by Lee Markham
‘Here.’
She looked at her coffee, then up at Tom, and smiled weakly. Her eyes were bloodshot, exhausted-looking. She winced against the bright lights of the diner.
‘How you feeling?’
She shrugged and sighed and held on to her coffee. She didn’t drink any. ‘Head hurts,’ was all she offered. Tom nodded, raised his coffee to his lips and blew across the surface to cool it before taking a sip.
‘Alright. Look. How sure are you that it was him?’ Tom asked her.
‘One hundred percent.’
News of Danny’s body going AWOL from the hospital had reached them at the flat. And initially it was just another bunch of shit that had happened today in the city. Until Anna had asked to see what the boy had looked like. They’d shown her. And then she’d called Tom to one side and had told him, ‘I saw him earlier. Going down the stairs. He had a little boy with him.’
‘You saw who?’
‘Danny.’
Tom hadn’t been able to digest that. ‘But… you were with me at the block earlier?’ Tom had assumed she must have come to the estate sometime during the day, if she thought she’d seen him. But couldn’t figure out why.
‘No. He was coming down the stairs when we were heading up. I saw him.’
‘You mean just now?’
‘Yeah. Well. Hour or two ago. How long have we been here?’
‘It can’t have been him. He was stabbed this afternoon. He would have been dead, Anna. It was probably just a kiddy that looked like him.’
‘I’m telling you it was him,’ she insisted, a troubled look in her eyes.
Tom had taken a deep breath when she’d first taken him to one side and told him, and he took another one now, in the diner. ‘How can you be so sure?’
‘Because I just know,’ she insisted, that strange, conflicted look in her eyes again. Intense. Slightly loopy. But utterly insistent.
Tom leant back against the leatherette banquette and held her gaze. She didn’t blink. In the end he did. He put his hands up and said, ‘OK. OK. So it was him. Which means that…’ he laughed tiredly, ‘… fuck knows what it means.’
What it meant was that everything might be connected, and if that was the case then it all started just over a week ago, with someone burnt on a bench. No witnesses. Nothing on CCTV of any use. No body. Some ash and a few bones. No DNA matches. Nothing. That on its own would be weird enough. Even if it had been a suicide: how? How does a person make themselves burn from the inside out, leaving nothing? Or, assuming it was murder, how do you do that to someone? Fill them with petrol and… what? Make them swallow a lit cigarette? Even then it’d surely just explode, if that. They wouldn’t keep burning once the petrol was burnt. And even if they did, the bench would burn too. So no. Essentially we’re talking about textbook spontaneous human combustion here, but you can jog on if you thought Tom was going to put that in any report.
So that’s one thing.
Then it happens again a week later. Same time, same place. Only this time we have at the very least a witness, and perhaps even a perpetrator. So maybe some answers. And the universe starts its inexorable spin back into alignment. Find the guy with the broken arm and find out what he saw. What he did.
Fine.
But by the time they find him he’s been executed. Along with two junkies who’ve had their throats ripped out. And a dog that’s been bitten to death by a small child. But the guy with the broken arm, he’s not just dead, he’s had his teeth and hands removed. They’ve since found the hands – burnt, in a box full of toys, also burnt, in the bedroom of the child of the murdered junkie female.
The small child is missing.
The hands and teeth thing Tom thinks he understands – no teeth, no hands: no ID. They’d found the hands in the burning box in the kid’s room. Scorched. No fingerprints. The teeth hadn’t been with them. Whoever it was that had carried out the atrocity in the flat, they didn’t want the police to know who the boy with the broken arm was. Which, as far as Tom was concerned, meant that that’s what they needed to know more than anything.
And then there was Danny.
Danny was nothing to do with any of the above. Not that Tom could see, anyhow. But here was Anna saying she saw him leading a little boy away from the flat. From which a little boy was missing. But this all takes place about five or six hours after Danny was stabbed and killed.
‘Right. So the dead kid left the hospital, went to the flat, killed everyone and stole the baby,’ Tom said, almost smiling. ‘Case solved. Let’s go home.’ He took another slug of his coffee and tried really hard to think. Then he just fired questions at Anna.
‘Why would they not want us to know who he is? Could the bench killings be assassinations? Like, I dunno, Russian secret service? That would explain how fucking weird they were. Maybe our guy with the arm saw something he shouldn’t have and they followed him to the flat. Shut him up. Took the baby with them. No loose ends.’ He shook his head. ‘Christ, listen to me.’
Anna looked at him and didn’t drink her coffee. ‘I feel funny.’
Tom regarded her but didn’t see or hear her. ‘But you saw Danny with the baby. Except Danny died this afternoon. But then again, where’s his body?’ His eyes widened and his arm stopped with his coffee midway from the table to his lips. ‘Tell me they’ve checked the CCTV at the hospital? They must have, surely?’
Anna shrugged.
‘OK. So we’ve lost our witness or whatever to the burnings. So that’s a dead end. We can’t ID him, nothing. We’ve got nothing. Except you seeing Danny leaving with the baby. Which is fucking insane, because Danny is dead. But his body is missing. So… maybe the hospital fucked up. But there’s no way Danny did all that in the flat…’
‘Why not?’
That shook Tom from his join-the-dots reverie. ‘Huh?’
‘Why not?’ Anna repeated.
‘Why not what?’
‘Why is there no way Danny did all that in the flat?’
Tom sneered at her then, his patience reached and beached at her relentless cynicism. ‘Because he’s fucking ten years old, Anna. On his own. How the fuck would a ten-year-old do that, to people like that, on his own. Jesus Christ.’ He shook his head.
‘You’d be surprised what children can do these days, Tom.’
He looked at her, and leant ever so slightly away from her. She seemed different. There was something in her eyes that he didn’t like. Something unhinged. All of a sudden he wasn’t sure that the words she was saying were anything more than the finest of veils thrown feebly in front of a seething mass of collapsing attachment to reality. She seemed as if the abyss was now well and truly looking into her. And that she knew it. Welcomed it, even.
He wasn’t sure how to respond. And so he searched for something real, a logical avenue of investigation, anything that they could do that might work as a temporary tether to reconnect her to the real world. He wasn’t sure she necessarily deserved his concern, but it was in his nature to try. ‘Look, Anna… OK… I think what we need to do is find the person who stabbed Danny. We know that he was stabbed. It’s the only fucking solid thing in all of this. So let’s start there and see where it takes us. Yeah? Let’s just forget all the rest of it, and find them.’
She looked at Tom then and smiled. It was a cold and terrible smile. ‘I’ll tell you who stabbed Danny, Tom. Children did it. Filthy little rat-children. You’ll see. But you’ll never understand. You’re too soft.’
She pushed her untouched cup of coffee away and stood up. ‘I feel funny,’ she stated distractedly before getting up and wordlessly walking out of the diner.
Tom, his mouth agape, watched her go.
He would never see her again.
2
When they wake up, they wake up hungry.
The youngest one, the boy who first noticed the knife in John’s hand the night before, he wakes up with a start just before dawn. He has had terrible dreams. Something has been plaguing him. It
has been howling with frustrated rage and unbridled hatred, rattling around within him, shouting commands, but simultaneously tugged in other directions.
This boy, whose name is Liam, wakens with an ache in his belly, and a pain in his head that the burgeoning gloom at the window only seems to make worse. He closes the curtains. He has never closed the curtains before. He’s ten. Why would he have? Not his job. But this morning he does. It’s not enough. So he strips the sheet from his bed, clambers carefully up onto the top bunk (he doesn’t want to wake his little sister), and stuffs the cloth over the top of the curtain rail. It’ll have to do.
‘Whatcha doing, Liam?’ Megan mumbles sleepily.
He turns to her and tells her to go back to sleep. ‘Just fixing the curtains Meg,’ he says. He loves his sister more than anything. She’s the best. Not that he’d tell anyone. Especially not her. But she knows.
She peeps suspiciously out from under her duvet, and only believes him once she sees the window. Then she rolls over on her side and pulls up the duvet and snuggles down.
Liam watches her do this, aghast and afraid. Because something inside him thinks of her as a rat. And that same part of him wants to bite her. To feed on her. He hurries back down from the top bunk and curls up on his own, pulls his knees in and shivers. He can’t get back to sleep. His heart is whickering. The cut on his finger burning unbelievably. Something is wrong, he knows it.
Something is very wrong.
Three, perhaps four, streets across the city from where Liam is wedging his sheet into the top of the curtain rail, Leanne is woken by the sharpest pain in her abdomen that she’s ever known. Worse than period pain. Way worse. It burns. And it sends tendrils up into her belly. These tendrils insinuate hunger, but the fire down below distracts her for now. Leanne’s window has a blackout blind behind the curtain so she’s not too worried about the coming of the sun.
There is a small, mean voice in her head ranting and raving, wailing and gnashing, but it is all too easy to ignore. The pain in her womb is just too much. She moans. And she curses Jamie’s name – she’d told him to wear a condom, but he’d said it didn’t matter if she was on the pill. They’d both been pissed. And a little bit stoned. They’d done it in the stairwell of the multi-storey car park after they’d left the crime scene last night. It wasn’t even that good. He’d kept complaining about how the cut on his hand hurt. Didn’t stop him wanting to do it though. Needs must.
And now he’d gone and given her something.
Arsehole.
A couple of stops away on the Underground, Jamie himself is still awake. He never got to sleep. He’d stayed up smoking spliff and drinking whisky, hoping that it would take the edge off the flaming agony of the gash across his palm. It didn’t help. The last hour or so, the thought of anything other than meat turned his stomach. But the idea of meat, rare as you like, was almost more than he could bear. He thought about heading out, down to the convenience store and getting some, but the sky was brightening and the light was like needles in his eyes. He couldn’t face it. The chatter in his head is a little livelier than he’s used to, but only a little. He’s long since learnt to tune it out. He does so again now.
He thinks he might have got tetanus or something from that knife.
When he catches up with that little John bastard he is going to wring his neck.
Back on the block now, within throwing distance of the flat that was the focus of so much attention the previous night, Amber is pacing the hallway. She can’t get this voice out of her head. He is telling her to come to him, but she is scared. She doesn’t feel right and her head is splitting. She goes to the front door, opens it quietly and looks out onto the balcony. The dawn is throwing shadows, but we’ve at least a half-hour’s grace before the sun might break out of its cage. Amber looks out and doesn’t know why she fears the coming of the light, just that she does fear it. Deeply.
But the voice in her head commands her: ‘Move. Now, rat. Before it is too late. Come to me and you might make it through the day.’
She almost decides then to make a break for it. She almost cedes control to him, almost lets him take her and bring her to where he is waiting. Almost. But she doesn’t quite trust him. She thinks he might be lying. He screams and thrashes at her impertinence. She retreats back into the gloom of her flat and hides from the sun.
3
Anna wanders the streets alone. She is confused and troubled. Her hand hurts. She has seen too much, gone through too much, and she feels like she is losing herself. The part of her that had always held hope at bay seems now to have grown teeth, and it is snarling and snapping.
She isn’t sure what she said to Tom. It hadn’t been her. She knows that words had come from her mouth, but she doesn’t remember what they were, or where they had come from. This has never happened before. She wasn’t weak. She’d never been weak. Pessimistic? Yes. Cynical? Arguably. But weak? No. Unprofessional? No.
Fucking mental? No.
She doesn’t know what is happening to her, but something is happening to her. Something has got into her and it’s trying to take control of her. And it might well be succeeding.
She holds the memory of Tom’s face in her mind. His face when she spoke her last words to him in the diner. The face that said that he didn’t know her. That she had lost it. And he had been right. She had lost it. She is still lost.
But now, as she walks down street-lit roads, past late-night kebab shops spilling out drunks and the desperate, she knows that she is lost. That something happened to her at the flat and it has catapulted her to somewhere she has never been before. Somewhere apart from her self. She felt like a ghost, haunting her own being. Like an echo trapped in the shell of the someone she used to be.
She allows her feet to transport her. Muscle memory, taking her home. She desperately tries to concentrate, to pull herself together. She feels a bit like she does when she’s had far too much wine and crossed that line and has to walk and walk and walk until she’s sobered up. She feels unmoored, unhinged, detached. All of these things. But different. Because she’s hasn’t touched a drop. She’s stone-cold sober. And this doesn’t make any sense.
‘I feel funny,’ she repeats, over and over under her breath. She doesn’t attract any glances. She’s not unusual. Not the first to have gone wrong around here.
Her hands are cold. She clenches them, unclenches them, gives them a shake. They won’t warm up. She feels lightheaded. Cold sweat. Her heart is skittery.
The scene at the flat had shaken her up. No doubt. You can’t prepare yourself for that kind of thing. But being jaded helps. She hadn’t expected it. But she’d known that one day it would happen. She’d had two not dissimilar days in her career. One was a murder-suicide. A father had decided time was up for his wife and two sons. He’d done that quietly, with a knife. In the night. No note. That had been five years ago now. The other had been human traffic, suffocated in the back of a lorry. Ukrainian. Mostly. A couple of Afghans in there too. That’s what they figured. They’d looked Afghan. And that was as much identification as those two particular teenagers had enjoyed before they’d been cremated. The Ukrainians mostly had some paperwork on them. Got sent home – in boxes of course, but still… That lorry hadn’t been good. They’d been looking for heroin. Hadn’t found it. You win some…
Actually… you don’t.
She pauses for breath and looks around and can’t remember how she got here from the lorry. Then she remembers the lorry had been three years ago. Or was it four?
Where is she?
She needs to get home. She’s not right. She keeps slipping away. Floating. Down here we all float. Where had she read that? Because she was floating now. Floating away, like a balloon blowing into the wind.
‘Couldja spare a bit of change, love? Just need a couple of pounds to get the bus home.’
He teeters and totters and smells of cheap booze and afterthought. His fingers are puffed up and hardened. Claw-like. His shell-suit has a
sweaty sheen.
She feels herself straighten. Her eyes narrow. And words bubble up in her throat, cruel, disgusted words that aren’t hers. But with which she has a certain empathy. The verminous street specimen troubling her for money appals her, as this new part of her is vocalising. To his face. She would never have played her hand so aggressively. Wasn’t her style. She was meek. Perhaps the flat had been a final straw, had unleashed her true, furious self. Perhaps now she would turn maniac. She feels like a potentially murderous cliché from a cheap revenge film. But she doesn’t kill him. She pushes past him and breaks into a trot.
‘Come on love… just a bit of change…’, his last-ditch plea before shouting after her, ‘Well fuck off then, you bitch!’
Underground station just up ahead. She can get home if she just holds it together. Concentrates.
On the train, in the tunnels, it is quiet. Nearly last train. Everyone is detritus. As is she. She closes her eyes and floats. Her hands are getting colder. Her heart feels weak. Her wrist aches. Throbs. Insistently. She goes to the place where it hurts and she rides the pain. It keeps her steady. Ensconced in the darkness behind her eyelids the throb acts like a beacon, a dark star for her to orbit. A centre of gravity. A supermassive black hole.
She orbits and drifts back through this inner space to the flat. Past the child’s room with the flames and the stink. She remembers the initial stab of sadness followed by the crash of the portcullis slamming down against her emotions. The child might not be here. Don’t assume anything until you know. Hope someone else finds the body. Chalk it up when they do. Job done. Into the sitting room with the corpses and the blood.
She sighs.
She stops at the door and she takes it in. The mother on the sofa with the rose on her cheek. The man – the father? – in the chair with the hole in his throat. And the man, the boy, they’d been looking for, seated and facing her. His hands gone. His face destroyed.