by Will Carver
I muddle through.
Drinking more.
Faking more.
Pretending that we don’t live in a world of filth and murder and degenerate selfishness and somehow, at the end of the night, I end up in bed, with Audrey, trying to fuck the life out of her.
The sex started how it always does, kissing, gradually taking each other’s clothing off and leaving it on the floor in a pile at the bottom of the bed. We roll around on top of the covers for a while, ensuring we give enough attention to all the parts of the body that we should. When we make our way under our king-size covers I work my way down to orally please Audrey. She grips my head with her thighs and pulls at the top of my hair like she usually does. She writhes and bucks and sometimes suffocates me, but I continue regardless.
The next thing, I am inside her, my arms gripping her thighs, pulling her into me.
I look down at Audrey with her eyes closed and her tongue forcing its way through her teeth as she pants. I close my own eyes and tilt my head up to the ceiling.
I see Dorothy Penn’s naked body in my head.
I see a bullet moving in slow motion towards her beautiful face.
I start to pump harder and harder, not realising how uncomfortable this is for Audrey.
I see another girl. Younger this time. She has red marks on her wrists and ankles.
I see The Smiling Man charging at me.
I open my eyes and my hands are around Audrey’s throat while I jackhammer away, but I can’t stop. Faster and faster I move, putting more and more weight around my fiancée’s neck, but she seems to like it, so I continue.
Faster and faster until I climax and release my grip. Audrey swipes my arms away weakly and I collapse on the bed next to her.
It scares me that I could do something like that and that Audrey seemed to enjoy it.
We both lay there, sweating and breathing heavily, not saying anything. What does The Smiling Man want? Who was the girl? Why am I picturing dead women while I try to make love to my future wife?
Audrey rolls over on her side and dozes off but, now, I’m afraid to fall asleep.
Girl 2
THEY SAY I have a problem with authority; that I’m tough to handle. That I take female independence to the next level.
That I’m feminist with a vengeance.
And it’s just not true.
I really don’t care about any of that equal opportunities bullshit that a gaggle of women burned their underwear for decades ago. I don’t care about a bunch of spotty, talentless teenagers who blew the right guy to get a break in the music industry and now preach about women’s rights and roles in contemporary society.
I don’t care about any of that.
I just want to be treated with respect, like any other human, and these middle-management schmucks with their colourful shirts that look like deckchairs, including the archetypal single breast pocket, their diamond cufflinks and their gel-soaked receding hairline, are everything I hate about hierarchy and the class system we have in this country.
That’s why I’m taking these laborious business classes once a week.
The classes are the reason that I am going out and drinking alone once a week. The rest of the time I’m in the library trying to better myself. I’d use the Internet at home, but I can’t afford the connection fees.
I have the dedication when I put my mind to something. I just don’t have the direction. I’m sure after the course I’ll have a set of skills that will mean I could have my own business, be my own boss, but I don’t know what I’d be the boss of. I’m hoping that if I keep reading it will come to me.
Besides, I’m twenty-six. Who really knows what they want to do with their life at twenty-six? I just know that when I find it, it will be worth the wait.
So I’m waiting.
It’ll happen, I tell myself.
Something will happen.
January
I HAVEN’T SLEPT all weekend.
I’ve been drinking Scotch and swallowing caffeine pills and it seems to be doing the trick. I’m up to date on my paperwork and I have an agenda for this week. I’m going to talk to the men on the list that Murphy looked into for me; the men at the speed-dating event that Dorothy attended before she was killed. Right now it’s my only lead.
The first on the list is Miles Jennings, a forty-year-old risk assessor, single, no kids, no previous marriage, no personality.
No way he did it.
I decide that I’ll start with the second on the list. Philip Bailey. Apparently he referred to himself as Dream Man, according to Murphy’s notes. Thirty-six, unemployed, single. It seems obvious to say that a list of people from a speed-dating event are single, but 30 per cent of people who go to things like this or indulge in those dating websites are married or in a relationship. I find it hard to believe that this is the only way people can meet each other these days. Our grandparents never had the Internet and they seemed to do pretty well. Most of them had to cope with war too.
People today don’t know how easy they have it.
I knock on his door. He lives in a high-rise block on the eighth floor. He opens the door in a dressing gown that doesn’t look like it has seen any soap powder for a couple of years. He is holding a bowl of cereal in one hand and takes a spoonful before greeting me.
‘I’m Detective Inspector David.’ I show him my ID. ‘I’m here to talk to Philip Bailey.’ He gulps down the spoonful of Rice Krispies he shovelled in a second before.
‘Er, I’m Philip Bailey, sir. What can I help you with?’ He seems startled and can’t fix his gaze on me, constantly looking out into the distance over my shoulder.
‘Just a few questions,’ I say. ‘Mind if I come in?’ And I start to step past his front door and into the flat. He mumbles something that I understand as a confirmation that I can enter.
The place is a mess. Wet towels hung over the back of the sofa, empty ready-meal containers on the floor and in the sink. Circuit boards and hard drives and other computer innards decorate the flat surfaces of most of the rooms.
‘A PC fan, I see.’ I try to make some small talk with him to begin with to show that I’m not here in a threatening way. He does seem nervous, but not nervous enough for me to dismiss him as a possible suspect just yet.
‘Well, yeah. I suppose. It’s kinda what I do. Or did, before they made cuts.’ He hangs his head, as though he just told me his puppy has died or something.
‘So you’re currently unemployed?’ I ask, already knowing the answer.
‘Well, technically, yes.’ He looks embarrassed. ‘But I’m not signing on or anything. I’m not really looking for work at the moment, you see. My company gave me a very generous pay-off for time served there, so I’m working on some of my own projects.’
He continues to bore me with stories of modular robots that he hopes will somehow help the world. In my job I can’t afford to stereotype, but examining his surroundings, the way he lives, his interests, it could be fair to say that he is exactly the kind of person you might expect to see at a speed-dating event. Inside I sigh, because I know that I have to see another seven of these misfits today.
‘Are you familiar with a Ms Dorothy Penn?’ I ask, closely observing his body language as I do so.
‘Er, no. I can’t say I know anyone by that name.’ He seems genuine. He doesn’t fidget or shuffle in his seat; it’s like her name just failed to compute or fell out of his head somewhere along the way.
‘Well, according to my records here’ – I pull the sheet of paper from my inside pocket – ‘you met her at a recent speed-dating event near Mile End Tube station and marked her down as a possible match for you.’ I plan to pause, but he jumps right in.
‘Oh God, that thing. I put every girl’s name down that night. No takers, though,’ he says nonchalantly, munching on another spoonful of soggy cereal. ‘What did you say her name was?’
‘Dorothy,’ I repeat, unimpressed.
‘Dorothy. Yes. I remember
her. Dream Woman.’ He chuckles. ‘The one that got away.’ He juts his bottom lip out to feign sadness and shrugs his shoulders.
‘She’s dead.’
‘What?’ He raises his voice and drops his spoon into the bowl in an almost cartoon way.
‘Later that same night she was taken back to her flat and shot in the face. I need to know exactly what you did after the event ended.’ I’m being deliberately shocking and graphic to see how he handles the news.
He handles it by crying.
I wasn’t expecting that.
‘Can you tell me what you did when you had finished at the speed dating?’ I continue with my investigation. I don’t have time for this. I haven’t been asleep for three days. I need to keep working.
‘She was so lovely,’ he blubbers, sniffing heavily.
‘I’m sure that’s the case, Mr Bailey, but I need you to answer my question.’
‘She was the only one who really gave me a chance at that thing. They were all so cold and dismissive. I mean, God, they’re all in the same boat as I am otherwise they wouldn’t be there, right?’
‘Look, Mr Bailey …’
‘I came straight home. I walked. I needed to clear my head from another night of rejection. OK?’ He seems quite agitated, like he is annoyed that I have made him admit what a loser he is. Then he divulges that he came home and masturbated aggressively several times to try and make himself feel better.
But it just made him feel worse.
‘I woke up the next morning, on the sofa, my stomach covered in a disgusting crust, the DVD player stuck on the scene selection screen of Fist Fuckers 4 and I have been in the flat since then working on my designs for my latest module. I don’t have anyone that can corroborate that story, though, because it’s a pretty solitary activity.’ He’s visibly narked, but I haven’t pulled this information from him. He gave it up like I was his therapist or something.
I write down Fist Fuckers 4 in my notebook.
‘OK, Mr Bailey. I think that’s quite enough information.’ I tell him that I will keep all the information he has given me, but that I might be back again, so he is not to go anywhere.
Something tells me that he will continue his agoraphobic lifestyle until the money runs out.
I leave him weeping into his bowl, wiping his eyes with the putrid dressing gown he lives in like some kind of cut-price Hugh Hefner.
Once I am in the sanctity of the lift, I swallow two more caffeine pills, loosen the knot of my tie a little further and look at the next name on the list.
Girl 2
I’M SCORED ON the amount of calls I make per day.
If I make sixty calls in a day, I get paid a paltry hourly wage. If I crack eighty, it goes up a little and, if I manage to make one hundred, then I might hit the £8 per hour mark.
I do the bare minimum.
Surely I should be tasked on the quality of the call rather than the quantity made.
I can do fifty calls by lunchtime. That way I can read throughout the afternoon and I only have to make two and a half calls per hour to ensure that I get paid.
I knew this strategy wouldn’t last for ever.
They’re on to me.
In our team meeting today my team leader said that some of us are not pulling our weight as much as others and that we now have a team target to hit as well as our individual targets. Apparently it averages out at eighty-two calls per person.
A stretch target, he calls it.
The way I see it, someone is bound to make over a hundred calls, so even with my sixty in the bank, it will average out.
I feel like he is only looking at me throughout the whole thing, though. I’m sure he feels like he is delivering the Gettysburg Address, but he needs to get real. We phone people at the worst time of the day to glean market information from them. Most tell us to fuck off and I don’t blame them. In fact, I respect them more for it.
I don’t respect my team leader. What kind of a title is that anyway? It’s just a role dished out to the automatons who have applied for a full managerial role several times, but really don’t have the capacity to organise their own sock drawer let alone preside over ten different individual personalities within a group of employees.
He’s an idiot. What does he actually do all day, while I get told to go screw myself by a tenth of the people whose day I interrupt with pointless questions about washing detergent or window frames or water pricing?
Today I make seventy calls by lunchtime. That way I only have to make three per hour in the afternoon to hit my target of eighty-two, the bare minimum. It leaves me time to read my book.
I’ll be able to return it tomorrow at this rate.
I only have one lesson and an exam left until I complete my City & Guilds qualification in business management. Then I can really think of getting out of this job. I can start my life.
A real job. A man. A house with a garden that has more than just a five foot by five foot patch of grass with one tree. Nothing special.
Just the bare minimum.
January
I’M PHYSICALLY AND emotionally exhausted after talking to everyone on the speed-dating list the last few days. Two men out of the eight had their wives as an alibi for that evening. The rest seemed either too pathetic to think up such a crime or too indolent to put such effort in.
I head back to the office. It’s dark in there and nobody is around. A side effect of the caffeine pills is to make me a little sensitive to light, so I don’t turn any on and negotiate the way to my desk in near-dark conditions.
Kick-starting my computer I take the bottle of Scotch from my top drawer and swig at it. Before I put it back I catch a glimpse of the paperwork the bottle was resting on. Cathy’s case file, several programmes from my father’s East-Coast performances in ’76 and a picture of Mum I can no longer bear to look at. I force another gulp down. The scalding of the alcohol is a momentary distraction from the consuming misery the thought of my little sister brings. The burn at the back of my throat keeps my eyes open; I’ve run out of caffeine pills.
I decide that I should type up my notes before going home this evening. It should take a couple of hours and Audrey will be in bed by the time I get back.
I love Audrey. I want to marry her, of course, otherwise I wouldn’t have asked her, but I can’t talk about the wedding all the time. That’s why I am delaying going home to her. There are more important things going on in the world. It has been four weeks since Dorothy Penn was killed and I don’t feel any closer to even identifying a motive. I just don’t believe that this was random, though.
I push my keyboard forward on the desk so that it rests on the stand of the monitor. I fold my arms, lay them down on the desk and rest my forehead on my left forearm. Exhausted, I fall asleep and, what seems like moments later, I find myself sat on a chair, blindfolded, my arms and legs tied to the seat with twine.
Behind my head I hear a light clicking sound. Each beat in time with the music, which I recognise this time. One finger clicks on the left hand, while two click on the right. It accompanies the initial build-up of music that I hear playing around me. I realise that I can hear the opening of the ‘William Tell Overture’ with a percussive partnering from the as-yet unseen figure behind me. As it builds to the crescendo, the clicking stops and my blindfold is whipped off the top of my head in one swift movement. Once my eyes have adjusted I see his yellow teeth. The giant grin of The Smiling Man who appeared to me some weeks ago. The location is recurring, but the scene before me is slightly different from before.
He is still dressed all in black. His long black coat over his black shirt that is tucked into black trousers. All I can focus on is his smile as he moves around the area in front of me, gesticulating like a symphony conductor.
He paces around in a circle, waving his arms, all the time smiling, only this time his eyes are closed. They are so bulbous that it seems as though his eyelids were not made for the body they are attached to and leave a partially
open slit at the bottom displaying his tawny eyes slightly.
Then he stops.
He turns to me, still with his eyes closed, still smiling, and lifts his arms out to form a large black smiling cross in front of me. As the music begins to build again he rotates his hands over and over. Keeping his wrists still, the fingers move, making larger circles in time with the orchestra. As the cymbal crashes his hands delve directly into his pockets. He pulls his left hand out, holding two fingers up towards me. His right emerges with an apple, which he takes a bite of with his large, dirty gravestone teeth then discards.
Moving in time to the music he reaches inside his coat with his right hand and produces a bow; his left hand digs around in the other side and he pulls out four arrows.
I try to wriggle out of the bind I am in, but the twine cuts deeper into my skin, grazing and burning a red line around my wrists and ankles.
He dances towards me. With every languid step he takes I grow slightly more bemused. Is he going to put a bullet in my mouth again?
He bends over at the waist so that his face is at the same height as mine, his closed eyes somehow peering into mine. It distracts me. Instead of looking at his smile I am drawn to his eyelids and the small strip of dull light that squeezes its way out just below the lashes.
And suddenly I feel the pain.
The slicing stab into my intercostal muscles that feels as though somebody has broken two of my ribs and left a lit match in the gap between them. Then the same in my shoulder, one in my stomach and one in my thigh. When he stands up I see the blood dripping from all four arrows in his hand. He looks at my face, then at the arrows, then at my wounds, and back to my face, all with his eyes closed. His left hand moves towards my face and I flinch slightly. He didn’t hurt me before. I woke up in time. But this time I do not see him as an ally.