Boo!

by David Haynes

  Kelly shivered. It really was cold, almost as if there was a breeze blowing through the house. He could hear cars on the main road. He couldn’t usually hear them unless there was a window open. He looked up. The small window at the top of the double-glazed unit was open. He stood on tiptoes and reached up, his gut bumping against the sink. No, it wasn’t open exactly. The entire pane of glass was missing. Just gone.

  Burglars.

  That was his first thought. It was as simple as removing the beading from around the frame and lifting the glass out.

  He peered into the back garden. It was dark out there, except for a wedge of light shining onto the grass from next door’s conservatory. He could feel his heart beating faster. Faster and louder. There was a chance they were still in the house. Good. In all his years, he’d never caught a burgling shit in the act. Reasonable and appropriate force, that was what the law said about detaining a criminal. Well, tonight that force may turn out to be unreasonable, particularly if the little shit struggled.

  Hold on. What was that down by the shed? Movement, slow and deliberate movement. And now someone was standing like a statue staring up at him. Someone with a face that looked too white. So pale, in fact, that it might belong to one of the corpses he’d found during his career.

  Only it was too close. So close that he could see it wasn’t a corpse or a mannequin, it was a clown. An ugly distorted clown with a ragged, bloody line around the contours of his face.

  It was behind him. The clown was in the kitchen behind him.

  A cold shiver crept up the back of Kelly’s neck and his heart hammered with a power and speed that boomed in his ears.

  “Boo!” the clown whispered into his ear.

  *

  Jane gathered the paperwork together in a neat pile and pushed it into a folder. She was going with the DI to brief the Superintendent on the progress of the investigation. Her paperwork was all in order, she knew what her team were up to and the state of all of their enquiries. Nevertheless, she was still nervous. She always was when she briefed someone that far up the rankings, despite having done it on at least ten other major investigations.

  She walked across the office. It was full of detectives either on the phone or tapping away at computers.

  “Anyone seen Stu yet?” His desk was empty.

  A voice shouted “He’s probably still pissed.” A few sniggers went around the room.

  She walked out and up the corridor. It was a possibility. His last manager had given Stu a breath test when he came on duty, such was the smell of booze on him. He’d passed, somehow, but it was well known that Stu Kelly was an alcoholic.

  If he hadn’t turned up by the time she finished the briefing, she would go to his house and give him a warning. It wasn’t time for him to see the boss, and she hoped it wouldn’t come to that, but he needed to think about his pension, if nothing else.

  She straightened her jacket and knocked on the Superintendent’s door. She could do without babysitting Stu on top of everything else.

  A little later, she came out of the briefing feeling a lot better than when she went in. DI White took most of the credit for how well the investigation was going, but he’d at least passed some of that down the chain to her. The Super was giving a press conference later that afternoon so he wanted to be fully appraised. It was satisfying to be able to answer all of his questions without once having to look in her book. Jane knew from experience that it gave him enormous confidence to see that in his officers.

  She left the DI with him and walked back to the office. It was quieter now and only two officers were still at their desks. They were both on the phone but there was no sign of Stu. She hoped he had been in and was already at the CCTV suite going back over the footage.

  She opened her emails, seeing there was another report from the computer geeks. She didn’t envy them their job. Going through thousands of vile images, categorising them and then going home to their families as if it were just another day.

  One of the detectives put his phone down. “Has Stu gone out already?” she asked him.

  “I haven’t seen him. What about you, Griff?” He looked over his monitor at the officer on the other side who held a phone to his ear, clearly on hold.

  “Nope, he hasn’t appeared yet.”

  Jane’s heart sank. She picked up her mobile and found him in the contacts.

  “Pick up, pick up,” she whispered as it rang but there was no answer.

  She ended the call and drummed her fingers on the desk. She was tired, they all were. Living on chocolate, coffee, and salt and vinegar crisps wasn’t something you could do forever. Not and stay alert and capable, anyway. Stu was taking the piss like he always did, and she’d had enough of it.

  She slung her harness around her shoulders and slipped her jacket on over the top.

  “I’m going out for a bit. If you need me, I’m on my mobile.” She stomped out of the office.

  Stu had probably been a decent officer at some point in his career but what she knew of him wasn’t good. He was lazy, arrogant, rude and disrespectful. The incident with the prostitute was her first real picture of him.

  He was her mentor, a senior detective in the division, and they had been sent to deal with an allegation of rape by a street worker.

  The girl had been hysterical, her make-up was smudged and her clothes ripped and dirty. She had shrieked and wailed, and it took ten minutes in the back of the car to calm her down. When she was composed enough to speak, Stu had spent as much time talking her out of making a complaint as it would have taken to actually start the investigation.

  “Who’s going to believe you were raped? Who’s going to believe a prostitute? You’re better off forgetting about it.”

  But she had insisted and he took her back to the police station. He had deliberately kept Jane out of the room while he spoke to her and sent her off on some ridiculous errand. When she came back Stu was smiling, as if he had just single-handedly solved a murder.

  “She made it up. I’ll write the report,” he said. Jane hadn’t yet grown the confidence to challenge him. The girl had complained about both of them, and although she wouldn’t report the rape for fear of not being taken seriously, they had both ended up in trouble.

  Being summoned to Professional Standards was an unwelcome episode in her career, but she had been given no choice in providing a full explanation about how they dealt with the initial complaint. Stu was suspended and she got management advice, which she was still deeply ashamed about.

  She pulled up on the road outside his house. If he was drunk inside the house, she would have no choice but to inform DI White. She didn’t want Stu to lose his pension but he needed a massive wake-up call.

  The front garden was unkempt and the windows looked like they could do with a clean. She had been here once before, when Stu’s suspension was lifted. He held a party but god alone knew why he’d invited her. His wife had given Jane some cold stares that evening. She was long gone by now.

  She knocked on the front door and peered in through the window. There was nothing out of place and no sign of an overweight drunkard with a bulbous nose lying comatose and dribbling in the armchair.

  She opened the letter box and shouted, “Stu, it’s Jane, can you let me in, please?”

  She cocked her head and listened for any noise. The house was silent so she called again.

  “Come on, Stu, come and open the door.”

  She took her phone out, pressed redial and put her ear to the letter box. It was ringing, sounded like it was coming from upstairs.

  “Stu, I know you’re in there. We need to talk.” She banged on the door with her fist, getting frustrated. He was clearly in the house, possibly asleep but probably trying to ignore her in the hope she would just go away. Well, she wasn’t having it. She wasn’t letting him get away with it this time. She walked around the back of the house.

  The rear of the property was in a similar state to the front. It needed some lov
e. She banged on the door and stepped back to look upstairs to see if the curtains twitched. There was a pane of glass missing in the kitchen window. She cupped her hands around her face and looked inside. There were two bags on the worktop. One with cans of beer inside and another with what looked like untouched takeaway.

  Her heartbeat bumped up a notch. Stu was a slob but a missing pane of glass? No, he hadn’t slipped that far. Not yet.

  “Stu! Come down and open up.”

  Jane banged on the back door again and tried the handle. The door opened slowly. Unopened beer, unopened takeaway, a missing window and now an unlocked door. This wasn’t right.

  She stepped inside. There was liquid on the floor and an opened can. The room smelled of stale beer.

  “The back door was open so I’ve come in. I’m getting worried now, Stu!” She was already thinking about what she would say to him if he challenged her about being inside. The justification was easy, her cop-sense had kicked in as soon as she saw the state of the kitchen.

  There were a number of things that could be happening here. Stu could be genuinely ill. He was overweight, an alcoholic, and on some level he was probably dealing with the stress that came with the job. He was prime heart attack material. Or, and this was the one that really made her nervous, there had been a burglary, a burglary gone wrong. At least for Stu.

  She racked her baton, stepping out of the kitchen into the lounge. Her sense of unease grew when she saw how neat and tidy the room was. He definitely wouldn’t have left a window broken like that.

  “Police!” she called out. Her heartbeat was loud in her ears but her voice remained strong. She should call for backup, but how would it look if the whole division turned up with lights flashing and sirens blaring, only to find him drunk and asleep? That would be the end of whatever respect he had left, not to mention his pension.

  She walked to the foot of the stairs and paused. The window had gone, that was the entry point, and the back door was unlocked. If it was a break-in then it was a possibility they were already gone. So where did that leave Stu?

  She bounded up the stairs and looked to her left. The bathroom was empty and the other bedroom door was wide open, no sign of disturbance in there. She turned to her right and gasped. A sudden and fierce headache ripped through her skull and the world seemed to tilt on its axis.

  The door, Stu’s bedroom door, was closed but someone had painted something on the white paint.

  It was a word which made her stomach lurch and her mouth go dry.

  ‘Boo!’

  In red. In blood. In Stu’s blood. The exclamation mark stretched to the bottom of the door as the blood dribbled toward the carpet.

  She reached down and pushed the red button on her radio. “Any available units to 24 Hillsway.” She paused for a second. “And I’ll need an ambulance too.” There was silence for a few seconds and it seemed absolute, as if the world was taking a breath. Then the emergency call ended and the radio went mad. She was aware of the chatter in the background but it was somewhere else. In another place, not with her and not at that moment.

  The baton was cocked on her shoulder and she used it to push the handle down on the door. It moved down easily, the door swinging inward a few inches. It wasn’t enough to see fully into the room.

  “Stu?” She was holding onto the last bit of hope.

  She pushed the door with the baton again. The carpet was too thick and it tried to hold the door in place, but she used both hands and gave it a shove. The door swung in and this time her legs buckled.

  Stu was tied to a chair in the corner. He faced a mirror on the wardrobe door which reflected his mutilated face.

  Jane ran forward, aware that the carpet beneath her feet was sticky. It was blood, she knew that without looking down, but it didn’t matter, she just had to get to him. She had to check his pulse... she needed to make sure he was...

  She felt a tear trickle down her cheek and bit down on her lip to stop others coming. There would be time for that later.

  She put her fingers on his neck, feeling for the familiar strong rhythm. She kept her eyes on her fingers, she couldn’t look at him, she couldn’t stand to see him like that. And it was Stu, in that brief moment when she saw his reflection, saw his eyes. They were unmistakable.

  “Come on, Stu,” she whispered but there was no pulse. How could there be when his throat was open from ear to ear and his blood was soaking into the carpet?

  She closed her eyes. The skin under her fingers was cold. Stu had been dead for a while, quite a while.

  In the distance she could hear sirens coming. Coming to her, to help her and to help Stu. She reached down and unclipped the radio.

  “Units coming to Hillsway, please wait outside for further instructions.” She needed the DI and the DCI to come before uniform walked all over the scene. She clipped the radio back into her harness and dialled the DI’s number.

  There were so many similarities to the scene at Newman’s house. Not least of all the bright orange wig and the blue and white striped costume that Stu was wearing. It was hideous.

  6

  An airplane engine scraping through the sky was the only sound from the outside world. I could do with a holiday, thought Ben. Somewhere warm, where the weather never really got cold enough to wear a sweater. That would do him nicely. It might stop him getting colds. It might stop him getting tonsillitis.

  He rolled over and took the glass of water from the bedside table. He looked at it like it was the enemy which in a way it was, at least to his throat. Anything going down there was treated like a hostile invasion force and had the potential to be expelled by any means possible.

  He wasn’t supposed to take any painkillers for another two hours, but he popped two out of the blister pack and swallowed them anyway. He gagged but they stayed down. At least for now.

  Was it getting any better? It didn’t feel like it. The fever was burning too hot, making him do things he couldn’t remember doing and leaving dirty great black spots in his memory.

  One thing he did remember was calling his local surgery, only to be told “The doctor hasn’t got any appointments this week, but we can fit you in late next week. Shall I put you in for the twenty-sixth at four-thirty?”

  “It’s really bad.” He’d forced a cough out in the hope she could hear how bad it was.

  “Well, I could squeeze you in at four o’clock on the twenty-sixth. Is that any good?”

  He’d told her it wasn’t any good and that it was a disgrace and that the NHS should be ashamed. He’d started to tell her that he was coming to the surgery whether they had an appointment for him or not, but she hung up before he could finish.

  Finding the half-written manuscript on his keyboard had been the last straw. After the initial shock of seeing the pages all neatly piled on the keyboard, his toes had stung and it was then he realised he’d dropped his drink. He stared at the papers for quite some time before building the courage to pick them up. He didn’t even remember coming into the office, let alone typing out several thousand words and printing them off. He had been ill, he still was, but losing his memory like that was strange to say the least.

  He had nearly dropped them all when he read the first line.

  ‘Sparkles was not dead. In fact, Sparkles felt more alive than he had ever been before. Boo!’

  He read the first two pages and then took the rest up to bed with a fresh drink. The spelling and grammar were atrocious, but his first drafts were always usually pretty bad and he was clearly delirious when he wrote it. The style was all his though, there was no disputing that.

  Sparkles, though? Why did he decide to reprise that character when the idea so repulsed him last night? He had wanted to dismantle the door chime and more or less burn everything he possessed involving clowns. Hadn’t he wanted to pull the book from the publishers too?

  But… it was good. The premise of the story was excellent. Didn’t Joanne say the book was flying off the shelves? Maybe now was
the time to strike and put some money back in the old coffers. The clown appearing in his dream like that wasn’t a random mirage generated by the policeman’s visit and his own thoughts. It had been created by his subconscious, telling him this was what he should write.

  Only once before had he written while drunk, and the results were appalling. When he read it back two days later, after the hangover cleared, he could see it was an incomprehensible stream of consciousness and had filed it in the bin immediately. This was different. Although he couldn’t remember typing a single letter, just like when he had been drunk, the story was good.

  Sparkles The Clown was alive. His rebirth was as gruesome and vivid as his death. And okay, so it was inspired by the real-life murder on the news, but hadn’t Sparkles been born from Gacy in the first place anyway? The policeman’s ugly visit, the delirious hallucination in the night and the book doing so well all came together to provoke into action again the part of his brain which had been dormant for so long.

  He might have to be careful with the timing of the release. It could be considered bad taste if he got it wrong. Joanne and the publishers would have to talk about that later. At that exact moment, all he could think about was getting the story down.

  Ben rolled onto his back. That was two days ago and he hadn’t been able to write anything since. Not in fevered delirium or otherwise. It was the same old story. Start something and then run out of steam after the first couple of chapters. Would he ever be able to write anything again, decent or otherwise? It wasn’t looking too promising.

  The manuscript was on the bed next to him. Some of the sheets were crumpled now. He must have rolled onto them in the middle of the night. Sharing a bed with a clown was no less problematic than sharing it with a woman.

  He pushed them together and slowly edged himself out of bed. Other than some toast, he hadn’t been able to stomach anything else to eat and his legs were shaky. He’d given serious thought to pissing in the bed to avoid having to get out, but things were bad enough without stinking too. Besides, he could hear Stan whimpering downstairs, and cleaning up his mess was definitely not an option.