by Will Carver
When people think they see the devil, they smell sulphur, but true evil smells like cinnamon.
And while his mind was busy thinking about everything and nothing at the same time it stopped on the image of that secluded spot in Swinley Forest and what he had done there, what he had left behind. He had been tested. And he had responded.
I looked into Pace’s eyes that night and he stared right back.
Detective Sergeant Pace managed to fight his way out of his mind long enough to notice a man entering a phone box. One of the old, iconic red ones. Not a silver one with frosted glass where you could surf the internet in privacy. He managed to smile to himself at the charming idiosyncrasies of his childhood home. These are the things he had missed.
He turned right onto Cotters Way. The Bradys lived half a mile up on the left.
Four of them had lived there a couple of days before.
Only two remained.
ONE DOOR SHUTS
When nobody answered, Detective Sergeant Pace let himself in through the front door. This part of Hinton Hollow was a more modern development that had been erected quickly, and often at the expense of quality, to accommodate the growing number of young families that were either blooming locally or being imported from areas that were not close enough to the train line to commute to the city.
Couples starting out, like Liv and Oz.
Families like the Bradys.
The letterbox had been fitted vertically in a position that made it simple enough to reach a hand through, flip the latch and open the door from the outside. Every house on the development had this ill-conceived feature. Teenagers exploited the flaw when they forgot their house keys, but it had never been used for anything more insidious than that.
Pace pushed the door open quickly, lifting it at the same time to avoid the noise of creaking hinges. A light was on at the end of the corridor. There were empty beer bottles on a table. The chair was far enough from the table to indicate that it had been pushed back in anger, in haste.
The sixth step made a sound as his size-eleven foot pushed down against it. Pace stopped for a moment. There was only one door that was shut upstairs. Any other officer in Hinton Hollow would assume that Faith Brady’s dead body was shut behind it. Pace knew that the boy and his father would be behind there, neither of them knowing what was happening or why.
Michael should have been scared. It had sounded like his father was killing his mother in the next room. But Michael knew better than that. He had been in the park the day before.
His eyes opened at the sixth-stair sound; his head was resting on his father’s chest. They were both awake. Both in shock. Owen had called for the police and ambulance. He’d left his wife as a damp, wrinkled pile of sin in their en-suite bathroom. He’d been lying with his son since that moment, his arms and clothes still wet from dragging her sorry body from the tub. And Michael had welcomed him without question, despite the words he had heard exchanged in temper and everything he had experienced only the day before.
They were holding each other, lying in Jacob’s lingering scent.
All the boys together.
Michael held his breath as Pace opened the door, the light behind him leaving him a silhouette that reminded the boy of the man who had killed his brother. He thought he was screaming but he was not.
‘Where is your wife, Mr Brady?’
Pace hadn’t even looked at the body but he did not suspect Owen. He’d still have to take him in, but he left the conclusion-jumping to the community members who thrived on g o s s i p.
‘Can we talk about this somewhere else, Detective?’ Owen was in denial. Not about Faith’s suicide but that his son understood that his mother was now dead, too.
‘We’re going to talk about it at the station. Where is your wife?’
Owen looked at Michael, both of them still lying in Jacob’s bunk.
‘In the bathroom.’ He exhaled. ‘She’s in the bathroom.’
When the paramedics arrived shortly after Pace, they gave him the same look they had given him in the park. No way. No hope.
Another dead Brady.
‘I want you to come with me, Mr Brady. It needs to be now and things will look a whole lot better if you do it of your own accord.’
Owen held his hands up in a gesture of compliant surrender. Michael was sat up on the bed alone. He was lost. He’d feel that way for a long while.
‘You’ll both need to be checked over.’ Pace’s tone was more hushed. Owen had stepped close enough to have both feet in Pace’s shadow, and Michael could be seen over his father’s shoulder, doing his usual act of saying absolutely nothing.
‘This is fucked. I don’t know what to say to him.’
‘Is there anyone who can look after Michael?’
Owen looked back at his son, then, through gritted teeth, ‘I’ll look after him.’
‘I know that, Mr Brady. I mean for the next day. While you are answering questions, helping with the investigation.’ Pace was trying to keep things as level as possible. For the boy.
‘I don’t…’ He trailed off.
‘No grandparents? Friends? Neighbours? A teacher that he trusts? Anything?’
Owen Brady shook his head in resignation.
‘I can’t think straight,’ he admitted.
‘We can appoint someone. We’ll get him seen to by a doctor and someone he can talk to.’
Owen was nodding and explaining things to his son while people were photographing Faith Brady’s undignified cadaver before bagging the woman and anything deemed vital from the last two rooms of the house she had been seen in.
Detective Sergeant Pace waited for a constable to finally arrive with the car he’d been waiting for. He put Owen Brady on the back seat and drove him back to Hinton Hollow Police Station, retracing the route he had taken to get there.
The man at the phone box was no longer there.
He had made his call.
He’d hung up on Liv Dunham.
And made his way back to the dark.
TROUBLE FOLLOWS
Pace was staying in a room above The Arboreal. A non-smoking, non-child-friendly room on top of the bar with a view that looked out over the Hinton Hollow crossroads. He took a sip of cheap whisky and lit a cigarette. And watched the lights turn from green to red.
I watched them, too.
I waited.
He took his mobile phone from his pocket – another way evil presents itself – and looked around at the wallpaper, expecting those black flames. But I gave him nothing. He had to make that call.
It was late. That’s what he told himself. That’s why he didn’t call. He sent a text. Straight ahead, in the flat above the dentist, a morbidly obese woman had pissed herself and died and her dairy-free ice cream was soft but hadn’t quite melted in the way that regular ice cream does. And her mouth was sticky with bean juice and soft drink.
Hinton Hollow. Population 5,017.
Down to the left, Rock-a-Bye was closed for the first day since anyone could remember. There was still a pile of clothes on the floor that needed washing.
Round to the right, towards the station, Reynolds was taking more calls than he could handle. Pissing in the street. Puking in someone’s front garden. Fucking in a phone box. A broken window. A dead cat in a bin. A mother in a bath, wrists slashed. Hinton Hollow was two days into a steady drop that would see it fall into a pit of torment where nobody would be themselves.
Apart from the kids.
The kids would be fine.
Unless the mothers made the wrong choice.
Detective Sergeant Pace was weak.
Detective Sergeant Pace was scared.
Detective Sergeant Pace was a coward.
He sent a text to Maeve. The worried girlfriend. The woman who thought she loved him.
Hey. You still up?
That was it. If she didn’t answer, she’d see in the morning that he was alive and well and that could buy him some time.
He
put the phone on the windowsill and took a long drag of his cigarette, eventually leaning out of the window like a naughty boy and blowing more poison into his town. Mrs Beaufort would not approve.
The phone rang immediately. Maeve’s name flashing ferociously. He shut his eyes for a moment and breathed to prepare himself.
Then hit the button to answer, not knowing how to open the conversation.
It wasn’t worth worrying about.
‘Oh, thank God you’re okay. You are okay, aren’t you?’
‘Yes. Yes. Of course. I’m sorry I haven’t come back to you. I meant to.’ It was a half-truth.
See: Little white lies.
See also: T r u t h.
Any edge to the conversation dissipated within seconds. I wondered whether Pace was himself with this woman. He told her things about the last case. Things he had never told anybody. Things about the letters and the triggers and the bridges and the suicides and the cult and the murders and a manual.
DETAILS DETECTIVE SERGEANT PACE SHOULD NOT HAVE MENTIONED
The victims had received a letter.
The letter contained four words.
Nothing. Important. Happened. Today.
These words triggered their death.
He had been sent one of these letters.
He should be dead. He should have been on Tower Bridge.
Staying with Maeve that night had saved his life.
He didn’t mention the culprit or how he had figured it out or how the police were still looking for somebody or how they would never find him. Because of what he’d done.
And you know that she was just happy to hear his voice because she let him talk and talk. About his hometown, about Hinton Hollow, about the Brady boy and his mother, about RD’s Diner, about Reynolds and Mrs Beaufort, about how he wanted to get away from the city but it seems as though ‘everywhere I go, trouble follows. Like I’m cursed or something. Like I’ve brought some fucking blight on my hometown, you know?’
She knew. She reassured him that there was no such thing. That he was being paranoid.
I wanted to throw some black flames across his walls but resisted. I don’t do this for my own amusement. I am here to keep the balance.
The call finished and Pace lit another cigarette. The bar kicked out downstairs and three men walked towards the crossroads. The lights changed to green and a car that had passed him on his first day made its way towards Roylake.
Inside the car were two brothers.
Another way that evil presents itself is estate agents.
See: Ablett and Ablett.
POO-TEE-WEET
From 13th to 15th February, 1945, nearly 4,000 tonnes of explosives and incendiary devices were dropped on the German city of Dresden.
People, again.
I was there. Of course. I had to be. But I am not a Lancaster aircraft. I am not a bomb. I am not the fire raging through the streets.
I am the raging fire within.
That war, however, is a much bigger story than the one that unfolded in Hinton Hollow. The destruction of Dresden was physical. It could be seen and smelled and touched. The decimation of that Berkshire village was internal. The buildings would remain the same, with the exception of a few broken windows. The changes were occurring inside each member of the community.
They were starting to feel something. But they had no idea what it was.
I was content with my work on that second day and let The Hollow lie in peace. And I watched over Oz Tambor and the woods.
It would be good to get an early start the following morning.
A SNEAK PREVIEW
Day three started with ‘Heeeeugh.’
And it ended with ‘I…’
DAY THREE
Where you will learn about:
An inappropriate inspector
A man in the woods in the boot of a car
The Hadley family
Two estate agent brothers
and the weight of a soul.
WHERE IS HOME, ANYWAY?
‘Heeeeugh.’ Liv Dunham let out an exaggerated yawn, stretching her arms over the edge of the sofa she had slept so soundly on. A piece of cardboard was taped over the hole in the window and the rock with a tie wrapped around it had slept next to her on the coffee table.
She’d needed her rest after such a broken night when Oz hadn’t returned. Liv had managed to convince herself, for one night, at least, that Oz was safe. That he was out there. He was alive. And that he had called her that previous evening.
Sure, the person at the other end of the phone hadn’t said a word but, sometimes, when you love somebody, you just don’t have to. That’s what Oz would say when Liv was fishing for an apology after an argument. He thought he was being laid-back or funny, but it just pissed Liv off even more.
The cold whiteness of a new day was already beginning to cast some doubt over the young English-teacher’s theory. It didn’t feel like Hinton Hollow.
Catching a glimpse of her ruffled reflection in the television did not help. Her hair needed a wash and her left cheek was red and mottled slightly from the imperfections in the leather sofa. It lent her face some much-needed colour, but somehow she thought she looked too good for her predicament.
How could she sleep so well when a little boy had been killed in the town where she lived? How dare she contemplate something so trivial as her appearance when the man she was due to marry in a few days was still nowhere?
I teased her.
Are you certain it was Oz at the other end of the line?
Do you really know who Oscar Tambor is, Liv?
The truth is, that morning, Liv Dunham didn’t know how she felt. She didn’t know how she should feel, what she should do.
Last night she had been so struck by her situation. The call hadn’t felt threatening. There was no heavy breathing or taunting. Just silence. But shouldn’t that be more disconcerting? Her intuition had told her she was not in danger from the caller, but that wasn’t based on anything other than sleep deprivation and the falsity that often accompanies hope. She had no experience in these matters. She had simply felt that it was Oz. She so much wanted it to be him that perhaps she convinced herself that he still cared enough to make contact. Maybe all she did was notify a mad person that she was alone.
Contradicting thoughts sparked across the synapses of Liv’s educated mind, flustering her in the way Constable Reynolds had the previous evening with his condescending insights into her relationship. Her right leg was already bouncing up and down as she leant a little closer to the TV screen, the sofa cushion squeaking slightly against her skin as she moved towards the edge of the seat.
It was 10:15. Almost forty-eight hours since she had last seen or spoken – in a two-way conversation – with her fiancé. She could call the local constabulary again in an hour and they would have to look into her story. But what if the silence at the end of the phone had been Oz? Wouldn’t she just be wasting police time when they needed all of their manpower to investigate poor Jacob Brady’s case? The news about Faith Brady was not yet town knowledge.
Maybe the constable would laugh at her for calling again. Or perhaps he would note her desperation. Her genuine distress. Neither option seemed the correct answer, at that time, for Liv Dunham.
So she remained a woman of inaction.
Staying in and waiting for the phone to ring.
Waiting for Oz.
She forced herself to her feet and plodded to the kitchen, the bruise on her hip had spread out into a deep yellow fan. She took two slices of bread from the cupboard, placed them in the toaster and waited. They popped out a couple of minutes later, browned, but not enough. She pushed the lever back down, went to the fridge, removed the butter and a knife from the cutlery drawer. When the toast bounced up a second time it was more on the side of charred than golden. Liv buttered both slices, cut them in half diagonally then walked them over to Oz’s place at the table and set the plate down.
Then she walked a
round to her own seat, gently lowered herself down and stared at the empty space she hoped would soon be filled by the man she loved and missed.
She took half a piece of toast off his plate and told herself that it was all she needed.
A PIG
Dorothy choked-on-an-ice-cream-covered-chicken-bone Reilly had finally managed to lose some weight.
At the time of her death, she dropped twenty-one grams.
The physical weight is insignificant when taking into account her obvious morbid obesity, but scholars and sceptics have pondered the idea that the metaphysical weight is incomparable. Many believe that this mysterious loss of mass at the moment one ceases to exist is a result of a person’s soul leaving their body.
WHAT I KNOW ABOUT
THE HUMAN SOUL
It’s not my department
At the moment Dorothy washed-down-a-bucket-of-chicken-skin-with-two-litres-of-full-fat-Coke Reilly died, her lungs were no longer active in cooling her blood. That sudden rise in temperature and subsequent sweating could account for the loss in weight.
Something I have noticed with the development of the Western diet – see also: heart disease, diabetes, gout, gallstones and cancer – is that people do not understand the weight of a gram.
What does 21g sound like to you? What object do you know that weighs 21g? That way, you would have a better idea of what a soul might weigh.
If someone had a cup of coffee and put two teaspoons of sugar into their mug, how much do you think that sweet powder would weigh?
What if you took a regular can of Coke and looked at how many grams of sugar it contained, would you understand what was going into your body? What if it was shown as thirty-five sachets of sugar? Would that paint a better picture?
And how would you react if somebody put thirty-five sachets of sugar into a cup of coffee?
If you don’t understand what is going into your body, how could the human mind and collective consciousness possibly comprehend the 21g that seemingly evaporated from Dorothy Reilly if, in fact, it was not through sweat and was the sudden exit of her soul, her essence?