by P W Hillard
“Well around here there is plenty of places to hide. It’s a poverty-stricken area in some parts. More than its fair share of squats and drug dens.” Aasif shrugged.
“We start there then, need to do something. At least,” said Jess standing up. “Get your keys.”
Jess sat on a small brick wall outside a run-down house. Its windows covered with metal sheets. Mark was scraping his shoe on the same wall having stepped on something unidentified inside.
“This is the fourth one now. How many more are left in this town?” asked Mark angrily.
“Squats or dens?” asked Aasif. “Because the answer is too many either way.”
“This is a waste of time,” said Mark putting his leg down.
“Compared to what, doing nothing?” asked Jess. “I would rather be doing this, even if it is a goose chase.”
“It’s a pity we can’t use like, a tracking spell or something to find her. Some kind of divination maybe? See when she arrived and when she left.” Mark lifted his coat and sat down on the wall next to Jess.
“Didn’t the cameras tell you that?” asked Aasif.
“Cameras?” Jess asked back.
“Yeah, that hairdresser is right opposite the train station, right?”
“Yes,” said Mark, curious where Aasif was going.
“There’s a closed pub next door, used to get all kinds of trouble with it before it got shut down. There are cameras across the outside of the station because of that.” Aasif said.
“Cameras Mark,” Jess said, turning her head to stare right at him.
“Cameras,” Mark sighed.
The three of them sat in Aasifs car, an old Ford KA. Mark had lost that particular game of rock paper scissors so had to squeeze into the back of the tiny car, accessible only by moving the front seats forward. Jess stared out of the window, arm resting on her hand. She lifted her head as she noticed a small patch of black up the mountain before her.
“What’s that?” she asked.
“Oh that?” said Aasif, his vision glancing quickly at the scorched earth. “Kids around here love to start fires in the fields. Gets to be a real problem in the summer, the valley sides can dry out and we get some nasty brushfires.”
“Sounds about right for kids,” chimed in Mark from the back seats.
Dale swivelled in his chair, holding a sandwich in one hand. He pointed it aggressively at Rajan.
“I’m just saying, everyone deserves a second chance,” said Dale, jabbing the corner of the sandwich in Rajan’s direction. Loose ham flapped about as he did.
“Some people really don’t deserve them,” objected Rajan.
“Yeah well, I’m a firm believer in it. People in witness protection are supposed to be on our side after all. It’s the professional ramifications I’m more worried about,” admitted Dale.
“What professional ramifications?” Asked D.C.I Weston. She was stood behind Dale, she leered at him. She had a large trolley with her, covered in thick leather-bound books.
“Oh, it’s nothing really Ma’am,” said Dale quickly, trying to cover his tracks. “What you got there?”
“I’m so glad you asked D.S Cooper!” replied Florence, clapping her hands together in faux excitement. “Seeing as you two are without a case for the moment, I thought you could help out Mark and Jess. This,” she said lifting a heavy book with a heave; it shook the desk as she dropped it in front of him, “is one of the books the archives guys says mention Jinn.” She wheeled the trolley closer with a loud squeak. They each had opposite cubicles, theirs backs facing each other. She placed it in the gap between them. “These are just some of them. There are two more trolleys on the way. So,” she tapped a shoulder on each man simultaneously, “get reading.”
The car door closed with a slam as the three stepped out of Aasif’s car. Across the road the street was still blocked with police tap, though the curtains had been taken down. Before them was the imposing train station, its dark stone rising on the hillside. A man-made wound carved into the mountain. Several large white cameras were bolted onto the rock, a curious mix of the modern strapped to the old.
“Right, let’s go then, time to spy on the populace,” declared Mark.
“Do you not do that anyway in your super-secret society police squad? You know unseeing eye and all that?” asked Aasif.
“Uh, what?” said Mark bewildered.
“Well I’ve been thinking, if monsters are real- “
“We don’t use the term monster,” interrupted Jess. “It’s considered offensive. Supernatural minorities is the accepted term. Sometimes just supers but that can be a bit dicey with some people.”
“Right well if…supernatural minorities, are real,” continued Aasif, “I figured maybe other things were. You guys are covering this up aren’t you.”
“I guess? Never really thought of it like that,” said Mark.
“So what else is true? Flat earth? Illuminati? Lizard people?” asked Aasif, he seemed genuinely concerned.
“So, no, Earth is still round,” said Jess.
“Yeah and the Illuminati? Not a thing. You think if there was one world controlling organisation they would be doing a better job,” added Mark.
“Lizard people I’ll give you. Never met one myself but I suppose it’s possible,” continued Jess.
“Yeah that could be a thing,” confirmed Mark.
“Great, thanks. Not sure my world could use any more revelations. Let’s get this over with so I can go back to sitting in my house watching daytime TV and eating cereal for lunch,” said Aasif, striding towards the seemingly endless staircase of the station.
Chapter 12
At the end of the platform was a metal gate, it had seen better days, its chain rusted and broken. One of its hinges held limply to the wall. The station security guard grunted as he turned a key in the gates padlock, the slow turn of a lock unused creaked forward. He held the key triumphantly when the lock opened with a satisfying pop, his moment of elation broken when he realised it had bent. He sighed, put the key back into his pocket and beckoned for his three shadows to follow him onwards.
Mark, Jess and Aasif followed the guard. Past the collapsing gate, far under the wooden pavilion its colours faded and dull compared to the still in use section. Plants were starting to spring up from between the stones beneath them. They walked for what seemed like an age, until lights of the newsagents attached to the station disappeared around the gentle bend of the valley.
“Right here we are!” declared the guard, arms stretched wide before a green metal door that looked oddly out of place set into the Victorian stone. A small keypad jutted from the brickwork next to it. The guard tapped in a number and swung the door open.
Mark whistled. “Wow,” he said, “this is a doozy.” Rows of monitors covered the room. Cameras had been fitted down the length of the line, covering a huge swath of the town.
“Don’t use it much,” shrugged the guard. “Used to get a bunch of trouble with the pub opposite. Right dive it was. Since it shut down most of the vandalism stopped. Personally, I think one camera would have done, just over the entrance you know. Figure maybe the company could write it off their tax or something. Went a bit mental.”
“Kind of out of the way isn’t it?” asked Aasif.
“Ah primo real estate is a station. Plenty of places looking to sell expensive coffees and damp pasties to people who haven’t got anything to do but wait. Stuck it down here so it’s out of the way.” The guard checked his watch as he spoke. “Look, I know I’m not supposed to show you this without the forms. Data protection and all that, but I’ll leave you to it. Caught a glimpse of that horror show on my way in this morning. You do what you have to do.” He nodded at the three of them and took his leave.
“I’m pretty sure if Orwell was alive this would kill him. Literally,” said Mark
“Literarily?” questioned Jess.
“No literally. I guess literarily too. Literally literarily,” pondered Mark conf
usingly.
“The fuck are you two on about?” interjected Aasif. “We going to check these cameras or not.” He pulled out a small plastic chair with castor wheels and sat down. “Ok so, when should we start looking?”
“Ten P.M or there about. This camera has a direct view of the salon,” said Mark, tapping a screen which wobbled worryingly. “You know how to work this?”
“If my six-year-old nephew can work YouTube I got this,” answered Aasif. “Ok so this is nine o’clock.”
“Someone’s leaving. Right there’s the victim,” said Jess. On the video the woman they had seen earlier, limbs still attached, was waving another woman good bye as she exited through the ground floor door that led to the long stairs up. “Keep going. Scroll forward a little. Stop!” Jess pointed at the screen. A figure was walking towards the salon’s door. A short woman wearing a pastel pink coat and a what looked like a separate clear plastic hood. Her white hair was up in rollers, thick milk bottle glasses rested on her nose. “Is that an old woman?”
The three of them watched transfixed as the old woman entered the salon, the victim letting her in but clearly confused. They sat slack jawed as they saw a few minutes later the windows thrown open, the old woman starting to knot the limbs into the curtains. The woman stood for a few moments to admire her handy work then vanished, appear a few minutes later at the door on the ground level. Calmly she walked off into the night.
Mark broke the silence. “Ok. So, it’s something else to add to our shit list.”
“Might be. Might not. Could be our Jinn has swapped bodies?” Jess reached inside her black windbreaker and pulled out a police notebook, flipping its pages over the ring binding.
“Could be there is more than one,” pointed out Mark. Jess put away the note book and reached into her suit jackets top pocket producing another.
“That’s a chilling thought,” added Aasif. He stared in disbelief as Jess put away the second notebook and slipped one out of her trouser pocket. “Got enough notebooks there?”
“That’s kind of her thing,” said Mark
“I got it,” Jess said triumphantly. “Ethel Mason. The victim, she had an elderly mother in a care home.”
“What and you think this is her?” asked Aasif.
“Sure, why not. Same Jinn, different Jinn, we’ve got no idea. What we do know is that when Claire was possessed the first thing the Jinn did was go after people she had grudges with.” Jess waved her notebook like a fan. “Maybe Ethel here wasn’t too happy with being put into a home.”
“Think she would go back to the care home?” Mark said as he leant over a monitor. He had startled scrolling through the video feed.
“It’s where we found Claire,” replied Aasif.
“Harder to hide there though. The Jinn we came across killed one parent and controlled the other. If it could control both why didn’t it? A whole care home might be beyond it.” Jess had put all three notebooks on the small table before the cameras and was trying to find a blank page in one.
“Fucking sneaky little shit!” exclaimed Mark. The others turned to face him startled. “Sorry. Could be Jinn-Claire just felt like killing one of the parents by the way. Look at this.” Mark pointed at a monitor. He had scrolled the time all the way to the police cordoning off the area. “Here.” He drew an imaginary circle around one of the onlookers in the early morning crowd. It was mostly drunks and people wearing high visibility jackets on their way to or from night shifts. Stood near the back of the crowd, clutching a small maroon handbag was a familiar old lady.
“Little fucker was watching the whole time!” shouted Jess.
Aasif took control of scrolling through the footage, the two detectives standing behind him, watching impatiently over his shoulder. Together they watched the old woman fade in and out of the crowd over time, moving away and then coming back to try and keep attention off her. Mark and Jess watched themselves arrive at the scene and an hour or so later leave, uneasy that they were so close to the killer. The coroner arrived around nine A.M to collect the body, the crowd dispersing as it did. The woman finally walked away. She stepped into a shop, hand in her handbag, and then vanished.
“Nothing on any of the cameras on the station past this point that anyone has seen?” asked Mark.
“Nothing, she up and vanishes after she enters that shop,” Aasif said. He leant back in the chair, stretching his arms.
“Time to leave this then,” said Jess gesturing to the room around them, “and do so old-fashioned boots on the ground police work.”
“Did you know about this before we got here?” accused Mark.
“Not at all!” Jess had her face pressed against the window. Behind the glass was an array of pens, notebooks and several other pieces of high-end stationary. She pulled free from the glass and excitedly pulled the door open, dashing inside.
“Is it really appropriate to be excited at a time like this?” asked Aasif, the two men still standing in the street. The door to the shop was still swinging with the force Jess had opened it.
“You need to find the fun where you can doing something like this. You let it get to you, really get to you, and it will grind you into dust,” Mark said. He shrugged and followed Jess inside. Aasif stood there for a second, collected his thoughts and followed.
Aasif had never seen so many pens. He had walked past the store on his beat on occasion, but never had cause to go inside. Aisles upon aisles of pens, big plastic bins of the things. On the far wall was a glass cabinet, it was heavily locked and the pens within were held on separate metal stands. Aasif thought it wouldn’t have looked out of place in a museum. Jess was stood staring into it. Somehow, she had already filled a basket with great flowery note pads, handfuls of pens and at least two sets of coloured pencils.
“Best leave her to it,” said Mark turning to look over his shoulder at Aasif. “Come on, let’s go see what we kind find out.”
“I’m Detective Constable Mark Curren, this is Constable Aasif uh- “Mark paused.
“Rhaman,” said Aasif.
“A fancy London policeman. Not enough stop and searches there so you branching out?” said the young woman behind the counter. She had hair that was buzz cut on the sides with a faux mohawk sticking from centre of her head. She was wearing a plain white blouse and black trousers. A deep burgundy apron covered her front, the name of the store sewn into the top right of it. Pen and Ink, it read. She hadn’t even looked up at Mark, instead staring at her phone. The woman was chewing something, her nose ring bobbing in time with her jaw.
“How would you know, didn’t even look at my identity. Want to pay a little attention maybe.” Mark had taken on a sterner tone.
“First of all,” said the woman putting her phone into a pocket on the apron. “The sixties gangster film level accent gives it away. Laahndon,” she said in an exaggerated accent. “Secondly you have the aura of a copper.”
“You kinda do,” agreed Aasif.
“Was there a woman in here earlier,” continued Mark undeterred. “Old lady, pink coat, red handbag. Hair still in curlers.”
“Oh yeah, weird as fuck. Bought red markers. Tons of them. Spent like sixty quid,” said the cashier.
“How long was she here?” chimed in Aasif.
“Ten minutes tops, in and out.” The woman began to tidy some pens in a display on the counter. “Picking on little old ladies now are you?”
“Something like that,” answered Mark. “Which way did she go when she left?”
“She took the side door, there’s a second entrance over there.” She pointed across the store.
“Do you have any cameras on that door?” asked Aasif.
The three of them walked the streets of Pontypridd following the trail of Ethel. They bounced from shop to shop, following her progress across the town. After buying the stack of pens she had stopped in a nearby Chinese medicine store and bought a collection of mixed supplies. From there they tracked her to an antiques place where she had picked up
a silver candlestick.
“I don’t like this,” said Mark as they walked down the street.
“Sometimes you just need to hit the beat and- “started Jess.
“No, not this,” Mark continued. “I mean the stuff. Herbs, candlesticks, enough pens to draw the contents of the Louvre. Everything about this scream’s ritual. Where’s the next location?”
“Camera from the antiques place shows her wandering up this street and stopping in that butchers up ahead.”
“Oh, come on!” shouted Mark.
“This is bad?” asked Aasif.
“Yeah,” Jess answered, “meat and blood are common ritual components. She’s up to something, and it can’t be good.”
The butchers was a bust, unlike the other shops it didn’t have a camera, so the trail went cold there. The three of them had taken seats on a street bench just outside. Mark was taking bites from a pie he had bought inside.
“So, this was a colossal waste of time,” said Aasif.
“Still worth a try, better than waiting for trouble to come to us,” said Jess, trying one of her new pens in a police notebook.
“It’s a pity we can’t just find out where everyone is all the time,” Mark added, his mouth still half full of pie.
“No that is something Orwell really wouldn’t approve of,” laughed Jess, “right to room one oh one for that.” She stopped herself and sat there for a moment staring downward. “Room. Room.” Jess pulled out her phone and flicked open the internet, taking multiple attempts for her smashed screen to register her inputs. She typed in some search details and then held the phone to her ear. “Hello? Is that Glyn Cork care home? Did I pronounce that right?” There was a murmuring from the phone. “Yeah I would never have gotten that right. I’m looking for an Ethel Mason is she there?” More murmurs emerged. “She is? Great. No don’t have her come to the phone, I want to surprise her with my visit. Thanks.” Jess put the phone back into her pocket.
“She was at the home this whole time?” asked Mark.