Mitchell, D. M.

by crime The King of Terrors (a psychological thriller combining mystery

  The woman made a dart for the door, but Isaiah’s arm lunged out like a striking serpent from the darkness and he clasped her round her slender neck. She was dragged back into the room, his hand a blur as he now moved it to cover her mouth and stifle her scream. They played out their struggle in the patch of cold moonlight, as if they were actors on a macabre stage, the rasping sound of cloth against cloth as harsh and distressing as their combined heavy breathing. Billy saw Isaiah’s arm rise, the mace flashing silver for a split second; saw the weapon whipping in a cruel arc to smash against the woman’s head. Her body collapsed into a shadowy heap on the carpet, a drawn-out bubbling groan fading into silence like a dribble of water disappearing down a plughole.

  Billy stumbled into the room. ‘Oh my god, you’ve killed her!’ he said.

  She was face down. Isaiah was already kneeling over her, feeling the pulse in her neck. An oil-like pool of blood was seeping across the carpet. ‘Not quite. Not yet,’ he said. He said it like he was checking a microwave dinner.

  That was it; Billy couldn’t take any more. He sprang over the outstretched legs of the woman and grabbed the door. Isaiah shot to his feet, his hand grasping at clothing, but he stumbled over the body, cursing as Billy ran out of the door beyond his reach. Billy turned to run back along the walkway and came up against Camael and Gabriel who were headed towards him.

  He spun on his heel to take the opposite direction, knowing there had to be another exit, another stairwell at the end of the walkway, and he bolted headlong towards it.

  Isaiah came to the doorway.

  ‘What the fuck are you doing letting him out?’ said Gabriel in a hush, indicating the man was to go back inside. He looked about him but no one stirred. He imagined this place wasn’t a stranger to weird noises during the night, and it paid not to investigate. ‘Do what you have to do,’ he told a contrite Isaiah. ‘I’ll take care of Billy.’ With that he went chasing after the young man, who’d already ducked rabbit-like down the black hole of the exit.

  Body pumped through with adrenaline, Billy took the stairs quickly, holding onto the rail as he cleared them two at a time. Behind him he heard the machine gun clatter of Gabriel’s heels ripping his nerves to a bloody pulp. He stumbled, regained his footing, knowing now that if he were caught he’d be as cold and as dead as Beth. He wanted to scream out in alarm, scream for help, but he simply didn’t have the breath.

  He emerged from the exit on the ground floor, raced across the muddy square, allowing himself a quick flick of the head to check where Gabriel was. He wished he hadn’t. He wasn’t far behind and he was closing fast. The sight of his indistinct but lean form lurching mechanically after him injected another much-needed shot of strength into his fast-failing legs.

  Billy had hated sports at school. He’d since avoided any kind of physical exercise. The many hours flopped in front of the TV, or laid prone on his bed as he played on his games came back to haunt him as his flaming lungs turned against him, his legs, sucking in the last dregs of energy, were gradually being converted to rubber. His mind yelled ‘run!’ and his body yelled back ‘I can’t!’

  He heard, through the fog of his fear, a car racing down the road. It drew alongside him as he ran. ‘Get in! Get in!’ he heard a man shout through the wound-down window.

  A mind in panic does strange things, was his first thought. This entire night was madness and the car was part of it. The car stopped just in front of him.

  ‘Inside, now!’ yelled the driver.

  And this time Billy didn’t hesitate, he flung open the passenger door and threw himself breathlessly inside the car. Gabriel came pounding alongside, made a hasty grab at the door as the car sped quickly away and Billy slammed the door shut. He leapt up and was relieved to see Gabriel’s form shrinking into the distance.

  ‘Oh, Jesus! he bawled. ‘Oh, Jesus Christ!’

  ‘What was happening back there?’ asked the driver. ‘Who was that guy coming after you?’

  ‘We’ve got to get to the police,’ Billy stammered. ‘Now, straight away. God, they’ve killed her!’

  ‘What? Who have they killed?’

  For the first time Billy looked directly at his saviour. A hard-faced man, aged about forty maybe, thick hair, narrow eyes ‘Beth, for fuck’s sake! They killed her, that crazy Isaiah dashed her head in with a freaky mace-thing.’ He put his head into his hands and began to blubber.

  ‘Beth? Beth who?’

  ‘Heaney.’ The word was muffled by his hand.

  ‘The girl from the supermarket?’

  Billy nodded. Then he looked up questioningly. ‘How’d you know she worked at the supermarket?’

  ‘Never mind that, Billy,’ he said. ‘Are you sure it was this Beth Heaney woman?’

  ‘You know my name? Are you the police or something?’

  ‘You sure it was her, Billy?’ He sounded pissed off.

  ‘You’re American. You’ve got an American accent. Who the hell are you?’

  ‘I’m Canadian, but I’ll forgive you. I’m a friend, Billy, that’s who I am.’

  ‘How’d you know my name?’ Panic began to sink its razor claws into his chest. ‘Let me out, I’ve got to get to the police.’

  ‘Yeah, sure, we’ll go to the police. Give me the number of her flat, Billy, and then we’ll head right on to the nearest station.’

  ‘Number 349, now stop fucking about! This is serious!’

  ‘Listen, you’d be dead if it wasn’t for me,’ he said. ‘Like I said, I’m your friend; you can trust me.’

  Billy closed his eyes. The world had gone crazy. He began to cry, great globs of tears streaming down his cheeks. ‘I want to go home!’ he wailed, his body shaking.

  ‘Sure you do. I’ll take you there. But you gotta answer me a few questions first. Understand?’ Questions first, home second. You got that? Billy, listen up, this is important! You got that?’

  ‘Yeah, I got it,’ he snivelled, wiping his nose on his sleeve.

  ‘I’m your friend, Billy. Didn’t I just save your arse back there? So you gotta trust me. You got that? Trust me.’

  Billy swallowed, nodded dumbly. The car sped down the deserted streets into the night.

  * * * *

  15

  Silent Scream

  These sorts of places were hell during the day, but at night they were something else. A stinking maze full of rats, he thought, eking out a dull, hand to mouth existence with little to relieve the tedium or the squalor. Most of the occupants unemployed, most doing drugs or something worse. A foetid pit where they threw society’s leftovers. At least, that’s what he thought, and once he thought something there was very little chance of shifting it. Helped him do his job. You needed to get things straight in your head, not mess them about. That way you knew where you were.

  And where he was at this moment was outside flat number 349. And the door was unlocked.

  He checked again down the walkway and then peered over the edge of the concrete wall and down onto the empty courtyard below. There were voices, in the distance, the hum of car tyres, the sound of a TV playing too loud a few doors down. But, from all appearances, flat number 349 had not attracted any attention. For the moment.

  He’d been back at midday to check, and though a number of people came and went, going about whatever business people around these parts needed to take care of, no one even suspected what had happened in flat number 349 the previous night. No police, no drama, nothing. A narrow window of opportunity offered itself before the law and media were crawling all over the place. He knew he might not have long. Billy had told him that Beth Heaney had been murdered, but he couldn’t rely on the word of that snivelling little runt of a weasel. He had to check this out for himself.

  He pushed the door open. The metallic smell of blood confirmed something had happened, and it was strong, enough to tell him plenty of it had been spilled in the process. He was careful to close the door quietly behind him before flicking on the torch, shining it at his feet.
As he suspected, an inordinately large patch of blood had soaked through the carpet almost to the place where he stood. He must not tread in any of this, he thought, sliding the beam over to the centre of the room.

  He’d seen many a body in his time – cut up, shot up, beat up – and had contributed to the list himself over the years, and he knew what state this one would probably be in, but all the same the sight of the inhuman lump of flesh, covered over with a fine grey-white powder, took his breath away for a second.

  He made out a torso, beside it its dismembered limbs arranged like so many logs beside a fire, and atop these was what looked to be the severed head. The whole sat in a black lake of blood.

  He bent to his haunches, aiming the torch at the head, the mouth, open and bloodied, gaping wide in a final silent scream, was visible through the mound of lime that had been poured over it.

  Difficult to tell who she was, he thought. But not a nice way to go, whoever. Fucking barbarians. He’d hoped to get to her before they did, to prevent this.

  He played the beam of the torch over the bare feet of the corpse. He squinted thoughtfully for a moment. He rose, and saw a strange symbol on the wall opposite. He played the torch beam over it. A circle in black paint, a cross in the centre, a star in the middle of it all. His eyes narrowed. The circle turned out to be a snake or something, eating its own tail. Fucking barbarians, he thought again.

  He edged around the room, avoiding any of the blood, careful not to touch anything, not to brush against the blood-spattered furniture and walls. His gloved hand pushed open one of the two bedroom doors revealing an unmade bed, a cheap, chipboard cabinet at its side, a chest of drawers – an ancient-looking thing, dark varnished wood and probably 1930s. He went over to the drawers first, going through them one by one. Cheap women’s clothing – T-shirts, underwear, a jersey. Precious little. Hardly enough to support a life. This place was temporary, he thought, a stopping-off place. To where, he wondered?

  The cabinet yielded nothing except a plastic alarm clock which had stopped at ten thirty-four. He lifted the mattress. Nothing underneath. He ran a speculative hand down the mattress edge and at the foot of it discovered a slit, six inches long, not easily detectable unless you knew what you were looking for. His fingers probed inside and he took out an envelope. He shone the light on the contents: a number of documents, including a plastic driver’s licence bearing the name Daniel Burgess, and a birth certificate for the same guy. He didn’t recognise the face on the photo. He stuffed it all back inside the envelope and back into the mattress, shining the torch around the room. By the window was a pair of women’s shoes. He picked one of them up. But on the way out he was drawn to two stylish photographic prints on the wall, incongruous because they didn’t seem to fit with the other taste in décor, or distinct lack of it, and because they were the only two things adorning the walls anywhere in the flat. Black and white photos. Coastal landscapes.

  In the corner of each, written in pencil on the white paper margin were limited edition numbers. And the name of the photographer: Gareth Davies.

  He took one of them down from the wall. On the back was a London gallery label: Foster Specialist Galleries, Chelsea. They would have been expensive to buy. He made a mental note of the name and address and hung it back up.

  A noise on the walkway outside caused him to stiffen, flick off the torch. He stood motionless in the dark, waiting for the voices to thin and disappear. Only then did he make his move. He paused by the hardly recognisable heap of human remains and placed the shoe he’d found in the other room near the dead woman’s foot.

  As he suspected, the foot was too big for the shoe. One thing he was almost certain of now; the woman lying here on the floor wasn’t Beth Heaney.

  * * * *

  16

  Learning to Swim

  She was cold. Shivering. Though the room was chilled, her tremors were because of the reason why she was here. What she had to do.

  She found her mind shooting back to when he was little, her Billy, though in truth she hated it when everyone called him Billy. His name was William, she said, getting progressively more annoyed each time. How could they corrupt it so? It was William. In the end she gave up the fight. But to her he was always William, nothing else. Her little William.

  How she’d longed – ached – for a baby. How she’d clutched him to her sweated breasts, a tiny, bloodied lump of a baby boy. But he was hers. She promised she would love him come what may. She was a mother, and he was her little boy. A bond that lasts forever.

  ‘This way, Mrs Krodde,’ said the man.

  He had a comb-over. Youngish but with a comb-over. She thought such things were dead and gone these days. Men preferred to shave their heads entirely. It was the fashion.

  There was a horrible smell in the room. A sharp, chemical smell that prickled the nostrils and made her feel nauseous.

  He was lovely till he was twelve years old, she thought. His mother could do no wrong. He worshipped her. He loved that. My William, she’d tell him, and he’d respond by kissing her on the cheek. Then all that fizzled away when he became a teenager and it never came back. One moment a sweet puppy; the next a snarling hound you couldn’t put your hand near. She could just about put up with the cold shoulder from her husband – there’d been no fire in that particular oven for years – but not from her William. It cut her up.

  So she ate away the misery but that just made her fat and feel even more miserable. Eventually she turned off from the hateful William he’d become, drowned her long tiresome hours in long bouts of mindless TV and chocolates. One life swapped for another. You are what you eat, people say. What did that make her?

  The man with the terrible comb-over took her to a table. A long form laid upon it, covered with a sheet. There was another similar mound on another similar table. She wanted to turn and run away, but folded her arms against the cool atmosphere and sucked in a breath.

  His fingers gripped the edge of the sheet. He observed her closely, a tiny smudge of empathy in his eyes. She glanced at him, nodded quickly.

  He peeled back the sheet. It crackled as if it were new and straight out of the polythene wrapper.

  The face was so white, she thought, like that of a statue she’d seen in a park.

  ‘Is this your son, Mrs Krodde?’

  She wanted to say no, because her son, her little William, had died a long time ago. But she nodded again, putting a hand to her mouth. ‘Yes, that’s my son William,’ she said. ‘You say he was found in the canal?’

  He said yes, and explained that he was found by two young people out jogging. ‘Drowned, by all accounts,’ he said. ‘No sign of any other injuries. He had his wallet on him, and his watch, so not a mugging gone wrong, one presumes. You say he’d been out drinking?’

  ‘Yes, he was depressed because he’d lost his job at the supermarket. I told him drinking wasn’t the answer.’

  ‘Probably had one too many, took a walk, went too close to the canal and fell in.’

  ‘He couldn’t swim. I couldn’t afford for him to have swimming lessons when he was little. Maybe if I had he’d be alive today.’

  ‘Perhaps,’ he said clinically. ‘Perhaps not. Depressed, you say?’

  She said yes. ‘You think that’s a reason? You think he drowned himself?’ The thought cut her up. She knew all about depression. She was drowning in chocolate.

  ‘Hard to say, but it could be a contributory factor.’

  ‘Oh,’ she said. She allowed herself to be led meekly to the door. ‘Do you think if I could have afforded swimming lessons for him, like other mothers did, he would be alive today?’

  ‘Difficult to say, Mrs Krodde. Difficult to say.’

  * * * *

  17

  A Prickling of Fear

  December 2011

  Christmas was fast approaching, a week or so away. The snow came down hard and relentless. But that was what winter could be like in Wales. Gareth Davies wasn’t complaining; it was pa
rt of the attraction, being cut off, isolated from everyone and everything. Isolation did have its drawbacks, namely the weather; he had risked the elements and driven out in his wheezy old Land Rover to stock up on exorbitantly expensive provisions from the Cavendish sisters’ store during one of the few windows of opportunity the weather presented. It had been a nightmare getting out, driving down the lanes and small single-track road; the council’s gritting trucks only concentrated on the major routes so when the blizzards came they experienced a total wipeout, with the small side road and neighbouring fields becoming one under the heavy drifts of snow.

  He had loaded his carrier bags into the back of the Land Rover and was making his careful way back. Night had fallen and the snow came down again in Arctic proportions. He cursed. He didn’t want to be stuck out in the middle of nowhere. The final mile stretch down to his cottage was on quite a steep incline, the road giving way to a muddy track, heavily rutted and frozen solid. It was covered in a fresh blanket of fine snow. The old headlights didn’t do much to light up the track, and the windscreen wipers came from an era when slow and erratic represented British quality. He was concentrating hard, struggling to keep to the track and avoid letting the vehicle slide into one of the deep, snow-filled ditches.

  He was, however, glad to be on the last leg of the uncomfortable journey home, and was looking forward to hunkering down in front of a log fire with a stiff drink. He’d even break into one of his recently bought sherry-filled mince pies as a minor salute to the season. And perhaps it was this warming thought that distracted him, because he did not see her till it was too late to do anything.

  A woman, her face gleaming like a bright full moon in the glare of the headlights; a look of surprise that switched to horror as she burst from the hedge to his left and realised that a car was bearing down on her. She appeared to slip on the snow, crash down the steep bank.