by Robin Ince
Well, not everyone’s. Some criminals hated her. She got threats. People setting up Twitter accounts just to tweet ‘Stop now or you’ll die :(’ to her before quickly deleting their account. She got phone calls. Not many. But enough ‘You’re dead’ phone calls to make it uncomfortable. And Detective Inspector Billingham wasn’t keen on her either. She’d been making him and the rest of the police look like fools. And how?
How? It was all down to Alf. Dependable Alf. A man who realised that, after an accident at work, he might not be here forever and he must do everything to provide for Gwen while he still can. He didn’t take time off after the accident. He came out of a coma and went straight back to work. Every day. Long hours. He had a responsibility. He had to face that responsibility. He loved Gwen and couldn’t bear to think of her unhappy. And look at her now. A master detective with a skill that he could never understand. If only he knew. After the accident, Alf had contracted a rare cerebral condition that let his mind predict the future and only Gwen knew about it and understood it. (This is a short story, reader. Google it.)
Billingham had a few more questions to ask about the arrest of Frazer Tuckley. How did Gwen know that Tuckley had even planned to rob the Eurostar? ‘Well, he was very quiet,’ said Gwen. ‘That’s always suspicious.’
Sure enough, guns were found at Tuckley’s flat along with blueprints of trains and tunnels. It certainly seemed that Gwen was right. The BBC wanted an interview with Gwen outside the station and as Tuckley and his men were led inside they screamed threats. ‘You’re dead.’ Words Gwen had heard before and shrugged off. But sitting in his work canteen watching TV was Alf. All he had felt about Gwen’s new life was pride but this is not how he saw heroes being treated. No one shouted ‘You’re dead’ at Ace Ventura or The Hulk.
The Hulk isn’t real though. Gwen is. And so are dangerous men.
Alf didn’t sleep a wink that night.
Gwen woke up with a start. She was startled by both her phone ringing and by how she had clearly had a proper good night’s sleep. That hadn’t happened in months. It was Billingham and he sounded serious. Not just serious but sad. He needed Gwen’s help. God, he hated that. Just asking for it left a bad taste in his mouth, like he’d just brushed his teeth and then had a Lucozade and then was sick. Gwen joyously rushed to the station. She was famous but she was still humble enough to let the police beg her for help.
Billingham was completely certain that Gwen knew about the two North London drownings even though she had never heard of them. With TV, radio and podcast interviews, Gwen hadn’t the time to keep abreast of the very thing she was pretending to be an expert in. He hated admitting it but the award-winning Gwen was the only person he knew that might have a hope of solving the case quickly. And if she didn’t? Even better. Two women had been killed. It was obviously someone hoping to become a serial killer one day but why, how and who? It made Billingham sick to the stomach of his guts and yet Gwen assured him that she understood the details and would crack the case quicker than a policeman getting to his third hallo.
Alf lay deeply awake. It was his second night without sleep. Every time he closed his eyes he saw Frazer Tuckley’s face and heard ‘You’re dead’ constantly screaming in his head. Gwen got into bed beside him, said ‘Goodnight’ and waited for Alf to sleep. This case was important and she needed to crack it to keep her reputation solid and, you know, to save any other people from being killed. But Alf didn’t sleep. He just lay there, wide awake with fear.
‘How long do you think you’ll do this crime solving thing then?’ asked Alf.
Oh, no. Alf was talking. Alf never goes to bed and talks. Not while he’s awake anyway. He works so hard that he’s normally asleep before he gets into bed so why is he talking? Gwen knew he was concerned for her so she gave him the answer she thought he wanted to hear, the one that wasn’t true. ‘Oh, not long,’ she said. ‘I’m getting bored of it anyway.’ There. That sounded right. A little lie to help give Alf some piece of mind and to get him to go to bloody sleep. This was the only chance that Gwen had to stop this killer and to secure her status as the country’s number one pretend detective. All she needed was for Alf to go to sleep.
The sun beamed through the curtains and woke Gwen up. ‘Aw, shit.’
She got dressed and hopped downstairs at the same time to find Alf ready for work and looking exhausted. ‘Erm . . . Are you alright?’ she said. ‘I mean . . . Good morning.’
‘Couldn’t sleep again,’ Alf replied, then kissed her and left for work.
No. No, Alf had to sleep. Gwen was famous now and she liked it and everyone liked her and her lovely hat was in all the papers and Alf had to sleep. How could she face everyone she’d lied to if Alf won’t sleep?
Billingham rang. He had some new information. A list of suspects, men that both women knew on a social networking site. Is there more than one killer? Did these women ever actually meet this man or men? Is this even the right lead to follow? Gwen didn’t know. Of course she didn’t know. All this sleep made it hard to think. She agreed that this was all good information and she’d look into it and she hadn’t a clue what she was talking about. She pretended her phone went dead by hanging up and then she pretended she didn’t have a phone by putting it in a drawer. Snap out of it, Gwen. You’re an award-winning detective. You can do this. A bit.
Gwen spent the day reading about the two recently killed women. So much information and she understood none of it. She read a long article on the Daily Mail website about how the police were baffled by the case and how tragic the murders were and about how the women were both good, decent, non-immigrant people. Then, at the very bottom of the comments section, Gwen saw her future. ‘Where is Gwen when we need her?’ wrote a reader who was known for their very racist comments on other ‘stories’. And that racist was right. Where is Gwen? Well, she could lie here on the floor feeling sick all day or she could finally face the truth and actually do something to make all this right. Gwen put on her coat, went out and bought a load of sleeping pills.
When Alf got home that night, Gwen had dinner all ready for him. She’d cooked (well, bought) his favourite. Curry, onion bhajis, coconut rice and a load of crushed up sleeping pills. ‘Something smells great,’ said Alf as soon as he walked in the door and stepped over the post. Gwen always ignored the post and, as always, Alf picked it up and looked through it. Bills, junk and a brown envelope with no stamp, no name and no address. Gwen served the meal while Alf opened the envelope. Inside was a single A4 sheet of paper with ‘You’re Dead’ written on it.
‘Dinner time!’ she said with a smile. Alf walked into the kitchen and handed the paper to Gwen. ‘I don’t think I’m hungry,’ he said.
It was just someone trying to scare her, Gwen explained. A crazy fan, an idiot. Someone who was jealous. It’s not from Frazer Tuckley. He’s in prison. And it’s not from one of his henchmen. No, she was sure it wasn’t from one of them. It’s just an idiot. She had the full support of the Metropolitan Police force behind her. Who would really threaten her knowing that? Now, eat up. It’s nothing. Eat up. She wasn’t bothered by a silly old death threat and neither should he. Now, really. Eat up.
Alf couldn’t face food. Gwen looked at him and she could see he loved her. Alf could provide for her but he couldn’t protect her. Not from a crazed murderer anyway. Gwen knew that Alf wanted all this to stop and for them to return to a normal life so that she was safe, secure and always loved. And Gwen began to cry.
She always got her way when she cried and Alf wolfed down the meal in minutes. ‘That was delicious,’ he said with his mouth full. ‘Good,’ said Gwen. ‘Maybe we’ll have an early night?’
It was 7.10 p.m. and Alf was fast asleep in bed. Gwen got her notepad and pen ready, indispensable tools for any detective. Especially pretend ones with husbands that solve crimes in their sleep. She sat beside him on the bed and waited.
Alf was right, of cour
se. This was dangerous. But it was exciting too. Not the lying in bed waiting for Alf to start sleep talking bit, but the other bits. The being on TV bits and being written about in the paper. People recognising her in the street and getting an award and the fan mail. Not the ‘You’re dead’ fan mail but the nice ‘You’re the best’ and ‘I love your hat’ messages she got on Twitter. But Alf was right. This had to stop. One day.
Gwen picked up her Citizen of the Year award from the bedside table and looked at it proudly, at first, and then ashamed. It didn’t belong to her. She’d stolen Alf’s gift to make her feel better about herself and awards mean nothing if you haven’t earned them. The award looked like a small Cleopatra’s Needle: made of glass and very, very shiny. So shiny that Gwen could see her reflection in it and that’s when she put it on the floor, out of sight. Sometimes even Gwen couldn’t stand the sight of Gwen.
Maybe it really was time to admit the truth. Well, not admit it. She just had to stop pretending. Lying.
Then Alf spoke.
Gwen spun round, grabbed her notepad and pen and accidentally kicked her Citizen of the Year award sending it smashing into three bits. ‘She died,’ said Alf. No time to care about the award now and anyway there’ll be plenty more awards were that came from if – WHEN – she solves this case. Alf continued to mumble.
‘She died.’
Gwen tried to be patient. OK, Alf, we got that bit. Who died? Who? And how? And how do we stop her from dying?
‘She died.’
Gwen started to pretend to stab him with her pen. Come on, Alf. Out with it.
‘She was killed. Killed . . .’
Right.
‘Gwen.’
She dropped her notepad and leapt across the room, cutting her foot on the broken glass on the floor. It was a small cut but enough to explain the feeling of blood draining from her face. Gwen’s heart pounded with fear. No, he didn’t just say her name. Tuckley’s in prison. Everyone’s in prison. He can’t have said her name.
‘Gwen.’
No.
‘She was killed. Gwen killed. Gwen was killed.’
Gwen knew three other Gwens. There were probably more. It’ll be another Gwen. Some other Gwen that deserved a good murdering. It can’t be her.
‘Gwen the detective.’
Great.
‘She was killed. Gwen killed. Poison.’
Poison?
‘Poison. Gwen. The killer . . . The killer . . . The killer in the house.’
Gwen screamed. Tuckley’s escaped. Knox has escaped. Every single person in prison had escaped and they’ve hunted her down. They’ve hunted her down and they’ll make her pay for her lies. Gwen threw up. It helped her think.
‘Gwen. Poison. Killer in the house.’
Alf. She needed Alf. Gwen ran to her sleeping husband and shook him. He reacted like any overweight, middle-aged, life-size rag doll. ‘Wake up,’ she threatened while repeatedly slapping his face. Nothing. Alf just lay there, peacefully drugged. ‘Wake up,’ she screamed again. Every noise in the house was a potential killer. Was that just a breeze making the tree branch lightly tap the window or was it Frazer Tuckley thumping up the stairs with a high-calibre assault axe? That sounded like the boiler switching off but it also sounded exactly like Peter Knox laughing insanely while revving up a chainsaw. ‘Wake the fuck up.’ But all she got was Alf sleeping soundly and mumbling, ‘Killer in the house.’
‘I’ll stop,’ Gwen negotiated. ‘I’ll stop right now. No more detective, Alf. You were right. I was wrong. Now, please wake up.’
‘Killer in the house.’
If there really was a killer in the house then Gwen had no choice. She needed to get out. No. HE needed to get her out. This was all Alf’s fault anyway. Sort of. There’s no choice. Alf had to wake up or they’ll both die.
‘Killer in the house.’
‘I’m well aware of that, thanks Alf,’ said Gwen as she grabbed him by the pyjama collar and dragged him to the edge of the bed. If he stood up, he’d wake up, she reasoned. She wrapped her arms around his waist and pulled him close to her, face to face. He was easily twice her weight but she had to try.
‘Killer in the house.’
‘Help me, Alf,’ she said, took a deep breath and lifted her deadweight husband to his lifeless feet. He reminded her that the killer was in the house one more time before she told him to shut up and shuffled his useless body just inches before he slouched forward and took Gwen with him. She hit the floor and felt the thud of the floorboards on her skull and the sharp, shattered base of the Citizen of the Year award piercing into her back. She opened her eyes just in time to see the lifeless Alf come crashing down on top of her.
As his weight hit her, the award tore through the flesh of her back, between her ribs and directly stabbing into her right lung.
She couldn’t breathe and, with Alf on her chest and throat, she couldn’t even scream out the pain that was within. She lay there, trapped and suffocating, with the man who loved her on top mumbling.
‘Poisoned food with sleeping pills. Tried to warn her. The killer was in the house. The killer was in the house.’
All Warm Inside
neil edmond
He woke, satisfied, crouching in darkness. He wasn’t sure he’d slept. If that had been sleep, he barely felt refreshed. More smug. A job well done.
His brain fumbled casually with the absence of duvet and mattress and pillow, the musty scent of pine obscuring something rich and human, the lack of elbow room . . . but then set them aside and suggested he extend his woolly reverie with a fondle. It was too cramped, too close to masturbate, though he tried, stretching an arm awkwardly beneath his thigh to cup his balls, which shied away, back into his interior. Perhaps they knew something he didn’t.
His fingers stank. He felt mainly naked. One sock, perhaps, unless that foot was numb. There was wood beneath the other, and at his back and shoulder. His eyes swam in blackness, unable to settle on anything but their own grainy splashes of effort. This was not a happy place, he realised. His pride congealed into unease and slid into his stomach which puckered and cooled – he had a sudden sense of having rummaged inside a man, tugging bowels from sac, briefly wearing them, a ruddy parade – then he shuddered violently and something touched his shoulder.
He stood, flailed and span endlessly, snagged in tendrils, shouting fucks and clouting wood and then – through a sudden yawn of light – he toppled backwards.
He lay on carpet, panting at an open wardrobe.
Were they his clothes, dancing on their hangers, rattling at him? A fraying shirt, pale jeans, a cardigan? Was that his style? He couldn’t say. He didn’t know.
Light, from a red-flecked strip above his head, demanded identity, so he looked at his hands. They were crusted with red and brown and strings of meat, and ached now they’d been seen. His nails were ragged, but he didn’t fancy chewing them, not yet. He peered further, past his reluctant genitals, to his foot. ‘It was a sock,’ he mentioned, and his voice sounded as he thought it should: a man’s, relieved, parched, a little short of breath. The sock was less familiar, sopped in gore. And striped.
A stuffiness, a Guinness tang, a hum of piss, the buzz of flies left little doubt. Something bad had happened here. With a sulking reluctance, he sat up and faced the room.
It was small and square and spattered with man. A central mass of person, ruined, lay a few feet to his right, then spiralled out about the place, in splashes and clumps of flesh and little mounds of organ. On a small single bed a rope of viscera had been milked for stools, which lolled reeking on a pillow. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, feeling implicated. He considered returning to the wardrobe, but no.
He retched. A dribble of spit did nothing to counter his discomfort. With a little effort, adjusted to all fours, back arched, head down, he managed to produce a puddle of froth. Amid it was
an eye. It was hazel brown, unseeing and unchewed, which seemed either gluttonous or overkeen or possibly accidental. He patted his own sockets, just in case, then opted to check the corpse.
It wore, or rather lay among, a suit. On the lapel was a name badge: Phil. If anything, the opposite had been done. Phil had been emptied, a great gash running from neck to navel, from which he spilled into the room so thoroughly. Limbs had been extruded beyond the confines of his clothing. Hands stamped flat, a knee kicked loose, the shin and foot torn from the trouser leg and propped against a chair, still socked and shod. A tatty rupture gashed the calf where the fib – or tib? – had been wrenched free. The sock was striped, Phil’s other foot was bare and – oh, a shard of memory – he’d nicked that sock and popped it on while Phil lay warm and sputtering nearby – a punt at empathy, he hoped, companionship. At worst a form of flattery.
He found the tib – or fib – at the other end of Phil, jammed in his head via an eyehole, more spear than spoon, jarringly white above the mashed, purpling visage. In half-arsed symmetry a biro pierced the other eye, nib uppermost, lid free. He winced. More artfully, a spider plant had been patted into the gaping mouth, though the jaw was too limply piecemeal to offer much purchase and the skinny leaves straggled chestwards, an elven goatee. The work of a madman. Not him.
He should do the decent thing, but couldn’t quite remember what that was. He found the pen lid near a flap of liver and tapped it back atop the pen, pulled the mattress from its frame and dragged it up to cover the excavated man, but stopped. Did he know him? He squinted at the battered face, blurring the insertions and distortions, and held it in his mind while rifling through a mental Rolodex which seemed to have been scorched with guilt or shame or – ah, a memory, his face, in here, unmashed, wide-eyed, agape, trying to say a thing, but – oh, just that. That and the name badge, ‘Phil’.