by David Haynes
The butterflies in Maldon’s stomach danced around and around and it felt wonderful.
After only ten minutes, Bingo had mesmerised everyone there. He fell over, he made silly noises, he did some magic tricks that went wrong. One of them went so spectacularly wrong that he soaked the adults and then the children with water. Everyone at the party was laughing like mad and in the background was the crazy circus music, going round and round and round.
It reminded him of his trip to the circus with his dad. The whole audience had been roaring and Dad’s beer had come out of his nostrils, he’d been laughing so hard. That was why he loved clowns so much. They made people laugh and laughing felt better than almost anything else he knew.
“Thanks for the present, see you at school tomorrow.” He waved Mark, the last of his friends, off and his stomach tightened. It wasn’t through excitement this time though, it was with sadness and disappointment. That was it for another year.
He felt a hand on his head and he looked up. It was Mum. “Don’t be sad, the day’s not over yet. Nana and Granddad are still here and your Uncle Russ. Come outside, I think Bingo is still here.”
Maldon walked slowly through the kitchen and outside. The adults were sitting around a table laughing and drinking. The smell of cigarette smoke drifted through the summer air.
He jumped down the steps and walked to Bingo. The clown was putting all of his things into a huge holdall. It looked big enough for him to climb inside.
“Did you enjoy the party?” Bingo asked.
“Yeah, I’m just sad it’s over.” He shuffled his feet in the grass.
“Me too.”
Maldon lifted his head. “You are?”
“Of course! There’s nothing better than making people smile.”
“I suppose not.”
“No suppose about it. If I could make you smile right now it would be the best feeling in the world.” Bingo sighed and picked up his bag. “But you’ve seen all my silly stunts now. I’ve got nothing left. Would you pick that bucket up for me?”
Maldon reached down and picked it up.
“Would seeing inside my special clown van bring back that smile?”
He could hardly believe what he was hearing. He looked up at Mum and Dad. They were drinking and laughing with the other adults.
Bingo started walking away. “Better be quick or that smile will be gone forever!”
Maldon ran to his side. In his mind, he was already inside the van. There were hundreds of red noses hanging up along one side. A selection of different-coloured wigs on the other. There were hand-buzzers, rubber animals, bicycles, tricycles everywhere and the floor was a rolling mass of gobstoppers.
They walked through the house and out through the front door. And there it was, a plain white van with a picture of Bingo on the side. Beneath his picture it said, ‘Bingo The Clown – Tickling Ribs since 1982’. That was only two years after he was born.
“Doesn’t look like much, does it? Just wait until you see inside. Come on.”
Maldon followed him to the back of the van and Bingo opened it up. It was a huge disappointment. Inside there was nothing. It was practically empty. He threw the bucket in and turned around.
Bingo was standing a little too close to him and his eyes had changed somehow. He didn’t look funny anymore. He looked scary.
“Boo!” Bingo said and pushed him into the van.
Ben felt tears building in his eyes. They were tears of anger and of sadness. He wanted to take Harvey Newman’s face and keep punching it until there was nothing left but a bloody pulp.
“I’m glad you killed him,” he said.
23
Jane walked down the corridor toward the exhibit store. She had put White’s file away. Now they had a name, she wanted to start at the beginning and review what they already knew. It would be a long and laborious task, but if it stopped another murder then that was all that really mattered.
Ben Night’s house was under surveillance and if anyone went near it, she would know. However much she enjoyed Night’s first book, she wasn’t sure she had the stomach to read any more. Not after what had happened yesterday. She looked at her watch. Pretty soon White’s murder would be the day before yesterday.
She unlocked the room and pushed open the door. She waited for the motion detectors to trigger the lights before she stepped inside. The exhibit store had changed location several times during the last week. At first it occupied a box-room beside the main office. It moved to accommodate Stu’s murder and then it moved once more to the current location. There were now three officers working out of the room and it was vast. It looked like a huge storage depot with computers, televisions, furniture and clothing all waiting to be shipped out.
She walked through the storage racks to the far end of the room. There were no windows this deep inside the building, so even in the daytime it was gloomy. At this time of night, the corner she was walking toward was covered in shadow. It contained all of the evidence from the first murder, from Harvey Newman’s mutilation.
Jane paused as she reached his sordid little corner. There were computer towers lodged on the rack’s lower level, and above them were his laptops and tablet computers. There were others too, others that the High-Tech Crime Unit were still examining. What she was interested in was stacked on the opposite rack, facing the computers.
It wasn’t just his library of books that had been extensive. Harvey Newman had an extensive collection of videos, DVDs and flash drives too. The videos took up most of the room, neatly stacked side by side on the shelves. She marched straight past them without looking too closely and grabbed the book which the officers had created. Since none of the videos, DVDs or flash drives were labelled, they had catalogued and referenced them as comprehensively as was possible.
She scanned down the list, feeling more nauseous by the second. Beside each exhibit number was a name. The name of a child who Newman had abused. She knew what she was looking for and although she was relieved to find it so quickly, a wave of grief washed over her.
How many victims had there been? She had lost track in the wake of all that followed the discovery of his body.
She read the reference out loud and closed the book. “CR/12 – Maldon Williams.” It was the exhibit number of the officer who found it and the name of the victim.
She walked back down the aisle and located the video. Its blank, black spine was as soulless as the man himself. She pulled it down and signed it out. A viewing room had been set up on the other side of the store. Did she want to see what was on the video? No, not with all her heart did she want to see it. Did she need to see it? She pushed the video into the player and sat down.
It was an old recording. The picture rolled over several times before it settled on the face of a young boy.
“Tell the camera your name,” a faceless voice asked.
“I’m Maldon Williams,” replied the boy. Whether it was because the footage was old she didn’t know, but the boy’s hair glowed almost white against the dark background.
“And why is today special, Maldon?”
The boy looked frightened to death and his voice wobbled. “It’s my ninth birthday.”
Jane calculated that it made the date the fourth of August 1989. She reached out to stop the video, she didn’t need to know what happened next, but the camera moved and suddenly she was staring at a clown.
“Boo!” Harvey Newman smiled.
She stopped the video. In the silence, she could hear her heart hammering in her ears. It echoed in her head and around the room.
“Bastard!” she shrieked, smashing her fist into the desk. “Bastard, bastard, bastard,” she shouted again. This time her anger wasn’t directed at the killer of Stu Kelly or John White, it was directed at Harvey Newman.
She almost ran back along the corridors to the office. Her speed was as much about getting away from the cave-like room and the videos as it was about telling Hargreaves.
She knocked on
his door and walked in. Hargreaves was just putting the phone down.
“Williams was one of Newman’s victims.” She felt dizzy and nauseous. “On his ninth birthday.”
Hargreaves grimaced. “Christ.” He threw his pen down and leaned back. “I’ve just had surveillance on the phone. They want to know if it’s normal for Night to leave his dog out for nearly two hours. How the hell do I know?”
Jane shrugged.
“As long as nobody’s been to his house, it doesn’t matter. I’m not going to go and kick the door in over a damn dog.”
Jane laughed, despite how she felt.
“Good work anyway. You okay?”
She didn’t feel okay. She felt terrible. “Fine, thanks.”
“Brings us back to revenge, doesn’t it?” he asked.
Jane nodded. “Yes it does and who can blame him for wanting that? I certainly don’t. It doesn’t fit for the others though, not yet at least.”
Hargreaves picked up his pen again and put it behind his ear. “Poor little sod.” He started typing and Jane took it as a sign to leave. She needed to get back to her desk anyway. There was a drawer full of painkillers and she was badly in need.
24
Ben could hear Stan whimpering outside. The dog didn’t like to be out in the dark for this long. Especially after recent events. But he couldn’t move. Not only was the clown holding a knife covered in blood, but he was transfixed by the story he was transcribing. It made him feel sick, repulsed and sad. It made him feel angry.
“I went to school the next day like nothing had ever happened. I played football in the playground like normal and I ate my packed lunch as if I had never been in that van. I carried on like that for two weeks. Mum and Dad asked me why I was quiet but I just told them I was tired. I was angry with them too. I was angry that they had let Bingo do that to me. All the time I heard music. I heard the circus music playing over and over in a never-ending loop. But I knew nobody else could hear it. Only me. Just like I was the only one who could hear his voice. ‘Don’t tell anyone or they will take you away and you’ll have to live with someone else. Someone mean. It’s our secret, Maldon.’”
As he typed, Ben could hear the anger and spite in the clown’s voice. It was strong. Why shouldn’t it be?
“He took this,” the clown said without any feeling.
Ben turned, watching the clown raise the knife and push the tip of the dirty blade into his face, into the part supposed to be a smile. The skin there was formed from someone else’s face. The blade sank down deeper and deeper.
The clown laughed and withdrew it. The tip was covered in bright, fresh blood.
“But I’ve got it back now, haven’t I?”
Ben turned back to the screen. The sound the blade made as it slipped through the flesh was repulsive.
“One morning I was sick. I was so sick I just couldn’t stop it. It was everywhere. On my pyjamas, on my bed, on the carpet and even on the wall. Mum said I must have eaten something bad but I knew what it was. It was the secret. It was burning and boiling my guts. It was turning them to mush inside my body and if I didn’t let it out I was going to keep on being sick. It was going to keep happening until my guts were covering all of the walls in the house. So I lay there and thought about how to tell them. I made myself sick again thinking about it and the day passed and the night came. But he knew what I was thinking. Just like he knows what I’m thinking now. He’s in here.”
Ben didn’t need to look up to know the clown was pressing the tip of the knife against his forehead. He could hear it sinking into the flesh.
“I heard Dad come home from work. I could hear their voices in the kitchen and I could smell food cooking. I could smell meat roasting in the oven but I wasn’t hungry. I walked downstairs knowing that I would puke at any moment. Seeing Bingo in my mind and hearing that music getting louder and louder and louder with each step. It got so loud that I couldn’t hear them talking any more. I couldn’t hear my own breathing or even feel my feet on the carpet. I didn’t know whether I was alive or dead.”
Ben struggled to keep up. His back was starting to ache from sitting there for so long.
“Mum had her back to me and Dad was sitting at the table reading his paper, smoking a cigarette. To the side of him was a window that looked out onto the garden. Only it was dark so I couldn’t see out. I was about to tell them when he appeared at that window. He wrote the word ‘Boo!’ with bloody fingers on the window and smiled at me. The back door was open and he just slipped in. They didn’t see him or hear him and I was too scared to say anything. I wanted to scream and shout and tell them what had happened but he had a knife. It was just like this one.”
He was speaking faster and faster, and Ben started falling behind. He gritted his teeth and was about to say something when the clown just stopped speaking.
He typed the remainder of what he had just said then stopped too. The room was silent again. The only sound was from outside. Stan was whimpering. Ben risked a look up. The clown moved the knife moved up and down in a stabbing motion. Blood, his own blood, fell to the floor in a thick globule.
Should he move? Should he try and rush him?
“Pleeeeeease!” the clown whined. “I can’t hear myself!”
Was he shouting at him? There was silence for a few minutes during which Ben convinced himself that he was already dead and this was some kind of writers’ hell.
“Bingo stabbed my dad in the neck first and then he stabbed my mum in the back and as she lay on the floor he slit her throat. Then he went back and finished my dad. He slipped out the same way as he came in. I saw his orange hair go wobbling past the kitchen window and he was laughing. He sounded just like Muttley.”
He spoke calmly, as if he was describing what he had just bought at the shops.
“It all happened in the blink of an eye and I was powerless to stop it. I didn’t even have time to scream. I’m not sure I had the strength to anyway.”
Ben stopped typing. It was awful. It was all so unbearably sad. The vile disfigured animal standing with a knife in his hand beside him was also a victim. He didn’t know what to think.
“Why have you stopped? Don’t stop. Don’t let the music start again.”
Ben put in a page break and typed ‘Chapter 2’.
“When the police arrived, I was standing in the same place. I was drenched in blood. It was even in my eyes and it was as if a red filter had been slotted in place. I watched everything through that red film. A copper threw up on the doorstep.”
He paused and pulled a flake of loose skin off his hand. Ben watched it float to the floor like a feather. Both of his hands were covered in scaly skin which looked like it was ready to slough away at any second.
“They took me away and that was the last time I ever saw Mum and Dad. Two lumps of meat on the kitchen floor. A policeman took me into a room, a fat policeman with bad breath. I didn’t know it then but he was a detective. I hated him. I hated the way he spoke to me, the way he drank his coffee and the way his voice sounded. He tried to make me look at photos of their bodies but I wouldn’t look. He shouted all of the time but even his voice wasn’t loud enough to rise above the clown’s music. That was louder than anything for a long time afterwards.”
“Are you talking about the same copper you killed?” Ben turned around slowly. He thought he already knew the answer.
The clown bent down so their noses were almost touching. The stench coming off him was unbearable.
“I took this back,” he whispered.
Out of the corner of his eye Ben saw the knife moving inward, toward him, and he flinched. The clown pointed to a lump of flesh on his own jaw. It looked to have been painted or coloured red, just like the dollop of gristle he supposed was meant to be a big red nose. Close up, it all looked so child-like.
“All I could say was clown. Clown, clown, clown, clown, clown. Constantly, without stopping, and the music grew louder and louder. They gave me something to subdue me
, knock me out, but even then my dreams were filled with clowns on little bicycles, talking with squeaky voices. Their smiles were upside down, just like mine. When I woke up, I was somewhere else. I was taken to a place where smiles weren’t allowed and if you wore one, somebody else would come and steal it from you.”
Maldon walked into the dining hall and looked around. It was two-thirds full already and the atmosphere felt charged with violence. There were other kids like him in here, kids without parents who were here by mistake. Then there were the others who wanted to be here. The ones who did everything they could to stay here. They built little empires around themselves and they filled it with weaklings and thuggish sycophants. He had been here long enough to know to stay away from them.
He liked to be on his own so he could listen to his music. It was music he didn’t need headphones or batteries to listen to either. It just played on a continual loop and had never once stopped in six years. He liked to hum along to it too. But that was usually in his room in the dark when there was nobody else around. It was the only time he allowed himself an attempt at smiling.
Occasionally he got distracted and realised he had been humming aloud, but the other kids thought he was mad anyway. He didn’t say anything to dissuade them of the idea.
The dinner lady slopped something that might have been cottage pie into his tray and he moved on. An apple and a plastic cup filled with weak orange squash. He knew what each element would taste like. They had tasted the same for years. He walked away and put his tray down on a table at the far end of the hall where a collection of frightened-looking boys huddled.
The cottage pie was grim, as it always was, but it reminded him of the same dish Mum used to make. Hers was...
“So, you’re Mouldy!” Someone was standing over him with a loud voice. This was how it always started.
He carried on eating without looking up. He was aware that the other boys on the table had gathered their trays and were leaving.