The Superhero's Murder

by James Damm

  “Quite a list,” Helen remarked. “The tattoo marked the date of his wedding anniversary; his husband is in name only, a reminder of where he’d come from. No ring allowed, after all! From all the science we’ve been able to pull together, abilities manifest in individuals undergoing intense trauma. A suicide attempt in a bathtub was sufficient for John. Rather than a dozen abilities, it was the ability of matter manipulation. At a molecular level, John could alter his form to suit his needs, enhancing his physical abilities to whatever he desired. Part of this was regeneration and immortality, but rather than being a permanent feature, it was something he could switch off himself alone if he so chose. Hence the tattoo, the scars and the hiding of this truth.”

  Juliet stood in dumbfounded silence as she tried to absorb all the information.

  “Let me get to the point and do the thinking for you,” Helen suggested. “John died because he switched off his ability and, despite months of investigating, we do not understand how or why he would do so. No conspiracy. The whole situation took us by surprise as much as it did the rest of the world. Casper Smith, to our knowledge, was a tripped-out drug addict in the wrong place at the wrong time, and our current line of thinking is he murdered John. I need to know why.”

  “So let me get this straight, you think this whole thing was some kind of suicide attempt?” Juliet spat in confusion. It made little sense; yet Helen’s thoughts were clear.

  “I have had many months in the same boat as you, and I cannot come up with any reason either. If John wanted to die, I do not understand why he wouldn’t just kill himself. Why allow it in such a brutal manner? I am at a loss for motivation.”

  “Why are you telling me this?”

  “Because you are curious and have nobody to tell. Even if you did, there’s no evidence and not a soul would believe you. Go to the papers or the media and they’d either laugh at you or ignore you. We are bulletproof, Juliet. The only reason you got close was because you had an inside track. The public out there? Why would they question it or really care with everything else going on? They’re apathetic and their attention has moved on,” Helen summarised.

  “But equally, like you, I gather knowledge. My motivation is different to yours; I see information as a resource and like to fill my head with it. Knowing why John died is redundant at this point. Yet I still want to know. I have an ulterior motive for you, if you care to take it?”

  Juliet didn’t know what to say, her mind a blur. Months’ worth of work had come to fruition before her eyes. They had answered all the hours of conspiracy theories, questions and dead ends in a single conversation. What terrified Juliet was that it all made sense. Since the murder, the world felt like it was drifting in a direction of fear. Would the British public have accepted someone with such baggage being so powerful?

  “What do you want from me?” Juliet finally asked.

  “There is another British citizen with abilities,” Helen confided. “A girl by the name of Alice, eleven years old. She first came onto the radar at a young age, drawing some of the most disturbed drawings the local authority had seen from a child. They suspected sexual abuse. Our intelligence service got hold of the situation when those pictures she was drawing proved to be correct forecasts. The little girl could dream and draw the future.”

  “Alice,” Juliet acknowledged, a sly smile appearing on her face. Not a red herring. “And you want me to get inside her head?”

  “Indeed,” Helen confirmed. “Towards the last months of his life, John took Alice into his confidence. We believe he was trying to mimic her ability, predict future events so he could be able to stop them. Any questioning meets refusal. We have no way to force the answers from her, she’s in an institute and as an eleven-year-old child has protections in place. Those conversations may hold the key for why John shut off his abilities and allowed himself to die. I want you to find out the truth.”

  “And the catch?”

  “She will already have likely dreamt you are coming, and it is likely to be the most challenging conversation you have had in your career,” Helen stated. “Alice is… unlike anyone I have ever met. I questioned her personally, but it was no use. Hyper-intelligent, manipulative and the ability she possesses is one that has twisted a poor child up inside and created something else entirely.”

  “I’ll do it, but you already knew that,” Juliet replied. “But I have a last request, at least so this trip hasn’t been completely wasted.”

  “You’re hardly able to bargain,” Helen lamented. “But go on, make the request.”

  “I’d like you to reach out to the husband and convince him to meet Mike.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I stole from him any idea that John turned out okay,” Juliet admitted. “A husband who loved him would have more of an impact than you know.”

  The world would remember John as a soldier, an aspirational hero with higher praise than saints and royalty. However, the near-religious entity was anything but. A brother, a son, a cleaner, a drug addict and, with his own baggage, a blend of a person masked from the wider world.

  “I’ll have a word with him.” With that Helen folded up her laptop, stacked her papers and put them into her bag. “We’ll be in touch with a date or time. Keep yourself free.”

  Chapter Nineteen

  “You’ll never have a high as perfect as your first,” the voice in Mike’s head taunted as he stumbled home. “But feel free to die trying.”

  For weeks Mike had been going to Rust’s house, graduating to needles to minimise as much time he spent in the actual world as possible. The money had run out, and he’d pawned whatever he could. The withdrawal felt like the most intense flu he’d ever had, a scraping inside of his body and brain. Mike would do anything to keep it at bay. Rust’s house had become more of a home than the one he returned to.

  The euphoria still coursing through his veins from the night before, Mike could describe his sensation as one of cosiness. As he approached his house, a car too flash for his neighbourhood waited outside. An estate, black and well-waxed. Against it lent a man, muscular with well-groomed black hair. Hands clasped before him, the man eyeballed Mike from some distance away, stare unflinching as he approached.

  “Mike Fitzgerald?” he said, his accent posh and from somewhere further south than Mike would know.

  “That’s the one.”

  “I’m John’s husband. My name’s Nick.”

  Mike felt his heart drop into his stomach, the statement like a punch to the gut. A hand outstretched on instinct, Mike shook it, the grip and shake firm. As he pulled the hand away, Mike tried to digest the statement but failed.

  Mike’s eyes immediately flicked to the man’s left hand, a plain metallic band on the correct finger. As Mike’s eyes flicked back up, a pair of hazel eyes behind a pair of horn-rimmed glasses gazed back. The man before him appeared normal enough. Not a crazed fan or oddball. Taller than Mike, at a guess around six foot, Nick resembled any normal bloke. Around thirty, he was dressed smartly in a navy jumper and blue denim jeans.

  “He had a husband?” Mike stumbled, the shock in his speech obvious.

  “Not legally,” Nick admitted. “In the law of the land our relationship never existed, but between us it did. Helen Becton rang me and probed whether I had any interest in reaching out and meeting you. My immediate instinct was to decline the offer. A few days later, I mulled it over and called her back. It’s what John would have wanted, it’s on his behalf I’m here.”

  The shock hung in the air around Mike. Gay? Mike’s son was always different. He thought John enjoyed reading and playing games because he was one of the nerdy kids. Mike wanted John to be like him and David, play sports and do manly stuff. But gay? Such a statement jarred with any image he possessed of his youngest son.

  “Do you have any proof?” Mike asked, still unsure of the situation that greeted him.

  Nick pulled a smartphone out of his pocket and handed the lock screen to Mike. The screen disp
layed a collage of two photos side by side. The man before him and John in matching blue suits beaming into the camera on the left-hand photo, and kissing a moment later on the right-hand photo. Although Mike heard of fake images and cropping jobs, the wedding day photos appeared real as far as he could tell.

  “Where are you from, lad?”

  “We lived in Rothbury.”

  “Rothbury?” Mike gasped. “That’s half an hour away.”

  Nick responded with an awkward smile. Aware of his surroundings, he glanced between Mike and the front door. “Should we go inside?”

  Mike nodded, apologised and beckoned a hand for Nick to walk through the front gate. Panic set in as soon as he opened the front door. The home in which he lived returned to chaos as soon as he returned from London. Food wrappers, clothes and dirt lined the hallway floor and Mike swallowed his shame as he led Nick into his kitchen.

  “Tea or coffee?” Mike quizzed as Nick moved clothes off a chair.

  “Tea would be great,” Nick responded. Facial expressions gave nothing away, but Mike knew that everything the man eyeballed only backed up any preconceptions further.

  As the kettle boiled, Mike attempted small talk. “So Helen asked you to come?”

  “Apparently you have been trying to learn more about your son. Digging in places those in power would rather you didn’t. The hope on the call would be that a conversation would put demons to rest.”

  “How come I haven’t heard about you before? You weren’t at the funeral or the eulogy?”

  “I’m a secret people would rather keep out of sight, which suited us fine.”

  Mike nodded and focused back on the tea and coffee duties. Assembling a combination of mugs, tea bags and a coffee pot, he set to work. A minute later, a cup of tea in one hand and a mug of coffee emerged. Putting them before Nick, Mike joined him on a seat at the kitchen table.

  “So tell me about yourself,” Mike fumbled for the words. After all the search for answers, he never expected them to sit opposite with a cup of tea.

  “I play rugby on weekends, enjoy long walks in the hills or down the coast when I can. During the week I work in a bookshop in Alnwick – Barter Books, which is where John and I met.”

  “You don’t sound like you’re from around here?”

  “No,” Nick admitted with a smile, like he heard it a thousand times a day. “I grew up near Bristol and went to Northumbria University to study business. I joined an outdoor society during my studies there and loved going for weekend outings to the Northumbrian countryside. Eventually I decided putting down roots up here seemed a good fit. The bookshop work allowed me a stable job when I could go walking on weekends.”

  Mike nodded as he swigged his coffee. Decades in, Northumberland and the concept of walks on the beach or hikes in the hills never appealed. Then something obvious entered his mind. “How have you been coping since John’s death?”

  For the first time, Nick looked uncomfortable in his seat at the question. The powerful frame slipped. “We got married six years ago, or at least that’s when we had a ceremony and exchanged vows. We could never have a civil partnership or a marriage, nothing that could ever be written. We bought a house in my name, lived the dream and were planning our family of our own,” Nick said, the words stinging in his mouth.

  “The night before he died, we cooked dinner together. A strange thing. Wine, laughter, excellent food. I could tell something was on his mind, a partner’s intuition, but it didn’t spoil the evening. We went to bed and in the night I remember him waking up. That always happened. In the six years, I can’t remember many times where we went to bed together and woke up that way. John was always coming in late or dashing off before I awoke.

  “This time, though, he was talking to me. In my head it’s a half-remembered dream. He stroked my hair, whispered to me how much he loved me. His delicate words were that he thought he’d die a lonely man. How grateful he was to have met me. If there was more I don’t remember because the next time I woke up he had gone. When I woke up that morning, I learnt they had found his body.”

  Nick’s voice cracked and his tears welled up in his eyes. There was a rage beneath the surface. His shoulders tightened and his fists gripped up into balls with his jumper sleeves. His voice had changed as he spat the words, forcing them out into the open.

  “I knew nobody would come, nobody knew I existed. All I got was one phone call off the lady in charge, asking me what I knew. I told her I knew nothing and just yelled at her before I put the phone down. What the fuck had they done to my John? Now I sit lost in a big empty house that was supposed to be full of my family. But now there is no family in my future. I’m angry because the man I loved is gone, angry because the reason he’s gone is why I loved him so much. He had to be out there, had to be out there saving people. No nights off, no sleeping beside me for a whole night.”

  Mike soaked up the statement in a room that had suddenly become a vacuum. “I drink,” were the only words forthcoming. “When John was a child, when John left, now John’s gone. All the way through it, around it, all I do is drink. Not for fun, pleasure or company. I gulp down the self-destructing poison because I am blind to any other existence.”

  Nick’s eyes concentrated on Mike. Shabby clothes, a mess of a house. A pair of eyes flicked to needle-marks on Mike’s arms. Like father, like son. Both men silently acknowledged a new addiction had moved in. “John had the same problem.”

  “John had been clean seven years, they tell me he had fallen off the wagon at the time of his death,” Nick continued, a darkness falling over his expression and tone. “When we first met, I knew exactly who John was. How could you not? This superhero standing before my shop’s bookshelves, reading the blurbs. Our eyes met and I got a certain vibe from him. That he was interested in me that way, you know? I grew a pair of balls I didn’t think I had and asked him for a coffee. In my shock, he accepted.”

  Nick paused and took a sip of his coffee. “Who I met bettered any pre-conceived ideas I held. Bright, articulate and optimistic, yet shy and anxious all melded in. The self-destruction etched over every inch of his body. I’d met people like him before, almost always an addiction to settle them. Out for coffee, a cosy night in watching a film or a walk in the countryside, John never settled. This rattle of anxiety constantly bounced in his mind. The only thing he had in his locker to soothe it were painkillers and drugs of that nature. Something to blur the rough edges of what he saw. I think no one ever thinks of that? The post-traumatic stress he absorbed daily. The bodies, death and destruction from morning to night.

  “We dated, we struggled, but I like to think I helped give him something to come home to. My John loved life. He had a home and a person who loved him and had been sober since the day he proposed. They say one bad day can change the world. It breaks my heart that I’ll never know what broke him.”

  Nick’s conversation trailed off as he sipped the tea. No grimace in his expression gave Mike hope that his tea-making skills were okay. Yet the words of Nick haunted him the longer they lingered. Offering someone a home to come back to, shared with a loved one. Maggie, David and John lived and died with no concept of what that could be like.

  “He hated me.”

  “He did,” Nick admitted. “You tormented him every day of his childhood and it haunted him, probably as much as it haunts you now. He remembered every time you said slurs in his presence. Every time you tried to make him act less gay. The days you would make fun of him and call him a poof for hating sport and getting scared at night. John hated you for all that, but human beings are capable of more than one emotion. Deep down he loved you because, as much as the hate rooted itself to his core, he knew who you were.”

  “I used to throw rocks at gays. I made those kids lives a living hell in school. I’ve hated gay people for as long as I can really remember, and I honestly don’t know why. Part of me still sees you as an inhuman person, to be gay. Something hard-wired to stop me accepting them, you, as r
eal, normal people.”

  “You’re not the only one who has thought that way, or still does,” Nick acknowledged. “I was lucky – I came out at sixteen and have two loving parents who have accepted me for who I am. Yet for every one of me, I have witnessed dozens in the community with stories like you and John. Parents who see homosexuality as a betrayal of religion, betraying the normal or their healthy upbringings. I’ve met teenagers from traditional homes where the parents have zero conception of being born gay, their opinion being that you make a choice to engage in it. They threw one friend of mine out.”

  All that Mike had recalled and relived over the past month made him no better than the other stories. If John came out as gay in his teenage years, the reaction would have been much the same. Time dissolved the energy Mike wished to pump into such hatred.

  “Do you hate me?” Mike asked after some hesitation.

  “I don’t know you,” Nick confirmed as he met Mike’s eye. “For a decade I heard enough to paint my own picture, and a lot of what I’ve seen today confirms it. The longer time goes by, the more I stop seeing the black and white of people. We’re fucked-up little creatures, too clever to be animals but not clever enough to make sense of it all. I came because Helen asked me to, and I was curious. I think I’ve seen enough to close one door.”

  The sense that time was slipping away, and the conversation drawing to a close, taunted Mike. A single moment that would not to be repeated. Once Nick walked out the door, there would not be a second conversation. Had he asked all he could?

  “There’s a letter, one he left behind to give you should anything happen,” Nick mentioned as he got to his feet. “All he told me was to make sure it got to you in person, never through any official channels, and to wait long enough for the heat to die down.”

  “He knew he could die?”