Duet

by O'Gorman, Brian

  “Morning sir,” said Blythe as he saw Slater coming up the path. “Another nasty one I’m afraid.”

  “Oh shit, well I will go and take a look. Do we have any identification of the victims yet?”

  “Forensics have sir, but they wanted to wait for you to arrive first, plus sir…” Blythe tipped his head towards the small crowd of people that were gathering. There looked to be a local television crew arriving at the scene.

  “Oh shit. Listen, if they even threaten to come across that tape then you have the power to arrest them O.K?”

  “Yes sir.”

  “Don’t tell them anything. If they ask, just tell them there is no comment at the moment. You also might want to get some back up down here to keep everyone at a distance.”

  “I will do it right now sir,” said Blythe and began to talk into his radio. Slater nodded at him and went inside. The scene of the murders was on the third floor and Slater had to climb the stairs to get up there. Each step made his aching joints protest and through the stuffiness of his nose a smell began to waft down the stairs towards him. He knew that smell pretty well, it was the same sweet sickly smell that had been hanging around Denton’s place when he had gone there. It was the smell of dead things.

  There were dead things here alright.

  The bodies were a young man and a young girl. The man was sitting in his armchair in the living room. He had been cut open from the point of his chin right down to his crotch. His intestines were sitting in his lap like a misshapen, stinking animal. His throat had been cut right down to the bony outcrop of his larynx. Gelled blood was pooled all around him. His hands had been tied round the back of the chair and were pulled backwards at an angle that Slater thought was impossible for a human arm to go without something giving. The young man’s lifeless eyes stared at Slater. Wherever he went in the room he was sure that those glazed eyes were following him. He was certain that there was going to be another message written on the wall in blood, but there wasn’t, at least not in this room.

  The girl’s body was in the bedroom. She hadn’t been dismembered the same way that the man had been. She was lay on the bed. She was naked from the waist down. Slater knew straight away without asking any of the forensic team that she had been raped. It looked to him like she had been strangled. There were deep bruises all around the girl’s neck. The girl’s face was a deep purple colour and her lips had turned a dark shade of blue. Her mouth was hanging open in its last ditched attempt to get some air into her lungs. Her eyes were open and deeply bloodshot. Slater wanted to feel anger towards the killer, but as usual he just felt nothing other than the urge to go and find out who it was and bring them to justice as quickly as possible. He was going to call someone else in to oversee this one. He had to get out to Layton House and find out what Jenny had to tell him. He needed to get this killer arrested and put away as soon as possible. Especially if the press was going to start getting involved. They had the power to blow the whole investigation wide open and if they also discovered a link to Patrick Hurst then they were going to be swarming all over him. If that happened, then it was going to be hard for him to lure the killer out into the open. Yes, he was going to use Patrick as bait. Perhaps it was immoral to put him in harm’s way, but if it saved lives then he was going to use any means at his disposal to get the job done.

  The only problem with this double murder was that he hadn’t found a message for Patrick like he thought he was going to do. There was a pit inside of his stomach that was telling him that there was a possibility of this being a copycat. His head was logically telling him that this was the work of the same killer, but he had no way to really prove it. There was no gunshot wound this time and the strangulation of the girl and the fact that she hadn’t been dismembered didn’t sit well with him. It put doubt in his mind. That doubt stayed there until he found out the names of the victims. It made his blood turn cold when he heard it. He had heard one of the names before and the other was vaguely familiar to him, but he couldn’t quite remember where he had heard it. He needed to get up to Layton House as quickly as possible. He made his way back outside and told Blythe to get another D.C.I. on the scene because he had something to follow up on. The small crowd that had gathered outside of the building parted like Moses parting the Red Sea when they saw him going. The news reporter tried to ask him questions about what he had seen inside the building. He growled ‘No comment’ at them and got into his car. His tires screeched when he pulled away. He feared that time was getting short. He feared that the killer was going to make his move very soon.

  3.

  The room was clouded in darkness until Patrick hit the switch on the wall. The shadows in the room lit up as the overhead light flickered into life. The room was as big as the rest of the house all put together. There were sterile looking white cupboards surrounding the room. None of which had any extra equipment on them, no microscopes or any of the other clichéd items you would normally find in a laboratory of any kind. The furthest right hand side of the room was dominated by, what looked like, another room that had been added in later on. The front of the room was filled with iron bars and Patrick knew that it was where James had spent most of his time growing up. The sight of it made his blood run cold, but not as much as when his eyes came to rest on what was dominating the room.

  The Pharmacon was directly in front of them. The most dominating feature of the machine was two enormous titanium circles. One of the circles was located inside the other one and they both appeared to vanish into the floor. In the middle of the two circles was a glass chamber, big enough to fit a grown man inside with plenty of spare room. To the right of the main body of the machine was a large control desk, which looked like you needed a degree in engineering just to operate. At the right of the panel was another glass chamber, similar to the one on the middle of the machine.

  Patrick and Jenny looked at each other for a moment and then they went into the room. Unconsciously they both reached out for each other and ended up holding hands as they went into the room. They both headed for the control panel on the machine to get a closer look. As they approached the panel they both stopped.

  “It’s really real,” said Patrick.

  “I know. Just think Patrick, if what your father said on that video is true then we are looking at a machine that can cure anything. Cancer, AIDS, everything. It could change the world Patrick; do you realise what that means?” said Jenny.

  “What it means right now is that I am pretty inclined to believe everything that was on that video. I wonder if this machine still works.”

  Patrick looked over the control panel trying to look for an obvious on switch. He didn’t see one but he saw a small metal leaver at the top of the panel and without thinking he grabbed hold of it and pulled it towards him. There was a loud metallic thunk from inside the panel and the screen in the centre suddenly lit up. Patrick and Jenny both took a step back, as if the panel had suddenly grown a set of sharp teeth and had begun snapping at them.

  “I don’t think we should mess with it Patrick, it could be dangerous,” said Jenny.

  “I think you might be right,” said Patrick. He stepped forwards furtively and threw the leaver back upwards again. The circles on the machine twitched and then the screen on the panel died again.

  “I think we should leave this alone for now,” said Patrick.

  They began to walk back towards the door, their pace quickening as they went. They both still felt as though something nasty was going to chase them out of the room and into the house. They made it back into the kitchen and Patrick closed the door behind them. The keypad beeped beneath its plastic case and the light turned red again. The door made a loud click as it locked itself again. Both Patrick and Jenny felt a little safer the moment that door clicked itself closed.

  “Jesus, that was freaky,” said Jenny.

  Patrick nodded in agreement. He hadn’t like being in that room knowing that was where his twin brother had been fucked up and his mot
her had been killed. There were too many ghosts in there for him to be comfortable. He immediately decided that once all of this was over he was going to go back to the safety of his house in Newtown. There were no ghosts there, only the memories that he had created for himself. It would be from the sanctuary of that little quirky house that he would decide the rest of his life. He was snapped out of his thoughts by his phone buzzing in his pocket. He had received a message from Jack. He tapped the buttons to open the message which said:

  Where are you? We are going to come over.

  He sent a reply telling him that they were up at Layton House. He also told him not to tell anyone where he was going and he would explain why when he got there. The message sent and he went to grab the kettle so he could make tea. Really he wanted something a bit stronger, but he didn’t want to come across as a drunk in front of Jenny. It was too early in the game for him to let all of his internal guards down. As he snapped the kettle on his phone buzzed again.

  No problem. See you soon.

  He returned a quick ‘O.K.’ and was about to carry on getting the tea ready when he heard a fizz-pop from behind him. He turned round and saw that Jenny had grabbed a beer from the large supply that had been left in the fridge and was necking it. She drank off half the can and then stopped for breath.

  “I hope you don’t mind, but tea just isn’t going to cut it at the moment.”

  He learned right then that he should just be himself at all times, no matter what the potential consequences. He had more in common with Jenny than he would ever allow himself to admit.

  “Do you know what? I think you are right,” he said going over to the fridge and grabbing himself a can. He opened it up and took a long pull from the can. Then he paused for a moment. There was something in his head that he had missed. He couldn’t quite place what it was, but he had seen it and just not registered it at the time. He tried to shake it off and drank some more of his beer.

  “You alright Patty?” said Jenny. She had seen the puzzled look on his face.

  “Yeah, I just feel like I have seen something important but I have no clue as to what it is.”

  “Why don’t we go and sit down. I’ll bring a few more drinks with us and we can mull it over together. If we are going to be bored shitless waiting around here we might as well be drunk doing so.”

  Patrick looked at her and smiled. “Sounds like a plan to me,” he said.

  They made their way through to the living room and plonked themselves down on the sofa. Just before he sat down, Patrick removed his phone from his pocket so that it didn’t dig into the front of his hip. He placed it on the arm of the sofa and nestled himself into the corner. He picked up the remote control for the television and aimed it at the large flat screen in the corner of the room. There was fuck all on but it stopped the room from being uncomfortably quiet. He found some stupid property development programme on and left it at that, it was as good as it was going to get. They drank beer and stared blankly at the screen. Both of them were beginning to feel the effects, not just from the beer, but of the bad nights sleep the night before. Neither one of them had any conversation left and they were both lost in their own thoughts about what they had seen in the room at the back of the kitchen. Patrick picked up his phone with the intention of checking out all of his social media. He had so many friend requests now that it would take him a week or two to go through them all. Ironically, a week ago he would have added all the girls to his list and then would have begun working his way through it. Now here he was with Jenny, a girl that he was pretty hooked on. Just goes to show that a drought can end at any time, not just with a rain shower but with a whole fucking flood. It was while he was thinking this one over that he finally saw what it was that had been bothering him. It was the messages from Jack. There was something not quite right about it. It was his teachers eye that had spotted it. The messages had punctuation in them. Jack never used punctuation in his text messages. Hell, Jack never used punctuation ever ! Why would he start doing it now? He wondered if Donna had done it on his behalf. He turned to Jenny.

  “Does Donna ever use punctuation in her text messages?” he said.

  “Nah. She doesn’t even bother using full words, she likes all that text speak shit. It takes me half an hour to work out what the fuck she is even saying, why do you ask?”

  “I got a message from Jack, I replied and he sent another message back. The messages had punctuation in them and Jack never uses punctuation, not ever. He is about as punctually illiterate as they come,” he said.

  Jenny laughed for a moment and then her face dropped.

  “What is it?” said Patrick.

  “Perhaps he didn’t send the messages. Perhaps somebody got hold of his phone,” she said.

  Patrick looked puzzled for a moment and then the realisation set in. The realisation that he could have been exchanging messages with his psychotic twin brother, and the fact that he could have just let him know exactly where they were. He had just invited evil to come home.

  “Oh shit,” he said.

  “Do you want to get out of here?”

  Patrick stood up, “Yes, let’s get the fuck out of here, go to the coast or something. We can take the fastest car that we have here.”

  Jenny stood up too. “O.K. then we need to get our shit together, perhaps we can get out of the country for a while until all of this blows over.”

  Patrick nodded and grabbed her hand. They both ran for the door, not caring a shit for getting any of their stuff. Patrick had his wallet and that was all that they ever needed. They were just about to get to the door when Patrick stopped.

  “Wait a moment. If James has Jack’s phone, does that mean that…..”

  “Patrick, I don’t know, but there is no point in us hanging around to find out. We need to get to somewhere safe and then we can sort it out. If we are cut to pieces, then we are no fucking use to anybody.”

  Patrick thought for a moment and then he grabbed her hand and made for the door again. He snatched it open and there was a figure standing in the doorway. Patrick was certain that it was him. He had made it here just in time to stop them leaving. In a moment he was going to feel the icy coldness of a blade penetrating his guts, if he was lucky. It might be that he would have to watch Jenny die first, and that would be worse than being stabbed a thousand times. They both recoiled from the figure in the doorway. Then they both realised that it wasn’t James in the doorway, it was Slater.

  4.

  “Running away won’t solve the issue Patrick,” said Slater from his position on the couch.

  “Neither will sitting around here waiting for him to show up and kill us,” snapped Patrick. He was pacing up and down the room, clenching and unclenching his fists.

  “That’s not going to happen, I can guarantee that.”

  “But how can you know? I’m pretty sure he has got hold of Jack’s phone. I need to at least find out if Jack and Donna are alright.”

  Slater sighed. “I’m afraid that I have bad news about that Patrick.”

  Patrick stopped pacing and stared right at Slater. “What do you mean? What are you talking about?”

  “They are both dead. Their bodies were found this morning.”

  Patrick’s temper broke. He grabbed Slater by the front of his coat and hauled him to his feet. “You’re a lying piece of shit. Why would you say that? Why the fuck would you say that?” Patrick roared in Slater’s face.

  “Because it’s true Patrick,” said Slater in a calm voice, “I saw the bodies myself. Now, if you decide to take off, whoever this guy is he will come looking for you. If you stay and he shows up here, we can put him behind bars where he belongs, then he can’t hurt anyone else. As long as he is out there he can keep killing. Now ask yourself Patrick, can you live with that? Because I know I can’t.”

  Slater felt Patrick’s grip lighten just a little. He was starting to get through to him, he could feel it.

  “You want to use me as bait don’t yo
u. Why don’t you just admit it,” said Patrick.

  “O.K. if that’s what you want to hear then yes. You are the best chance I have of catching this guy. Now are you going to help me do it, or am I going to have to do it the hard way. Like I said, as soon as I have him, the killing will stop. If you run, you are going to be looking over your shoulder for the rest of your life. All the money in the world won’t protect you.”

  Patrick had nothing left to say. He curled his top lip in disgust and then he let Slater go. He turned his back on him for a moment and ran his fingers through his hair.