Jess Castle and the Eyeballs of Death

by M B Vincent

  ‘How long were you there?’ asked Eden.

  The officer answered for Squeezers. ‘Eight hours, Sarge. Practically till daybreak.’

  ‘You took eight hours to not steal weedkiller?’ asked Eden.

  ‘We fell asleep,’ sobbed Squeezers. ‘Them barrels is heavy and we were knackered. Please don’t nick me, sir. Beefy Dave’ll kill me.’

  Eden sighed. ‘Squeezers, you’re the weirdest petty criminal I’ve ever come across. You’re lucky I’m busy or I’d nick you for this, but you didn’t take anything, after all. In any event, what we have here is a solid alibi for the murder window. You’re free to go.’

  ‘Thank you, sir.’ Squeezers stood and bowed. ‘I can’t tell you how much I appreciate your kindness and your exquisite—’

  ‘Yes, all right. Off you go.’ Eden shook Squeezers’ hand. Looked around for something to wipe his hand on. ‘One more thing. The roundabout. Was it still or moving when you found the box?’

  ‘Moving.’ Squeezers, for once, was certain.

  When he’d dribbled out, Eden said to nobody in particular, ‘The killer watched him take the box.’

  ‘Yikes,’ said Jess. It was a word she hadn’t said since she was eight. It fitted the bill.

  ‘Please tell me you’ve had a breakthrough with the symbols.’

  ‘I’d have to lie.’

  Karen made a little noise. It was a cheeky little noise. Eloquent.

  ‘May I see this new box? The one Squeezers brought in.’

  ‘Being processed.’ Eden seemed too tired to speak in whole sentences. ‘No inlays. No decoration. But it’s yew. Finely made.’

  ‘By the same person who made the first one?’

  ‘Without a shadow of a doubt.’

  ‘Sir,’ said Karen. ‘What if the gaps between the murders is a code, too?’

  ‘Not another one.’ Eden ran a hand through his hair and almost managed to untidy it. ‘What was it, five days between murders one and two. Then seven between two and three. Not enough information there to help us. If it was the same amount of days, maybe.’

  ‘Pan said anything useful?’ Jess had told Eden about her conversation with Caroline.

  ‘Pan’s said nothing at all. Meditates apparently. And annoys the hell out of the custody officer.’

  Karen sauntered up to Jess. Head back. ‘You’re so keen on your witchy woman, Hecate, but you missed something.’

  ‘What?’ Jess could see up Karen’s nose.

  ‘Shane Harper was draped over the market cross. He was in the shape of a cross. Another of your double crosses.’

  ‘You’re right,’ laughed Jess. It was her cue to lay the business card on the table.

  ‘Strophalos?’ Karen had three goes before she pronounced it properly.

  ‘It’s a wheel that spins. People used to make them, not just draw them. They put a semi-precious stone in the middle and spun them. It would make a whoop-whoop noise. Useful, apparently, for attracting love.’

  ‘Huh,’ said Karen, whose hairstyle suggested she was above romance.

  ‘Love wasn’t a soppy romantic notion to the ancients,’ said Jess. She felt a vague ache as she said, ‘It was powerful. A force to be reckoned with. Majestic.’ She waggled her shoulders. ‘The strophalos can change the weather. Conjure a storm out of nowhere. Make it snow in July.’

  ‘All that on a business card,’ said Karen.

  ‘I don’t know about Hellcat and Hecate,’ said Eden. ‘These aren’t hard facts, Jess.’

  ‘I’ll tell you what is a hard fact. How can the manageress vouch for Unthank never passing the main foyer when the EasySleep Inn has an automated reception desk from eleven p.m.?’

  ‘Knott,’ said Eden.

  ‘I’m on it, sir.’

  When she’d gone, Jess said, ‘I keep returning to the trees on box one. They’re so bold. And according to their symbolic code, they’re offering clarity and wisdom.’

  ‘Look at them from another angle,’ said Eden. ‘Walk round them, as it were.’

  ‘Well, they have different names in Ogham. The ash, for instance, is . . .’ She screwed up her eyes. ‘Edad. It’s called edad. The rowan is called luis.’

  They said it together, as if it was part of a song they both knew. ‘Luis Unthank.’

  ‘The trees are speaking to us,’ gasped Jess. Ancient history had leapt off the page and into this lamplit office.

  ‘It can’t be used in court, Jess. It’s circumstantial at best.’

  ‘But it’s something.’

  ‘It is.’ Eden raised a styrofoam cup to his lips. Grimaced. Put it back down.

  ‘I’m going to visit Caroline again. I’ll keep going until she breaks and tells me what really goes on there. I can’t believe she’s toeing the line even though there’s a murderer at large.’

  ‘Look at Charlie Manson. He controlled that gang of his even from prison. Had a vice-like grip on their minds.’ Eden paused. ‘Did he die?’

  ‘He did die,’ said Jess. ‘God rest his ’orrible little soul.’

  ‘Do you remember he got engaged in prison? He was about eighty-two and she was twenty-seven.’

  ‘Yikes.’ Twice in one day that word had come in useful.

  ‘He ditched her. Said she was crazy.’

  ‘Typical man. It’s always the woman who’s nuts, even when you’re Charlie Manson.’ Jess had a thought. ‘All the victims are men.’

  ‘I did notice.’ Eden was arch. It didn’t suit him. ‘Unfortunately that’s about the only link. We can’t rule out women victims. Statistically, serial-killer targets even out at about fifty–fifty gender wise.’

  ‘Gender equality. So serial killers aren’t all bad.’

  She had a perfectly good home. Four stout walls, fitted carpets, a conservatory for heaven’s sake, and yet Jess found herself walking past her car, to patrol the town, alone, in the dark.

  She was, she told herself, investigating. Details mattered. I have, she thought, an eye for the miniature. Jess might notice some tiny fact that would crack the case.

  She liked the thought of how much Eden would hate that phrase.

  Country towns are so much darker than cities; night falls harder. There was no pastel gloaming tonight.

  The high street was silent. Castle Kidbury was a creature of habit. Only the minimart and the garage kept anything like big-city hours. The other shops and services obeyed a call of the wild at around the same point of the day. Closed signs. Lights off. She had the thoroughfares to herself.

  A curfew, self-imposed, kept strollers and dog walkers indoors. Nobody wanted to end up crucified. Even the press pack were invisible, presumably drinking Eddie’s cellar dry at the Royal Seven Stars.

  DI Phillips’s advice to the community was to lay low, ‘until the present situation is resolved’. Jess scoffed at such a lily-livered response to the ‘situation’, despite knowing that if the Judge was more welcoming, she’d be snug indoors, like her neighbours.

  Crossing the market square, her Doc Martens slapped on the ancient cobbles. A roaring noise, like a dragon, turned out to be a lorry. Out of place, it hurried past her en route to the motorway.

  As she patrolled Fore Street – patrolling being so much more noble than skulking – she heard a smaller noise, the silver clink of keys, from Dunch Lane.

  Mr Kuzbari was shutting up shop. Jess watched, waiting for him to turn towards Fore Street. Despite her bravado, she’d welcome the company.

  Rattling the door to check it was locked, Kuzbari hurried in the opposite direction, towards the dimly lit end of the lane, until he was abruptly swallowed by the night.

  Jess took off after him. Why, she wasn’t entirely sure. It wasn’t suspicion, it was instinct. She didn’t want to lose the only other human figure in the landscape.

  Curiosity also played its part. There was nothing, except for back doors and bins, at the end of Dunch Lane.

  Kuzbari’s dim outline turned right, out of sight, and she dashed to the corner. There he
was, up ahead. It was darker here, with no kindly shopfronts lighting her way. The buildings closed in over her head; on one side the blank cliff face of a warehouse, on the other the unlovely rears of the Fore Street shops.

  Rubbish bags lolled. There was a summery stink in the cooling air. Kuzbari was in a hurry.

  Jess remembered to be frightened. Three people had ended up dead since her return to Castle Kidbury. The shadows might shelter a killer. She twirled, paranoid, checking behind her, and when she faced forwards once more, Kuzbari was gone. The cluster of fire escapes and grotty back entrances – such grim contrast to the polite shopfronts – offered no clue.

  Jess stood still, listening hard. She heard a rustle, a squelch, the yowl of a prowling tom. Then she heard something else. A rhythmic metallic creak. The moon came out from behind a cloud and she saw a silhouette raise slightly above the roofline, then dip out of sight.

  ‘You’re a brave girl.’ A voice behind Jess. She wheeled around.

  ‘You’re a brave boy,’ she told Unthank, who had taken shape in the dark. She wondered if her voice shook. Her knees had certainly got the memo.

  ‘Not bothering with the curfew?’

  There was no need to answer him. Jess saved her manners for people who reciprocated. ‘Do you often hang around bins?’

  ‘I’m taking the back way.’

  ‘From where?’ asked Jess. ‘To where?’

  ‘From somewhere that’s none of your business to somewhere else that’s none of your business.’ He took a step towards her.

  Jess loathed herself for the way she jumped.

  ‘Sorry.’ He didn’t sound it. ‘Female friends tell me men have no idea how vulnerable women feel on the streets at night. I’ll be a good boy,’ he said. ‘I’ll keep my distance.’

  Jess glanced up the alley. Padlocked doors. Not enough light. She’d lost her bearings. Was she at the back of The Buttonhole or Silver River? ‘The funeral was three days ago. What keeps a hipster here? Castle Kidbury’s always been boring; now it’s boring and dangerous.’

  ‘Nothing boring about danger,’ said Unthank. His eyes were impossible to see in the dark. ‘This place is inspirational. You’re from here, so you don’t get it.’

  ‘Come on, you design groovy brands. This place is Nowheresville. Unless you’re inspired by the EasySleep Inn logo.’

  ‘You’re good at sneering. The EasySleep Inn logo is a modern classic.’

  ‘Eh?’ Jess thought of the yellow, shakily drawn house on the front of all EasySleep Inns.

  ‘It tells you what you’re buying. A space out of the rain. A rest for the weary traveller.’

  ‘The logo has a little chimney with smoke curling out of it. EasySleep Inns are more like barracks. Horrible carpet. Thin curtains. Not homely.’

  Unthank pursed his lips. He seemed to feel the same way about Jess as she felt about him; their mutual goodwill would fit on the head of a pin. ‘I’m walking away. Slowly. If I hear a scream, I’ll come and rescue you.’ He turned away. ‘Or not,’ he said over his shoulder.

  ‘And if I hear a scream,’ called Jess, ‘I’ll come and rescue you.’

  The silence returned. Jess picked her way down the alley. She stopped at a rickety door with ‘KEEP OUT’ painted in hostile capitals.

  Easing through, looking neurotically around her, Jess crossed a shadowy backyard. An iron ladder was embedded into the building. She put out a hand. Cold, slippery metal.

  She looked up at where the ladder poked into the air above the roof. She knew that Mary would scale the ladder in a heartbeat, but Jess was more a creature of the mind than the body.

  One foot, then another. No looking down, Jess counselled herself. She looked down. It made no sense to be crawling up the side of a building like a human fly. Her stomach rebelled.

  Grateful to reach the top, she poked her head over the parapet. A roof, flat and bland. A tatty sofa facing away from her. Smoke scything upwards.

  Weed. The smell reminded her of student lodgings, where even the mice smoke dope.

  ‘Care to join me?’ The voice came from the sagging sofa.

  Jess heaved herself gracelessly onto the roof. ‘I make a rubbish stalker.’

  Kuzbari straightened up, turned his head. His smile had film-star glamour. His colouring suited the midnight smell of his joint. ‘Come. Sit.’

  It was impossible to roost on the edge of the dilapidated sofa. It absorbed Jess until she was almost lying down.

  ‘Care for some?’ Kuzbari held out the joint.

  ‘I don’t get on with dope. Makes my arms feel as if they’re too long.’

  He laughed, snorting smoke. ‘How do you like my roof terrace?’

  ‘Short on mod cons.’ Jess looked around her at discarded planks of wood and broken flowerpots. ‘But it has a certain je ne sais quoi.’

  ‘It’s the view that makes it special.’

  Jess craned her neck. ‘Hmm.’ She was sceptical that the panorama of Castle Kidbury chimney pots merited the climb.

  ‘Not that way.’ Kuzbari pointed upwards. ‘That way.’

  Jess gave herself up to the sky, resting her head on the back of the sofa.

  ‘Every night, a free show.’ Kuzbari’s voice was a smile.

  ‘Tonight’s especially clear.’ Jess thought of the last time she stargazed. With Rupert. She couldn’t imagine Pandora lying on her back on wet grass.

  ‘See over there,’ said Kuzbari, his voice a low rumble. ‘That bright trio of stars. They’re called—’

  ‘Vega, Altair and Deneb.’

  After a slight pause, Kuzbari said, ‘Sorry. Most people aren’t that interested in stars.’

  ‘I like their constancy,’ murmured Jess. ‘Deneb is a swan, according to the people who named the stars.’

  ‘She swims down the Milky Way every night.’

  ‘But never gets anywhere. Do you come here often?’ Jess laughed. ‘I’ve never actually said that before.’

  ‘I do come here often.’ Kuzbari didn’t get the joke. ‘Most nights, when it’s temperate. I have one of these.’ He held up his spliff. ‘I look at the stars and I think.’

  ‘What do you think about?’ Jess pulled her knees up under her chin and half turned towards Kuzbari.

  ‘The vastness of everything.’ He settled back, his regal profile pointed at the sky. ‘The smallness of me.’

  Deep stuff for a tatty roof. ‘Depending on your mood,’ said Jess, ‘that could make you feel plugged-in or deeply lonely.’

  ‘It always has the same effect on me.’ Kuzbari’s voice was measured, giving no clue to which he meant. ‘This sky, you see, stretches over the entire world. The moon hangs over everybody.’

  Jess caught on. ‘The same moon looks down on Syria and Castle Kidbury.’

  He looked at her. Grateful. ‘Exactly so.’

  Something surged in Jess’s chest. This was Kuzbari’s way of communing with the people he’d left behind. His mother.

  ‘It also shines on Peckham,’ said Kuzbari, lightly, lampooning himself. ‘On my wife.’

  ‘Does it help? The moon?’

  Hecate had followed Jess up the metal ladder. Goddess of the moon, she was also associated with liminal places. Thresholds. Doorways. As queen of the underworld, she stood between life and death. As an adult child returned to the family home, Jess was an expert in liminal places. In being in neither one place nor the other.

  The roof was liminal, too. Between the muddy earth and the placid sky.

  ‘I try to stare at the moon and think of nothing. To will myself to my mother’s side. To tell her, somehow, that I’m coming for her.’ Kuzbari reached over and pressed the joint into the tarmac. ‘Which may not be true, but . . .’

  Platitudes gave Jess hives, so she said nothing. She hoped the quality of her silence might help.

  ‘And you, Jess? Why are you hanging around these dangerous streets on your own?’

  Hardly as dangerous as the streets Kuzbari left behind. ‘Home’s the place
where, when you have to go there, they have to let you in,’ said Jess. ‘But I don’t want to go there. Not right now.’

  ‘I would cut off my right hand to go home.’

  ‘I didn’t mean . . . That was crass.’

  ‘No. Home should be taken for granted.’

  ‘Until that’s no longer possible.’ Jess would have liked to take this man’s hand. She didn’t dare. Kuzbari was too correct for such a gesture. What’s more, she distrusted her motive: his beauty had power. ‘My home, well, without my mum in it, it’s not like it used to be.’

  ‘Allah yerhama,’ said Kuzbari, with a dip of his head.

  Jess recognised it as a condolence. She had a flash of her mother in startling 3D and cleared her throat. ‘Dad, well, he’s not suited to solo parenting.’ It struck Jess how childish it was to expect parenting at her age. But a dam had been breached; Jess’s resentments tumbled through. ‘He disapproves of everything I do. Or don’t do. He’s got some woman installed in Mum’s kitchen.’ Referring to Bogna as ‘some woman’ wasn’t fair, but it popped the blister of Jess’s myriad resentments; the sting felt good. ‘My brother’s grown up to be a stranger, and saddled me with a sister-in-law who measures out her life in spa days. And this town’s gone crazy. My old school friend’s waiting, hoping, for the apocalypse.’ Rupert was next on her list of grievances, but Jess stopped short. ‘Sorry, Jesus, where did all that come from?’

  ‘I don’t wish to be presumptuous . . .’ started Kuzbari.

  Uh-oh, thought Jess. Was he just another bossy male after all?

  ‘Our true enemy in life is discontentment. There are troubles enough along the way, but discontentment we make ourselves. Your father, his housekeeper, they may frustrate you. But these are merely deflections. Jessica, family are not our friends. We are bonded whatever we do, whether we care to admit it or not. And you already know how it feels to lose a parent. Your father is not a well man. Allow him to be closer to you. I believe a little of your discontentment will fade.’

  Jess blinked, a little ashamed.

  ‘You are home. Your mother may not be there in person, that cannot be helped. But she will always be there in you. Your home, your father, the memory of your mother . . . these are all things you should be grateful for.’ He pressed his hand gently on hers. His skin was warm. ‘Allow yourself to be at home, Jessica.’