by Jon Richter
‘What is it?’ Sigurdsson asked, rising to his feet.
‘That was Clive. We’ve just had a call from the hospital – someone’s attacked Dr Leithauser. He’s unconscious and being treated there.’
‘Jesus… someone broke in, you mean?’
‘We don’t know yet… the cleaner found him when she went into the mortuary.’
‘Okay… well, it doesn’t need both of us, does it? Why don’t you stay here with Holly while I head over to the hospital?’
‘No, you don’t understand,’ she continued, her face contorting as if she was still processing the information she had just received. ‘Schultz’s body has disappeared.’
Excerpt VI: Vic Valiant, Unmasked
So all that brings us back to where we started, back to Old Blighty, right here on Salvation Island, where I am right now, writing this soon-to-be-recognised literary classic.
Except it doesn’t, not really, because I haven’t told you anything yet.
You know I’m a recovering drug addict. But you don’t know about my anxiety attacks, the Lorazepam I’m having to stick in myself before every match, like some fucking junkie. I don’t know how the attacks started. I remember the first time, maybe about five years ago, in the dressing room at some sports centre after a show. I thought it was the end, a heart attack, the same thing that’s killed off so many of us. It’s the crowds, I think. I’ve wrestled in front of thousands of people, but suddenly, for the first time, I can feel all these eyes on me, the fans circling the ring like demons, fangs and claws out, ready to write their little reports on the internet, ready to crucify me if they see me slip. Without the booze and the pills I feel so fucking… exposed.
You know about my childhood and what happened to me when I was a kid, but you don’t know how much I love my own children, because it’s impossible to put down in words.
You know I’m an alcoholic, currently sober for ninety-six days. But you don’t know why I drank, what I was trying to forget.
You know about my problems with women, but you don’t know why all my relationships were doomed to fail.
It’s been impossible to say it for forty-eight years, so I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised that it’s really fucking hard to even write it down.
I’m gay.
There you go. Vic Valiant, the big macho man, former pro wrestling star, is a fucking fag. A queer. A fruit. Whatever you want to call me, go right ahead. I don’t know if I was born this way, or if my stepmom turned me against women forever, or if it was just that the first person I fell in love with was a man, and that’s just the way it goes. Buddy Briscoe was my idol in more ways than one. I don’t believe in god, but I know you did Buddy, and so I hope for your sake that you were right and I’m wrong, because if you were then you’re sure to be with the angels now, because I know that God doesn’t give a shit what side your bread is buttered, he just cares if you’re a good person, and you sure as hell were, my friend.
I’m sorry Tanya. I always knew we were living a lie. I thought maybe you could… fix me. I know now that it doesn’t work that way, and that what I needed to fix was my attitude, my choices, my decisions. How I felt about myself.
I’m sorry Jesse, Gaia, Symphony. I hope that the world really is becoming a more tolerant place, and you can understand how a man in my situation might end up with three children, and how he can still love them all, even if they didn’t come out of a happy relationship.
I’m sorry to the lady I’m living with right now. You’re a great person and so is your daughter. I’m sorry for taking advantage of your good nature. I just needed some time, and a place to stay. I didn’t mean to get involved in something again, and for the lies to start all over. My nerves are in shreds because of it. I’m sorry for making you think I’m seeing another girl from the show, because I’m not. I’m seeing one of the guys. I’ll call him Mr X, because he sure as hell won’t want to be named; he’s just as trapped in the closet as me, and he’s a mean guy, and the sex is pretty rough. It’s not often I meet a guy bigger than me, and he’s much bigger, a real genetic anomaly, and really into the juice too, and I’m coming home with bruises and telling you I’ve been in a bar fight. I don’t really know what I’m doing. I just haven’t had a relationship like this before. It feels… exciting. I know I don’t deserve it, and it sure as shit doesn’t have a future, but then there probably isn’t much future left for a guy like me.
I’m sorry to all my fans, especially to those that now think I’m disgusting, just like she did. But for those of you that are still reading, I hope you can understand. If I’d come out in the eighties, or even the nineties, it would have been the end of my career. I’d have been hounded out of the industry, lost my friends, lost my family, lost everything.
Turns out I lost it all anyways.
So now you know. If Barbara was right, I’m going to rot in Hell for the things that I’ve done, whether they’re written in this book or not. I still don’t know what I’m going to do with it. Maybe I should just burn it. The main thing was that I thought I would feel better if I got it all off my chest. Like a confession.
And you know what?
I do.
Friday
‘How did you get this number? No comment!’ he shouted angrily, ending the call. That was the second reporter to have phoned him that morning. News of the latest developments had somehow reached the press already, and he suspected it wouldn’t be long before a national newspaper picked up the story – events were, after all, spiralling into insanity.
They had eventually decided that they would have to wake Mason’s mother, and deposit Holly at her house for the night, despite her feeling under the weather. The little girl was incredibly cute, and shared her mother’s apricot-coloured hair. She hadn’t even woken up when Mason had lifted her out of bed, surrounded by her teddy bears in the glow of a SpongeBob nightlight. After they’d dropped her off and apologised to Mason’s sniffling mother, they had taken Mason’s car and sped to the crime scene. There they had found evidence of a struggle in the mortuary: shattered glass where apparatus had been broken, two gurneys upended, a splash of blood on a worktop into which it appeared the unfortunate doctor’s head had been viciously driven.
There were no signs of forced entry. In fact, the only other signs of intrusion were the things that weren’t present: the security camera that had been wrenched from its place high on the wall in one corridor, and the drawer hanging open in the refrigerated storage area.
The drawer from which Victor Schultz’s body had been removed.
Once again, as the newspapers seemed to be revelling in reminding them, they were clueless. The Scenes of Crime Officers they had flown in that morning had found not a single fibre or fingerprint, and the pathologist himself was in no condition to answer questions; the head trauma he had suffered had left him in a coma.
Sigurdsson’s mood wasn’t helped by the fact that he hadn’t ended up sleeping at all the previous night, all thoughts of the luscious lips of Inspector Carin Mason long dispelled. He’d tried to grab a couple of hours in the archive room in the early hours of the morning, but instead his mind had been feverishly active, gnawing away at their latest unanswered question: why on earth would someone steal Vic Valiant’s corpse?
Since then, everything had been mayhem. A deluge of calls from the media, some reporters even travelling to the island to congregate outside the police station; an irate Wells pressuring him to find something, anything that could help explain the latest absurd twist; a call from Howard Penman demanding an update on the case and asking if there was anything he should be aware of in advance of that evening’s show; and no good news from Mitchell or Giggs, who were still frantically hunting for Wheeler and Adams, if they were even still on the island. Eventually he and Mason had fled to her office to plan their next move.
‘Jesus, I don’t even know where to begin,’ Mason muttered, pacing back and forth across the carpet like a caged leopard. �
��We must be on to something with the drugs angle.’
‘I agree,’ said Sigurdsson. ‘Let’s say Wheeler is the one that’s taken the body. Forget how he managed to break into a fully operational hospital in the early evening – why did he do it?’
‘Because there’s some clue that Leithauser missed when he carried out the autopsy?’
‘Makes sense… but if that’s the case, why hasn’t he been concerned about it until now? And he knows that we already know that strychnine poisoning was what killed Valiant.’
‘Argh, I don’t know… maybe he’s cracking under the stress? I know how that feels… or maybe it was Adams, not Wheeler. Jesus, Chris, maybe it was both of them acting out some sort of tag-team wrestling fantasy… the truth is we don’t have a fucking clue!’
He opened his mouth to say something encouraging, but she was right. Every turn this case took led it further and further into a quagmire. He was about to suggest that they consider asking Wells for more support, when the door opened.
‘There’s someone here to see you, Inspector,’ said Giggs earnestly.
‘If it’s another reporter, tell them to fuck off,’ she snapped in response.
‘It’s one of the wrestlers, ma’am – a lady called Stacey Wainwright.’
Mason and Sigurdsson exchanged glances.
‘Any idea what she wants?’ Mason asked.
‘She just said she needs to speak to you urgently.’
Mason sighed. ‘Okay, bring her through – it’s not like she’s interrupting any major breakthroughs.’
Minutes later Giggs returned, this time accompanied by the diminutive figure of Stacey Wainwright, also known as April Summers. She was dressed in a shapeless waterproof with her hair tied back into a bun, and didn’t look a great deal better than she had during their last encounter. Hastily applied makeup could not conceal the dark circles around her eyes. She was clutching something to her chest, wrapped in a plastic bag.
‘How can we help you, Stacey?’ Mason asked, impatience mixing with intrigue in her voice.
Wainwright’s face was strangely resentful as she began to unwrap her mysterious package.
‘I found this in the desk drawer last night. I’ve been up all night reading it.’
A thick A4 pad dropped out of the bag onto one of the desks.
‘What is it?’ Sigurdsson inquired.
‘Disgusting, is what it is…’ she spat in reply. Then she sighed, and the anger fell from her face. ‘I don’t know why I… well, just read it and you’ll see.’
‘Stacey, I don’t understand,’ said Mason as she moved towards the tome, which had fallen open onto a bookmarked page. Wainwright’s gaze had drifted into the distance as she responded, out through the window into the rain.
‘I loved him, you know. I think that’s why I wanted to give you this. In spite of… all this, I still want to know what happened to him…’ She broke down then, sagging against the partition wall as she sobbed.
Sigurdsson rose to join Mason, who was poring over the text. He began to read from a random point on the left-hand page.
‘I was so sure he’d been with her,’ murmured Wainwright, sniffing noisily. ‘So sure…’
‘What are you trying to tell us, Stacey? What is this?’
But Sigurdsson already had an idea, and he continued to read.
‘It’s his memoirs,’ he explained, half to himself. ‘Valiant was writing an autobiography.’
‘Stacey, thank you for bringing this to us. But there’s a lot of writing here we’ll need to work through. It would be really helpful if –’
‘Who is Mr X?’ Sigurdsson interrupted.
Wainwright’s gaze returned to their faces for the first time since she’d dropped the ledger in front of them.
‘Isn’t it obvious?’ she replied with a rueful smile. ‘It wasn’t Ciara he was shagging behind my back at all. It was Tall Paul. Vic was gay.’
*
Sigurdsson had shut himself away in the archive room. Mason was now utterly convinced that Dixon was the killer, that the journal proved that he had killed Schultz and then tried to butcher Sigurdsson to protect the secret of his sexuality. And Sigurdsson knew that Wells would jump at the chance to pin the whole thing on Dixon and get him on the next boat home.
But the nagging feeling wouldn’t go away. Arn Adams… Mark Booth… something in Schultz’s past was still locked away from them. And this memoir, inscribed in Schultz’s angular, aggressive handwriting across hundreds of pages, might finally hold the key.
Mason had agreed to let him read the rest of the book while she caught up with Mitchell about both of their ongoing manhunts. Although she no longer suspected either of them of the murder, there were still drugs charges to be levied at Wheeler, and Adams… well, he seemed to have completely disappeared. They’d checked with every airline that had run flights out to the States since Monday morning, and he hadn’t been on any of them.
Adams. He had already featured as a peripheral character in Schultz’s accounts of his earlier years, which focused heavily on the wild parties and heavy drinking and drug use that would eventually lead to a full-blown addiction to alcohol and painkillers. The memoir was remarkably frank and honest, Schultz not suppressing anything about his troubled childhood, his abuse of narcotics, his violent mood swings.
Sigurdsson felt a twinge of affinity as he read the wrestler’s account of his first anxiety attack, and about the drugs he’d started using to keep them under control, like Lorazepam. It was clear that that’s what Schultz had been injecting every night – not steroids or stimulants as they’d first thought. Which put them right back to square one on the steroids angle too. If his drugs were unrelated to the ones that Wheeler was selling to the others…
He kept reading. The day bled into the afternoon, the mist thick and restless outside the window, like something alive and lurking. He found another section that referred to Adams, this time referencing the in-flight punch-up they had already heard about from Booth.
As he read on, any shred of empathy Sigurdsson had felt quickly evaporated.
The Milwaukee thing was soon after that, so I never spoke to Adams again. At the time I thought he was acting nuts, but now I know why he started on me. He’d been hanging around with some girl – she kept showing up at our matches, like a groupie. Maybe they were together, I don’t know. After one show we had a big party at Dwight’s house, and she was there, and I fucked her. Then I saw her again a few weeks later, and she told me she was pregnant. I didn’t believe her, told her she was crazy. We were at another party, and I was really trashed; I’d been drinking all day and doing lines, weed, pills, all sorts of shit. She was all in my face, telling me how she was knocked up and I might be the father. I just wanted to get rid of her, but she wouldn’t leave me alone. In the end I punched her in the stomach. There are a lot of things I’ve done that I’m not proud of, but that was a new low for me. But you’ve got to understand – at the time my head was all over the place because Tanya was leaving me, and this was the last thing I needed.
An idea started to form in Sigurdsson’s mind as he read Schultz’s chilling words. He re-read the passage, and then he dashed from the room.
He found the contact numbers in a notebook on Mason’s desk. Booth was staying at a hotel called the Marine View. Sigurdsson used his mobile to dial the number, asking to be put through to his room. It was a long shot – it was past five, and The Strongman was likely to already be on his way to the venue for that evening’s show. But perhaps he was still there, preparing, just as Schultz must have done, before his last ever match exactly one week ago.
‘Hello?’ came Booth’s Texan drawl.
‘Mr Samson? This is Detective Sigurdsson. I need to ask you something.’
‘Geez, well make it quick Detective – I’m supposed to be heading to the show in five minutes.’
‘You told us that Arn Adams fought with Vic Valiant on the plane because
Valiant had slept with his girlfriend. Why didn’t you tell us Valiant attacked her a few weeks later? I’m reading a diary written by Valiant that says he punched her in the stomach.’
There was silence at the other end of the line.
‘Mr Samson?’
‘Yeah, I’m here. I just… ah, shit.’
‘What’s the matter?’
Booth exhaled deeply.
‘Arn came to see me, a couple of nights ago, here at the hotel. He was a mess. He said he couldn’t get his flight home because of the storm, but I didn’t understand why he was so cut up about it. We ended up drinking in the bar, and at first it was okay, just talking about the old times, you know? But he got real drunk real fast. He kept talking about Valiant, about how much he hated him, calling him a son of a bitch, how he was glad he was dead and that he’d had it coming… and he told me about his wife losing a baby when they first got together, how she couldn’t have kids no more and children was all he’d ever wanted…’ Booth paused. ‘Do you think…?’
‘That she lost her baby after she was attacked? That Arn Adams didn’t come here to scout you, but to kill the man that did it?’
‘Look, dammit, I told you – Arn is a professional. He’s been a talent scout for decades. This business is his life!’
‘Did he tell you he lost his job at the SWA six weeks ago?’
More silence. Sigurdsson fancied he could here Booth’s mouth opening and closing as he chewed gum. Eventually, the wrestler spoke again.
‘He slept on my floor that night, you know. I left him there in the morning and he was gone when I got back.’
‘He hasn’t been seen since he checked out of his hotel on Monday morning.’
‘Ahhh, shit.’
‘If you have any information that can help us locate him –’
‘But it don’t make no sense!’ Booth interrupted. ‘Why, after all these years, would he suddenly decide to… to kill Vic?’
‘Maybe he didn’t know. About the baby being Valiant’s, I mean. Maybe she finally told him and he couldn’t handle it. That’s why we need to talk to him, Kevin.’