14
I told DCI Stronge to get some shuteye while I carried on the investigation overnight. She protested, telling me she could power through, but she was dog tired and we both knew it. As for me, I had to do something to keep my mind occupied, and even if I were able to sleep I couldn’t have. This case had gotten into my head, and I wouldn’t let up until the Hooded Man had answered for what he’d done.
Before I said goodnight to Stronge, she mentioned that Dr Anand was carrying out the autopsies of Mike and his abuser that evening, so I decided to ditch the meat suit and pay a visit to the morgue for an observe and report. Don’t get me wrong, I didn’t relish the prospect of watching Anand carve a giant Y into a dead kid, but if there was any chance of her examination leading me to the man in the hood, I was going to be there.
As I’d been informed, Dr Anand was there, dressed in her scrubs and apron, burning the midnight oil. As she worked, I stood by inconspicuously in my ghost form, watching her unseen. Anand began with a cursory examination of the adult, the cadaver of which lay on its fat belly, presenting a back full of holes. She inspected the corpse visually and reported her findings into a microphone that hung above the autopsy slab.
‘...Multiple sharp force injuries from a rear, dropped position consistent with the witness report of a juvenile stabber. I count... eleven puncture wounds and... five chops. Cause of death at this stage seems self-explanatory.’
She moved across to the opposite slab and began to examine the body of Mike, which lay on its back, facing the ceiling. He looked peaceful. Except for the belt mark around his neck, he might as well have been sleeping.
‘Come on,’ I whispered, goading Anand on inaudibly. ‘Give me something. Find me a clue. Lead me to the puppet master.’
Anand went about her second exam with the same dispassionate professionalism as the first. ‘Without opening the body up and studying its internal organs, it would appear this death occurred due to strangulation.’ She picked one of the cadaver’s legs up by the heel and flexed it at the knee. ‘Going by the degree of rigor mortis, the time of death is estimated to have occurred at least twelve hours ago.’ She put the limb down and pinched the bridge of her nose in frustration. ‘Which of course is impossible as the deceased was seen to perform a frenzied homicide less than four hours ago by at least a dozen witnesses.’
That part was no news to me, even if the reanimator’s motive, method and identity were an utter enigma.
Anand went on. ‘Continuing my examination, I will now conduct an internal exploration of the cadaver.’
She went to a tray of stainless steel instruments and selected a large scalpel. This was the part I’d been dreading. I wanted to look away of course, but I forced myself to stay focussed and remember that I was only looking at Mike’s corpse. Just a vessel, nothing more. The real Mike was over at the scrap yard, waiting on me to solve this mystery. Waiting on me to get him to the other side.
‘Beginning dissection,’ said Anand, and brought the gleaming blade to Mike’s shoulder joint in preparation of the first cut of the Y. ‘Making the first incision now...’
The tip of the knife was pressing into the boy’s dead flesh—
—When his hand struck out and seized Anand by the wrist.
The body’s eyelids snapped open to reveal two gleaming white orbs. His mouth cracked apart and launched a scream like a baby born without skin. It was the kind of sound that made you want to stab out your eardrums.
Anand cried out in terror, jerking back her arm to break free of the corpse’s grip, her face knotted with panic. She scurried into the corner of the theatre and slumped to the ground, dread taking hold and leaving her catatonic.
Meanwhile, the corpse raised its arm and turned to point at me accusingly. ‘You,’ it said in a voice like two rough stones being ground together.
It was far too deep a voice to belong to a child. It seemed I was finally meeting the wizard behind the curtain. The Hooded Man had made himself known.
‘Who are you?’ I demanded.
‘That is no concern of yours,’ he replied. The voice issued though the corpse’s mouth, which hung open and slack, jaw unmoving.
‘Oh, it’s well within my bailiwick,’ I explained. ‘I’m a P.I.’
‘You’re no Private Investigator,’ the voice mocked. ‘You work for the man.’ He turned the body’s white eyes to the heavens. ‘For the ultimate “The Man.”’
‘You’re wrong, pal. My bosses are the ones you’re leaving trapped in limbo while you turn their bodies into murder puppets.’
‘Lies!’ he boomed. ‘You do what you do in the hope that it will save you from His wrath. You are nothing more than a servant. A toady. A miserable boot-licker.’
Okay, I thought, I got the message with “servant,” no need to put a hat on a hat. ‘And what about you?’ I shot back. ‘What’s the man with the pitchfork and the pointy tail paying you to express deliver him those rotten souls?’
The mystery man twisted Mike’s face into some approximation of a smile. ‘I do not come from Hell,’ he said. ‘I come from another place. A place I was sent in exile. A place I have languished for decades, waiting for my time to come again.’
His constant deflections were really getting on my tits. ‘Enough with the chit-chat and tell me who you are.’
‘You already know who I am,’ he replied. ‘My name has diminished in power I’ll grant you, but now, in this time of strife and uncertainty, with the Doomsday Clock at two minutes to midnight, it is on the tip of everyone’s tongues.’
‘Not mine, mate. I don’t know you from Adam.’
The corpse made a gurgling sound that I guessed for a chuckle. ‘It humours me that you should mention the First Man. He lived for many hundreds of years, so he did, but the day still came that he had to pay the ferryman.’
The bloke was making no sense. Was he telling the truth when he said he’d been held prisoner for decades? Was forced confinement the reason he was acting mad as a bag of spiders? ‘At this point I don’t really care who you are,’ I told him, ‘I just need you to pack in the murdering and fess up for the damage you’ve done.’
‘And how do you plan to punish me exactly?’ he asked. ‘Are you going to “run me in,” Detective Fletcher? Hand me over to the authorities?’ He raised Mike’s dead, feeble arms, wrists pressed together, daring me to take him away. ‘You have no power over me, phantom. This game is far too rich for your blood. Take your chips and cash out now before it’s too late.’
‘Listen here,’ I said, squaring up to him. ‘This is my patch, and I’m not going to let some jumped-up Dr. Frankenstein run around butchering people.’
‘What do you care?’ he asked. ‘Were my victims not deserving of their fates?’
Now it was my turn to deflect. ‘What about the people you didn't send to Hell? What about the two innocent souls you left trapped here on Earth?’
‘That is not my will, that is God’s will.’ The corpse’s head cocked to one side, as if paying me special attention. ‘The Devil claims his own, and yet the Almighty is content to let his flock linger here on Earth instead of bringing them home to their final reward. Have you ever asked yourself why that is, Detective? Why He allows the spirits of the innocent to remain trapped between this world and the next? The victims? The waifs and strays? The wretched refuse? The people like you?’
‘There are no people like me,’ I replied.
‘You may have a point there,’ he said. ‘You’re certainly the first ghost detective I’ve ever met.’
‘Kill one more person and I’ll be the last ghost detective you ever meet.’
The corpse grinned like a split watermelon. ‘That’s good,’ cackled the mystery man within. ‘That’s very good!’
The possessed cadaver convulsed, shoulders shaking with cruel pleasure. Mocking laughter rang hard off the cold, ceramic tiles of the theatre, making surgical instruments rattle and dance in their tray, and then just as soon as it had begin, the c
orpse’s eyelids snapped shut and the body slumped onto its slab, still once more.
15
I was shaken by my run-in with the Hooded Man, but nowhere near as shaken as Dr Anand was. To save her spending the rest of her life in a rubber room, I spent a little time in her brain before I took off, clearing her browser history, so to speak. Now, whenever she reflects on the events of that evening, all she’ll see are mundane, workaday memories of her cutting up a dead child.
And I thought my job was weird.
Since it was obvious that the Hooded Man planned to strike again, I needed to get ahead of his game. If I could figure out who he planned to off next, maybe I could catch him in the act, and though I still didn’t understand his motive, I was starting to get a pretty clear picture of his MO. So long as he followed his existing pattern, the next victim would be another one due for the bottomless pit, and his killer the one he’d wronged. That narrowed things down by quite a margin.
It was late still, but there was no time to waste. I picked up the phone and got Stronge on the blower.
‘Do you have any idea what time it is?’ she slurred from the other end of the line.
‘Time to rock and roll,’ I told her. ‘Listen, I need you back at the station and up to your nuts in that HOLMES suite.’
The HOLMES system is an investigation database that allows officers up and down the country speedy access to criminal activity logs.
After Stronge was finished shouting at me, she eventually dragged her arse to the office and called me from the control room. ‘What am I looking for, Fletcher?’
‘The Hooded Man is going to need a new puppet. I need you to let me know about any murders that have happened in the last twenty-four hours.’
The phone went silent except for the clackety-clack of keyboard strokes, then eventually Stronge picked up the conversation. ‘Nothing,’ she reported.
‘Really?’
‘What do you want? This is London, not the Gaza bloody Strip.’
I sighed. ‘Roll back another twenty-four hours.’
Again, more tapping. ‘Still nothing.’
‘Damn it.’
‘Do I need to remind you that no murders in forty-eight hours is actually good news?’
Maybe it was, but it was going to make the search for the Hooded Man a fuck sight harder. ‘Forget about murders then. Check for suicides, suspicious deaths. Is there anything that jumps out at you? Anything at all?’
The wait was a lot longer this time, but I wasn’t going anywhere.
‘There’s this,’ she said. ‘It only happened a couple of hours ago so the details are still coming in, but five pensioners just wound up dead.’
‘All at once? How?’
‘Says here carbon monoxide poisoning. Happened in a care home they were all living in. There’s a note attached saying the landlord’s under investigation.’
‘Why?’
‘Relatives of the deceased reckon they complained at him for weeks that something was up with the boiler, but he fobbed them all off.’
That definitely got my spectre-sense tingling. Fresh meat with a grudge to settle? This was right up the Hooded Man’s alley.
‘So, what now?’ asked Stronge. ‘Go stake out the dead OAPs?’
‘I’ll do that,’ I replied. ‘You go find the landlord and keep him out of harm’s way.’
‘Sod that for a game of soldiers. So long as our man’s going corpse shopping, that’s where I’m at.’
‘No,’ I said. ‘We can’t have another man getting killed. Someone has to look after him in case our hoodie’s already making a move.’
‘Then I’ll put a couple of uniforms on him—’
‘No!’ I told her, putting my foot down. ‘I need someone I can trust over there. It has to be you, Kat.’
I couldn’t tell her the truth. Stronge was a tough old bird, and if I let on that I was sending her on a wild goose chase to keep her out of trouble, there was no way she was going to give in. The Hooded Man was going to be where those bodies were—I could feel it—and I wasn’t about to put her in the middle of a boss fight. No, I couldn’t lose her that way. Kat was too important for that. She was my best link to the land of the living. She was a damned fine copper. She was my friend.
‘Why are you doing this, Jake? I thought we were partners.’
It pained me to say what I said next, but I had to get her off my case, and since pissing off women was a speciality of mine, that’s the arrow I drew. ‘We’re not partners, Stronge. DC Maddox is your partner. I’m the dead bloke you pester when you run into a tight spot.’
‘That’s not true—’
‘It is and you know it. Now go take care of the living and leave the supernatural stuff to me.’
‘Forget it. I’m not letting you push me to the sidelines while—’
‘Just tell me where the bodies are so I can take this guy down.’
‘No, you listen to—’
‘We’re running out of time here.’
‘This isn’t the way—’
‘Just do your fucking job, Kat!’
She went quiet. Eye of the tornado quiet. ‘Camden Crematorium,’ she hissed. ‘Next to St. Pancras Old Church.’
‘Thank you,’ I said, but she’d already ended the call.
I let out a long sigh.
Kat’s anger I could handle. Her death I could not.
Between running around after the bad guy and trying to stay ahead of my avenging angel, I couldn’t tell whether I was coming or going. One minute I was doing the chasing, the next I was being chased. I felt like a ghost running around in a maze after Pac Man, and as a fellow phantom, that's a pretty spot-on analogy.
Since the morgue was at capacity, the bodies of the OAPs were being kept overnight at the nearest available cold storage unit, which belonged to the parish crematorium.
I called Stella Familiar on my way there. I wasn’t going to risk dropping Stronge into the danger zone, but Stella lived for this stuff. Literally; she was created by a coven of witches for the specific purpose of fighting fiends and battering bogeymen.
Lucky for me, she picked up the phone this time, and since she still owed me a favour, agreed to put aside a job of her own and do a little moonlighting on my behalf.
‘Thanks for coming, Stella.’
‘You’re welcome,’ she replied, ‘especially since it sounds like you’re completely out of your depth.’
Now I think about it, Stella stayed “off-camera” during our opening chapter, so I didn’t feel the need to describe her for you. Let me remedy that now by putting a picture in your head. I’ll start by saying this: when that coven of witches built Stella, they built her right. She has the kind of beauty you see on a billboard for a fancy hair conditioner; flawless skin, legs for days, and an arse that could broker an international peace treaty. Even more impressively, she seems somehow oblivious to her own physical qualities, as though she’s too modest—or perhaps too focussed on smiting demons—to take the time to look in a mirror. Instead, she carries herself in an understated way, dressing in a tomboyish leather jacket and wearing her hair straight and unfussy. That arse though. Hoo boy.
‘How’s your detective friend, David?’ I asked her, thinking back to our adventure in the nightmare realm. ‘Actually, is he just a friend, or—?’
‘Just a friend,’ she replied, definitively.
‘Easy, tiger, no need to get testy.’
She shrugged it off. ‘What about you? How’s Detective Stronge?’
I thought back to our recent phone conversation and decided to move the subject on a notch. ‘Hey, check us out, we both have detective friends. You know, Stella, we've got a lot in common, you and me. We should really get together one night and chat about it.’
‘I’m busy that night.’
‘Come on! We’re both Uncanny, we both fight for the same side, and we’re both knockout gorgeous. Besides, it’s not like either of us is getting any younger.’
‘Only b
ecause neither of us ages.’
‘See, there's another thing we have in common.’
‘Give it up, Jake.’
‘What is it? You don't like this body? Because I can get a better one – just name your type.’
‘You know, you make it very difficult not to incinerate you with a fireball.’
We walked on in silence, but it was obvious she was crazy about me.
I mean, probably.
We arrived at the wrought iron fence surrounding the church yard. I knew this place. I ought to, I was buried there. My earthly remains had been interred on the grounds a few years back after I crossed over, which is a polite way of saying, “Got brutally murdered.” That story will have to wait for another time though, much as I’d like to vent about it here. Suffice to say, the matter has left me a mite peeved.
I peered through the fence. While the crematorium beyond was still in business—if vacated for the night—the adjoining church was closed for repairs. The building had been declared unsafe and forced to shut its doors after ground movement created by the crumbling Roman drains beneath it caused the structure to subside. To date, the charitable donations required to stabilise its foundations and fix the damage remain far below the necessary target. Make of that what you will.
We approached the iron gate that led into the church yard. A thick chain had been looped through it and secured with a heavy-duty padlock, barring our entrance. I was about to jimmy it open with a bit of kleptomancy when Stella reached past me and took the lock in her fist. A moment later it was dribbling between her fingers like silver water.
‘Open Sesame,’ she quipped.
She pushed through the gate and into the church’s graveyard with me at her heels. As we headed for the crematorium I looked across to the chapel, which was shadowed by a gathering of gnarled trees that creaked ominously in the breeze. Somewhere out there, among the chapel’s surrounding tombstones, was my own grave.
Something Rotten: An Uncanny Kingdom Urban Fantasy (The Ghosted Series Book 2) Page 9