Authors: Michael J. Malone
Then a small black dot in my mind grows. It takes wing and flies into every fold of my brain. Did I kill someone, it asks? I knew too much. I know too much. Where did all this knowledge come from? Not only did I know what the wounds on the dead man were, but I have a series of pictures in my head that show me how it happened. All that is missing from the murder scene are the feathers. Am I the killer? My colleagues appear to have little doubt. Maybe it was my feelings of guilt I was trying to deny.
But I was with Theresa, sensible me argues. I go over the events of the night in my head. I go to Theresa’s from the pub, we make love, we fall asleep, we make love again, we fall asleep and then I get the call to head over to the crime scene. Where was there time in that little scenario to go and commit a murder? Did you really sleep, a voice asks? You could have slipped out of bed, hailed a taxi on the main road. Then you did the deed, cleaned yourself up, changed out of your costume and returned to give Theresa another one…
‘Stop it!’ I shout, causing the young PC behind the glass to stare. I look at him for the first time, taking in the blond, almost white hair, and the face that probably sees a razor once a fortnight at the most. He has gone for an expression of boredom, but his crossed arms and legs and the fact that the line of his long, lean frame is facing towards the door lets me know he isn’t entirely comfortable at his post. I meet his stare and toy with the idea that I could quite easily mess with this guy’s head. Then I move my line of sight from him to the door facing me, thinking, don’t be a bastard, McBain, you can use this time a little more productively than that.
I drop my shoulders and take a deep, slow breath. Relax, you’ll not fight your way out of this one if you’re wound up. Breathe. Drop those shoulders. I go through every part of my body naming it in my head and tell it to relax. I feel the air brush against the hairs in my nostrils as I breathe in, feel it fill my lungs and allow it to seep out again. A crystal forms in my mind’s eye, I watch light beams reflect from its faceted face and try to concentrate. But thoughts and accusations don’t allow my mind to be still. They crowd in like cars on the M8 at rush hour. Murderer. I feel the muscles in my back tighten. This is no good. I lie down on the mattress on my stomach and using my arm as a pillow, aim for some sleep instead.
When I was younger and after I had learned to control my bladder, sleep was a hobby of mine, I loved my bed. While other convent children complained among themselves that it was too early, that it was still light outside, with the customary chant, “It’s not fair”, I would brush my teeth with pleasure at the thought of curling under those heavy blankets and fantasising about the life I wished I lived. My parents were together in this dream and we lived in a house built on the playground behind the convent. There was a neat little row of these houses and all the children had one each and their parents lived with them too. In this house I had a massive room to myself, with a huge bed that stretched from wall to wall, and I had a stash of batteries and a torch under one pillow so I could read into the night after everyone else had gone to sleep. In this house there was plenty of chocolate and crisps and I always got a cuddle before I went to bed. Under the warmth of this fantasy, I would coast off to sleep in seconds.
What would provide a fantasy that would send me off to sleep in my present situation? I imagine being in bed with Theresa in post-coital sloth. She has her head resting on my shoulder. I kiss her forehead and breathe in the smell of her shampoo. She slides a hand over my chest and down to my stomach, tweaks a hair here and there, her breath hot on my nipple.
‘Do you want to do it again?’ she whispers.
‘In a moment,’ I smile and close my eyes, enjoying her calming touch, arousal for once the last thing on my mind. The light dims, sounds fade. Peace. My heart has slowed to match the give and take of the tide on a windless summer’s day. All is black.
Then a pinprick of light glows in the centre of my mind’s eye. Slowly it expands and, as it grows, it greedily squeezes out the dark, I hear a voice singing. Then another joins in. And another. They belong to children. Except the tone isn’t light and fun, it’s heavy with threat. Every hair on my body is on end. But I’ve no need to be afraid. Yet.
Can I put a name to those voices?
Is it a memory? What is happening to me? Why is this going on in my head?
A thought of such certainty and clarity forces me to sit upright on the bed. Someone has been murdered and more are going to follow if the police don’t get their collective act together. This isn’t a one off. There’s more to this than a simple, solitary act of revenge. I don’t know how I know this but I do. I run to the door.
‘Campbell. Campbell, get your arse down here,’ I shout over and over again, banging on the door with every ounce of energy I own. What feels like hours later the door opens and several large men run in and rush me over to the bed. Someone is holding each arm and leg and stretching my head back, I recognise one who is sitting on my chest.
‘Johnstone. Get Campbell.’
‘Sir, if you don’t calm down we’ll have to put you in restraints,’ is his reply.
‘For fuckssake, get Campbell.’
‘Sir, I’m going to warn you one more time to calm down or we’ll have to put you in restraints.’
‘Okay. Okay.’ I force my voice to slow down, ‘I’m calm. I’m calm.’ The pressure on my chest eases.
‘Right, I’m going to take a step back and if you start up again, we’ll bring the doc in here and give you something to calm you down,’ says Johnstone.
‘Okay. Okay.’ I take deep, slow breaths, fight for composure, ‘But you need to get Detective Superintendent Campbell. There’s going to be another murder.’
‘Right, McBain. What the hell is going on?’ Campbell pushes open the door and walks in. Peters walks in behind him. I walk up to my old boss.
‘You have to let me out of here. There’s going to be another murder.’
‘Right.’ Campbell crosses his arms. ‘Sure. There’s going to be another murder. And you want out.’
‘Yes dammit, we need to act quickly. Find the fucker who’s doing this!’ I feel a speck of spittle spray on to my lips. Campbell, who is inches from me, picks a linen handkerchief from his breast pocket and wipes the side of his face; his lips curl in a shape of utter distaste.
‘And we are going to act on the word of someone who is behaving like a madman?’
Walking back from him, I feel my calves hit the side of my bed and I sit down. His look of disgust and disbelief hits me like a fist in the solar plexus.
‘We’re friends, Tom. We’ve…’
‘Were friends. Ray. Were. The minute… the second you crossed that line you lost all claims to that.’
‘So what happened to “innocent before being proven guilty” then?’ My voice is quiet, almost hushed. He hasn’t shown me any of his feelings up to now and it comes as a real shock. ‘I didn’t do it, Tom.’ The note of pleading in my voice turns my stomach, but I can’t help myself.
‘Yes. Well. That’s for a jury to decide.’ He turns and moves towards the door.
‘Tom. I’m serious.’ I decide to change tack. ‘I was a good cop, right? Right?’
He nods like it’s breaking his heart to agree with me.
‘So, for a moment ignore the fact that I’m in a cell…’
‘Sir,’ Peters takes a step towards us, ‘You can’t seriously be entertaining what he has to say?’ Campbell silences him with a look.
‘Ray, I can’t ignore the fact that you are in a cell. I can’t ignore the fact that you have just been charged with murder either.’
‘The guy who did this; he’s going to kill again.’
‘Well, when he does and it matches the M.O. of the Connelly case, your innocence will be assured. Until then you stay locked up.’
One of the benefits of being a police officer in this situation, well, the only benefit, is that I know the system. They have to take me to court the next lawful day after my arrest. There I will appear in a private hearing in the Sheriff’s Chambers. I will be bound over for a period of seven days with no plea or declaration, then reappear in the courthouse to plead guilty or not guilty. Then comes the bit I’m really not looking forward to. The law says that I must be held on petition for no greater than one hundred and ten days and that the trial must commence within this period. They are not going to keep me in this wee cell for that length of time. That would be inhuman. No, they’ll have to send me to the Bar L. Just where every policeman wants to spend his days.
Every occupation must have their nightmare scenario, one the workers, every now and again, will talk about in whispers around the water-cooler. We have ours as well: being locked up with a group of people who feel they have every right to hate you and no compunction about acting on their animal instincts. Tales are common about former policemen being beaten or raped, or beaten and raped.
Maybe I could play on the impression I just gave Campbell. I’ve lost it. I could use insanity as my defence. I’ve never considered it a blessing before now, but I have a heavy growth. If I don’t shave tonight or tomorrow before I go in front of the Sheriff, I’ll look quite rough. A wild stare and a few comments about hearing voices and they’ll send me off to a psychiatric hospital instead.
Light coming in from the window has faded somewhat. Movement beyond the glass catches my eye. A young dark-haired cop has replaced the young, blond cop. He adopts the same seating posture as his predecessor and sets himself up for a long, boring night. I envy the blond guy so much I want to punch something. What’s he going to do tonight? Sit in front of the telly? Go for a drink with his mates? Pork his girlfriend? Bastard.
Calm down, McBain. I tell myself. You’ll never sleep if you get all riled up. But I don’t want to sleep. Look what happened the last time: strange notions popped into my head. Aye, and if you stay awake all night, you really are going to look like shit when you go before the Sheriff.
I need to stop thinking like this. It’s going to send me into madness. Be constructive. Concentrate on finding a solution to the problem, instead of dwelling on the problem itself for hours and hours. Fact one: someone was murdered. Fact two: I’ve been accused of it and locked up. Fact three: I’m not a murderer. Someone else did it, and that someone else is laughing his clever little head off at my predicament. How happy will they be that an investigating officer is taking the blame?
So what do you normally do at this point in a case? You review the evidence you do have.
We found three plausible suspects so far.
The boy, Crichton. I recall our meeting, his posture, and the look in his eyes. My reaction to him. Correct that: overreaction. Could he have planned and carried out such a murder? Yes. Did he do it? Possibly.
The next suspect is the salesman from Aberdeen. Could he have carried out such a murder? Perhaps, but I get the feeling that his likes are more subtle than that. He is about taking power over vulnerable people and using them. If he killed his victims, he wouldn’t be able to do that. He’s guilty of something, I’m sure, I just don’t know what it is.
Who’s next? Carole Devlin. What do I know about her? We are part of one another’s past. There are not many kids I remember from my time at the convent, but I remember her. Probably because the nuns didn’t want me to talk to her too much. They thought she would be a bad influence on me. She was a good five years older than me, no doubt sexually aware, and the nuns would have been in the horrors at the thought of what she might do to poor impressionable little me. After all we were all just wee animals, with no instinct of what was right or wrong and not to be trusted, especially when a girl was on her own near a penis-bearer. Regardless that the owner of said penis thought it was solely a tool for urinating with.
Carole wasn’t like the other older girls who, thinking we were on a par with vermin, completely ignored the boys. Whatever her purpose was, and from the vantage point of age that is no clearer to me now, it suited me. I was on my own. No family to speak of. A sister would have been nice.
So what that every now and again she would demand a look at my penis? It was just another part of my body. It had no particular use that I could think of and if she wanted to touch it as well, what was the harm?
The recent Carole was a different story. I wasn’t drawn to her in the least. The opposite in fact, she was like a void. When I bring an image of her into my mind I see workmanlike hands and unhappiness that surrounded her like a cloak of dust. However, she took in that young boy and brought him up after his mother died. That is the discordant note in my memory of her. The person sitting in that chair, quietly hostile, was not a woman I thought would have bothered about her own child, never mind someone else’s.
What was the deal about the boy? Why was she obliged to look after him? And after being so generous, how would it feel for the boy to throw it back in her face by going off to study in a city two hundred miles away? Is this the reason for her bitterness?
Then there were all the photographs around her living space. If she was reluctant to take the boy in, she appears to be proud of him. Or am I missing something?
The question remains, however, is she a killer? My instinct at the time was that she and the boy are linked to the deceased in some way and if I could find out that link, I might be on my way to finding the murderer.
There’s just the small matter of finding a Get Out of Jail card. Pronto.
The first thing I’m aware of this morning is the pressure on my bladder. The second thing is that I have my usual morning stiffy. It’s bad enough having to pee in full view of someone, but to have to do so while pushing down an erection makes it all the more humiliating.
Sitting on the edge of my bed, I realise my prick is not the only part of my body that is stiff. My neck. My back. I rub my neck with the fingers of my left, kneading the flesh in the hope that the resultant increased blood flow will mean that I can move without feeling any pain. Standing up, I grunt. I feel about fifty. Placing the heels of my hands over my kidney area, I arch my back. Another grunt. My bladder is becoming more insistent; walking with the pace of a geriatric I go over to the toilet bowl. Thankfully Mr Stiffy has subsided so I can pee without any acrobatics.