She was taller and physically stronger than him and had little doubt that she could handle him in a normal confrontation, but this suddenly felt far from normal.
The staffroom seemed to dim as the shadows encroached inward, strangling the light until it choked. She could feel her entourage on the outskirts of reality; the dead were watching hungrily and that was never a good sign. She tensed her body and shifted her weight to a fighter’s stance, ready for his attack. The air was sucked free of life and she felt like she couldn’t breathe but she wouldn’t blink.
“Hello?” A voice called out from the doorway and immediately the mood was shattered into a thousand black shards.
Jessica Nelson emerged into the room and Jane felt a huge sense of relief as Marty turned away with an odd look on his face as though he’d just woken from a bad dream that he couldn’t quite grasp as it floated away only leaving a bad taste behind.
“Ah, Jane,” Jessica said catching sight of her. “I was wondering if I might have a word, although I can see from your now empty locker perhaps you were having the same thoughts.”
Jane waited until Marty had left the room completely before she allowed herself to relax.
“Are you okay, dear?” Jessica asked, seemingly with genuine concern.
“Yeah, I’m fine. I wanted to come and apologise about whatever trouble you might have had or might get on my behalf.”
“Well I suppose it can’t be helped.”
Jane watched her boss’ face carefully for any signs of distrust or fear but couldn’t find any. “Did you want to ask me any questions before I go?”
Jessica stared long and hard at her. “Could you talk to my mother?” she finally asked.
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Randall read the contract again and again, his eyes pausing every time that they reached the money figure near the bottom of the page. It was everything that he had hoped for and a little bit more. He had already reached out to his ex-wife who had responded with well worn scepticism to his financial claims, but at least she had listened.
The Herald had promised him anonymity, which had been one of his main conditions ever since Alfonso Ramsey had made his opinions clear. The story was too huge now to have a lid put back on it and Ramsey was just going to have to live with it and there was still more to come. He had originally wanted to end the story with its natural conclusion, but his impatience and declining health had overtaken his thoughts and he’d reluctantly decided to cash in early.
He had enough of the story to reduce the editors of The Herald to quivering wrecks with shaking hands as they signed on the dotted line, but it wasn’t done. The Crucifier was still masked and until he was brought into the light of day, Randall still had a job to do.
Chalmers, Barrett and Parkes’ faces were all about to be strewn across the front pages, named and shamed, in the coming days and he felt that part of his debt had been paid to his old friend.
The hotel room was a step up from the one that Marion Ramsey had set him up in, in what seemed like years ago now. He felt a stab of regret for her demise but not that much when he remembered her father standing over him and breaking his hand. In his experience, apples never fell that far from the tree.
His new handler was a woman called Helen Allen. She was a stern, officious woman who showed little interest for him personally, only the prize that he offered which suited him just fine. He was in control now and he only fed Helen what he wanted to and kept the lion’s share safely hidden away. It had been Helen who had insisted on him taking a medical, despite his protestations to the contrary. He knew that it mattered little just what exactly was wrong with him; he only knew that it was fatal and his time was limited. But she’d shown up at his hotel room with a discreet doctor in tow who’d prodded and poked him with fingers and needles before slinking away. He knew that his new handler was only concerned that he would keel over before they got their pound of flesh from him and, considering the deal he’d made, he couldn’t blame her.
He lay on the plush bed and consulted his thoughts. Thanks to his bullying of the police aide, he had a name - Marty Kline - but it was a name that was not written down anywhere in his carefully secluded notes. This was his one jewel that he wasn’t going to share with anyone, not yet. Marty Kline wouldn’t be brought down by the police. He was going to be caught by Randall Zerneck. The money that he was going to earn was for his son and would secure Randall’s legacy in his boy’s eyes, but when Randall brought down the Crucifier, his legacy would be secured before the whole world. It was time to put away the reporter and find the detective in him.
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Commander Jeffrey Barrett looked down nervously at the floor. It had been a long time since he had been by far the least senior man in a room and it wasn’t sitting well with him. There were senior officers and politicians viewing him with dead shark eyes and he could feel their anger. He had promised them all that the situation was under control and that their fears of much unwanted publicity were unfounded, but yet here they all sat.
“How much damage are we talking about?” an elderly man in a smartly-tailored gre
y suit demanded.
“Worse case. More than we can handle,” another replied. “It will mean resignations and plenty of them.”
“But it’s just one woman and one police station,” a man barked, who Barrett knew to make police decisions at the very top table. “Surely we can just make an example of a few rotten apples in one rotten barrel?”
“Well, let’s see now, Alistair: we’ve got police cover-ups, falsifying evidence and statements to the public; we’ve got lies about murder cases both past and present. Oh, and some kind of bloody magician on the payroll!”
“Psychic,” Barrett couldn’t help but interject.
“Excuse me, Commander?” his superior snapped.
“She’s a psychic, Sir, … you know, a medium - talks to the dead and all that…” he said, his voice trailing off.
“Oh. Well now, that’s wonderful, Commander; perhaps you and this bitch can get a circus act on the road after all this!”
Barrett kept his mouth shut and made a mental note to continue to do so.
“How much backing have we got to do what might need to be done?”
“The Prime Minister wouldn’t even tolerate the suggestion of impropriety,” the first suited man said with a heavy sigh.
“Bloody boy scout,” the second man snapped.
“This…, Chalmers,” Barrett’s boss asked him, looking down at his notes. “How much can we rely on the man?”
“Superintendant Chalmers is a career officer, Sir; he’s a company man.”
“It’s too bad that the first case didn’t happen on his watch. Then we could just lay everything at his door and be done with it,” the politician sighed.
“And this Parkes woman? When we discredit her, how hard is she going to kick back?”
“I couldn’t say, Sir,” Barrett answered honestly.
“Didn’t she get an officer killed on the first case?” the second suit asked hopefully.
“An officer did die, yes, Sir - a DI Karl Meyers,” Barrett replied. “By coincidence the man’s son is the lead officer on the new case.”
“Can we use him to get at the woman?”
“The word is that she is helping the son on the new case,” Barrett replied with a wince as the words sunk in around the room.
“Jesus H Christ, what the hell sort of division are you running here, Barrett?”
“I can assure you all that this was done without my knowledge,” he answered meekly.
“Well then. That’s Chalmers, the Parkes woman and DI Meyers who all need to take the blame and then the fall, Barrett. I don’t care how you do it but I want this mess purged, and quickly, before we add your name to the list.”
“I’m sorry, Sir, just what exactly do you mean?” Barrett asked. “I want to be of service, honestly I do, but I don’t want to be hung out to dry here with a whole barrage of culpable denials down the line.”
“Barrett, just get it done; whatever it takes - whatever.”
With that, the three men left and Barrett was left with three problems and no solutions. This wasn’t the movies and he wasn’t about to start tampering with brake lines, but he had to deal with a mess of Chalmers’ making and he was going to have to get his hands dirty.
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Jane knew that what Jessica was asking was as near to impossible as it got. She could no more talk to her boss’s deceased mother via a psychic link than she could pick up the phone and dial heaven direct. She’d tried to gently explain this fact, but Jessica wasn’t in the mood to listen. Jane cursed herself for wanting to help and agreeing to try.
They were sitting in Jessica’s office with the door locked and the staff under strict instructions to give their boss some privacy. She had told them that she was in with the VAT man and was to be disturbed under no circumstances.
“Have you got something intensely personal belonging to your mother?” she asked.
Jessica removed a silver St Christopher medal from around her neck and passed it warily across the desk. “She wore this until the day she died; she never took it off.”
“Look, Jessica,” Jane tried again. “This really isn’t going to work. It’s not something that can be controlled like that.”
“I understand, Jane, but please try; it can’t hurt, can it? It’s…, it’s important that I speak to her.”
Jane sighed and cleared her mind. She gripped the medallion gently but firmly in her hand and opened herself up. Maybe she would get lucky; maybe the gods would be smiling just this once, and she would find the woman that she was looking for against all odds.
She waited for the doorway to open before stepping across the threshold. Time slowed in the pendulum swing of the scythe’s blade and the Shadow World turned into sepia tones. She had tried to find individuals before on the side of the doorway but the world was too large to track down a single person. Faces flooded at her with dizzying speed, and cold tentacles brushed her skin, leaving icy burns that scarred her flesh. She tried to stand against the tirade as the dead pushed at the small gap that she opened, their spirits thudding heavily against her barriers, desperate to force their way free.
She knew almost instantly that this had been a mistake. There was turmoil here like she had never seen before. The dead were surging in a tornado of chaos and she was going to drown here if she didn’t get out. Dimly, she was aware of Jessica’s voice someway off in the distance, but she could not answer the woman now. The spirits tore at her in desperation and Jane pushed hard at the barrier to close the door with everything that she had. Her recent troubles had hardened her will and strengthened her gift beyond anything that she had been capable of before and it took every ounce of her to force the door shut despite the clawing fingers. And then suddenly it was done.
She stood panting with her hands on her knees, regardless of the fact that she was not really here and any tiredness was all in her mind. With the door closed, she started to catch a scent, something familiar that she hadn’t come looking for: it was him.
She followed his trail on instinct, tracking him carefully so as not to alert him to her presence. She was fairly confident now that she could remain undetected, but that didn’t stop her from walking as lightly as possible.
His path was narrow and surrounded by darkness. The forest thicket was twisted with wickedly sharp thorns and rotting roots. The smell was rancid and almost overpowering as she followed in his footsteps. There were images off to the side, leering out of the shadows, bright halos of light that soon descended into faces splattered with blood and tortured pain. These were his victims and how he saw them: women who offered him salvation, only to then show their true faces of betrayal.
She walked further into the black heart of his forest, determined to catch sight of something useful, something real to bring him down.
She looked down to see that the forest floor had given way to a stone corridor. She was suddenly inside and so was he. Footsteps echoed off the walls as he walked casually, watching his surroundings. She caught sight of framed pictures hanging in antique frames. The hallway was long and there were multiple doors along the way. The building was old and had a feel of structure and organisation about it. She could hear mumbling voices but they were too fuzzy to make out clearly. He strode purposefully and without fear of discovery as though he was allowed to be here.
Jane tried to look around the outskirts of his vision to catch something identifiable. He paused by a door and suddenly she was sure that he had felt her presence. She froze on the spot and tried to blend into the background of his mind. It seemed like an age before he opened the door and stepped through.
Inside was a huge room full of buzzing people. They seemed smaller and, for a moment, she wondered just how far away they were, before she spotted the fact that they were all female and all wearing the same outfits with sewn badges on the blazers; it was a girls’ school and the man was looking out over an ocean of glowing halos.
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On a whim, Danny decided to make a few cal
ls and purchase a couple of tickets to the big fight in a couple of weeks’ time. Nathan was a big boxing fan and for the first time, Danny thought it might be about time that he started taking some advice concerning his private life. It couldn’t hurt, after all.
Bradshaw had slipped away earlier on, after their meeting with Chalmers. The FBI man claimed that he had a little private business to attend to before they’d meet up again later.
The American had certainly proven himself useful when dealing with the superintendant but he was still largely a mystery and Danny did not like unsolved problems.
He was parked up discreetly waiting for Jane. He’d finally gotten hold of her after a day of unanswered phone calls and had been relieved to do so. However, the broken story had screwed all of them and the investigation. Faircliff Police Station was under siege from the national press and every kind of local pressure group demanding answers. The Crucifier case was rapidly becoming smothered under a blanket of bureaucracy and nothing was going to get done anytime soon. Whatever Jane had planned was now going to be their last throw of the dice before Barrett and the suits shut them all down and hung them all out to dry.
He looked up as Jane emerged from the delivery door of the large pet store. She hurried her way across the car park in the most conspicuous attempt at being inconspicuous that he had ever seen.
“What are you doing?” he asked, grinning as she jumped into the car.
“Trying to keep out of sight,” she said, pulling the baseball cap down over her face.
“Yeah, good job,” he laughed as he pulled away. “You had much trouble today?”
“Just the world’s press camped outside my door and I’ve had to leave my job as well.”
“Sorry about that.”
“It’s not your fault, Danny. I decided to get back on the horse and I can’t act surprised that she’s bucking hard.”
“Did your boss take your leaving okay?”
“She asked me to do a séance and talk to her mother.”
“Shit, you can do that?”
She withered him with a look that answered the question. “I’m not a circus act, Danny. None of this is an exact science. If it was, my life would be a whole lot easier. Where’s our colonial cousin?” she asked.