by Bill Hussey
‘She’s not answering. My grandad’s not about either. She’s supposed to be picking me up from footy practice at half-six.’
‘Good lad. We’ll wait for her there.’
‘Jack, you know you’ve got about thirty messages on your phone?’
When Dawn returned to the station, she found that Jarski’s temper had not improved. Jack had still not shown up and there was another press conference scheduled for later that afternoon. As much as it was obvious that the DCI was not averse to hogging the limelight, and despite Jack’s recent TV performance, it was clear that Jarski felt that the star of the Greylampton case would be beneficial in a PR sense.
‘And where the hell have you been?’ Jarski bellowed, as she entered the Incident Room.
‘Interviewing a witness.’
‘Well, can you inform me before you swan off? Christ, I’ve got enough on my plate with Jack going AWOL.’
‘I keep telling you, Roger, Trent’s a loose cannon.’
Pat Mescher had been hanging around the Incident Room since yesterday, attempting to make himself look inconspicuous. A task nigh on impossible, Dawn thought, when you take up half the room and possess a face that glows in the dark like a jack-o’-lantern. He stood beside Jarski now, spraying the DCI’s arm with pasty crumbs as he spoke.
‘I thought you were supposed to be babysitting school kids,’ she said.
‘This Trent’s bit, is it?’ Mescher smirked. ‘How unprofessional can you get?’
‘Pat, fuck off,’ Jarski exploded. ‘And stop spitting crap all over me. Waddle back to your office and do some fucking work. Dawn, come with me.’
Jarski led the way, barking orders and pushing harassed-looking DCs out of his path. Dawn followed him into an unoccupied interview room. She perched on the edge of the table and ran her fingers over the dints and cigarette burns.
‘Look, Dawn, I don’t want to discipline Jack. And I sure as hell don’t want to reassign the case to that useless tub of lard, but put yourself in my position. Jack’s OIC and, on the first proper day of operations, he’s found sleeping rough in one of our more prestigious colleges. If he does have a drink problem …’
‘Jack doesn’t drink. He’s never touched a drop.’
‘OK, so what’s the score? Why’s he suddenly away with the fairies?’
‘Has it occurred to you he’s following up a lead? Or …’
‘Then where’s the fucking prelim report? Let’s say he fingers the bastard who killed these boys. Any decent defence brief’ll go into the case operation notes and tear us to pieces. Now, look, I know you’re close. Drop what you’re following up at the moment and find him.’
‘No. No way. I am worried about Jack, but I do have my own career, you know. Jack Trent isn’t the be all and end all, saviour of CID. Two kids are dead and I have a job to do.’
Dawn barged out of the interview room. She pushed through a throng of journalists, all chomping away on sweating pre-packaged sandwiches. She would be lucky if there was anything left in the canteen. After an eternity of queuing behind the representatives of the Fourth Estate and listening to their numbskull questions – ‘So … I take this ticket and you bring me my food? Do you bring cutlery? In that tray? Do you bring ketchup? In that tray? Napkins? In the tray. The trays? – she found a secluded spot behind a plastic trellis frame interwoven with plastic ivy. She ate off a plastic plate with plastic cutlery and wondered if it was possible that her pasta was, likewise, plastic.
‘Dawn? Have you seen Jack?’
‘Oh, please,’ Dawn muttered into her lunch. ‘No. I have not seen Jack, and when I do … Manny? Are you all right?’
Manny Steiner, the audio/visual bod for CID, looked nervous as hell. Dawn was used to seeing him in his tiny office next to Archives in the basement, basking in the glow of half a dozen monitors. The Prince of the Pixel, the Audio Oracle, were a few of his self-styled monikers. Within his kingdom of loops and filters, he was supremely self-confident. Dawn sometimes imagined the cool, collected Manny in the outside world and found it difficult to picture him other than downloading pornography while his mother called him for dinner. Now that home-life version of Manny stood before her, twisting his fingers around a video cassette.
‘Is that the lecture hall video Jack gave you?’ she asked. ‘The one with the glitch?’
‘There’s no glitch. I cleared up the image late last night.’ He said the next sentence slowly, giving weight to each word. ‘Dawn-it-scared-the-shit-outta-me. I’ve run it through every filter program available, even used the Video Image Stabilization software developed by NASA for the Feds. It’s not been tampered with; no cheapo special effects, this is real. It is what it is. Look, I’ve heard the stories about Jack, who hasn’t? I never believed them though.’
‘Manny, what are you talking about?’
‘He’s a magnet for this stuff, isn’t he? The Greylampton thing? I heard he spoke to those dead girls with, like, mind powers. But this. I’ve cleared up the image, printed out stills and enlargements, but that’s it. Finito. I don’t wanna see this shit again.’
Manny tossed a package onto the table and headed for the lifts, no doubt returning to the comfort of his subterranean lair. Dawn gave up on her pasta and opened the envelope. She took out three A4 stills. Each was a shot of Simon Malahyde, standing in the audience of the theology lecture. A time code was printed in the bottom left corner of the frame, recording the moment from which the image had been taken. Fractions of a second separated the shots.
She flipped through them several times. Her mind raced, searching for explanations but knowing, deep down, there were none. It seemed that her initial impression on seeing Doug Winters’ video had been partially correct. Simon Malahyde did not have a face, after all.
He possessed several.
She spent the rest of the afternoon reading through transcripts of interviews from the usual collection of cranks and attention seekers that come forward after a TV appeal. Five murder confessions, none mentioning the extraction of fat. One haunted mind had claimed that the voice of Johnny Morris, speaking through his Yorkshire terrier, had told him to kill the child. A DC, who obviously hadn’t thought her transcript would be read at any senior level, had scrawled- ‘Copy To: Jack Trent – Plausible, don’tcha think?’
Dawn always double-checked these ‘freak’ confessions. The OIC on her first major case had told her: ‘Remember, you ain’t lookin’ for one crazy in the midst of a bunch of sane people. Out there, they’re all crazy.’
For every ten minutes taken up reading the masturbatory fantasies of would-be killers, she would spend twenty examining the stills. She supposed she had to believe Manny when he told her the video had not been digitally altered. An elaborate prank then? The lecture was a set-up. The faces were masks. She could hardly see the university allowing its most hallowed lecture hall to be used like that. And then there would have to have been a conspiracy between the students in the audience, which surely would have come to light. But if it wasn’t a joke perpetrated on the day, and the film had not been tampered with, what then? She threw the stills into her bag. It was time to pick up Jamie from practice.
By the time she reached the playing fields, she had tried Jack’s phone a half dozen times. Always the same message greeted her – you cannot be connected. Rain drilled the windscreen. She grabbed her umbrella, stepped out of the car and slammed the door. She would drop Jamie at her dad’s, drive straight to Jack’s and wait outside until he returned. All bloody night if she had to.
The pitch was deserted. It was only six-fifteen by her watch. A group of boys traipsed across the field, their heads low against the driving rain.
‘Hey!’ she called. ‘What’s happened with practice tonight?’
A kid she recognised as one of Jamie’s team mates came running over.
‘Mrs Howard? No, called off. Coach thought it was too wet. Look, is J with you?’
‘He’s not with you? Where is he?’
‘He
bummed off school. Look, he owes me a …’
‘I don’t care what he owes you. Don’t stand there like a bloody halfwit …’
‘Hey, chill. I don’t know where he is, okay? I gotta go.’
The boy rejoined his gang. He said something and they all looked in her direction and laughed. She pulled out her mobile and grunted. The battery was dead. Where the hell was her little boy?
‘Dawn, he’s with me.’
Jack. She felt a strong urge to kiss him. To put her lips to his face. To bless the bridging scar between his eyes. Jamie was with him. That meant her son was safe.
‘Where is he?’
‘I told him to wait in your car. Don’t you ever lock that thing?’
For some reason, his question seemed very funny. She burst out laughing.
‘What’s going on, Jack?’ she asked, breathing hard. ‘Why’s he with you? Where were you today? What happened last night?’
‘I’ll answer your questions, Dawn. All of them. But you have to believe what I’m going to tell you. For the sake of …’
‘I saw his face.’ Jamie, standing behind her.
Dawn was about to throw her arms around him, in one of those public displays he hated so much, when she saw what he was holding. One of the stills of Simon Malahyde. The most disturbing, most impossible of the three. The first of the faces, taken at 06:06:01, was weird enough: the little dark-haired boy. The second, timed at 06:06:02, showed a pallid, middle-aged man, his cheeks wet with tears. The child and man resembled each other strongly and the same expression was imprinted on both faces. Horror, agony, revulsion. The third face – 06:06:03 – the one Jamie held out to Jack, was quite different. The features, if features was the right word, withered and decayed, the expression, malevolent.
‘This is him,’ Jamie said, his voice small.
‘I know.’ Jack took the picture. ‘We’ve met. In my dreams.’
‘Jack? What the hell’s going on …?’
‘Dawn, it’s time you heard the truth. About Simon Malahyde. About Jamie. About who I really am.’
Thirty-two
Jack’s Story
Jack Trent pulled his mother and father close, as if they were a pair of recalcitrant bookends. They walked on, a snug little huddle. All along the pavement of Oxford Street the snow was a well-packed, slippery carpet. Occasionally a bus would trundle by, careful of kamikaze Christmas shoppers who dashed between the stores. Jack was wearying of the bustle. He’d not been to London before and, exciting as it was, it seemed as if everyone and everything had something to prove. In his village, things were happy with what they were. Small church, small houses, small noises. Even the people seemed smaller, though perhaps that was because Londoners collected themselves into big, bad-tempered herds and crashed about the place.
‘So, boy, your mum’s off to get a few surprises for the Big Day. What’ll we do?’
‘Why don’t you take him to the Father Christmas Grotto in Hamley’s?’
‘Mum, I’m twelve, I’m not a baby.’
‘Hear that, Claire? He’s not a baby. Better scratch the playpen off the list. Tell you what, there’s one of those new American hamburger restaurants not far from here. Fancy that?’
‘Here, you can’t go into a restaurant with a dirty face,’ his mother said, spitting into her handkerchief. ‘What’ll the waiters think?’
‘Urgh, Mum, get off. That’s disgusting.’
‘It’s how cats wash, and they’re the most hygienic creatures going.’
‘What? Like next door’s cat?’ Jack laughed. ‘It sits around licking its bum all day. And it does this thing where it …’
James Trent caught his wife’s eye and tried to stifle his laughter.
‘That’s enough of that, toilet gob,’ he said. ‘Come on. We’ll meet up in an hour outside Woolworths.’
Claire Trent waited for a kiss from both her boys, and then they went their separate ways. Hand in hand, father and son jostled along the pavement, Jack trying to keep his footing on the ice. He looked back once, scanned the crowd for his mother and saw her swallowed up by the press.
‘Look lively, son.’ The fatherly grip tightened and the boy felt reassured. ‘Keep up.’
They passed a Salvation Army band on the corner of New Bond Street, and James sang along boisterously to Good King Wenceslas while his son cringed.
An hour later, they stepped out of the fast food joint on Regent Street. Jack licked tomato sauce from his lips and belched, savouring the flavour.
‘Glad we got you washed up for that unique culinary delight,’ James Trent said.
‘You’re such a miserable old fart. Better hurry up, we’ll be late for mum.’
Jack held on tight to his father. He looked up at the grainy pink strip between the tall shops. He had never seen the sky that colour before. It was just like the rest of the city; jostling for space and making itself horribly different in order to stand out. He was tired now and, as much as he had liked the taste, his dad was right about the food. The burger felt like it had reassembled itself in his gut and had taken a wander back up his windpipe. Any minute now it was bound to make a reappearance. Jack swallowed hard.
As he walked, it seemed that he had to push, not only against the people, but against the glare of light and white noise. He hardly noticed the sky open up as they crossed Oxford Circus. Shoulders shoved against him and he felt the phantom burger move further up his throat. His hands ran wet in his gloves. If he was home now, he’d be curled up in front of their twenty-six inch Keracolor TV set, devouring egg on toast and watching a Batman re-run. A mental image of Eartha Kitt in her tight Catwoman outfit diverted his mind from the crush and swell, but he still felt nauseous.
‘You all right, boy? Not far now.’
The real faces advancing on him looked cruel and hard, while the plastic ones that flashed by in window displays were jovial but frozen. He felt bruised and dirty by the time he saw his mother. She was standing on the opposite pavement, trying to wave at them while labouring under a dozen fit-to-burst bags. A motorised tableau of the nativity whirred away in the window behind her, complete with holy family, shepherds, barnyard menagerie and the Three Kings, robotically offering and withdrawing their gifts.
Jack waved, certain now that he was going to puke. Then a string of tinkling Christmas lights overhead caught his attention and he forgot his upset stomach. His eyes followed the wire to a lamp post on the other side of the street. Nearby, at the same level as the lights, a group of men stood in the cradle of a cherry picker. Clipboards in hand, they appeared to be making a bird’s-eye inspection of the thoroughfare.
‘Come on, son. Quick as The Flash,’ his dad said, pulling him between the traffic.
They were halfway across the street when it happened.
Jack saw the cherry picker’s lorry jolt forward. Above, the men in the cradle called out in alarm. Newspaper reports would later blame a faulty brake for the accident. At that moment, however, it seemed to Jack that the crane had come to life. Like some mechanised brontosaurus, it rumbled towards the lamp post from which the Christmas lights were strung, its great neck swaying this way and that. The cherry picker crashed into the post and its cradle juddered and dropped three feet. The men screamed as the vehicle’s hydraulic arm cut through the wire that held the lights. There was a vicious metallic twang. Sparks flashed. The lights flickered. Jack screwed his eyes tight shut.
Against the blackness, he imagined the sounds around him – cries, shouts of warning, the whoosh of the wire – in comic-book style captions. Then a glare, fierce as lightning, flared against his closed lids. In the same split second, he felt the explosion against his face, so strong it launched him off his feet. He seemed to be airborne for ages before falling against the hard, wet ground. The scent of burning skin filled his nostrils.
Jesus, I’m on fire …
Then there was PAIN. Pain so huge that he was able to sidestep it and marvel at its enormity. Confused shouts and screams, and a th
under of feet roared around him. He felt his arm plucked from the ground and a finger press into his wrist.
‘He’s gone.’
‘Bring him back. Please, you have to bring my boy back.’ His father’s voice, rolling like a slowed down record.
‘What are you talking about?’ Jack asked. ‘I’m all right. I’m …’
‘Please, Jesus, take my child. Let him pass quickly through Purgatory.’ His mother. ‘God, our Father, Your power brings us birth, Your providence guides our lives …’
‘He’s not dead, Claire. Stop praying. He’s not dead.’
I am. You’re wrong, Dad. I am dead. My eyes won’t move and my breath isn’t steaming no more.
He could feel nothing. Not even the touch of snow against his face. He was speaking to them, but they couldn’t hear him. All that he could see of his parents were their shoes: brown brogues, black boots, slurry-stained. A circle of shoes had gathered around him and, oddly enough, he could read fear and agitation in the way they shifted and pawed at the ground. Between a pair of high heels and rubber galoshes, snaked a trail of multicoloured broken eggshells. At first he didn’t recognise them as the Christmas lights.
A few feet from his head, two red stains sat upon the snow. Blood. His blood. Scary, big pools of his blood. So big, he doubted there could be much more left inside him. A cable lay across the puddles and fizzed blue at its frayed end. As his mind began to drift, and his parents’ pleadings and the cries of the crowd became muffled, he watched the blood spread and sink. The world was slipping away from him. It was okay, really it was. He found he didn’t mind the growing dark. He was about to surrender to it, when he heard the sound.
Ripping. As if a thick piece of fabric was being torn along a seam. It was unnatural, jarring: the report of something that shouldn’t be happening. He saw the tear. It started as a paper-thin slit, running from the base of the nativity tableau. There was a gasp, and the rent widened and lengthened. Mary and the baby Christ were torn apart, their faces flapping on either side of the aperture, as if they were no longer solid forms but painted on canvas. The tear opened wider still and Jack saw all that was beyond it.