Shooting in the Dark

by Baker, John

  They turned towards the door as Celia’s footsteps sounded on the stairs. She was wearing knee-length boots with a Russian coat and a round fur hat. ‘Oh, girls’ party,’ she said. ‘The men still out hunting?’

  ‘Presume so,’ said Marie. ‘We haven’t heard anything.’ Celia slipped her paying-in book into the top drawer of her desk. ‘I hope they’re watching this chap,’ she said. ‘Only there was a blond in the bank giving me the once over. I hope it wasn’t him.’

  ‘Who?’ said Janet. ‘What blond in the bank?’

  ‘The guy Sam and JD are tailing,’ Marie explained. ‘He’s a blond.’

  ‘Oh, my God,’ said Janet. ‘Of course he is.’

  ‘Explain,’ said Celia, coming around her desk.

  ‘I was following Ralph,’ Janet said. ‘For a few days before he was killed. But I wasn’t the only one. There was a blond guy watching him as well. I didn’t think about it before, what with Ralph’s death and the state of Geordie. It must be the same man. Rent-a-drool face?’

  ‘Sam said six foot three or four, but slim, long legs.’

  ‘It’s him,’ said Janet.

  ‘Would you be able to pick him out of a line-up?’ asked Marie.

  ‘No problem. I’ve seen him two or three times. If it’s the same guy, I’ll recognize him.’

  The girl left the house early, just after eight. She didn’t take the bike this time, walked in the direction of the café. An hour later the man came out and walked off in the same direction.

  Sam said, ‘I’m going inside. Cover me.’

  They were sitting in the Montego and it was so cold that they had lost feeling in their toes. JD’s breath steamed his window. ‘I thought we were going to follow him.’

  ‘Change of plan. I wanna see what he lives like.’

  ‘Don’t be long, Sam. I’m feeling more like Cap’n Scott every minute.’

  There was a window with a small screw lock on the inside. Sam cracked it, removed the lock, opened the window and was through it within five minutes.

  In someone else’s space now. He stood quite still for a hill minute. He closed his eyes and listened to their silence. There was a yearning in the hush, something similar to the quiet of his own house, but there was taciturnity as well. It was as if the house was trying to tell him something and he could detect the sounds of the vowels and the consonants but was incapable of hearing the words.

  He walked through the rooms. The guy was tidy, his clothes hung up or neatly folded on shelves or a chair. On his side of the bed the book was placed squarely on the bedside table. The Undermining of Psychological Principles. There was nothing of his that was on the floor. She was the opposite; instead of a book there was a Walkman and a mess of tapes and magazines by her bed. On the wall were pop singers wearing skimpy and transparent clothes, an abundance of glossy lipstick. Her clothes left a train between bed and bathroom, her underwear drawer was half-open and had slips and pants hanging out of it as if they were trying to escape.

  The obsessive and the trollop.

  A corner of the bedroom was given over to a personal torture chamber. There was a home-made rack there and some kind of electric-shock machine, handcuffs, gags, blindfolds, leather belts and restraints and a selection of instruments with which to pierce or cut or bruise.

  In the sitting room there was a bookcase with hundreds of textbooks on psychological practice and theory. They were not for show either, they were well thumbed and many of them had bookmarks and scribbled notes in the margins.

  By the door on a chair was a worn leather satchel. It had a brass fastener with a keyhole and it was locked. Sam carried it back into the bedroom and prised open the lock with an implement that looked as though it was designed to remove stones from horses’ hooves.

  He tipped the contents of the satchel on to the bed. Syringes and needles and a small bottle with no label containing a tiny amount of colourless liquid. Must be the stuff that Ralph had been injected with, a drug for sedating animals in the wild.

  ‘This’ll wrap it up,’ Sam said aloud to himself. His voice was out of place in the room, not simply because there was no one there to hear it but because the room was predominantly a place of silence, of emptiness. He left everything where it was and walked back through to the sitting room, looking for a telephone. But before he picked it up there was a knock on the outer door. Must be JD telling him the guy was on his way back.

  Sam lifted the latch to let himself out, expecting to see JD on the step. But it wasn’t JD. The blond guy was standing there, the yale key in his hand and an expression of complete surprise on his face. ‘You,’ he said.

  He recovered fast and pushed Sam into the house, sending the detective staggering back towards the bedroom. Sam stopped himself falling but before he had recovered the bigger man had pushed him again. Sam bounced off the edge of the bedroom door and went down on all-fours. Immediately the blond had him in a lock, the man’s forearm wrapped around Sam’s neck while with the other hand he pushed Sam’s right arm into a tight halfnelson. The man was sweating, his skin suddenly slick as his pores oozed an oily combination of adrenalin and fear and absolute conviction.

  Sam felt himself being lifted clear of the floor and saw the bedroom wall coming at his head, fast. He tried to struggle free but was not quick enough to avoid the impact. The room reeled around him. White painted walls with a couple of Bruegel prints and a smear of red blood freshly squeezed from his own forehead. Once again the blond ran him head-first into the wall, then dropped him on his back over the wooden foot of the bed.

  In the dream Sam was a character in a soap opera. It felt as though the budget had been cut and the director was getting ready to write him out. There were three angels playing horns, all too tired to sing; and there was a disembodied refrain coming from concealed speakers. He couldn’t make out the words, something about ice and fire, raging against absolutely everything.

  He was aware of his body being dragged along the floor, could feel the carpet trapped beneath him. Then he was hoisted aloft, his body swinging into open space, an astronaut now, something else to add to the long list of jobs on his CV.

  The smell of stale sweat was the first sense to kick in. An ache in his back. But the dream was mixed in there as well, that voice going round and round, ‘Don’t fall apart on me tonight.’

  Sam was lying full-length on the rack. It was his own voice he had heard. He was muttering away to himself, chanting, rhythmical, on the point of song. One of his hands was handcuffed to the side of the rack and the guy was about to lock his other hand in a leather cuff. ‘What’re you doing?’ Sam said.

  He looked up briefly, engaged with Sam’s eyes. ‘I’ve got a drug you might find interesting. It’ll keep you awake while I take your eyes out.’ The blond hair was sticking up in clumps but the eyes were dead, pale blue, almost transparent. The eyes were windows on to a deserted landscape. There was nothing behind them. They concealed nothing.

  Sam didn’t think. He sat up and nutted the blond with all his might, bringing his forehead down on the bridge of the guy’s nose. There was a crack and the man’s blood shot down the front of his shirt and sprayed Sam’s face. Sam leapt from the rack, dragging it after him with his handcuffed hand. With his free hand he reached for the wooden handle of an implement of torture which was decorated with fish-hooks and lead-weights. He lashed the man across the face with it, feeling it stop for a moment as the hooks dug into the flesh of his cheeks. But the velocity of the blow carried it through and the flesh was gouged out in a bloody wake.

  The blond reeled backwards. He turned around on the spot and touched his fingers to the congealed blood on his face. He picked up the duvet and wiped some of the blood away, but as quickly as he mopped it up his body produced more. He screamed like an animal, without restraint of any kind, and hurled himself across the room towards the detective. Sam stayed cool, let his breath come easily, knowing that he had the measure of the guy now. He waited until the man was within strikin
g distance and then let go with his right foot, bringing it up between the guy’s legs with the force of a sledgehammer. The blond stopped. All of his systems seemed to close down simultaneously. Sam watched the breath leave him, saw the colour drain from his torn and ravaged face.

  Sam was ready to lash out again, he still held the fishhook implement and if necessary he would have taken the man’s head off. But the guy had had enough. He went down on his knees and slowly brought his head on to the blood-stained carpet. Sam allowed himself a tiny smile that hurt every muscle in his face. He said, ‘I don’t take drugs. I’m not even an athlete.’

  They were still in the same positions a few minutes later when the police arrived.

  Sam had lit a fire in the large grate and Angeles could feel the heat on her face and legs, hear the wood cracking and splintering as the flames consumed it. She fingered the rug and turned to Sam as he stacked logs into the wicker basket standing in the corner. ‘They actually locked him up?’

  ‘Yeah. Don’t worry. They won’t let him go. There’s the evidence of the syringes and Janet can identify him. They arrived and arrested the guy. They took him away. They had him in cuffs.’

  ‘You saw him?’

  ‘Yeah, we were there. The police have got him. He’s out of circulation. Stop worrying.’

  ‘I need a drink,’ she said. She went upstairs and poured a half-tumbler of Scotch. She got a chunk of ice from the fridge and brought the drink back into the room where Sam was waiting. ‘You don’t like this, do you?’

  ‘I don’t mind people drinking,’ he said. ‘As long as they’re in control.’

  ‘But you think I’m an alcoholic?’

  ‘Doesn’t matter what I think. I know I’m an alcoholic; only you can say if you are.’

  ‘Maybe I’m a little bit?’ she said.

  He laughed to register the irony. ‘Doesn’t work like that,’ he said. ‘Either you are or you aren’t. If you can manage it, you aren’t an alcoholic. If you repeatedly drink more than you intend to, you probably are.’

  ‘And if I come to one of your AA meetings, will there be someone there to make a diagnosis?’

  He shook his head. ‘It’s not like that. You have to make your own diagnosis.’

  ‘Then I’m not,’ she said. She sniffed at her glass and took a sip. ‘I like a drink and I can’t remember the last time I fell down.’

  ‘OK. So you’re doing good.’

  Angeles turned towards him, tried to imagine the expression on his face. ‘Then what happened? After they arrested him?’

  ‘Hardwicke arrived with a van-load of guys. They combed the house, took away armfuls of documents, different devices. He had a home-made torture chamber in there.’

  ‘And his girlfriend. What about her?’

  ‘They picked her up from the café. Took her down the station.’

  ‘What kind of torture?’

  ‘Heavy. He had something to cause electric shocks. There was leather gear and knives.’

  She tried to imagine being cut or electrocuted and enjoying it. She shook her head from side to side. ‘So he’s a random killer? He’s a sadist who fixated on Isabel and me? Is that what we’re saying?’

  ‘I don’t think so. The guy himself s not saying anything. But it looks and feels like something personal to me. Plus he’s a psychologist, you’d expect him to have a reason.’ Her sensitive fingers found the edge of the brass fender and she traced the floral patterning. ‘I don’t know any psychologists and I’m certain that Isabel didn’t. How old is he?’

  ‘About your age, maybe a couple of years older.’

  ‘What’s he called?’

  ‘Jenkins. Rod Jenkins.’

  She shook her head. ‘Why me, Sam? Why Isabel and me? There’s got to be a reason.’

  ‘D’you want to tell me about the accident at the pond?’ She whirled around on him. ‘Why? How can that have anything to do with it?’

  ‘I don’t know. Everything else comes up blank. It might lead somewhere, give us a clue.’

  She sat upright on the rug, crossed her legs. She’d found the fire-fork and as she spoke she rocked it backward and forward on the stone hearth. It set up a tapping rhythm, somehow comforting, as she recollected the events of a day far in the past.

  ‘I was tiny,’ she said. ‘Five years old, Isabel would be about three. It was a Sunday morning. Daddy was going to take us out in the car that afternoon. Mummy was baking a cake in the kitchen, making sandwiches. We would be sledding and then have a picnic in the car.

  ‘I said I’d look after Isabel, we’d play around in the paddock outside the house. And Mummy wanted us out from under her feet. “Not on the road.” She always said that.

  ‘I don’t know how we got to the pond. I suppose we just wandered. You know what it’s like in the countryside after the snow has fallen, the landscape was magical. Everything was glistening and new and I remember showing Isabel that there were no footprints in the snow, and then looking back and seeing our own footprints, like the only footprints in the whole world.

  ‘It was a big pond, not very deep. In the summer, the rest of the year, there were ducks. Sometimes you could walk around the edge and disturb frogs and they’d jump in, almost too late, so you’d nearly stand on them.

  ‘That morning it was frozen over. I remember throwing stones on to the ice and watching them bounce around. It was while I was throwing stones that Isabel went on to the ice. She didn’t walk on to it; she fell on to it, rolled down the bank and landed on the ice. She didn’t cry, just sat there beaming up at me as though she’d done something special. She was a beautiful child, always smiling.

  ‘I picked my way down the bank and on to the ice, but as soon as I got there my feet slid away under me and then we were both sitting there. It felt as though the pond was frozen right through. It was completely hard, like concrete.

  ‘I ran into the middle and Isabel came wobbling after me. We were dancing, singing and dancing on the ice, slipping and sliding and falling over. We must have been making a racket because someone rang the fire brigade.

  ‘When my foot went through the ice it only added to the fun. There was no sense of danger with us. We carried on dancing and jumping around. At some point I remember hearing the ice cracking. It was as if the earth was splitting apart. It was loud, the kind of noise that you stop and listen to. We couldn’t see anything but we could hear the run of the fissures and breaks as the surface cracked up around us.

  ‘I didn’t understand what was happening but a sixth sense took over and I made Isabel sit down with me. I put my arms around her and told her to keep still. She looked frightened and I told her to listen for a bird. The ice was no longer dry. Where we were sitting on the ice the water was slowly rising. Isabel said there was water in her wellie, but I wouldn’t let her take it off.

  ‘The fire engine came. We saw it pulling up at the edge of the pond. A huge monster with the mechanical ladder on the top. Red in the white landscape. Red, to match our wellies. And then we were gripped by panic.

  ‘The men jumped down from the fire engine and started running around, shouting out to us. I couldn’t make out what they were saying and I don’t think it would have made much difference if I could. I was paralysed. Isabel began crying and everything suddenly seemed hopeless.

  ‘They pushed a ladder out towards us and one of the men crawled along it. He pulled and pushed me until I was on the ladder. But when I got on to the ladder the ice cracked again, sharply, as if it had snapped, and I turned and saw Isabel topple over sideways and disappear.

  ‘I screamed. I suppose you’d call it a scream. But it was something else. I’ve been in a couple of scary situations since then, situations where I’ve screamed. But the scream that came out of me that day, when Isabel went under the ice, well, I’ve never been able to reproduce it. It wasn’t confined to my throat, to my vocal cords.’

  She picked up the fire-fork for a moment and held it in two hands. Then she placed it back down a
gain, partly missing the hearth. She knew it was half on the hearth and half on the rug but she didn’t care. She didn’t look at him.

  ‘I was five years old, Sam. A scrap of a girl. I didn’t know I had a being until that moment.’

  He put a hand on her shoulder, squeezed it lightly. She reached up and brushed his fingers. Sam’s voice was husky. He said, ‘Go on, what happened next?’

  ‘The fireman went in after her. He plunged in and disappeared, just like Isabel. There was only me left. The water was as black as oil. There were a few pieces of broken ice floating on the top, but I couldn’t see anything beyond the surface. And it was still, there was no movement, nothing to betray the fact that my sister and the fireman were under there. It was as if they had been swallowed by a void.

  ‘I expected that I would be sucked in next. I sat there on the ladder and waited for it to happen, something like a huge vacuum cleaner to pop up out of the blackness and suck me into it. It may have been only a second or two but in my memory it was a space beyond time. It was as if everything had stopped. I didn’t expect to hear sound again or see anything move or feel warmth. It was as if I was suspended there, as if the world had stopped at that moment and nothing would ever happen again. That that would be the end, that suspension. I imagined my parents at home, similarly suspended: Mummy over a baking tray and Daddy about to strike a Swan Vesta to light his pipe.

  ‘And it was all broken up by bubbles. Huge bubbles coming to the surface of the black water and bursting. Isabel came out of the hole like a rocket. She only had one wellie on and the fireman’s arms were holding her clear of the icy water. He plonked her down on the ladder next to me. I saw his face and it was blue. I mean really blue, not just a faint blueness about the gills. His face was dark blue, violet-blue. He shouted something and the men on the other end started pulling the ladder in to the bank.