Contents
About the Book
About the Author
Also by Will Carver
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraph
The Truth
Prologue
Part One: Pledge
Girl 8
The Foot
January
The Front Line
January
The Call
Eames
Girl 8
January
Eames
January
The Skys
Audrey
Girl 8
January
Eames
Audrey
January
The Gentle Child
January
Girl 8
January
Audrey
The Cycle
Part Two: Turn
Girl 9
Eames
Audrey
The Sponsor
January
Eames
Girl 9
The Conversation
Girl 9
The Request
Eames
The Revisit
Audrey
January
Girl 9
January
Girl 9
January
Audrey
January
The Perfect Day
Part Three: Misdirection
Girl 10
Audrey
The Dig
January
Eames
January
Girl 10
January
The Suspects
Girl 10
Audrey
The Hospital
January
Audrey
January
Eames
Girl 10
The Bones
Audrey
January
The List
Eames
January
The Weight
January
Girl 10
January
Eames
Audrey
January
The Confession
January
Audrey
January
The Park
Part Four: Reveal
Girl 11
January
Audrey
The Lean
Audrey
The Cheap Seats
Girl 11
The Drunk
Eames
January
The Anomaly
January
Audrey
Girl 11
The Mistake
Audrey
The Tale
January
The Tail
January
Audrey
January
Part Five: Prestige
Eames
Audrey
The Wait
January
The Wolf
January
Girl 12
January
Eames
The Fourth Girl
January
Acknowledgements
Copyright
Will Carver is thirty-three years old, married and comes from Reading. His fantastic debut, Girl 4, was published in 2011, with The Two following in 2012. Dead Set is his third thriller.
Detective Inspector January David doesn’t love me.
He loves his missing sister. He loves his job.
But he doesn’t love me. Not in the way he should.
I am his wife. I am still his wife.
And I will do anything for him.
No matter what I have to sacrifice.
Girl 4
The Two
Mum, this one’s for you.
‘The easiest way to attract a crowd is to let it be known that at a given time and a given place someone is going to attempt something that in the event of failure will mean sudden death.’
Erik Weisz, also known as Harry Houdini
IN NOVEMBER 2006, Dorothy Penn consented to have sex with the man who would take her life. She was discovered standing naked, tied to her bed, which had been flipped upright, and shot through the mouth at close range.
She was the first.
She was Girl 1.
Over the next two years, this man continued to kill. Each victim chosen for their name, each from a different London borough, each killed with increasing theatricality, taking inspiration from the world’s greatest magic tricks, mutating them into scenes of morbidity. The press called him ‘The Zone Two Killer’.
His real name is Eames.
The night before Dorothy Penn died, Detective Inspector January David saw something. In his sleep. A dream, a vision, an intuition of a giant, dark figure occupying an empty black space in his mind, feeding him clues about the woman who would die within the next twenty-four hours.
This apparition would visit him the day before each victim would be taken, delivering his message through a perpetual grin, giving the detective enough time to stop the murder. January David called him ‘The Smiling Man’. He disappeared the night that Eames was captured.
Five innocents died at the hand of Eames. One survived.
Girl 4.
Audrey David.
The detective’s wife.
This was not through luck or a mistake; she planned it this way. She planned everything. Manipulating the mind of a serial killer to do her sinister bidding in a warped attempt to be noticed by her husband, to be loved. Loved more than the sister who has been missing from his life for over twenty years.
She failed.
And now she is gone. Left without a word. January David does not know of his wife’s involvement, he knows not where she is, only that she is not alone. The baby will be eighteen months old by now. Her baby. Eames’ baby. She naively believes that this is all behind her. That January David no longer cares.
She wants him to care.
But The Smiling Man has returned; another girl will die in the next twenty-four hours.
For now, Eames remains incarcerated in a high-security psychiatric hospital.
With four more tricks on his list.
WHEN A PERFECTLY coiffed reporter perches himself inside a cell and throws a question across a flimsy wooden table, believing he already knows the entertainment value of the answer, that’s not me he’s trying to bait. If it were, his adrenalin would lose its battle with fear.
When this journalist’s adversary claims not to remember murdering anybody, when they eventually cave, stating that killing is like a drug, that we all go a little mad sometimes, that occasionally I feel like a vampire, that is not reality. That is not something I would say.
I am not a sound bite.
I don’t want notoriety.
Just leave me to do my job.
I’d rather disappear.
In the beginning, when I gave myself up, when Detective Inspector January David took the glory of capturing me, when he thought it was the end, everyone wanted an interview: they needed the exclusive conversation; they had an idea for a true-crime story or a novel; they were making a documentary.
Think how lucky the filthy reporter will feel that I didn’t jump across the table and strangle him, the relief he’ll experience as the door is locked behind his back on exit; when he gets to go home and tell his wife that she is safe, I am still locked away.
Think how protected this hack convinces himself he is with the camera pointed directly at my face, and how naive he truly is to believe that I care.
I’ve been in this place for nearly two years now. You can’t call it an asylum. We are no longer known as lunatics. Political correctness. Or the rather weaker reason that there has been an evolution in the attitude towards mental health. It is a hospital. You must refer to it as a hospital.
For the criminally insane.
You have to whisper the last part. Or say it in your head.
But there is no space in my mind for anything other than Audrey. The last time I saw her she was barely conscious. Folded in half, waiting for her unappreciative husband to arrive and not save her again. Not be there in her time of need.
When the saw dropped.
That was January David.
Detective Inspector January David.
That is not who I am.
When the columnist asks about your childhood, whether it was normal, whether it was loving, his knees bounce nervously under the table I could easily tip over. His hands tap silently against his thighs beneath the thin wooden top I could force down on his neck as he lies on the floor, his windpipe crushed and clamped together before the man with the camera feels the impetus to react. He wants me to say that my father hit me. That he left. That I suffered some kind of abuse, which manifests itself as violence and hatred towards women. But that is not me either. I’m nothing like all the others.
I am Eames.
They know of five people that I killed. What they should want to know is why I let Girl 4 live. They should want a reason for Girl 7 to still be breathing. But they speak only of my mother’s death and the families of my victims. Because that is good television or magazine copy. Maybe they can rile me. But they do not ask why Girl 4 and Girl 7 are the same person. Why they are both Audrey David. The detective’s unfaithful wife; the woman I love. Why is she still alive? How can I love this woman?
I have not finished with her.
She was not supposed to die then.
That is the simplest of answers.
But her time has come.
When January David uses the term ‘career case’, that’s me he is proud of. It is I who define him. When this same detective believes enough time has passed to place part of history in a locked compartment of his brain, just as the faces of the five victims he failed to protect start to blur in his mind, as the scent of his wife finally fades from the material of their formerly shared home, that will be the optimal moment for a demon to return to his life and reopen those wounds, unlocking that compartment.
That monster is me.
Imagine his confusion when he finds Girl 8.
CE23.
Think how terrified he will be that I could walk straight out the front door.
Detective Inspector January David, when will you realise that Audrey was not the final trick? That this is far from being over? That things have changed. Altered. Metamorphosed. That there are four more.
Your wife was not the reveal.
She was merely misdirection.
It was never the plan to stop at Girl 7.
That’s not me.
I can’t stop.
Wednesday
CHELSEA, 22:53
I’M MEETING EAMES at the theatre.
This afternoon I laid the foundations of my imaginary illness to my colleagues and my boss. My head hurts. It might be a migraine. I feel sick. My neck is stiff. Is it hot in here?
I’ll call them in the morning and fake a sore throat. Maybe I’ll cough for good measure.
I’ve been vomiting all night.
My gut keeps cramping.
I’m sweating but I feel cold.
The framed poster on my living-room wall says Amen Avenue. Written and directed by Kerry Ross. That play was over two years ago, when Eames was still killing people and we were reading the newspaper articles thinking it could never happen to us. That was before I’d forgotten his name.
The experimental theatre company I once belonged to is no longer inflicting its horror on small, discerning crowds in Chelsea since our performance space closed two Novembers ago. The Old Sanford Meisner Theater would only seat seventy-three people at capacity and is, at best, off-off the theatre district. Amen Avenue was the first and last play I wrote that was performed.
Until now.
My old theatre company website is still active and has the contact details of each member listed. Nobody has taken the site down because it is a record of the things we achieved as a group. We’re all still proud of it even if we aren’t in touch as often any more. That is how Eames found me. I don’t even use that email address any more, I just kept it in the vain hope that I may need it again some day, when I can leave my fledgling PR career and move back to the theatre. I don’t hate my job; it’s great. It’s just not where I want to be in five years. Or ten. Or the rest of my life. So feigning sickness is hardly a crime.
My nose just started bleeding.
My skin won’t stop itching.
I think I need to take the morning off.
Every couple of weeks I go into the email account to keep it activated. As usual, everything is junk. Job offers, pills to enhance my apparently dreary sex life, discounts and free shipping applied. And what seems like a philanthropic gesture to fund a play. Somebody contacting playwrights and directors in the area with the hope of resurrecting the Sanford Meisner Theater as a performance space for lower budget exploratory ventures.
This is the ticket.
A once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.
I am being presented with my dream in order to take away my life.
Too wired to sleep, I flip open my laptop and email the former members of our troupe, hoping they, like me, retained their accounts and empty them weekly of trash. Desperately, excitedly hoping that they, like me, still allow themselves to dream.
Tomorrow, I will call in sick. Women’s problems. Ear infection. I’m having trouble sleeping. I will be picturing the next production. Getting the gang back together. Filling those seventy-three seats. I won’t be worrying about e-shots and website banners. I won’t be distracted by a distant memory of the name Eames.
Tomorrow I will know what a mistake I have made as I lash out, kicking my legs hard against the floor for leverage, waving my arms about hoping to hit something, fighting for breath. I will remember Eames.
Tomorrow, when they find my body, when they see that I have been made to look exactly like one of his previous victims, that I have been chosen as the understudy to Audrey David, everyone will be reminded.
And they will recognise me as a fool.
Wednesday
CAMDEN, 23:57
ALAN BARBER IS not important to Aria Sky’s life story, at least not as a person, a personality; it is only his actions that carry significance. And he only knew her in death.
He has a list of sins throughout his life, he has even added some this evening, but he is incapable of murder. The first time he noticed the young girl it was late and he was pissing all over her.
It begins in Camden.
And ends in Regent’s Park.
The Taittinger gathers dust on the top shelf. Below that, the Disaronno is crying out for some wannabe trendy sophisticate to order it with orange and ice while winking at a female stranger across the room. The Macallan whisky doesn’t look like it has been opened on the shelf beneath, but just under that is the place Alan Barber calls home. Somewhere between the Gordon’s, Plymouth and Tanqueray.
‘I can’t get fat on gin and tonic,’ he tells the other two men at the bar. They are a decade or two older than he is and are sticking to ales and bitters. ‘Clear spirits are the key to staying slim while having fun.’ He doesn’t tell them the effect that the tonic water has on him. That he spends half the next day on the toilet losing liquid and calories.
Recumbent bulimia.
Dysentery of excess.
Two hours pass and Alan Barber alternates between the three available gins on offer so nobody can tell he has had an entire litre to himself: each bottle has only gone down by one third; it’s barely noticeable.
Then his friend finally arrives.
His name is irrelevant; in fact, his actions are negligible. The one thing he does is keep Alan Barber drinking into the late hours, testing his constitution, forcing him outside with that woman then walking him through the park late at night and waiting while Alan Barber relieves himself through a fence which has a four-year-old girl on the other side.
‘What can I get you, (Insignificant Friend)? The usual?’ Alan asks.
His friend nods and sits down.
Alan Barber orders a Disaronno with orange and ice for his friend and a Plymouth and tonic for himself. He lays a ten-pound note on the bar and excuses himself to go to the lavatory while the barmaid completes the order.
At the furthest urinal, facing the corner at an angle, an older, more portly gentleman leans with his left hand against the tiled wall, his right hand by his zip, whistling. Alan Barber never sees his face.
This is unfortunate because, unlike Alan, he is important.
He is significant.
He is capable of murder.
Alan Barber is so drunk that later, when the police question him, he will not be able to recall this seemingly arbitrary encounter. At first.
Though he does not need to clear his throat, Alan coughs as he approaches the urinal furthest to the right, thus alerting the other patron to his existence.
‘When you get to my age, you have to whistle sometimes just to get things moving,’ the faceless killer jokes, masking himself from view, fixing his eyes on his flaccid, unused dick.
Alan Barber grunts an acknowledgement towards his left then stares down into the bowl, looking at the yellow cakes, which smell of bleach, piss and lemon. He does not avert his eyes even when the notable character to his left finishes, walks behind him, washes his hands and leaves.
When he returns to the bar, his friend is sitting with a girl. He has bought her a drink with the ten-pound note that Alan trustingly left, and there is now nothing in the way of change.
‘Hey, Alan’ – his friend stands up from his stool – ‘this is (a female name Alan Barber instantly forgets).’ He does remember that they went into the cold, empty beer garden after closing time and that she sat on the bench, unzipped his jeans and performed an impressive oral dance on him, complete with humming interludes. He omits this portion of the night from his original testimony, too. He doesn’t mention that he walked away, unable to ejaculate.
Leaving the Edinboro Castle pub, Alan Barber and his friend, who has been waiting patiently at the end of Delancey Street, stumble around the perimeter of Regent’s Park until they spot a young girl walking on her own and, in their inebriated state, think it will be hilarious to follow her for a while.
Stop.
It’s not her.
She’s not the one who dies.
Part of the way into the park, Alan Barber decides to stop pursuing the woman. He needs to empty the gin from his bladder. He knows there is a toilet nearby on one side of the small coffee shop, which is closed.
This is the point where his life gained some meaning. Some clarity.
He jogs on from his friend, turns right at the bush, which was suggested as an adequate urinal, then turns left up the path to the brick building partially covered by the undergrowth.
The lights are on but it is locked. Alan Barber pushes and pulls at the door in frustration before being overtaken by a state of urgency. He pulls at his trousers violently before poking his penis between two of the iron bars of the fence, which runs around the ground to the right of the building.
Dropping his head backwards, he looks up at the sky and naturally arches his back enough to change the trajectory of his open-air urination. It hits a muddy slope and begins to splash against something flat. He looks to see what it is.
Toes.
Pale, white, tiny, delicate toes.
Instead of pulling back or stopping or jumping over the fence, he continues to empty his bladder, circling around the exposed digits, revealing the outer arch, part of the ankle.
He screams the name of his friend.
Still, he doesn’t move. He doesn’t react. Adrenalin does not force him to vault the fence and take a closer look or dig through the mud with his hands. He becomes a grotesque statue of an inconsequential, drunken life. His hands drop to his side, his flaccid penis drips between his legs, his eyes fixate on the excavated-by-gin-sodden-kidney-waste foot.
He can see it is a foot.
A child’s foot.
And he assumes that she is already dead.
At no point does it occur to him that this was recent and that he could still help in some way, that the last time he evacuated his bladder he stood next to the man that buried this body.
He is the one to call the police and he waits behind the fence gazing at the dead, porcelain foot until they arrive.
So forget about Alan Barber. He is not a suspect. He has a witness to corroborate his actions. You can forget about him too; he’s an idiot. There is CCTV footage of Alan at the pub he admitted to drinking at with his friends. It is time-stamped to confirm his story. He is just a man who was on his way home and found a girl who was never expected to be found.
This is what Paulson and Murphy have been missing.
What they have been waiting for.
This is the front line.
Wednesday
HAMPSTEAD, 23:59
I SAW MY sister.
I saw Cathy.
She was standing in the corner of my living room, her head bobbing slightly as she faced the wall; it looked like she was counting. I knew it was her. Her hair was the same. Her manner the same. She was wearing the same polka-dot dress she had on the day she went missing.
That spring in ’85.
When everything withered.
And then she just disappeared.
It has been just over six weeks since I saw her. Since I have slept well enough to dream. Since I was last at work. My democratically enforced sabbatical has afforded me the opportunity to arrange the journals my mother left to me after her death, and gain insight into the intuition we seem to have shared. I drink less. The dark shadows under my eyes are ever-present, whether I am rested or not. I’ve had time to reflect. And I’m ready to go back. Return to my job.
To lie.
I will admit to my superiors that my drinking had escalated on the last case, the hunt for Celeste Varrick, and I won’t use the excuse that both of my parents had died and my wife had left me after sleeping with a fucking serial killer. I’ll explain that I was exhausted when returning home the night I solved that mystery, that everything had conspired too abruptly, that I must have been hallucinating or projecting as a result of the alcohol level in my body and the emotional fatigue.
That it was a shadow or a trick of light. A wind-blown curtain.
That, whatever it is that I think I saw, it could not have been my sister.
I will lie.
Because everyone but me thinks my sister is dead.
And these are the things they want to hear.
I know what I saw. I know Cathy. And it is time that I return to lead my team. Chief Inspector Markam needs to bring me back in. Not because a man named Alan Barber has numbed himself with gin and will foolishly trail an innocent girl through Camden in the early hours, unaware of his impending discovery. That is not my case. Not yet.
I just need to work. That is who I am. It is all I am now. My parents are gone. I accept that the unresolved issues with my father will remain unresolved; I can bear the slow erosion of unanswerable questions. I have locked Eames in a box in my mind; Audrey’s compartment has been placed in the opposite corner of my memory.
A point of equilibrium has been reached. The sabbatical I never wanted to take has worked in the way that nobody truly expected it to. I’m ready. Ready for work, for the next case. Ready to dream.
But, if that is so, I must also prepare myself to experience nightmare. And nightmares have the power to unlock the chambers of grief and torment and misery and murder that a person like me hides in the recesses of his mind.
They can bring back the very incidents you have been trying to forget.
I have been ignoring Eames. I’ve overlooked Audrey. And said goodbye to their infidelity.
It will soon be tomorrow.
And The Smiling Man wants me to remember.
Thursday
REGENT’S PARK, 05:23
MURPHY CONSIDERS HIMSELF to be the inspector in January’s absence.
Paulson would never refer to him in that manner.
As Acting Detective Inspector, Murphy revels in echoing the message he had received only moments before from his unknown supporter to Paulson, the man he now regards as a subordinate.
‘We’ve got one. And it’s going to be huge.’
‘What are you talking about, Murph?’ Paulson, his mobile pressed to his ever-decreasing cheek, pants heavily as he continues to march on his new routine, thumping along the London pavements in his early-morning, pre-work power-walk. Nobody is out at this time. Nobody can see an overweight man trying to sweat out the excess kilos.
‘A case. We’ve got a case. A young girl has been found.’
‘Oh fuck.’ Paulson hates those words. Why a young girl? Why does it have to be another young, innocent girl?
‘We don’t know how long she has been dead for. Discovered by a couple of drunks. A shallow grave.’
Paulson remains silent, put off by Murphy’s verve.
‘Meet me at Regent’s Park. The corner of Broadwalk nearest to Park Square Gardens. We’ll go in together.’
Detective Sergeant Paulson ceases his exercise and rests against the concrete wall surrounding the stone front garden of one of the houses on his street, his lower back pushing against the bricks to support his weight. And he despairs. The moment he heard it was a young girl, and that there is no evidence yet to suggest how long she has been buried, he thought about January David and, more specifically, his missing sister Cathy.
With his real inspector on indeterminate leave, DS Paulson feels burdened. Murphy may have the title but Paulson is taking on the anguish. Fearing he will be the one forced to inform his friend that his missing sister has finally been found after all these years.
That she is dead.
And her bones are still small.
And the lack of sensitivity that Murphy displays only adds to the frustration.
This is the kind of thing January David has to contend with each day.
Paulson knows that they have to deal with the violent cases, the extreme cases, and that a certain level of desensitisation occurs in everyone after prolonged exposure to the scenes they encounter, but Murphy seems excited. This is what he has been waiting for. The opportunity to tackle a high-profile case without January David’s input.
All that Paulson can muster in response is, ‘OK.’
And he ends the call.
Before he realises that there is nobody at the other end of the line, Murphy punctuates his call by repeating, ‘This is going to be huge.’ He knows he should not be smiling as he says this but it doesn’t stop him. He has become someone even he no longer recognises.
And it’s too late to turn back.
The severity of the situation only turns to reality at the crime scene. Alan Barber, the man who unearthed the child with his gin-soaked urine, still sobs into his own lap, a friend uncomfortably laying a hand on his shoulder, nervous though he has done nothing wrong.
Two police colleagues, assigned to a missing person’s query nearly two days ago, wait in front of the tape which separates the path to the public toilets and the patch of dirt where a four-year-old porcelain doll lies at rest.
It is the girl they were assigned to locate.
Aria Sky.
The gentle child.
Paulson spots the body through the gap between his failed colleagues’ shoulders. She is wearing a muddied, white, child-size boiler suit. Her hair is straight and scraggly and blonde. Her feet are small and clean and pale. But at least she has skin and muscle and eyes and hair. This is recent.
It cannot be the body of Cathy David.
Detective Paulson breathes a sigh of relief.
And this time he feels like the monster.
Thursday
HAMPSTEAD, 07:15
BLINDFOLDED AND TIED to a chair.
That’s how it always starts with him.
He pulls the scarf away from my eyes, his giant frame looming behind me, no shadow, no sound of breath, just the empty expanse of black before me stretching into for ever.
I don’t need to turn around to know that it is him.
Again.
The Smiling Man.
The apparition that leads me to Eames.
I want to wake up. I don’t want him back because it reopens the wounds I felt were healing since he disappeared from my intuitions. Mother’s journals state that she was able to pull herself out, get back to consciousness. To reality. I want this now. But he starts to shift behind me, his left foot then his right, bobbing from side to side in this dust-covered purgatory he calls home.
And I realise I am stuck.
I can’t get out before he delivers his message.
Not this time.
When the image of my missing sister appeared to me following the last case, my pain was emotional. She looked the same as she did all those years ago, a ten-year-old girl in a polka-dot dress innocently playing hide-and-seek. Her presence wrenched at my heart but I was never in danger.
The Two who guided me on the last case were threatening. The apparition of that young boy and girl working in perfect syzygy, always edging closer to me, increasing their menace with each vision, but they just wanted to communicate, to convey the information that would help me capture Celeste Varrick.
The Smiling Man is different. He tied me up, hit me, placed bullets between my teeth, stuffed my mouth to its maximum point of elasticity with hundreds of cigarettes. He abuses me physically. He gets off on torturing me.
I’m anxious.
Still, I have not turned around but I know it is him.
The lack of air is the same.
His presence incites a horror within me akin to no other emotion I have ever felt. Though he exists as merely dust and figment, our connection surpasses reality.
I don’t question his motives for returning to my mind. I don’t think about Eames yet, or Audrey, or the five people killed the last time this sinister giant occupied a space in my subconscious. I just want to know what he is going to do to me this time. I’m thinking about myself.
One of his large, dark hands grazes my right shoulder as he floats into view and ignites the sound of an out-of-key piano being played badly.
It has begun.
I inwardly judder at the first note but the startle does not manifest itself into movement; I’m frozen rigid.
He controls me.
The long leather raincoat he once wore, which made him look like a nightclub bouncer, has been replaced by a blue velvet suit, which makes him look like a pimp. His legs are thin but his back, which is turned to me still, is a broad, stalwart triangle.
Then he starts. His trick, his charade, his torment. And cold runs through me. My organs goose-pimple.
His strong arms stretch out to form a crucifixion much like he did in my vision of his levitation, but his hands are delicate. Womanly, even. With a gliding fluidity his wrists circle around and eventually stop to reveal his forefinger and thumb touching at the tip to form two rings of dark flesh and bone.
And he starts to turn around.
Somehow I feel more paralysed; I can move my body less than not-at-all. His feet have ceased their usual shuffle and are clamped together at the ankles. It seems as though the floor moves to rotate this giant figure ahead of me like a sinister music-box ballerina.
From the side I can see how his jaundiced eyes protrude from his skull; I know every bloodshot vein. He turns further and my gaze is drawn in to his yellow gravestone teeth. He is smiling. Of course he is smiling. Still, the piano plays its series of flats and sharps.
He stops and fixes his unblinking stare on to mine, scorching my retina with his disquieting beaming expression. I can’t look away. I don’t dare. With a subtle flick of his wrists towards the gloaming above, I feel my body jolt into a standing position. He is controlling me. Like a puppet my limbs dangle floppily as though being held up on display by two rods underneath my armpits.
As he brings his hands closer together, his arms still outstretched at chest-height, my elbows begin to lift so that the backs of my hands are now resting against my stomach. The nearer his looped fingers get to each other, the nearer my elbows are to one another.
Eventually both shoulders pop from their sockets in order for the elbows to connect. I grimace and shout but the only sound in this place is a B-flat, which should have been played as an A. He smiles at my agony.
He smiles at everything.
He lifts the two circles of fingers, which are now touching, up to his face and peers through them like joke glasses. He lowers them, then lifts them.
Lowers them.
Lifts them.
Then links the circles.
My right arm appears to push straight through my left as though one is a hologram but I feel the bone pass through bone, the muscle entwine with muscle, before my broken-doll knot of an exterior mimics his intricate hand gestures.
Before I have a moment to convey my pain he is flinging his arms towards the non-existent ceiling and my flimsy legs are taken from beneath me to hoist me into the dust-drenched air.
The Smiling Man steps closer to me, resuming his original dance, bobbing from left foot to right, left foot to right. I sense what I think is his glee but it is not his emotion to have: this belongs to the person he represents. The killer I must apprehend.
The giant stands below where I float so I know I am at least seven feet up. We make eye contact again. This time he tilts his head to the left for a moment as if apologising for what will come next.
He gently places his linked fingers below my Adam’s apple. His remaining fingers touch lightly at the sides of my neck. I note a tendon tense in his own neck to bring his head back to mirror mine. He is giving me all the clues I need.
Then he squeezes. Bracing my oesophagus.
And I wake up.
In bed. The bed I once shared with my wife, Audrey. The wife whose scent once lingered in this room, a ghostly reminder of our failed relationship. But she is not the person I think of; I have learned to deal with this loss.
I picture Eames, sitting in the hallway of his house two years ago, awaiting my arrival, seemingly happy to be caught. Glad to be rid of his secrets.
All rationality leaves me when The Smiling Man is involved in my thoughts. He is my link to Eames. He represents Eames’ actions. Someone, undoubtedly a girl, a woman, will be killed in the next twenty-four hours.
Fuck.
How did he get out?
How can I get back in?
Thursday
VIOLENT CRIME OFFICE, 07:32
IT HAS BEEN six weeks since the last case ended, since Detective Inspector January David took the bullet for the conduct of that final operation. Where he had apprehended the perpetrator of those ritualistic murders only to allow his guard to drop for a moment, resulting in a struggle and the eventual death of the suspect. Detective Sergeant Paulson has been losing weight from that day.
The day January David was praised for apprehending the perpetrator, only to be rewarded with an indefinite sabbatical. Reprimanded for the death of Sam Abbadon, though there was nothing he could have done to prevent it.
At least he wasn’t fired.
Thank God Paulson is still around to keep an eye on Murphy.
That fucking snake.
‘Jan won’t recognise you if he ever comes back,’ Murphy spouts towards Paulson, who is pouring a coffee on the other side of the office.
‘When. When he comes back, Murph.’
Murphy rolls his eyes as if he knows something Paulson does not. They have fallen effortlessly back into their archetypal roles of principled policeman and corrupt cop. Aria Sky’s body was only discovered a little over two hours ago.
‘And when he comes back,’ Paulson adds, ‘he’s gonna be pissed off to find you sitting at his desk.’
Murphy has taken a more active role in leading the team from the moment of January’s departure. He spread his files over his inspector’s desk but his gumption fell short of emptying the drawer that January reserves for his missing sister’s case file. He’s stupid but he’s not an idiot. Chief Inspector Markam had offered the temporary upgrade in status to the thinning detective Paulson, but he expressed a preference to be on the front line.
There had been no front line. At least there hadn’t been for a couple of months. There was no sociopath looking to outsmart Detective Sergeant Paulson. No mass-murderer trying to one-up Detective Sergeant Murphy. Nobody knows who they are. They are support. Lackeys, at best.
Only the scalp of January David will do.
And Eames feels this is his property.
Paulson’s phone rings. Not the one on his desk or the mobile phone he has for work. The other one. The one only a few people know about. People he likes. People who owe him favours. People who owe him money. People with information.
Murphy does not have this number.
He looks at the screen and sees January’s name flash in bright blue letters. ‘I’m going to take this into the hall.’
‘You can talk freely in here.’ Murphy doesn’t even look up from the desk as he speaks.
‘I’d rather go outside, all the same.’
‘Checking up on me, is he?’ Murphy grins knowingly and flicks through a handful of papers he’s not even reading.
Paulson, though slimmer than usual, still possesses an intimidating frame. He turns to the desk, steaming coffee in his left hand, and faces his irritating colleague. Staring through him apathetically, he lifts the phone to his cheek, flips it open to answer the call and simply says ‘Go!’ to the person at the other end.
Murphy peers on, dumbfounded.
Paulson walks out casually without saying a word.
And he won’t be back for the rest of the morning.
He is being asked to drive out of London and head west on the M4 motorway. Phone confirmation won’t do. It isn’t good enough to hear from a nurse. It won’t work to believe a voice on the end of a line. Paulson must travel in person. Sign in at the front desk. Be escorted down the corridor. Wait in a guarded room.
See him with his own two eyes.
January trusts Paulson. That’s why he called him. He will rely only on Paulson’s verification that Eames is still there, locked away in his cage. He needs to know for certain that nobody is going to die. That The Smiling Man is not real this time. An aftershock, at best. Residual memory.
‘Jan. This is ludicrous. He’s there. We’d know by now if he’d escaped.’
‘Will you just do it for me, please? It’s important.’
Paulson agrees to the trip. Says he’ll call back once he has seen Eames. But he worries: his friend should be feeling better; he should have recovered. In the car, he turns the ignition and rests his head back.
The time away from the station and the pressure of cases is supposed to clear his inspector’s mind, give him a chance to regroup, face some lingering demons.
What if Murphy is right?
Maybe January David is never coming back.
Thursday
BERKSHIRE, 09:04
THEY TEST THE alarm every Monday morning at 10 a.m. Two minutes of an air-raid siren followed by another two minutes of a single tone to signify the all-clear. For the first year, I thought this would be the best time to escape.
It’s not.
Imagine how futile it will be to sound the alarm thirty minutes after I walk out unnoticed. Think how stupid you will all feel for, once again, buying in to the misdirection.
I’ve already taken your card while you focus on shuffling the pack.
A male nurse comes to retrieve me.
You can’t call him a guard. This is not a prison. He says I have a visitor.
‘There are no visits on a Thursday before two,’ I tell him, lying on my bed, hand behind my neck, gazing at the ceiling as though it is the first sky I have ever seen.
He’s visibly uncomfortable; he is told that we require a regimented structure to our days, weeks, months. Lives. He is afraid to disrupt.
Shh. Don’t refer to me as a maniac.
I’m ill. That’s all.
‘It’s a policeman.’ He speaks coyly yet succinctly.
I sit bolt upright and the glorified orderly sent to collect me steps back and widens his stance in preparation. I smirk without looking at him. I’m not going to hurt him. I won’t attack him. I’ve just been caught off guard. I wanted to be prepared for this meeting, know everything I would say and how I would act, but now I can’t do that.
He is here now.
Detective Inspector January David is here right now.
He’s a day earlier than I expected.
Nobody has died yet.
Kerry Ross is yet to call in sick for work today.
I shut my eyes and breathe deeply, perched on the edge of my mattress.
‘Ready to go?’ my escort questions.
I take three more breaths, stand, nod, then open my eyes.
He moves his well-over-six-feet, looks-like-a-prison-guard body to the outside of the room and I exit. He walks next to me, towering over me, slightly behind. So he can always see my hands.
There is no doubt in my mind that he could stop me with ease if I tried to run or hit him, yet still I sense his fear. That is my gift. Terror keeps you safe. Trust ensnares. There are people here who would fight just to take a chunk out of him; some would not hesitate to bite through his neck, spoon out an eye. That’s not me. That’s impulsive. It requires no thought, no control.
We plod down the hall to begin with but I find myself picking up the pace in anticipation of a meeting with my favourite opponent. I want to look into his face and smile. I want him to wonder what it is that I know. I want him to torture himself about it in the same way he will for ever be tormented that I have been inside his wife.
The overgrown carer opens the door to the visiting room. I have never been in here before. Nobody has come to see me. There is nobody. Just letters. Or cards. Or code. But nobody real. Nothing is real.
And my excitement dissipates in an instant.
The room is filled with tables, each surrounded by four orange plastic school chairs. Every chair is empty but one. He stands up when I enter the room. Echoing around the giant space is the sound of the chair legs screeching against the floor as he pushes it backwards.
‘You’re not him.’ I whisper this sentence in the same way I say lunatic. In the same manner I utter asylum. In the same way I call this place a prison.
He takes four steps towards me.
‘You’re not him,’ I repeat, this time audible to the fat man opposite me.
‘No. But you certainly are,’ he responds smugly.
Then he walks past me as if it is the end.
‘Hey,’ I call out to him, as though speaking to a friend. He is no friend. He continues to walk away.
‘Hey.’ This time louder, my venom aimed at his broad back. Still, he is unperturbed. He has what he came for. A positive identification. I am still locked away.
‘Hey!’ He turns around this time. My voice warbles slightly and the man who is apparently not a prison guard widens his stance once more, his low centre of gravity planting him firmly into the ground. Unrockable.
The overweight detective turns but does not speak.
‘Where is he?’
Nothing.
‘Where is Detective Inspector January David?’
He is consistent in his indifference.
‘I need you to give him a message.’
He doesn’t blink. He doesn’t even move. I wait a short time and monitor him, hoping he will give in and ask what the message is, but he shows mettle.
‘CE23,’ I state confidently.
His eyes squint ever so slightly as he digests the information. The movement is minute, but I notice it. I was looking for it.
We wait again. He thinks this is a stand-off, that he is a match for me, that we are in some kind of cerebral confrontation. But I have already won the battle. I step closer to him and he is predictably unflinching.
‘You can leave now.’ My smile stretches across my face without showing any teeth.
He turns back and strides to the door. At one point he stutters, stops as if to say something, thinks better of it, and continues.
And then he is gone.
Back in my empty room, my cell, my prison, beneath the uncomfortably thin mattress, bending against the springs, there is a single playing card taken from a split-spades deck. The eight of spades.
It starts now.
Thursday
CHELSEA, 09:30
MY BOSS SHOWS no sympathy for my alleged illness. He wants me to feel guilty for having the day off. He employs the same tone when people are really sick yet still come into the office.
I click through my emails again with the telephone receiver tucked beneath my chin, my voice hoarse, sniffing as I speak. I have sinus pain. Conjunctivitis. There’s a lump in my breast.
None of the old theatre troupe have responded to me.
They will, I’m sure.
It’s what we always wanted.
I sip at a mug of chai tea while navigating the old theatre company website, smiling at some of the production pictures we plastered over the Internet for people to enjoy, but hardly anybody bothered. My reminiscences fill me with the warmth of creative innocence and naivety yet at the same time I feel a sense of loss at the group’s long-defunct camaraderie.
I refresh my emails.
Still no answer.
I’m meeting Eames in less than an hour.
My boss tells me to rest. He says he hopes I’ll feel better tomorrow morning. He doesn’t know that I won’t feel anything, that yesterday was my last full day. I hack into the mouthpiece for good measure and croak, ‘Me too.’ Then I hit the red button on my mobile phone to cut him off for good.
I have time to quickly read through the various updates of my so-called friends on the several social-networking sites I can’t seem to drag myself away from. I want to write something about my meeting today, how my life could be turning around, how I’ll be back in the theatre very soon, but I can’t: I have to maintain the illusion and instead opt for a lie about how sick I feel today. Someone I went to school with but haven’t seen for ten years feels compelled to comment with words of condolence that I read as disingenuous.
I don’t shut the computer down, I just log out. I’m sure the authorities will be able to crack my password when I don’t return; it’s the name of the play I directed followed by the date of opening night. Then they’ll be able to go through my files, my pictures, my emails.
And they’ll know who killed me.
They’ll know Eames is back.
My outfit is somewhere between the smart, city-savvy look I don for work and the casualness I adopt away from the office. I want him to know that I am creative but also commercially astute.
I exit my apartment to the familiar sight of blue construction boards covered in white stencilled lettering ordering Post No Bills. I do not live here for the view. I’m here because it is affordable, there are no tourists and I’m somewhere between the theatre district where I dream of belonging and the Chelsea area I must conquer first.
I cross at the corner where my road intersects a major avenue, keeping parallel with the iron bridge, which now runs trains directly over my head. In the distance I see decrepit office blocks with ageing wooden water towers across the rooftops. Back over my right shoulder are the brighter lights I long to live amid. For now, the graffiti-stained concrete ahead is all I have to look forward to.
I glance at the rubble beneath the railway bridge as I walk and think of every detective show I’ve ever watched, every film about small-time crooks and organised crime. I wonder whether there are any bodies buried in there; it seems an ideal spot. I don’t walk around here at night. In my head I start to create a story of crime and malevolence that ends on the broken stones underneath this bridge. It could be my next play. It doesn’t seem right to be smiling as I imagine this storyline but nothing can bring my mood down today; I see beauty in everything.
In thirty-five minutes I will be attacked.
And killed.
And stripped of dignity.
And nobody will know for hours.
Thursday
HAMPSTEAD, 10:31
‘HE’S STILL IN there.’
I say nothing but my mind breathes an extended sigh.
‘I saw him with my own eyes, Jan,’ Paulson continues, hoping to elicit a response. ‘He looks the same. Unde—’
I jump in. ‘I don’t care how he is or seems to be, I just want to know that he is locked away.’
There is silence at both ends of the line while I think of a way to speak about Eames, the man who took away half of my life, without getting agitated and thrusting that disquiet in the direction of my only friend. Paulson could confirm again that Eames is secure. He could moan about something Murphy has done at work. He could tell me not to worry about The Smiling Man. But he doesn’t do any of these things.
‘When do you think you’ll be back?’
‘I can’t say for sure. I thought things were picking up. I’ve served out the sabbatical’ – my eyes roll at the word, flimsily disguising its true meaning of suspension – ‘and Chief Markam says it’s up to me now. This false intuition is making me think that I may need more time. I had thought I was ready.’
‘But you are . . . coming back, aren’t you?’ he asks nervously, Murphy’s earlier words still invading his thoughts.
I allow myself a moment to smile, exhaling a short puff of laughter.
‘What else am I going to do?’
‘We’ve got something. You could come back and run it.’
I’m silent for a second, not sure how to react. I don’t know whether his desperation for me to return is for my sanity or his.
‘Young girl. Shallow grave. Regent’s Park,’ he continues, waiting for me to bite.
‘Have you spoken to the family yet?’
‘Today. With Murph. No need for them to identify the body. We know.’
‘How long has she been missing? A day or two? You think it’s the family?’ I fire the questions out as though he’s on the wrong end of an interrogation.
‘Yeah. It usually is.’ He seems confident in this summation. I think it’s laziness. They do need me back.
‘Not this time. I don’t believe it. The burial seems rushed. And why take the body to the park? Seems risky. If results come back and say she has been there the whole time, then lean towards the relations; but if she was kept alive for even a day, you could be looking at something else entirely.’ I can’t assume Paulson is still thinking laterally; with nobody there to make him up his game, he could become complacent like Murphy.
I keep him sharp.
He is helping me. I will help him in any way I can.
We talk for a while as friends. Paulson explains a little about his eating and walking and breathing exercises, which seem to be helping him regain some health while dropping the weight he has carried around for as long as I can remember. He says he’s still heavily involved in the online poker community and that he has hooked his workstation up to an even bigger flat-screen.
Then he says, ‘Gosh, I nearly forgot.’
‘What? What is it?’
‘He had a message . . . for you.’
‘Forget it. He’s trying to get inside my head. Keep it to yourself. I don’t want to know.’ I string the sentences together as though speaking one long word.
‘OK. OK. You’re probably right. Sounded like gibberish, anyway.’
‘Look, Paulson, thanks for driving over there. He’s incarcerated. His words have no significance any more. Nothing good can come of entering into this game with him.’
He agrees and I hang up.
Thursday
BERKSHIRE, 10:31
JACK OF HEARTS.
Five of hearts.
Five of diamonds.
Five of diamonds. Each diamond surrounded by a hand-drawn circle in black ink.
Queen of diamonds.
These were the last five cards I received. Each delivered to me in a separate brown envelope with my name written on the front in a silver marker. Someone opens the envelope before I am allowed to see what is inside. They used to take the cards away, afraid I would slit my wrists, until I told them that they may want to take my teeth away, in that case.
The letters could have been delivered to me in any order and it would not make a difference.
I would understand.
I would know that Kerry Ross is dead.
That she is Girl 8.
That everything is still going to plan.
That there are now only three.
Thursday
HAMPSTEAD, 10:33
I STEP INTO