Hangman

by Daniel Cole

  A long white wire ran across the landing to the home’s first sign of inhabitancy: an answering machine placed on the floor at the top of the stairs. An LED display flashed in warning:

  Message box full

  He moved on, away from his colleagues, and, with an uneasy feeling in the pit of his stomach, approached the closed door at the far end of the corridor. A sliver of light escaping beneath the whitewashed wood quickened his pulse as a familiar feeling returned to him. The door seemed to glow against the rest of the dark house, beckoning him, just as the solitary light shining down over the Ragdoll corpse had drawn him in.

  He knew he didn’t want to see whatever lay beyond, but his vault of nightmares still sat relatively empty in comparison to Baxter’s. This would be one horror he’d invite to haunt him in order to spare his friend.

  He braced himself, twisted the ornate doorknob, and slowly pushed the door open . . .

  “Baxter!” he yelled at the top of his lungs.

  He could hear her recklessly negotiating the deathtrap of a staircase as he stepped back out into the corridor and gestured to the officers that everything was all right.

  She came stomping over to join him: “What?” she asked, looking worried.

  “You were wrong.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  Edmunds sighed heavily:

  “You got it wrong,” he said, nodding toward the open door.

  She gave him an inquiring look and then stepped around him to enter the small but beautifully decorated bedroom. An intricate mural had been painstakingly hand-painted across the back wall behind a narrow bed that overflowed with stuffed animals. Fairy lights sparkled where they’d been draped over the shelves, lending a magical ambience to the rows of pop CDs.

  Beside the Barbie Dream House in the corner of the cozy room, three photographs stood on the windowsill: a darker-haired Rouche smiling broadly as a gorgeous little girl laughed from his shoulders, stuffed toy in hand; an even younger Rouche and his beautiful wife holding their baby daughter; a picture of the girl in the snow, stood beside the familiar Wendy house in an unfamiliar garden. She looked to be trying to catch snowflakes on her tongue.

  Finally, Baxter looked down at her feet. She was standing on a sleeping bag that had been laid out over the fluffy carpet beside the bed. Rouche’s dark blue suit jacket was folded neatly beside the pillow, obviously placed carefully so as not to disturb anything in the perfect little room.

  She wiped her eyes.

  “But . . . he phones them all the time,” she whispered, feeling physically sick. “She answered the phone to me and you said there was someone in when you were here . . .” She trailed off when she realized Edmunds was gone.

  She picked a silly-looking penguin up off the bed, recognizing the soft toy from one of the photographs. It was wearing an orange woolly hat, much like her own.

  A moment later, a woman’s voice filled the empty house:

  “Hello, my love! We’re both missing you so, so much!”

  Baxter placed the toy back onto the bed and listened in confusion as the vaguely familiar voice grew louder and louder until Edmunds reappeared in the doorway holding the flashing answering machine in his hands.

  “OK, say good night to Daddy, Ellie . . .”

  Finally, an abrupt beep signaled the end of the recorded message, leaving Baxter and Edmunds standing in silence.

  “Bollocks,” sighed Baxter, marching out of the room to stand at the top of the staircase. “Everybody out!” she ordered.

  Curious faces appeared in doorways.

  “You heard me: everybody out!”

  She herded the disgruntled officers down the stairs, over Rouche in the hallway, and out into the rain. Edmunds was the last to leave. He loitered at the broken front door:

  “Want me to wait for you?” he asked.

  She smiled appreciatively: “No. Go home,” she told him.

  Once they were alone, she silently took a seat on the dirty floor beside Rouche. He appeared too lost in his thoughts even to notice. Without the luxury of a door, the pelting rain had started to flood the far end of the hallway.

  They sat quietly for several minutes before Baxter built up the courage to speak:

  “I’m a shit,” she announced decisively. “A complete and utter shit.”

  Rouche turned to look at her.

  “That slightly annoying, geeky, ginger guy who just left . . .” started Baxter. “He is literally the only person on this entire shitty planet that I trust. That’s it. Just him. I don’t trust my boyfriend. Eight months together . . . but I don’t trust him. I get reports into his finances because I’m so scared he’s trying to use me or hurt me or . . . I don’t even know what. Pathetic, right?”

  “Yep.” Rouche nodded thoughtfully. “That is pathetic.”

  They both smiled. Baxter huddled up tighter to keep warm.

  “It was just after we’d bought this wreck,” started Rouche, looking around at the broken house. “We’d gone into the city. Ellie . . . She was getting ill again . . . Her little lungs . . .” He trailed off, watching the rain intensify at the end of the hall. “Thursday, 7 July 2005.”

  Baxter put her hand over her mouth, the date ingrained into every Londoner’s memory.

  “We were on our way to see a specialist at Great Ormond Street. We were sitting on the Tube as normal one moment; the next, we weren’t. People were screaming. Smoke and dust everywhere, scraping at my eyes. But none of that mattered because my daughter was in my arms, unconscious but still breathing, her little leg all bent out of place . . .” Rouche had to pause for a moment to compose himself.

  Baxter hadn’t moved. She waited for him to continue, her hand still covering her mouth.

  “Then I saw my wife lying under a pile of rubble a few feet away, where the roof of the train had come down on us. I knew I couldn’t save her. I knew I couldn’t. But I had to try. I could have got Ellie out then. People were already running down the tunnel towards Russell Square. But you’ve got to try, right?

  “I start pulling at these sheets of metal that I have no hope of ever moving, when I should have been getting Ellie out instead. All that smoke and soot: she couldn’t cope. And then another part of the roof falls in, just as it was always going to. Everybody left down there starts to panic. I panic. I grab Ellie to follow the others down the tunnel when someone shouts that the tracks might still be live. Suddenly, nobody’s leaving. I know I can get her out, but I just wait there because nobody else is leaving . . . nobody.

  “The crowd had made its decision, and I mindlessly obeyed. I didn’t get her out in time. I could have . . . but I didn’t.”

  Baxter was speechless. She wiped her eyes and just stared at Rouche, amazed that he was strong enough to carry on after all he had been through.

  “I know you blame me for leaving Curtis behind in that terrible place, but—”

  “I don’t,” Baxter interrupted. “Not anymore. I don’t.”

  She hesitantly put her hand on his. She wished that she wasn’t so awkward, otherwise she would have hugged him. She wanted to.

  “I just couldn’t make the same mistake twice, you know?” Rouche told her, running his hands through his graying hair.

  Baxter nodded as a timer switch clicked, illuminating the lamp in the corner.

  “OK. Your turn again,” said Rouche with a forced smile.

  “I let Wolf . . . Sorry, Detective Fawkes,” she clarified. “I let him go. I had him in handcuffs. I had backup moments away . . . and I let him go.”

  Rouche nodded as though he had suspected as much: “Why?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Sure you do. Did you love him?”

  “I don’t know,” she answered honestly.

  Rouche considered his next question carefully before asking it: “And what would you do if you ever saw him again?”

  “I ought to arrest him. I ought to hate him. I ought to kill him myself for making me the paranoid wreck tha
t I am today.”

  “But I didn’t ask what you ought to do.” Rouche smiled. “I asked what you would do.”

  Baxter shook her head: “I honestly . . . I don’t know,” she replied, ending her turn. “Tell me about the blood in the doorway.”

  Rouche didn’t answer her immediately. He calmly unbuttoned his cuffs and rolled up his shirtsleeves to reveal the deep pink scar torn into each of his forearms.

  This time, she did hug him, for some reason recalling one of Maggie’s pearls of wisdom to a distraught Finlay the night her cancer returned with a vengeance: “Sometimes the things that nearly kill us are the things that save us.”

  Baxter kept the thought to herself.

  “A couple of days after I got out of hospital,” Rouche explained, “birthday cards started arriving for my wife. I just sat there by the door reading through the pile and . . . I guess it wasn’t my time.”

  “I drink too much,” Baxter blurted, confident that she and Rouche no longer had any secrets from one another. “Like . . . too much.”

  Rouche laughed at her inappropriately cheery admission. Baxter looked offended but then couldn’t help smiling.

  They really were both as messed up as each other.

  They sat in a comfortable silence for a few moments.

  “I reckon that’s enough sharing for one night. Come on,” said Baxter, getting to her feet and offering him one of her frozen hands. She pulled him up, took out her keys, slid one off the metal ring, and held it out to him.

  “What’s this?” asked Rouche.

  “Key to my apartment. There’s no way I’m letting you stay here now.”

  He went to argue.

  “You’ll be doing me a favor,” she told him. “Thomas will be over the moon when I tell him we’re going to play house for a little while. The cat’s already at his. It’s perfect. There’s really no point even trying to argue about it.”

  Rouche got the distinct impression that was probably true.

  He took the key from her and nodded.

  Chapter 27

  Friday, 18 December 2015

  10:10 P.M.

  Rouche loaded the dishwasher while Baxter finished stripping the bed in the other room. He was afraid to touch anything in her surprisingly ordered apartment, which would serve as his temporary home until the resolution of the case or he was called back to the US. He could hear her across the hall, swearing as she struggled to stuff the provisions for an indefinite period into two small holdalls.

  She emerged from the bedroom a few minutes later, dragging the bloated bags behind her.

  “Arse,” she sighed, spotting her workout clothes draped over the treadmill. She collected them up and found a zip pocket to shove them into. “Right. I’m off, then. Help yourself to . . . whatever. There are some emergency toiletries below the sink, if you need them.”

  “Wow! You are well prepared!”

  “Yeah,” she replied cagily. The moment had passed to explain why she still kept, and had even restocked, the supply of men’s toiletries in her bathroom cabinet—one of the more pathetic parts of herself still hoping that they might come in useful one day. “Well, help yourself. Good night!”

  It dawned on Rouche too late that perhaps he should have offered to help her with her bags when there was a crash out in the hallway, followed by a particularly offensive expletive. Deciding it safer to pretend he hadn’t heard, he went through to the bedroom. A selection of threadbare soft toys had been hastily stuffed beneath the bed, making him smile.

  He had been touched by the amount of effort Baxter had gone to in making him feel welcome in her home. He switched the bedside lamp on and the main light off, immediately making it feel a little more like Ellie’s cozy room. He unpacked the three photographs from the windowsill and lost a few minutes in their happy memories. Finally, he unrolled his sleeping bag across the carpet and got changed for bed.

  Baxter arrived at Thomas’s house a little after 11 P.M. Abandoning her things in the hallway, she went through to the dark kitchen to pour herself a glass of wine. Still peckish, thanks to the stingy fish-and-chip shop owner on Wimbledon High Street, she raided the fridge for dessert. Irritatingly, Thomas was on one of his sporadic health kicks, meaning that her only options were chocolate-less fruit slices or a suspicious-looking bottle of green slime that the Ghostbusters would certainly have considered evidence of paranormal activity.

  “Ahhhh! Don’t try it, funny!” yelled Thomas from the doorway.

  Baxter peered around the fridge, eyebrows raised. He was standing in his boxer shorts, anchored by a pair of tartan slipper boots, and was wielding a badminton racquet above his head menacingly. He almost toppled over in relief when he saw her:

  “Oh, thank Christ! It’s you! I nearly”—he looked down at the ridiculous weapon he’d selected—“well, swatted you, as it happens.”

  Baxter smirked and picked up her drink: “‘Don’t try it, funny’?” she asked.

  “It was the adrenaline,” replied Thomas defensively. “Something about not trying anything and not wanting any funny business got a little jumbled up on delivery.”

  “Uh-huh,” said Baxter, smiling into her wineglass.

  “That’s right,” said Thomas, placing a reassuring hand on her shoulder. “You drink up. You’ve had a hell of a fright.”

  Baxter spluttered up her wine laughing.

  Thomas handed her the kitchen roll:

  “I didn’t know you were coming round,” he said as she dabbed at the fresh pink spots on her blouse.

  “Neither did I.”

  He brushed her hair away from her face, revealing some of the more stubborn scabs that were yet to fully heal.

  “You look like you’ve had a rough day,” he said.

  Baxter’s eyes narrowed.

  “In an effortlessly beautiful and refreshed sort of way, of course,” he added quickly, making her soften. “So what’s going on?”

  “I’m moving in.”

  “Right . . . I mean, right! That’s great! When?”

  “Tonight.”

  “OK!” He nodded. “I mean, I’m delighted, but why the sudden rush?”

  “There’s a man living at my place.”

  Thomas took a moment to process that one. He frowned and opened his mouth.

  “Could we talk about this tomorrow?” asked Baxter. “I’m exhausted.”

  “Sure. Let’s get you to bed, then.”

  Baxter left her unfinished glass in the sink and followed Thomas out.

  “Forgot to mention we’re in the spare room for the time being,” he informed her as they climbed the stairs. “Echo’s fleas have laid claim to ours. There’s been a bit of a siege, but I let off a second Nuisance Nuke this evening, which will hopefully kill the last of the little bastards.”

  This might have been infuriating news any other time, but Thomas looked incredibly proud of the genocidal finale to his microscopic war and the words “Nuisance Nuke” had sounded so absurd in his toffy tones that she could only laugh as he led her up to bed.

  The next morning, Baxter entered Homicide and Serious Crime Command with a slight swagger to her step thanks to the pair of boxer shorts she’d had to borrow from Thomas, having forgotten to pack any underwear. It being so early on a Saturday, she didn’t expect to see anyone important, but she entered her office to find Vanita in her chair and a well-dressed man in his fifties sat opposite.

  Baxter looked puzzled: “Shit. Sorry . . . Wait, am I . . . ?”

  “You are,” Vanita assured her. “This is my office . . . until you resume normal duties.”

  Baxter looked blank.

  “None of this ringing any bells?” asked Vanita patronizingly.

  The man with his back to Baxter cleared his throat and got to his feet, pausing to do up the top button of his tailored suit.

  “Sorry, Christian. I forgot you two hadn’t actually met,” said Vanita. “Christian Bellamy, Detective Chief Inspector Baxter. Baxter, this is our new commissioner
. . . as of yesterday.”

  The handsome man was sunbed-brown. His full head of silver hair and chunky Breitling watch added to the impression that he was far too wealthy to concern himself with paid employment beyond the occasional business lunch or poolside conference call. He had a winning “vote me” smile, which had evidently done its job.

  He and Baxter shook hands.

  “Congrats,” she said, letting go. “Although, I actually already thought you were anyway.”

  Vanita forced a laugh:

  “Christian moved over from Specialist, Organised and Econom—”

  “Really don’t need his whole life story,” Baxter interrupted, turning back to the man. “No offense.”

  “None taken.” He smiled. “Long story short: I was only acting commissioner.”

  “Well,” said Baxter, checking her watch, “I was only acting interested. So if you’ll excuse me . . .”

  The commissioner burst into laughter:

  “You certainly don’t disappoint!” he told her, unbuttoning his jacket to sit back down. “You are everything Finlay promised and more.”

  Baxter stopped on her way to the doorway.

  “You know Finlay?” she asked dubiously.

  “Only for about the last thirty-five years. We worked robbery together for a time, in here for a while after that, before our careers took different paths.”

  Baxter considered that a rather smug way of feigning tact. The underlying sentiment: Finlay had been left stagnating in the same dead-end position while his leathery friend ran out of rungs at the top of the ladder.

  “I dropped in to see him and Maggie yesterday evening,” he told her. “The extension’s looking good.”

  Baxter caught Vanita rolling her eyes:

  “I haven’t seen it,” she said. “Been a little busy.”

  “Of course.” The man smiled apologetically. “I hear we’ve had a promising development.”

  “Yes. We have.”