Pariah

by Thomas Emson

  They were checking him out.

  “What you got there, fellas?” he said.

  One of the coppers held up an iPhone. At five yards away, Faultless could make out the image on the screen.

  It was him. A photo from the dust jacket of Graveyard Of Empires.

  “You know who this is?” said the iPhone copper.

  “Is it your very handsome boyfriend?” said Faultless.

  “You wish, poof,” said the second copper.

  The iPhone officer gave him a look before staring at Faultless again.

  The cop said, “Incident room just sent this over. You’re either Charlie Faultless or a very good match. Which one is it?”

  “Very good match,” said Faultless.

  “I think you’re him. And Detective Chief Superintendent Don Wilks wants to talk to you,” said the copper, still holding up his iPhone.

  “I’m not sure I want to talk to him.”

  “Whatever, mate. You’re under arrest for the murder of Anthony David Graveney in 1996.”

  The coppers stomped through the tall grass towards Faultless.

  He bunched his fists, ready.

  Chapter 75

  DARK PLACES

  The elevator clanked. It went down, hurtling through the shaft. Spencer had never known it to travel so quickly. He stood in the corner, leaning back in an effort to stay on his feet. He was shaking. His skin felt as if it were peeling away from his bones. It was like one of those films you saw of pilots exposed to G-force.

  What the fuck is happening? he thought.

  Hallam held on to the girl. She looked terrified. He looked calm. He’d gone really weird in the past few hours. He’d always been a victim. Bullies picked on him. Everyone picked on him. But since he’d broken into Spencer’s flat and got involved with Jack, he seemed to have an aura around him.

  It made you shiver, being near him. The atmosphere around the bloke was dank. He’d killed Candice, Danny Daley’s little sister. After that, the Barrowmore Estate had gone mental. Protesters took to the streets. The Old Bill got slagged off. Some old fella got beaten up because he was a little bit too close to the kids’ playground, and the mums clocked him as a pedo.

  Fucking nuts, thought Spencer.

  And now it was getting even nuttier.

  “What the fuck are we doing with fucking Roy Hanbury’s granddaughter?” he asked.

  “She’s a seer,” said Hallam, arm snaked around the girls throat.

  She whimpered. She cried. She had tried to kick and bite, but Hallam just stared ahead as if nothing was happening. He never blinked. He never grimaced.

  Weird, thought Spencer. Way too weird.

  “Where the fuck are we going, man?” said Spencer.

  “We might be going to hell.”

  “You what?”

  “Hell. Ain’t that exciting, Spencer? Hell.”

  “Hell ain’t exciting.”

  The elevator kept descending. The numbers on the display were just strange symbols by now. They flickered like mad, but they made no sense to Spencer. They’d gone way past Ground, and he never realized there was anything below that level.

  “Didn’t he show you?” said Hallam. “Didn’t he show you all the secret places? All the arteries of Barrowmore? Where its blood flows? Where you find its life force?”

  Jack had dragged him to all kinds of dark, grotty hovels in the hours after he’d killed the Sharpleys and Lethal Ellis. He vaguely remembered them. But it had been like being high. Everything was hazy. He’d been sick and groggy.

  They had been places Spencer had never seen. Some of them appeared to be on the same floor as his flat. Dingy coves holed out of the bricks. Alleyways so narrow you had to squeeze through sideways. Pits filled with bodies, some of them alive and in agony. Altar-rooms displaying skulls and crucifixes. Desecrated churches attended by ghosts. Abandoned slaughterhouses exhibiting corpses that hung on hooks.

  They had even visited an attic above his mum’s flat. Only there was no attic above his mum’s flat—just another apartment. But Spencer had been inside the non-existent loft and watched his mother through a pinhole in her ceiling while she had sex with a horned man whose lower body was that of a goat.

  A fucking goat.

  He had been sick then. He had moaned, puke dribbling down his chin.

  The next thing he knew, Jack had dragged him to another terrible place, another gut-wrenching scene.

  It was a nightmare. Or a drug trip. It had to have been. No way was it real. No way would his mother do that. She was God squad. Big time God squad.

  A fucking goat. Fucking bones. Fucking corpses on hooks. Fucking ghosts. Fucking . . . hell.

  “My mum’d never do that with a fucking goat,” he remembered groaning.

  But Jack, he was sure, had whispered in his ear, saying, “She would, Spencer—and she’d do worse.”

  The elevator was now screeching as it sped down the shaft. It started to shudder, knocking from side to side.

  Spencer stretched out his arms to steady himself. His gaze skimmed around the narrow container. Claustrophobia panicked him. His chest tightened. His gaze fell on Hallam. The man looked calm. His eyes glittered. Jasmine Hanbury sagged in his clutches.

  The elevator clunked. It stopped dead. Spencer jerked. His neck whiplashed.

  “Where are we, for fuck’s sake?” he said.

  “The world was made with dark places in it,” said Hallam. “Places we can’t see. Places we don’t know about, but we feel them sometimes. We feel them cold on our skin, we feel them in our bellies. Places where evil hides. That’s where were going, Spencer—one of those places.”

  The girl whimpered.

  “Ain’t she lovely,” said Hallam.

  “You’re sick.”

  “What are you going to do about it?”

  Hallam Buck would never have said that in the past. He would scuttle by, scared and nervous. The kids would pester him. They would harass him. They would throw stones at him.

  Not anymore.

  Hallam had found his place in the world.

  “Christ, look at that,” said Spencer.

  Fog slithered under the elevator door, which then slid open. The mist curled inside. It felt really cold. The smell turned Spencer’s stomach.

  With the doors open now, he narrowed his eyes and stared into the darkness.

  What is this place? Underground parking lot? Cellar or something?

  The fog filled the elevator. Jasmine cried. Hallam gasped. Spencer whined. A dark shape came out of the blackness and stood on the elevator’s threshold. A white face slowly appeared. It smiled. It showed yellow teeth.

  Jack.

  His long, white fingers beckoned them out of the lift, and then, seeing Jasmine, he said, “A little seer, ready for ripping.”

  Chapter 76

  JUST SKIN

  “You’re a special girl,” said Jack to Jasmine.

  Jasmine spat in his face.

  He wiped the spit with his fingers and licked them.

  “You let me go,” she said, struggling in Hallam’s grasp.

  Spencer watched in horror. This had gone too far. It had to stop. But who was he to stop it? He was nothing. He was no one. He would go down too—for killing Jay-T, for stabbing Paul.

  He looked around. It was a large area. It appeared to be an underground car park. But it contained no cars. Pillars reached up to the ceiling, which was too far up and too dark for Spencer to see when he craned his neck. It was very cold in here.

  “Where are we?” he said without thinking. His voice echoed.

  Jack stared at him. The only sound was Jasmine’s cries.

  Jack said, “Didn’t I show you places you’d never seen, Spencer? Things you’d never seen?”

  Fucking goat . . .
r />   He shuddered, trying to get the image out of his head.

  “You think your world is the only world there is?” said Jack.

  “I . . . I don’t know.” He had thought that. Nothing lay beyond Barrowmore. In any direction. The estate was everything to him. It was hell and it was heaven. It was the place he hated and the place he loved. Leave and he’d die; he was sure of that. So were many other kids. On the streets, they felt strong. They owned their territory. Or they thought they did.

  “Your world was built on other worlds,” Jack said. “Your cities on other cities. Your history cloaks other histories. This is just skin, Spencer. Barrowmore. Whitechapel. London. Just skin. This place”—he gestured to the vast cavern they were in—“is not part of your world.”

  “I . . . I thought you couldn’t leave.”

  “I can’t. I’m still trapped. A great circle surrounds Whitechapel. It goes to heaven; it stretches to hell. I can’t move past it, no matter how deep I go. This is why we have to deal with this seer.”

  Spencer felt sick.

  Jack walked over to the kid and the pervert.

  “Don’t kill me,” said Jasmine.

  Her voice cut into Spencer’s heart.

  “I ain’t going to kill you, child,” Jack told her.

  “What are you going to do to me, then?”

  Jack smiled. “I’m going to get someone else to kill you for me.”

  She cried for her mother.

  Jack said, “It’s what I have to do. It’s the rules. It’s how we were made, you and me. You are poison, little girl. You are the only ones who can hunt me down. The only ones who can find me. And when you do, I have you killed, because your deaths will secure my freedom.”

  “You’re crazy.” She struggled, but Hallam held her tightly.

  “They say so,” said Jack, “and it may be true.”

  “My grandad’ll kill you.”

  He laughed, and it echoed around the underground lot, bouncing off the pillars. Spencer’s eyes followed the sound and then came back to Jack. By then he had taken a Butcher’s knife from inside his cape. It had a wooden handle. It was the one he’d used to gut the Sharpleys and Lethal Ellis. The one he’d taken from the briefcase he left in the lock-up.

  “Do it, Hallam,” said Jack.

  Spencer froze.

  Hallam said nothing.

  Jacks face darkened. “Hallam, did you hear me?”

  Jasmine said, “Please don’t, Hallam.”

  Spencer thought, Please don’t, Hallam.

  “Hallam,” said Jack, his voice low and chilling. “Now, Hallam. Now.”

  “Why can’t you do it?” said Hallam.

  Jack growled. “Hallam. She is God’s own. I can’t harm her. I wish I could. I need her dead. Make her dead, Hallam. Now.”

  Chapter 77

  THE NEW CHARLIE FAULTLESS

  It felt like the first time in days Faultless had been back in the flat he’d rented to write his book. The place was cold and dark. He switched on the light and took off his coat, flinching at the pain in his ribs. One of the filth had smashed him with his truncheon. But not before Faultless had decked his pal. Despite the pain in his side, he’d then turned on the copper who’d attacked him and laid him out with a right and a left. Then he’d legged it. It had felt good, standing up for himself. But it was going to cause problems. The Old Bill would come for him. And not just two of them this time.

  He walked into the living room.

  Writing felt like the last thing Faultless wanted to do. Things had changed. The book he’d intended to write would be very different if he started it now.

  On July 24, 1996, my mother, Patricia Faultless, was murdered. Her killer has never been caught.

  That had been his opening. Not anymore. Patricia Faultless wasn’t his mother.

  He sat at the table near the window. He switched on the radio. The headlines reported more financial gloom, the death of a Mafia godfather, and a Premiership footballer jailed for rape. Faultless half-listened to the bulletin as he stared down into the quad. A large group of people milled around the area. He leaned towards the window. He saw camera crews. He saw placards and heard chanting.

  The residents were protesting.

  Faultless ignored it. He stared into space.

  What would he do?

  He’d come here to nail his mother’s killer. But not in the old Charlie Faultless way. Not with fists and feet. Not with a shank or a baseball bat.

  He’d come here to nail him with words.

  This was the new Charlie Faultless.

  In the past few years he’d discovered that power lay in the pen. He could cause a lot of damage with a few sentences.

  And the injuries caused by an article published widely would be slower to heal.

  Sticks and stones might break bones, but they healed. It was being named that could really wound the prey Faultless hunted. Named and shamed. Hunted and humiliated.

  He recalled some of his successes as a journalist. His book Scapegoat was about a British soldier wrongly accused of killing an Iraqi civilian ruffled feathers. And it left a few politicians red-faced.

  It had been 2004. The war was going badly. The press and the politicians were looking for someone to blame. You’d had Abu Ghraib. The Yanks abusing Iraqi prisoners. You’d had the insurgency turning the country into a charnel house.

  They wanted a fall guy. They got one. The soldier killed a would-be suicide bomber, but footage shot on a mobile phone made it appear he’d murdered an innocent local.

  The soldier was drummed out of the Army.

  Faultless’s book sold okay, but best of all it had government ministers squirming on Question Time and Newsnight.

  Faultless remembered another hunt.

  Psychic detectives.

  He fizzed now thinking about that investigation.

  He was working for a news channel in Chicago. He and a female colleague he was dating at the time had gone undercover, pretending to be the parents of a missing child.

  There wasn’t a missing child, but that didn’t stop three “psychic detectives” from claiming to have pinpointed the made-up kid’s body.

  A fourth said the fake daughter was still alive but had been taken into slavery in the Far East.

  One of the psychics led Faultless and his fellow reporter to a quarry and started having a fit and speaking in tongues.

  Another led them to an apartment building in the city and said their bogus baby had been brought there. “But I am truly sorry to say, she was killed here and thrown into the river—but her soul is now at rest and with Jesus in heaven.”

  Faultless and the investigation team then set up a TV show where the psychics appeared—and were outed as scammers.

  The psychics and their supporters were furious. They claimed to have read Faultless and the other reporter’s minds. They said they felt there was a child. Their spirit guides or auras, or whatever, had led them to those places.

  So how had they all come to different conclusions?

  The psychics refused to accept they were making it up. They were either convinced they had a gift, or they were liars.

  “Liars,” Faultless had said on the TV show.

  The psychics fumed. They threatened him with a lawsuit. They told him to “go back to England, where you are all godless”.

  Faultless then reminded them that God frowned on mediums, quoting the First Book of Samuel in the Bible, which states they should be put to death.

  The psychics stormed off the TV show.

  Faultless had gloated. And he gloated now. It made him feel better. But he still had no idea what he was going to do. He considered leaving Barrowmore. He looked at the flat. It would be easy to leave some of his stuff here and get out, today. He was thinking seriously about it now, seeing himself t
aking a train to Heathrow and getting a flight back to New York.

  Get away from this hell. Escape the cops. Avoid the judgment.

  He blew air out of his cheeks and made his decision.

  His phone rang. He checked the caller ID.

  Tash.

  He thought about not answering.

  Easier to go without saying a word, he thought.

  But an ache in his chest led him to answer.

  “Tash,” he said.

  And she cried and wailed down the phone.

  Chapter 78

  LEW

  Most of Tash’s ceiling was on her floor and all over her furniture. It looked as if a bomb had hit her flat. There was dust and debris everywhere. She was crying and shaking on the settee. Her father comforted her. He was saying, “We’ll get her back, darlin’’, we’ll find her,” and tears had also made his eyes red.

  Faultless looked up at the ceiling. Whatever came through had left a large hole. The edges of the hole looked charred, and Faultless could smell a burnt odor.

  Hanbury said, “I’m going to find her, Tash, and when I do, I’ll—” His face darkened. Faultless thought God might have left Hanbury’s heart by now. The devil had moved back in. But Hanbury was resisting. He was trying to hold on to his faith, because if he didn’t there would be trouble.

  Tash said, “It’s him, ain’t it? It’s that Jack.” She looked at Faultless, and her eyes were on fire. “Where were you? You weren’t here to . . . ” She trailed off and cried again.

  Hanbury said, “Where have you been?”

  “I had a spot of bother,” said Faultless. He told them. Not about his identity crisis or about his plans to leave. Just about looking for the old man and fighting off the cops.

  Hanbury said, “So they’ll be on to you, now, son.”

  “Fuck that. We got to find Jasmine. You told the Old Bill?”

  Hanbury nodded.

  Tash said, “They thought I was crazy.”

  Hanbury said, “They got a plateful of shit at the moment. They don’t know their arses from their elbows.”