Down into Darkness

by David Lawrence

  Well I must stop now Stell as there are things to do when you move. I have been writing this on Ricardo’s computer and it is slow work for me with two fingers and spell check bringing me up short. I hope you are happy and expect you must be but I didn’t have a chance to ask. Much love from, Your loving mother, Tina. xxx

  Stella was holding the letter with her fingertips, as if it might unexpectedly ignite. She slipped it into one of the lockable drawers in her desk, then looked around like a prisoner searching for an escape route.

  Harriman came by and said, ‘Ten minutes, Boss, car park – all right?’

  She said, ‘Yes,’ or thought she did.

  She couldn’t go to the women’s room, because anyone might come in there, but she sure as hell couldn’t stay at her desk, so she walked out of the squad room and out of the building and got into her car, but she couldn’t stay in the car park either, with people coming and going, so she started the car and drove without thinking where she might go, and soon realized she couldn’t drive much further because she wasn’t able to see all that well, and she was getting horn blasts from either side, so she turned in to the car-wash just off Shepherd’s Bush Green.

  She sat in the wash-tunnel, hedged on both sides by the rag-rollers, yellow rinse-rollers front and rear, windscreen slathered in foam, everything dim, the roar of machinery, the rollers’ clatter and slap, and howled and beat the dashboard with her hands and cried so hard, so hard, that she thought something inside might break.

  Little Stella Mooney, all alone, tears like stones.

  Harriman said, ‘Sorry, where did you go?’

  ‘Don’t be sorry. I had some calls to make.’

  Stella had fronted the car-wash men with her make-up a tide line round her jaw and her tear stains plain to see, but she’d parked in a side street and carried out a wet-wipe repair job before driving back to the squad room. Now she felt fine. She felt steady. Apart from anything else, the bitch was leaving. Nottingham – far enough to be out of mind.

  Harriman said, ‘You remember the problem I mentioned…’

  ‘The girl you unaccountably miss.’

  ‘I’m seeing another girl tonight. Different girl.’

  ‘And this is your solution to the problem.’

  ‘This different girl is a very hot girl.’

  ‘Sounds to me like your troubles are over.’

  ‘Yeah,’ Harriman said, ‘that’s what I think.’

  He was looking out of the window, his eyes slitted against the head-on sun, though he might have been frowning.

  Stella sat down with James and Stevie and got some pretty straightforward answers to her questions. A cartoon character called Silent Wolf had killed their father.

  Were they sure?

  Yes.

  Had they seen him do it?

  Yes.

  Where did this happen?

  At home.

  What did he look like?

  Like this.

  Stella took the game that James handed her. There was Silent Wolf, his long coat, his mane of hair, his yellow eyes. His kick had skied one attacker, another was arching back, the impact-star from the Wolf’s fist nailed to his chin. The city skyline was a dark silhouette.

  She flipped the disc over to read the blurb, and there was the emblem his enemies had come to fear: the mark of the wolf.

  77

  The AMIP-5 team spoke to the manufacturer, were briefed on the game’s market profile, interviewed the team of nerds who had created Silent Wolf. The nerds were freaky obsessives all right but not killers. Harriman and Greegan went over the SOC stills and videos; they put up new cordons and arranged to revisit the scenes in case there were other symbols, other pointers, that they might have missed. Frank Silano spoke to the design company who’d packaged the game: their designers were checked out and found to be solid citizens with wives, children and only minor coke habits.

  Maxine Hewitt and Anne Beaumont sat down with James and Stevie and their Game Boy, all of them taking a walk with Silent Wolf as he freelanced out along the razor’s edge. Maxine had obtained the full set of Wolf games, and the boys were heads down, silent, following every move, racking up a score.

  Between games they talked about the time Silent Wolf had killed their father.

  Stella and Anne found an office that wasn’t in use. It contained seven chairs, a white-board and easel, and a photocopier with an OUT OF ORDER note tacked to it. They pulled two chairs round to face one another, a mini-conference.

  ‘What’s the profile now?’ Stella asked. ‘I mean, crazy, sure, but”?’

  ‘I need time to look at the games.’ Anne was flirting with a cup of squad-room coffee. ‘Follow the narrative.’

  ‘The narrative? Easy: he kills people.’

  ‘Yes, but look, there’s the business of motive. How did he get started? Is he killing out of revenge or is it a warped sort of altruism? He thinks he’s ridding the world of evil, remember that. In a way, he’s on the side of right. It’s rough justice – he’s judge, jury and executioner – but he’s not an indiscriminate killer, and he doesn’t kill for pleasure.’

  ‘No?’

  ‘Well, all right, sure, he’s good at it, he has preparation rituals, he assumes he has the moral high ground, and he feels no remorse – all of that. But his victims are deliberately chosen and clearly tagged as bad guys. Silent Wolf’s a vigilante.’

  ‘You think our man sees himself that way? Tell me how his victims qualify as bad guys.’

  ‘If I knew that,’ Anne said, ‘I’d know almost everything. A similar sort of question is: why does he identify so strongly with this character? There are hundreds of super-heroes and shoot-’em-up games.’

  ‘You think the game influenced him?’

  ‘No balanced individual ever became a killer after watching screen violence, or reading a book, or reading an account in a newspaper.’

  ‘There are copy-cat crimes – well documented.’

  ‘Sure, I said balanced individual. Obviously that doesn’t describe our man… all the same, I think this game has some sort of special significance for him.’

  ‘Because the hero’s victims aren’t random and aren’t innocent.’

  ‘Could be.’ Anne sipped her coffee and immediately set it aside. ‘One thing seems sure: he’s adopted the persona of Silent Wolf. From what the boys said, he looks just like him.’

  ‘Which is why they’re so fixated on the game,’ Stella said. She frowned, remembering something. ‘The grandfather… something he said. Yes, one of the boys told him they were worried they’d got the wrong one – the wrong Silent Wolf adventure, I suppose. Did you or DC Hewitt ask them about that?’

  Anne nodded. ‘Yes; but I already knew what the answer would be. These kids live in a screen culture. They see violence of this sort in a game, and it’s fiction; they see it on TV, and it’s the news; how do they distinguish one from the other? How do they tell the difference between a target centring, a missile firing and a house exploding when on one occasion it’s game graphics, on another it’s a real missile and a real house with real people in it? The images are identical.’

  ‘So… when they asked whether they’d got the right one?’

  ‘They were looking for a certain scene and wondered if it would be in another game, because they couldn’t find it in the one they’d got. What they had seen in life, they expected also to see on screen.’

  Stella felt a chill. ‘They were looking for the scene where their father is killed by Silent Wolf.’

  Anne nodded. ‘Maybe they thought…’ She paused, because the idea had only just come to her. ‘Maybe they thought they could put it on rewind; maybe they thought they could hit the stop button and make everything all right.’

  Stella took her notes into DI Collier, who reached for them with a stiff, awkward gesture like a man with a pulled muscle. The dailies, with their scare-’em headlines, had been thrown on the floor along with files, reports, memos: MONSTER… SIEGE… CRAZED KILLE
R… FEAR… STRIKE AGAIN…

  She asked, ‘What did they say at the hospital?’

  ‘That it looked worse than it was. He clipped me just back of the ribs. It would have missed a thinner man, so they told me, which was fucking wonderful to hear. Lot of blood, only two stitches.’

  ‘The ARV caught up with them…’

  Collier smiled. ‘They ran their car into a fence; bones were broken.’

  ‘That must have made you feel better.’

  Collier shrugged, then regretted it. ‘I was slow. Desk jobs make you rusty.’

  ‘You saved her,’ Stella said, ‘and you got shot doing it. Good job, Boss.’ Collier looked at her: both of them taken by surprise. As she was leaving, he said, as if to no one in particular, ‘I’m crap at this. I’m a street cop. I’m out of my fucking depth with all this paper.’

  Harriman and Greegan were walking through the Strip. Their trip round the scenes of crime had resulted in nothing new, though there were a few changes. The tree was now in full leaf, and the old hospital had bred a thousand species of crawling and flying insects.

  It was neither afternoon nor evening, that depressing, headachy time of day when body-sugar levels dip and everything slows down. The whores, the shebeens, the casinos, the cafés, were idling and the lunch-time drunks weren’t yet seeking a freshener. Smells of fast food and gasoline and spilled booze rode the city breeze. Harriman stopped for a moment, looking at a man on the opposite side of the road; the man looked back, smiling and yanking his crotch. It was Costea.

  ‘Friend or acquaintance?’ Greegan asked.

  ‘We raided a casino down here…’

  Greegan remembered. ‘The guy with the razor. You had to go across the rooftops to nab him.’

  ‘I’m not good at heights.’

  ‘What’s he doing up here?’

  Harriman shook his head. ‘Some smart brief got him bail by the look of it. I expect I abused his human fucking rights in some way.’

  Greegan looked across to where Costea was leaning against a black four-track Merc. The man waved a cheery finger. Greegan said, ‘Does he look like that all the time, do you think, or only when he’s on the job?’

  Harriman cast a glance at Costea. ‘What?’

  ‘No, not him. Our silent wolfman. Does he get into costume when he gets up in the morning, or –’

  ‘Who knows… Why?’

  ‘Because now we have a description,’ Greegan observed. ‘Now we know what he looks like.’

  They’d left the car at the bottom of the Strip and walked to the SOC, because a lorry had spilled its load up on the rise. Greegan fished in his pocket for the keys, then checked his watch. ‘I’m heading home,’ he said. ‘You?’

  ‘Definitely. Hot date.’

  Greegan sighed and sang a couple of lines of ‘Memories’. They got into the car and drove the fifty yards to the end of the Strip, where the traffic backed up.

  Gideon Woolf was walking in the opposite direction, masked from them by a high-sided van, thinking of a letter he had to write.

  78

  Stella was adding a picture to the white-board in their flat – Silent Wolf, his desert camouflage combat pants, his long coat, his ruff of hair. Delaney was watching the news, reading through an article, opening wine.

  Stella asked, ‘Stanley Bowman, Neil Morgan –’

  ‘I asked around,’ Delaney said. ‘The only connection anyone could come up with was that Bowman had fingers in many business pies and Morgan has influence with various committees.’

  ‘They were talking business – if that’s what it was – very late at night.’

  ‘So off the record, you think?’

  ‘I do, yes. Money matters, Bowman said. Where to invest.’

  ‘You know…’ Delaney poured the wine. ‘… politics and business are much the same thing these days. They all swim in the same sea. Sea of Sleaze. Is that him?’

  He was pointing at the artist’s impression of Silent Wolf.

  ‘We think so.’

  ‘The fashion for combat fatigues,’ Delaney observed; ‘it says “I’m hard,” but it’s also something to do with belonging, don’t you think? I’m a soldier, I’m combat fit and I’m ready. The paramilitaries in Bosnia used to wear them as if they conveyed authority. You’d get pulled over at a checkpoint by some illiterate kid with a bad-attitude problem and a liking for violence. He’d be wearing combats and a New York Mets baseball cap. So far as he was concerned, he was the law. You might live or die on his say so.’

  ‘They were militia?’ Stella asked.

  ‘Nationalists is what they called themselves. Arkan’s Tigers, for instance: nothing more than a bunch of homicidal thugs. Patriotism’s a repulsive thing.’

  He looked shaky for a moment, and Stella reflected on what he must have seen but would never speak about.

  Harriman’s date was called Miriam, and she was definitely hot. She was catwalk-hot, drop-dead-hot, perfect-in-all-departments-hot. One of the departments in question was bed, which is where she and Harriman were doing everything you could possibly do without throwing your back out or pulling a hamstring.

  Afterwards, Harriman took a shower: an unusual event; why wash that scent away? Miriam’s bathroom had everything, just like Miriam, but he felt uncomfortable there, and when he emerged to find that she had unpacked lobster from the fridge and put a bottle of champagne on ice, he felt his appetite wane.

  They ate the food and drank the champagne. Miriam talked, but Harriman didn’t have a hell of a lot to say. An hour later he left, telling her that he would call her. He’d call her soon.

  Miriam knew what that meant.

  When he got back to his own apartment, Gloria was on the answerphone.

  Hi, whassup? You still working late? Hmm… You know what? I’ve got a funny feeling about you. Not so funny, really. Not funny at all. Want to talk about that?

  He could still smell Miriam, so he got into the shower and stood with his face raised to the jets, gasping, like a man drowning.

  Delaney was at the checkpoint. The boy in combats and baseball cap had just unslung his gun. One minute Nathan Prior was standing at Delaney’s shoulder, the next he was on the other side of the checkpoint, beckoning and smiling. Delaney started to shout at Prior, but the words were a mouse-squeak. The boy lifted the gun to Delaney’s head, except now it was a pistol, and Delaney and the boy were making that iconic image of execution from the Vietnam War: the prisoner shot on camera.

  Delaney was yelling, but only he could hear. Prior beckoned, smiling. The gun made a mechanical sound, like tumblers falling, and the bullet started along the barrel.

  Stella lay beside him as he muttered and twitched his way through the dream. She thought she knew what all these combat-zone dreams meant.

  That morning an estate agent had called to tell her that they’d had an offer on the Vigo Street flat. The buyer was offering the asking price. She put a hand on Delaney’s arm and he half woke, staring at her.

  ‘You were having a bad dream.’

  ‘Okay,’ he said, and closed his eyes. ‘Okay,’ as if he’d expected nothing else.

  79

  I am the one in the papers, but it’s over now. I have no more calls to make. The ones who died deserved what they got, and there is nothing left to say. To let you know this is genuine, I can tell you this one thing that hasn’t appeared in the papers, I wrote on them about their offence. Leonard Pigeon was a mistake and I am sorry for that.

  Gideon Woolf at the computer in his room high above the heat and lights of the Strip… A thin charcoal dust from the scorched beams sifted down on to the keyboard as he inserted the game and waited for the logo to arrive on the screen, for the low, slow notes of the music, for the first graphic of yellow eyes on a black screen, then the skyline of the city fading in below a rose-coloured sky.

  Silent Wolf walked him down unlit alleys and round blind corners; they were the street-sweepers; where they walked, enemies fell; they were invincible. />
  It’s over now…

  But there was still Aimée.

  80

  The letter was in Brian Collier’s mail. He opened it and read the first couple of lines before realizing what it was. Stella picked up his call as she was leaving Coffee Republic, and by the time she reached the squad room a forensics officer was already on the way. She read the letter hands-free.

  ‘It’s him.’

  ‘Could it have leaked – the writing on all the bodies?’

  ‘I don’t see how. Anyway’ – she was remembering that, yes, she had told Delaney – ‘it hasn’t been in the press, and that’s the only way a crank would have known about it.’ She hunkered down to get an eye-level view of the envelope that was lying on Collier’s desk, next to the letter. ‘This doesn’t look like a self-seal. If he licked it – plenty of isolated DNA. That’ll tell us for sure.’

  ‘I wonder if he means it,’ Collier said.

  ‘That he’s finished?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘He’s nuts,’ Stella said. ‘Who knows what he means?’

  ‘He means he’s killed his chosen victims, the ones he set out to kill.’

  Stella sat in Anne Beaumont’s basement kitchen and watched as Anne chopped vegetables. A large pan of water was simmering on the stove.

  ‘This is a man who thinks he’s Silent Wolf, enemy of Ironjaw, for Christ’s sake.’ Stella leaned back in her chair and closed her eyes for a moment. ‘What makes you think he’s working off some sort of logical game plan?’

  ‘Depends what you mean by logical. Remember Leopold and Loeb? They killed because they felt like it.’

  ‘He even dresses like Silent Wolf.’

  ‘Well, we think he does. James and Stevie might have projected that. But, yes, it’s a fair bet. How mad does that make him? We all imitate styles of dress in order to belong or impress. Mods, greasers, punks, hippies, politicians in grey suits, the bare-midriff look, hoodies. You, for instance, have obviously been strongly influenced by Parisian haute couture.’