Seeing the Wires

by Patrick Thompson

  ‘Now,’ he said, walking around the end of the table. ‘Let’s do this the old-fashioned way.’

  I looked at the camera.

  ‘It’s a dummy,’ said Fields, standing up so sharply that his chair jumped back across the floor. He removed his own jacket and walked around his end of the table. Moore put a heavy hand on my shoulder.

  ‘I think we could do with some refreshments. PC Fields, would you be good enough to get us a cup of tea each? And see if you can find someone to repair the recorder. It doesn’t appear to be working. I will make sure nothing unfortunate happens to Mr Haines.’

  ‘I’ll be right back,’ said Fields.

  ‘Good,’ said Moore. ‘I wouldn’t want to be left alone with a prisoner without an escort or any means of recording the conversation. Who knows what might happen?’

  ‘I’ll be a minute or two. I’m not sure where I last saw the kettle.’

  ‘Forensics,’ said Moore. ‘And wash it out before you use it.’

  Fields nodded and left.

  II

  I was aware that the whole interview had been stage-managed. It had been designed to leave me frightened and alone with Moore. I was aware that it had worked. Moore let his hand rest on my shoulder. He moved behind me, out of sight. I wanted to turn around and watch him. I wanted to know what he was up to.

  ‘If I was in your place,’ he said, ‘I’d be a worried man. We’ll get to the bottom of this. You do know that? We’ll find out what we want to know.’

  His voice seemed to be coming from all around me. His hand left my shoulder. I felt myself hunching. I clenched all over. I waited for him to hit me.

  ‘You seem tense,’ he said, with a hint of concern in his voice. ‘You seem frightened. There’s nothing to be frightened of. Tell me what you know and we’ll be fine.’

  I failed to relax.

  ‘Well,’ he said, moving back into view. He sat on the desk in front of me and put one foot on the seat of my chair. His shoes were enormous. They were very polished. I can never get my shoes to shine. Perhaps I should try polishing them. There was a smell of leather.

  ‘Can I offer you a cigarette? If we’re going to be at this for a while you’ll be wanting a cigarette. You have a cigarette and a cup of tea and think about things. After that, if you want to talk to us, fair enough. Is that Fields with the kettle?’

  He looked towards the door. I looked too. At once he straightened his leg. That enormous shoe slammed into my thigh. The chair flew back and fell. I fell with it. I landed badly, and discovered that solid cement floors are cold and hard. Something else hit me somewhere. Again. I didn’t know what he was hitting me with. It might have been the floor. I hadn’t been in a fight since I was at school, and in those days fights lasted until someone gave up or had a nosebleed. I didn’t think I was going to be allowed to give up, and he was too efficient to make me bleed. I couldn’t even tell what part of me he was hitting. The blows jerked my whole body. I was being mangled by a mild-mannered, middle-aged man.

  It stopped. I waited for something else to hit me. When it became obvious that nothing was going to I raised my head.

  Moore was back in his chair on the far side of the desk. He looked bored, as if this was all in a day’s work.

  ‘You appear to have taken a tumble,’ he said. ‘I hope you didn’t land badly. This floor is a bit unforgiving. If you’d like to get back in your seat we can carry on chatting.’

  My chair was back upright. I stood up and fell into it. I half expected pulverized kidneys to drop out of me, but they stayed where they were. Thinking about it, I’m not surprised. They were having a bad enough time on the inside.

  I did an inventory of injuries. Nothing seemed to be broken. There were painful areas on the back of my head and my upper arms. My thigh hurt.

  It wasn’t the pain, anyway. It was an atmosphere. While he’d been attacking me I’d been helpless. All I could be was attacked. I was not in control of anything. I was only the thing being battered.

  ‘I could report that,’ I said. I knew it was a stupid thing to say. There was no one I could report it to.

  ‘Report what?’ he asked. ‘You fell out of your chair. These things happen. Let’s not try to make it into something it wasn’t.’

  ‘You put your foot on it,’ I said, ‘and you kicked it over. When I wasn’t looking. The next time you try that I will be looking. I’ll have my eyes on you. And I won’t be the one on the floor.’

  I don’t know where the aggression came from. As a general rule I’m not at all aggressive. Perhaps it was simply that I’d had enough. I’d been falsely accused, falsely imprisoned, falsely beaten and I had no proof of any of it. I wasn’t even bruised. Where were the Panorama team the one time in your life you needed them? By being aggressive I changed all that. I was in control after all. Moore was a middle-aged man. Suddenly, he looked it. Suddenly, the balance changed.

  ‘Let’s talk about things,’ I said. ‘Let’s see where we are. You have no evidence. You have the word of someone certifiable. You have bones that don’t belong to anyone. They could have come from a hospital incinerator. They could have come from a graveyard. You’re the tail end of a dead breed. Why do you get this joke crime to investigate? Because you can’t be trusted with anything else? How long until they shuffle you out of the job altogether? Where are you going to go then? Out there with the people who’ve been through this room.’

  Moore linked his fingers. ‘Perhaps so,’ he said. ‘But for the time being, you’re the one in this room. And they won’t be shuffling me anywhere until I’ve finished with you. And if you raise a hand to me three other officers will come in and use entirely unjustifiable force to subdue you. Then we’ll sentence you for that and you’ll spend a week in a soft prison and your employment prospects will look worse than mine.’

  He leaned towards me. All of the control was back with him. My anger had been and gone. It had only been adrenaline, after all. All I had left of it was a taste like tin in my mouth.

  The door opened.

  ‘Here come the reinforcements,’ smiled Moore, unbuckling his belt. ‘Now let’s see what we can get you to admit.’

  Fields walked in.

  ‘Hold on,’ he said. ‘There’s a problem. It’s Forensics.’

  ‘What is?’ asked Moore.

  ‘They’ve done a quick test or two on the bones. They’re too old.’

  ‘In what way?’

  ‘They can’t be sure. But they’re at least five hundred years old. They can tell that. Perhaps even eight hundred.’

  ‘They did it bloody fast,’ said Moore, his eagerness dissipating. ‘Are they sure?’

  ‘Very sure.’

  ‘Such is life,’ said Moore, buckling his belt. ‘It appears that the case against you is no longer tenable. You can go, Mr Haines. Do be sure to pick up a complaints form from the front desk.’

  They let me go. There weren’t any complaint forms on the front desk. It didn’t matter. I wasn’t thinking about that. I was thinking about Jack. He knew about the bodies. They were eight hundred years old. That wizard, the one I’d read about, the one at Dudley Castle; he’d be eight hundred years old, if he wasn’t dead.

  Jack knew about the bodies.

  Jack knew about the ritual.

  I thought about his piercings and tattoos, his bizarre home life. His damaged girlfriend.

  I’d known him at school. I’d always thought we were the same age. Now I wondered if he wasn’t a little older.

  Somewhere in the region of seven hundred and seventy years, for example.

  Chapter Sixteen

  I

  When I got home I realized that I was late for work. I hadn’t thought of that. I’d had other things on my mind – being arrested, having a friend who was centuries old, little things like that.

  I was glad that Judy wasn’t there. Sometimes, she would come and stay at my house and find things to complain about. I called work and spoke to Theresa. I told her that I had fa
mily problems, and that I’d be in as soon as I could.

  She asked me to hold on. The telephone played tinny music to me. After a long wait Ted Wiggins said ‘Hello?’

  ‘Hello,’ I said. ‘Ted. I’ve got some problems at home.’

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Yes. You have some problems here, too. To be frank you’re suspended on full pay. I don’t suppose it’ll come to anything. I suppose they’ll bring you back in once it blows over. It’s the police thing. It puts us in an awkward position.’

  There was more of it, in the same vein. I didn’t take any of it in. I had lost contact with my ears. They would sack me. That’s what it meant when they suspended you. It meant they’d trawl through your personnel files and rifle your desk for anything incriminating.

  If there wasn’t anything they’d put something there.

  That was the end of the job, then.

  I mumbled something to Ted and put the telephone down. I hadn’t had time to restock the alcohol department. I slumped onto the sofa.

  Someone had stolen my cushions. The ones Judy had brought with her.

  I noticed that other things had also gone missing. There was a blank space on the wall where she’d hung a small print of a pre-Raphaelite bint. There were gaps in the CD collection.

  I checked it. It had improved. All of her top twenty things were gone. She’d also taken my Doves CD.

  I knew what had happened. She’d gone.

  The house seemed emptier.

  I went from room to room. All of the female things had gone. All of the colours had been removed. I still had the gadgets and music. I still had the tasteless videos.

  I called her but there was no answer. I let the telephone ring. She’d be at work, I realized. I called the work number.

  A recorded voice told me to press one for timetable information, two for complaints, or three to talk to a human being. I pressed three and waited for twenty minutes.

  ‘Yes?’ said an angry female voice.

  ‘I’m trying to get in touch with Judy,’ I said. ‘If she’s there.’

  ‘Is that Sam?’ asked the voice. I recognized it. It was Lynn.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Then you’re wasting your time. I’m sorry, Sam, but she doesn’t want to talk to you. She’s had enough.’

  ‘It’s a mistake. They’ve let me go.’

  ‘It’s not that. She hasn’t been happy. She says that you look at other girls. All the time. She says you think she’s a nuisance. If she tries to do anything for you, it’s a joke. I don’t think she’ll talk to you. If you give her some time, that might do it. I’m sorry, Sam.’

  There was a dead click. I set the phone down. It was obviously in a bad mood. Every time I used it, a part of my life was excised.

  I knew what giving someone some time meant. It meant: go away – forever. Please. I wouldn’t be seeing her again. I’d have to get my bus pass from somewhere else. I’d have to buy another copy of the Doves CD. I went to the bedroom and lay on the bed. There was plenty of room for me. The house didn’t seem emptier. It was still cluttered with all of my junk.

  I seemed emptier.

  I watched the ceiling. I couldn’t think of anything else to do. At least the ceiling was solid. Nothing else was. I couldn’t rely on my friends, on the world, on anything.

  If Jack had buried those bones, eight hundred years ago, what did that mean?

  I’m no good with supernatural forces. I’m a modern guy. I have gadgets: DVDs, CDs, a PC. I have an MP3 player. The thirteenth century is a long way away.

  Of course, you wouldn’t know that walking down Dudley High Street, with its smelly market and its disconcerting townsfolk. Dudley never got past the visit of the warlock. I’d always thought that Dudley was awful for no particular reason.

  Now I wondered.

  Those bones meant that there must be some truth to the warlock’s story. Before he went to Hollywood, surely James Whale had read about it. The castle on the hill, the strange noises and peculiar lights, the ignorant townsfolk burning it all down: he’d made a coded film about it. All of that was in Dudley’s history, and in Dudley the history was close to the surface. All of those mineshafts cut into the foundations, and the wrecked castle still looking down at it all. The road system that had been designed for a light load of horse-drawn carriages, clogged now by traffic. The canals choked with shopping trolleys, the railway lines without rails.

  Dudley had been sent strange in the thirteenth century, and it had stayed that way. Dudley was tainted.

  So what about Jack? My childhood friend? At school he’d been the same age as me, to look at. He’d been a little boy. A strange one, granted, but not a grown man. Did he get older and younger cyclically as the centuries passed, so that he could pass for different people? Which one had he been, the warlock or one of the apprentices? Surely not the misshapen one?

  I thought about the woodcut that had accompanied the tale of the warlock. There had been nothing obviously wrong with the misshapen one.

  Perhaps it was something under his clothes. Jack had plenty of strange things under his clothes. All of his piercings and tattoos: didn’t that seem ritualistic? Hadn’t he told me that it was?

  Someone knocked on the door.

  I still trusted the door. It was the telephone that was doing all the bad news that day. The front door hadn’t done anything to blot its copybook.

  I rolled off the bed and went downstairs. I walked past my shelves. They were standing solid, packed with my junk.

  That saucer of nails was still on the top shelf. I made a mental note to do something with them.

  I opened the door and found Jack standing outside.

  Perhaps we could do something with the nails after all, I thought. He was carrying a hammer.

  II

  He wandered in past me. I couldn’t think of a way to stop him. If he had been alive eight hundred years he’d have picked up some survival tips. And he had a hammer. I closed the front door and followed him to the living room. He sat on the sofa. I stood by the door. If he turned nasty I’d be able to outrun him.

  ‘They let me go,’ he said. ‘They had the evidence and they let me go. Did you tell them anything?’

  I shook my head.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘You wouldn’t have.’

  ‘Jack,’ I said, ‘those bones were centuries old. Whatever happened to them didn’t happen ten years ago. It couldn’t have.’

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘Fair play. The thing is, I remember it.’

  He looked up. I’d been concentrating on the hammer, and I hadn’t noticed his face. It was drawn in, closed. I knew what he was going through. He was shut in with his thoughts. I was in the same state.

  He looked down again.

  ‘I remember it,’ he said. ‘We were twenty. It was ten years ago. I feel that. Ten years. I have these things in my head. I can’t get rid of them. I was fucking delighted when they came to arrest me. I was over the fucking moon, and now they’ve given it up. Because they got the wrong bones.’

  I’d been wrong about him. He wasn’t eight hundred years old after all, and he had no more idea of what was going on than I did. We were both lost, in the same room but in completely different places.

  ‘I got to thinking,’ he said. ‘You’re there in the memories. It’s the two of us, Sam and Jack. You’re different, too. You’re not you. There’s something different but I can’t see it properly. It’s my piercings. It’s them. Like I told you, they help me to see. They make me into a receiver.

  ‘Your mate Spin told you that, too. You don’t see him now, do you? He was on the news today. They showed me coming out of the police station. I thought it’d be a blanket over the head job, but they just shoved me out the front door. I saw Eddie. He’s doing well out of this. He’s got offers coming. Your man Spin came on the telly and showed this clip of me. He said I was confessing to stuff I hadn’t done. Wasting police time.

  ‘I don’t remember how he sounded. I don’t know if he spok
e to tell you the truth. I got caught by a bunch of people on the way home. They told me what they thought of me. They didn’t think much of me and they went into lots of detail.

  ‘A lot of people round here don’t like people who confess to things. Not if they haven’t done anything. When the neighbours thought I was a killer I got some respect. Now they throw things through the windows. Broken glass all over the gaff.’

  He considered that, and smiled.

  ‘Been a treat for Lisa, though. The broken glass and that.’

  I nodded as though he was making sense.

  ‘So,’ he said, ‘there we are. Stuck with it. I remember what we did, you don’t remember, the bones are too old. I can’t make sense of that. You won’t even try. I mean, for my sake. For our sake. If it’s being pierced that makes me see it, then if you got yourself pierced …’

  He let it hang. I shook my head. However he’d got to his state of mind, I wasn’t about to follow him.

  ‘Thought not,’ he said. ‘I know some clean places. Out on the bypass there’s a studio opened, does body modifications. Fluorescent tattoos is the new thing. Done with bacteria. Bioluminescent. Have your name up in lights on your chest. We could go there, get you something small done. Nipple or something. No?’

  I shook my head again.

  ‘Thought not. So where does that leave me? I mean, I’ve got Lisa, she’s not going to head for the hills just because of this. You, though. You’re still cracking on that you’re innocent. You aren’t though, are you? I know you. I called round at your brother’s and he told me you weren’t there. You weren’t going to be welcome there, not ever again. So, what does that mean? Your brother doesn’t want you at his house. Does that make me think you’re innocent? Not much, no. Not at all.’

  ‘That has nothing to do with this,’ I said. ‘That’s something else.’

  ‘Oh yes? And what would that be?’

  That would be family things. That would be private.

  There are things I haven’t told you. This is one of them: