The Superhero's Murder

by James Damm

  Mike looked up as the door opened. A young woman in her early thirties was entering. Charlotte hadn’t mentioned speaking to anyone else, and he felt the hostility in the approaching gaze. When Mike imagined government and police, he did not imagine so many women on the front lines. Hard, aggressive men in uniforms with batons flashed in his mind. The police force and law enforcement had evolved a little since the seventies and eighties.

  “I’m not the police,” the lady declared as she took a seat. “And I can read every thought that rattles through your brain.”

  Surely she was messing with him? A journalist who’d broken through the ranks. There were meant to be less than a hundred people like John in the world. Tensing in his seat, Mike regretted his most recent thought process but quickly concluded that the lady was bluffing.

  “I’ve been watching you through the glass,” she said, nodding to the mirror. “My name is Juliet Reynolds and I have questions I need your help with. You are one of our best chances of getting up to speed on who your son was and who may have murdered him.”

  “And why didn’t Charlotte mention any interview?” Mike replied. “She’s my contact.”

  “They sent me in to cut through the bullshit.”

  “You’re not meant to be here,” Mike concluded, a wry smile forming on his face. “I’m not saying a word until Charlotte is back.”

  “You don’t have to,” Juliet said, tapping her head. Leaning back in her chair, her eyes were unflinching as they watched Mike. Confident in her manner, her body language made Mike uneasy. Could she be telling the truth?

  “Why did you stop speaking? What happened all those years ago?”

  “None of your business,” Mike snapped.

  “A man hears his son is murdered,” Juliet pressed. “It seems strange for him not to do all he could to help with the investigation.”

  Mike glanced at the glass. How many people were on the other side? Was Charlotte? Suddenly he felt very isolated, shoulders tense, and his trembling hands under the table wouldn’t stop.

  “It’s something I don’t like to talk about, that’s all,” Mike responded as he tried to move the conversation elsewhere.

  “Were you involved in the murder of your son?”

  The picture of John, cut open on the mortuary table, flashed back in Mike’s mind. The face, older than he remembered, soulless. Years of history Mike would never know. “I wasn’t,” Mike snarled. “I was in Northumberland, for fuck’s sake, and we hadn’t spoken in years.”

  “Then what do you have to lose filling me in about what happened all those years ago?”

  “I don’t like your tone,” Mike stated. “And to be blunt, I don’t like you.”

  The atmosphere was delicately balanced. Like a child walking into the room following a heated argument, there was an indescribable weight, beyond something physical.

  “Fair enough, I maybe have been a little hostile,” Juliet admitted. “But my bosses have instructed me to come interview you, and I know it’s a waste of time. You didn’t even know your son.”

  “What the fuck do you know about the relationship with my son?” But Mike got it. John Fitzgerald wasn’t just his son. John’s murder, not just his business. But the face opposite him was one of only cold, hard expression. There was no heart or sympathy in her eyes.

  “What happened?” came the rapid response. “Why did you and John stop talking?”

  A curled lip, eyes filled with hatred, Mike spat, his words coated in venom. “You want me to answer your fucking question? I can’t. That’s your answer. Not that I won’t answer, because I can’t. I was drunk, so drunk that I couldn’t stand, and I said something, can’t even remember what. The next morning he’d gone, and he never came back.”

  Across the table from Juliet, a pair of vicious eyes stared back. The stench of booze was thick in the air. Before her sat a man who had lost all the close family he had. Alone to raise the boy. The information she had on the family life was bare, the next question she wanted to ask was obvious, likely to unsettle Mike.

  “Did your problems with alcohol come before or after John ran away from home?”

  “Always,” Mike answered. He’d calmed a little in his responses but remained agitated by the situation. “Why are you asking about me?”

  “I just wanted a sense of the environment John grew up in,” was Juliet’s measured response. “Not sure why I’m bothering mind, you barely knew him. You hadn’t spoken in years.”

  The statement caused Mike to consider walking out. His anger boiled beneath the surface as he pictured slamming Juliet’s head against the table. Mike didn’t need to stand for this; his son was dead and he was being treated like he was dirt by a stranger opposite.

  “I knew my son,” Mike spat. “For sixteen years I put food on his table and clothes on his back. Every meal he ever had, every shirt and every sock came because of my graft and my discipline. We may not have been close, but don’t you dare question my parenting. I was a single father with two young boys. I did the best I could.”

  “A single father with two young boys so drunk he could barely stand,” Juliet recited. “When he left at seventeen, I have it on record that he joined the military before being revealed to the world in the Cherwell fire. Do you know where he went, where he lived, and who he was close to in that period?”

  Embarrassment filled up Mike, but Juliet knew she had to verbalise what she was hearing in his thoughts. She didn’t have long until someone returned and pulled her out. The answers the case needed weren’t there in the room, nor through any amount of questioning would they be. Rage, regret, and resentment. Those were the emotions Juliet needed to tap into. A roll of the dice that might lead to the truth.

  “You never called the police or told anybody close to you what had happened, did you?” Juliet said scornfully, her eyes flicking to the glass. “Shame meant that you never looked for him, never attempted to reach out, and so you spent the intermittent years wallowing in self-pity. Earlier on, I had full access to your son’s autopsy. Let me tell you what it told us. His body contained heroin in surprisingly large quantities. There was a tattoo on his chest I know you know damn well nothing about, and scarring on his body too. I’m not meant to be in here, let alone tell you that, but I am. Here I am as the world’s sole mind-reader and I’m looking for any scrap of information that might tell us how his powers developed, how they were switched off, who he was close to and who may have murdered him. Instead, I’m given a man who can’t even look at me straight, he’s so drunk. Is there anything you can give me?”

  The only way Mike could describe alcohol addiction was like living with a daily tormentor. It was a bully that knew every one of his delicate, precious hopes, guilty secrets and weaknesses. Daily, it pulled and pinched his invisible puppet strings to manipulate and torture him. The woman Mike was facing was a human embodiment of the nasty bully he craved to bury.

  Juliet was right, of course. Outside of raising John in an unstable environment before finally driving him away, Mike had little to offer the investigation in terms of history. John never had an ability, showed no sign of being special when they were together. Anything between then and saving the children at Cherwell School was as big a mystery to Mike as it was to Juliet. The military? No idea. Where he lived? Mike wasn’t exactly first on any invite list. Any friends or partners? John would hardly have introduced them to Mike.

  Before Mike could answer the final, punching question, the door swung open and another man, stocky and with a face full of rage, burst in. Juliet didn’t even resist as the arm grabbed her and ushered out the door. The only company Mike was left with was Juliet’s last revelation. Heroin. Like a dagger through the heart, Mike learnt like father, like son, John has been an addict.

  For years the silver lining to all that had happened, all that Mike had messed up, was that the boy had turned out okay. Healthy, self-assured and with an incredible arsenal of super-abilities? The man that appeared on the news was more tha
n Mike could have prayed for his son to become. But heroin? Mike had dabbled in several society’s vices to numb it all. Alcohol was the cheap poison of choice, but he knew one thing – there was no taking heroin casually.

  What had John got himself into?

  The fury began as soon as Tom and Juliet hit the quiet of the next room.

  “What the fuck was that? They will go ape shit when word gets back to them on this. That man just lost his son and you call him wallowing in self-pity? That same man meets the fucking Queen later on. The press will crucify you.”

  BLAH, BLAH, BLAH.

  Tom may have seemed hard, but was really a mild-mannered individual with a vast amount of patience. An employee with a reputation for doing things by the book, listening to rules and never overstepping the line, it was the exact reason they had paired him with Juliet. The explosion she was witnessing was the consequence of pushing his boundaries to breaking point. But she wasn’t sorry. What she’d done was necessary.

  “An ability to read people’s minds, yet you seem clueless what it’s like to be a human being,” Tom said coldly.

  “Mike Fitzgerald has spent the past few years in a self-destructive spiral with the outcome only ending one way. He barely knew his son, who just died,” Juliet detailed calmly as Tom paced, seething. “If I were to be soft on him, pander to him like everyone else, he goes home to mourn and we gain nothing. By going hard on him like that, ripping the delusion right out of his head, he might just go home and question himself a little now. His son was a drug addict. That would shock even the worst father.”

  “It’s always the fathers with you, isn’t it,” Tom taunted. “Go see a fucking therapist.”

  Juliet let the insult pass, remained cool. “The shock and knowledge I just gave him will eat him up inside and may get us something useful.”

  “Or maybe you just signed the death note of a man who has nobody left,” Tom responded. “A dead wife and two dead sons. I don’t care if he was a good or an awful father, what he isn’t is a tool for you to toy with. Don’t you think he’s suffered enough? He’s an alcoholic who’s barely getting by.”

  “And it’s one man versus solving the murder of a superhero,” Juliet retorted. “I get it, the man has lost a son, and I went in heavy. But out there? John Fitzgerald doesn’t just die Tom; whatever and whoever they implicate in his murder, the outcome will be massive. I’m taking the steps that will eventually need to be taken. John Fitzgerald does not just die like that without something bigger going on. Unless we get answers, and soon, this could spiral out of control.”

  “It’s Bowman all over again,” Tom yelled. “Screw the case for your own warped sense of justice, right?”

  “Here we fucking go,” Juliet sniped back. “Bring Will Bowman up again all you want, but I made sure that scumbag never made it back onto the streets. Which is more than can be said for you. If we’d followed all the rules, how many other little girls would have died?”

  “I lied for YOU.”

  “You didn’t lie for me,” Juliet scorned. “You lied for my ability.”

  Tom slammed the coffee mug down and stormed out the room. In the meantime Charlotte had returned, looking equally furious as she spoke to Mike through the glass. Ethan would be back soon too. Another scolding, most likely. Any response Juliet could give them would be just more fuel to the fire and no help to her cause. As an agent she was rebellious, forthright and bold. But had that ever gone past the line into cruelty? One last look back through the glass and she saw an old man despondent. Years of being inside the minds of others and she felt no closer or further away to understanding their owners. Outside there was a world trying to glue itself together, while being pulled apart in equal measure.

  Where was the sense of urgency?

  Chapter Eight

  For decades Mike had failed to describe the problem to people like Juliet. How could he when it made little sense to himself? It sounded so simple in his head. Stop. Just stop it. Put the drink down. Tidy the house, clean his shit up and get a job like the rest. When Mike put his head to the problem, the answers were so clear cut. The doctors and lost friends each went through their own journey from optimism to the pits of accepting the cold, hard reality. Most people drank for positive reasons, like social occasions, to celebrate and to let loose at the end of the week. Men like Mike drank for the darkness, not to feel okay but, for a moment, to not feel so bad.

  The hour after the interview triggered such levels of second-hand embarrassment, it even shamed Mike’s guide for the day, Charlotte, to silence. Mike didn’t know if this was better or worse, half-hearted attempts at trying to make the situation better or being left alone to stew in his own public humiliation. All the while there was the image in his head: his son dead on a slab, far from home and where he had begun. There was anger stirring deep, fury at the scorn levelled on him by a complete stranger. Yet Mike reserved most of the anger for himself. Within Juliet’s unkind words, little in them proved untrue.

  One look in the mirror told Mike all he needed to know. A self-destructing failure of a man. How could a person’s gaze not be drawn to all of his faults? Tangled hair in need of both a wash and trim, an unkempt beard sheltering worn, rough skin and tired eyes. Out of view there was regular pus in his socks, nails that bled, not to mention his memory loss. It wasn’t just his clothes that smelled; Mike’s entire body stank of booze so deep that even scrubbing his skin raw couldn’t shed it. Any person who bothered to rest their eyes on such a sorry sight would draw the same conclusions.

  Under Ethan’s orders, accompanied by Charlotte, they whisked Mike away from the police station. That evening there were plans at the palace. Royalty, the Prime Minister and a vast array of other members of high society. Delicately, Charlotte pitched a haircut, suit fitting and an assortment of other things to occupy the time. Only if Mike wished, of course. But what else was he going to do?

  All afternoon there were commiserations, handshakes and pitying eyes. A barber tamed Mike’s ragged mane, tried to chit chat, liven up the situation with small talk. Eventually the trim and wash was completed in silence. The tailor, the epitome of professionalism, fared better. With his measuring tape and needles, he made rapid work of measuring Mike for a suit, with barely a word uttered.

  As Mike admired himself in the mirror, the self-destructing man had momentarily disappeared; the face one he no longer recognised. Is this what another life could have been like? The longer he stared, the more the sense of failure within himself stirred.

  “I need a smoke,” Mike stated rather than requested. Tears had welled up in his eyes as he handed back the suit jacket. Charlotte did nothing to stop him.

  Lost in a labyrinth of corridors and meeting rooms, Mike found the first fire exit he could and walked down the metal stairs. An alarm sounded, but there would be a lot more going on around the place than one fire alarm.

  Downstairs, at least there was a bench, out of sight of any road or entrance. Caged and with big black bars around its perimeter, Mike laughed at how the life of a smoker had deteriorated over the course of his lifetime. Once seen as glamorous, an edgy habit of rock-gods and movie-stars, the health warnings had kicked in and left it to ordinary people in pubs, clubs and offices. Then the smoking ban had come in, which forced men like Mike out of their nice warm environment and out into the bitter cold. Caged like misbehaving toddlers, you could often find smokers round the corner in a cloud of smoke, usually with a fence to keep them in place. The bench with only a tree for company proved the extent of the natural views in London. Northumberland had spoilt him.

  As Mike took a spot on the empty bench, a weight of rage left upon the first inhale. Didn’t know his own son? Mike remembered his boy all right. Both of them. Mike recalled the first time John had opted to run away and packed a bag as he headed for the door. A small cartoon backpack filled with underpants and a teddy bear. The fury in his face as Mike could only laugh rather than stop the four-year-old making his momentous statement
. Mike also remembered the school play where John had got bored midway through and crawled off stage to join his mother and father, despite it being his turn. As fellow parents laughed, a junior teacher desperately tried to coax the child back to the stage but John was having none of it.

  He thought of David too, how different the boys had been. The first sports day of the first-born child had been magnificent. Egg and spoon race, coconut toss, the sack race: whatever the sport, David mopped up the medals. Years later John would often get upset as he finished last, but David had never had such problems. As if he was born for sport, they said. Mike remembered basking in the other parents’ praise of David.

  Mike had been a poor father – in a shock to nobody the flawed person had grown into a flawed parent. But not be there for his own kids? That was a goddamn lie. Reminiscing about those past days, Mike barely noticed the approaching figure.

  “Do you need a light?” came a foreign voice and jolted Mike from his thinking. Stood above him was a small man with hard eyes. He pointed at Mike’s unlit second cigarette, still fumbling in his hands. He couldn’t even remember the first.

  Mike nodded, and the man flicked his fingers into a flame. Outstretching it, he lit the end and lit his own.

  “Spanish?” Mike said, not wanting to focus on the obvious super-ability.

  “Italiano,” came the proud response, and the man took a seat. “Wish I was there. England and her crazy cigarette prices.”

  “In London, nearly twenty pounds,” Mike said incredulously as he shook the packet.

  “We’d have revolted by now,” the Italian said with a shake of his head, taking a drag.

  Mike agreed as he puffed on his own. “Robbing bastards.”