R3 Deity

by Steven Dunne

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘Because I couldn’t find it when Yvette was making coffee.’

  Terri narrowed her eyes at her father. ‘Isn’t it illegal to search a house without a warrant?’

  ‘Absolutely. It’s on a par with impersonating a police officer.’

  Terri laughed. ‘Yvette didn’t seem to catch on, Damen.’

  ‘Let’s hope she doesn’t remember you,’ said Brook, ignoring his daughter’s insinuating tone.

  But Terri wasn’t to be deflected. ‘Are you and her. . . ?’ She tilted her head suggestively.

  ‘Certainly not,’ replied Brook. ‘She’s part of an investigation. Her son is missing and she’s very vulnerable. That would be opportunism of the worst kind.’

  ‘But if she wasn’t involved in a case?’ Brook concentrated on the road. ‘Taking the fifth on that one, Damen? Well, she’s certainly pretty.’ Brook wasn’t to be tempted into an answer. ‘And far too attractive for that dirty old Len. Did you see the way he looked me over?’

  ‘I did. But he may just be Slab Happy.’

  ‘Pardon?’

  ‘He used to be a pathologist. It’s a habit in people who work with the dead. They assess people’s height and weight. Just in case. They don’t know they’re doing it.’

  Terri pulled a face. ‘Gruesome.’

  ‘What about Russell? Did you get a feel for him?’

  ‘Sort of. There’s a poster missing. Do you know what it was?’

  ‘No. Miss Thomson couldn’t remember.’

  ‘Pity. And without books he’s a tough read but, no books,’ she raised an eyebrow, ‘that’s significant in itself.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘He’s more of a plotter than a thinker.’

  ‘Plotter?’

  ‘Director would be a better word. Probably where he gets his love of films.’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘Look, this may be completely offbeam. He may just be a film buff and his tastes may be completely random . . .’

  ‘But?’

  ‘But if you were to assume his character from the posters in his room, there are one or two pointers. The Blair Witch Project, for instance. Did you know the makers built its reputation by using the internet? They created a website that treated the disappearance of three students investigating reports of a supernatural entity, as a real event.’ Brook looked at her. ‘I know. Spooky, eh?’

  ‘And people got hooked on the mystery like they are with Deity?’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘What happened to the students in the end?’

  ‘It was a bit vague but I think they died.’

  Brook nodded. ‘Similar to Picnic at Hanging Rock. Anything else?’

  ‘Have you seen Badlands?’

  ‘Actually I have. I saw it with your mother a long time ago. I can’t remember much about it.’

  ‘It’s about a mindless teenage killer played by Martin Sheen. He’s on the run and heading for the Canadian border and safety.’

  ‘Go on,’ said Brook, trying to remember.

  ‘He’s getting away – just a few miles from the border – but suddenly he stops and shoots out his tyres.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because he’d rather die on the electric chair and be famous than live in obscurity for the rest of his life. Think that’s what Russell and the others were planning?’

  ‘Well, they’re more famous than they were a week ago.’

  The press conference was now featured on the national news channels, as were parts of the two internet films from the Deity broadcasts. They didn’t carry the appeal for information about the suspect in The Embalmer case although it went out after the main news on the local East Midlands bulletins.

  ‘They’ve found their audience,’ said Terri, looking up from the Sylvia Plath book. ‘Are you feeling okay, Dad?’

  He snapped out of his reverie and switched off the TV. ‘Bit of a headache.’

  ‘I’m not surprised.’

  Brook padded into the kitchen for some tablets and returned to sink into a chair with the photocopies from Adele’s diary. He swallowed two aspirins with a gulp of Aberlour to wash them down. ‘I can’t help thinking I’ve seen The Embalmer’s face before last night – except it’s wrong.’

  ‘Wrong? What’s wrong?’

  ‘The face.’

  ‘Looked pretty regulation to me,’ said Terri. Then: ‘Listen to this, Dad.’ She read ‘Suicide Off Egg Rock’ from the Plath anthology. When she finished the line I am, I am, I am, she said, ‘Need I say more?’

  Brook nodded thoughtfully. ‘Adele wrote the same line in the front of her diary.’

  ‘You still won’t let me read it?’

  Brook grimaced. ‘There’s a big difference between giving your impressions on her collection of books or Russell’s taste in films and actually looking through their thoughts.’

  ‘I don’t see it.’

  ‘But I do. I’ve been doing this a long time and, believe me, putting yourself in someone’s head is not healthy. Doubly so if that person’s a victim. Or a killer. I’ll let you know if I need advice on something. That reminds me. What does,’ he checked a detail in Adele’s diary, ‘WGAF mean to you?’

  ‘Who gives a fuck?’ she answered.

  ‘I do.’

  ‘No, I mean . . .’ Terri pushed back her chair at first sight of her father’s grin. ‘Very funny. I’m tired. If I’m driving you in early tomorrow, I’d better get some sleep.’

  Brook got out of the chair. ‘Good idea. Night, darling.’ He turned at the door. ‘And Terri, you’ve already helped me a lot.’

  She smiled at him. ‘Night, Dad.’

  Brook closed the living-room door and sat at the kitchen table to read more of Adele’s diary. When he picked it up, he noticed the word Diary had been split by a hyphen added in the middle of the word. Di-ary. Why? Brook held it away from him. Di – could she be a female friend? Was Adele personalising her memoirs to make the diary an imaginary comrade?

  He opened it at the first passage again. The entry was for I January 2011 but Adele had crossed out every date of every entry and replaced it with Some number, some month. WGAF?

  Believe nothing. It’s not real. None of it. It pours out of the screen. And the idiots suck it up. Mums and dads, neighbours too. Look at their faces, all aglow, deformed by defeat.

  ‘Hallelujah. We believe.’

  Here is the news. Drive to work, drive back, sit for hours plugged into the stream of stuff flowing from the tube. The surrender of life, the move from first hand to second. A headshake here, a tut there, a ‘serves them bloody well right’ somewhere else. There’s a Japanese earthquake but it’s not real. How can it be? We’re not there. There’s no tsunami. Those poor people. Look at them run. Now that’s entertainment.

  A girl’s body is found. They put up the maps. It’s real. It happened here. It could happen to you. I wish it would. I’d be a star. Mum’s mouth sags in awe. ‘I’ve driven on that road. Who would’ve thought?’ No one, why start now?

  Bedtime. Turn it off. The Machine Stops. Time to wake up. Time to dream. No time for reality, a better world beckons from the pillow. Even waking is a dream. A dream that today will be better, kinder, full of love and hope.

  The real wake-up beckons. ‘Have a nice day, dear.’ ‘You too.’ And the hours start to die, killing the day. It’s over. File it with the others. U for Unmemorable, Unreal. Unrepeatable? If only.

  Same old world. Not waking is the answer. Dream forever. Like the Lady of Shallot, I am half sick of shadows.

  My hand is real. I examine it as I write. My body is real. My vagina is real. My breasts are real. I can still feel AR’s weight on top of me, inside me. My whole being throbbing. Lungs filling. Such exquisite pain. I am, I am, I am.

  Brook turned the page to a fresh entry.

  Dad’s face when I told Mum I was going out with someone (AR). I could almost hear the blood rushing to his head. He was in the next room but
I didn’t have to shout. He listens to everything I say with bated breath. Words are so powerful. To think the word ‘boyfriend’ can deliver such a kick in the teeth. It was all I could do not to march in there and laugh in his spluttering face. And Mother? Stupid bitch. She doesn’t even know what her man is thinking, wanting. I could’ve kept AR secret and let Dad keep hoping, but I need to crush his heart now. I can’t go on. I can’t stand being around him. My own father. He comes to stand next to me just to smell me, like I’m prey. I’ve ignored his sly looks at my body too long, his enthusiastic hugs. Think I don’t know you lie on my bed when I’m not home, Dad? Give it up. I don’t want to dress like a nun around you. I don’t want to cover my tits. Cover your eyes, old man. Cover your eyes.

  Brook read the last entry again. Jim Watson was telling the truth. Surely he would have removed that last section, had he been censoring his daughter’s thoughts. The missing pages must have been cut by someone else. Adele? It seemed likely.

  Brook picked up the ESDA copy of the page below the absent pages. The technicians had not picked up all the text with the Electrostatic Detection Apparatus but there was enough to show that Adele had created the script for the leaflet. Live Forever. Immortal. Beautiful. She’d written the same words several times in a variety of ways, presumably as a design exercise.

  Brook turned back to the diary and read other entries.

  A strange boy joined our literature group. Russell Thomson. He hardly speaks and he can’t bear to look people in the eye. He has a camcorder on his wrist and doesn’t take it off. He looks like he has Special Needs and even Wilson thinks he’s smarter than him but he’s wrong. There’s something about him. I don’t know. It’s like he knows something that the rest of us can never know and he’s just working out a way to explain it to us. I saw him with his mum the other day. She’s beautiful and it’s hard to imagine the two are related. Wilson saw her too and was all over her like a ten year old with a toffee apple. He says he’s going to pop her if it’s the last thing he does. Bad boy. Dirty boy.

  Then it was back to her relationship with Rifkind and the passion spilled off the page again.

  Adam Fucking Rifkind. No more secrecy. No more sneaking around. No more AR code, Adam Fucking Rifkind. I should Facebook the shit out of your guilty secret, then where would you be? You think you’re a god to women. Is that why you don’t want me and say you don’t love me? You only love yourself. You want your slag of a wife and the brand new screaming receptacle of piss and shit she’s carrying. Fuck you, Adam Rifkind. (Good title for a poem.) Fuck everything about you. And another thing. Your novel is shit. You think you’re God’s gift to literature. You’re not. No more suggestions from me. Or is that the point? I’ve cured your infantile story, put a line through the puerile, and you don’t need me now.

  Brook smiled. Rifkind in a nutshell. Adele was very astute. Was? He hoped she was alive, hoped she was too clever to give her life for fleeting fame and the momentary regret of loved ones.

  He turned to her notebook of poems and read the piece that she’d composed on the blotter of her desk before transferring it to her notebook.

  Live Forever. Question Mark

  Life is not a rehearsal, They say

  Life is not an audition, They say

  Life is something that happens while

  You’re making plans. They say

  Live Forever? Make your mark

  Be someone. Face on the telly.

  Or embrace mediocrity, scuttle around,

  Do stuff, buy stuff, fuck stuff,

  Sand through the fingers, draining away.

  Does this make a living? They don’t say.

  He looked at the clock. Gone midnight. He took a final sip of whisky. Why was he devoting so much time to this girl and her friends? They’d run away and didn’t want to be found. They weren’t dead, he was sure of it – almost sure. Not like Phil Ward. Phil was out there, facing death. In his mind, Brook had already signed the death certificate.

  Concentrate on the hope. Terri had come through, survived her crisis without him. She didn’t need him any more. Perhaps she never did. Concentrate on Adele. Adele was alive. Adele was his daughter now. He could still save her. He could be a proper father to her. He could pore over her life in the reasonable knowledge that he’d never have to stand over her alabaster corpse. He could read her deepest darkest thoughts, and take comfort from the notion that one day they might actually meet, while deep in his subconscious Brook knew that the next time he saw Phil Ward, he would be on a mortuary slab. What good was his lap and a half now?

  With a feeling of dread, Brook picked up Adele’s diary and turned to the copy of the final page again. He reread the three words and tried to put a positive spin on them. She was referring to the end of her life as it had been lived to this point – looking forward to the new, to her rebirth as an internet celebrity. That had to be it. That had to be the meaning. TIME TO DIE.

  Nineteen

  Saturday, 28 May

  AFTER THREE HOURS’ SLEEP, BROOK tiptoed down the stairs early next morning and made tea. He caught sight of his head in the kitchen window. He’d removed the bandage and replaced it with a plaster over the stitches. The area was still swollen and the bruising was beginning to colour.

  He took his tea into the tiny office at the back of the cottage, turned on his computer, typed in the Deity address and loaded the page. For no particular reason he watched the archived footage of both Deity broadcasts again but gleaned no fresh inspiration. The countdown to the next broadcast had dipped under eleven hours.

  He decided to search sites with information on Ancient Egyptian burial rites and clicked on a few, confirming some of Dr Petty’s conclusions about The Embalmer’s treatment of the vagrants’ bodies. He read up on the procedures. Petty was right. The Ancient Egyptians believed the heart, rather than the brain, was the seat of emotions and was necessary for the dead to proceed safely to the afterlife. After the organs were removed, including the brain through the nostrils, the heart was put back into the cavity as it had been with McTiernan and Kirk.

  He read more information on embalming and made a list of some of the chemicals required. Maybe they could find Ozzy that way. Brook sniffed the air and then his arm. He could still smell whisky despite a shower and change of clothes. He looked around and spied the whisky glass he’d used the previous night. It still had a few dregs in it. Brook picked it up and padded into the kitchen to make more tea.

  He was about to rinse out the leaded tumbler when he stopped and looked at the pale golden liquid. He stared for a few seconds then washed out the glass and opened a cupboard to put it away. There was a loaf of sliced bread in there. Terri had bought it for her breakfasts. Brook gazed at it in confusion while he thought things through. A moment later he broke into a grin and returned to the computer.

  ‘And people worry about my mental health,’ he said, typing another topic into the search engine.

  Half an hour later, Brook was sitting contentedly on the garden bench sucking in the cool damp air and smoking a cigarette stolen from his daughter’s handbag. It was just after five and he had the world to himself. The telephone destroyed his reverie and Brook launched himself barefoot back into the house to answer it before Terri could wake.

  ‘You’re up.’

  ‘John. What is it?’ said Brook, breathless.

  ‘Another body.’

  ‘Jock or Phil?’ asked Brook.

  ‘You’d better come see for yourself.’

  Terri pulled the VW on to Meadow Road and as close to the crime-scene tape as she could manage. Brook opened the door before the car had stopped and stepped out. The noise of the river was more apparent here over the quiet buzz of Derby’s city centre.

  ‘You’re sure you can find your way back?’ he said to his daughter.

  Terri was yawning again but managed an affirmative grunt with a nod for back-up. ‘I’ll be fine,’ she said once her jaw was back under control.

  Brook clos
ed the passenger door and watched her reverse the car and speed away. He turned to see Noble heading over to him. They exchanged nods then Noble led Brook across the small triangular green space towards the concrete wall at the river’s edge. The increasing noise of the weir was competing with the occasional car roaring over the St Alkmund’s Way flyover nearby.

  The river bank had clearly been a hive of activity but now the body was recovered, men and machinery stood idle, as Scene of Crime Officers walked to and from the screens hiding the corpse from potential onlookers. As he approached, Brook nodded to Keith Pullin and a knot of other emergency workers sharing a joke and a cigarette.

  ‘Who is it?’ he said to Noble.

  ‘It’s hard to tell. But it’s not Jock or Phil Ward. It looks like one of our students.’

  Brook shot him a glance. ‘Male or female?’ he asked quickly.

  ‘Male. He’s been in the water several days and the blows to the head are probably from being smacked around at the bottom of the weir.’

  Without knowing why, Brook’s heart began to beat a little easier. He arrived at the body laid out on a plastic sheet. It was a well-built young male, fully dressed. The face and neck were discoloured and the body was severely bloated from the gases of decomposition. The eyes were gone, devoured by fish and microbes.

  ‘Several days?’ said Brook, walking around the corpse.

  ‘Probably more than a week, with that much bloating,’ observed Noble.

  ‘Then why didn’t he surface sooner?’

  Noble nodded towards a pile of wet stones. ‘The body was partially weighted down or it would have popped up sooner.’

  ‘No ID?’

  ‘Nothing in his pockets except this.’ Noble pulled out an evidence bag. It contained a smaller, sealable plastic bag. Inside were the mushy remains of a few tablets.

  ‘Ecstasy?’