Dead Bad Things (24 page)

  The elephant's rear-left leg began to twitch. The movement was quick, jagged, and the little old man with no face moved his own leg in tandem, tapping out a silent beat. The two were linked; they were part of the same image.

  I blinked, wishing that they would vanish. Somehow the hollow papier mâché beast and its wizened inhabitant were even more horrific than the man with the dragon-wing bellows.

  "Just show me," I said. "Show me what it is I need to understand. Fuck off with the symbols, the puzzles… just show me what you want me to see."

  In the fragmented mirror something else began to form. The vision resolved itself from a light fog, becoming clearer and clearer, as if in answer to my words. It was a man – a normal man in a dark suit. He was sitting on a three-legged wooden stool, like a milking stool, with his back to me.

  I stepped forward, having to force my legs to move. It was like walking through mud. The man just sat there, staring into space, stiff-backed and unmoving. I approached the shards of mirror, so close that I could see their perfectly smooth shorn edges. The pieces of mirror had not been shattered; they had been sliced, or moulded.

  "Who are you?"

  The man didn't move.

  "Tell me who you are. Is it you I've been looking for?"

  He nodded his head, once, a tiny movement in the mirror-mosaic.

  "Show yourself. Show me who you are."

  Just as the man began to turn around I realised who he was, and for the first time since the accident that had claimed the lives of my family, I experienced a genuinely spontaneous emotion – one that I didn't have to force or fake.

  The man turned incrementally, as if his joints were rusted and their motion was restricted. He moved awkwardly, like a clockwork toy. His hands were resting on his knees. His feet remained flat on the floor. He twisted from the waist; a wholly unnatural movement.

  I tried to scream but my voice would not come. It was broken: it was busted, like a vandalised machine.

  The man turned and I looked at his features. He turned and I stared into my own face, inspecting my wide, watering eyes for signs of deceit.

  "So you found me." His voice was the female voice I had heard on the phone at the house in Plaistow, and again on the mobile phone in the café opposite the massage parlour. It was a false voice, a clockwork lie. But this time it sounded familiar. The voice was that of Ellen Lang, my dead friend, my murdered lover.

  "Who are you?" I fell to my knees. The floor was hard; it sent shockwaves through my legs. "What is this?"

  "You found me. You needed to find me." That voice: it was summoned from old machine parts, ancient cogs and levers.

  "I needed to find myself." The truth was so obvious that it seemed almost trite, the tired punch line to an old joke. Was this yet another form of mental torture, or had Ellen come through from another realm to help me, perhaps even to protect me… to save me from myself?

  "Stay here. Don't go there. Don't go back. You can't help her. You never could." Words formed on the fractured surface of the mirror, written in breath. A light misty message, one that Ellen's cobbled-together avatar could not possibly hold back. "Don't," she said, and then the figure on the chair – the representation of me – crumpled, fell apart, its dusty clockwork pieces scattering across the floor.

  I read the misted words on the glass, even as they faded, and they were in direct opposition to what the figure had told me.

  
Go Home.

  Somewhere far off, probably behind the haphazard mirror, a baby started to cry.

  Then I saw something else in the reflective surfaces, a scene broken into scores of separate images. Only when I took a step back, gave myself some distance, could I see what was forming in the silvered shards on the wall.

  The wailing of the unseen baby grew louder, as if it were distressed.

  I saw the room above the massage parlour: Immaculee Karuhmbi's place. It was a mess. Furniture had been smashed, the walls had been hacked at with blunt instruments, and a body was positioned on the floor, shrouded by detritus.

  The corpse was that of the Rwandan psychic. Her armless torso was face-up, eyes open, her mouth was agape. As I watched, the scene jerked into life, like a film roll starting to play. Straddling the psychic's body was Traci (
with an eye not a
why
), her factotum, her ex-lover. The skinny little girl I had fucked on a grimy mattress in the grey zone. Traci looked insane: she was naked, her hair was writhing like a nest of vipers, and her thin body was soaked in sweat. She smiled – she
grinned
at me, I'm sure of it. She reached down and tore a chunk of meat from Immaculee's stomach, and then stuffed it into her mouth. I closed my eyes when, slowly and methodically, she began to chew.

  The sound of a baby crying began to fade, gradually turning to silence.

  As I turned away I knew that there had never really been a choice, despite what Ellen had somehow managed to say to me. If it had even been Ellen at all, and not simply another trick by the one who taunted me from the ginnels and alleyways between realities.

  Of course I would return to Leeds; I would always go back, go home. There was nobody left here to cling to, and no other place that would have me.

 

 

 

 

 
 
 

Sarah pushed slowly through the doors and stood in a narrow corridor, wondering where the black-robed figure had gone. She knew that Eddie Knowles would follow her. He had no choice; he was part of this now, even if he denied it to himself. He was just as much involved in whatever the hell was going on as Sarah, perhaps even more so.

  "What is it?" His voice was at her shoulder, hovering like a bird. "What happened?"

  "I saw… I don't know. Someone. Somebody's been following me, hanging around wherever I go. If I didn't know any better I'd say it was my father's ghost."

  Eddie didn't laugh, and that unnerved her. He was not the type to believe in spooks. Eddie lived in the real world, the hard world of greed and violence, not some soft-centred place where things went bump in the night.

  "Say something, Eddie. Tell me I'm being fucking stupid."

  "You're being fuckin' stupid." His voice was deadpan – flat and unconvincing.

  "Thanks," she said, taking a step forward.

  "Any time, love. Any fuckin' time."

  She walked forward, moving hesitantly along the corridor.

  Up ahead were several doors, positioned on either side of the tight space. She could hear the faint strains of a radio playing somewhere in the heart of the building, probably in one of the dormitories.

  "Keep going," said Eddie, still following her. "There's something I should probably show you, now that you're here."

  "Where?" She kept moving, her feet scuffing the floor. The radio fell silent.

  "Turn right at the end, and then go through the first door."

  Sarah did as Eddie asked, and found herself standing in the doorway of an odd little room. Low concrete benches lined the walls, and located at the centre of the room was a sunken area in which sat a small altar – there was a font, some candle-holders, and a small framed picture of Jesus Christ holding a bleeding heart. Assorted paraphernalia of faith: small articles of the divine.

  "It's the prayer room." Eddie stepped past her, walked to one of the benches and sat down. He stared at the altar, his gaze cold and implacable. "Me and your old fella, we spent a lot of time in here. It was a nice quiet place to chat." He looked over at her and smiled, his fringe flopping to cover his lined forehead. It was a strange expression, and seemed somehow more genuine than anything else about the man. In that moment he looked vulnerable, as if he were letting down his defences.

  "OK. So what did you want to show me?" She folded her arms, not yet ready to lower her own barriers, not completely.

  Eddie shook his head. "You coppers… you can be blind as fuck sometimes." He motioned with his arms, bringing them up and out, as if embracing something invisible. "Look at the walls. The pictures. These people were all regulars here at one time or another – this is how they're remembered. They're all dead now, but these drawings are like a shrine to their memory, a way of making sure they're not forgotten."

  Sarah let her gaze wander around the room and took in the delicately chalked portraits that dominated the walls. She had already noticed them of course, but nothing about them had drawn her interest enough to deserve more than a brief glance. They had been applied directly to the plaster render, and then framed with thin plywood strips. Each one was incredibly well done; the level of detail was breathtaking. She did not know any of the faces, but she guessed that the actual men the portraits were based on looked exactly like these representations. "Yes. They're lovely. But what does all this mean to me?"

  Eddie laughed. It was a quiet sound, and slightly creepy. Sarah was reminded of the sounds her father used to make as he prowled the family home, late at night, drinking whisky, talking to himself and laughing at his own dirty little jokes; all the sounds of madness, or at least of sanity that was coming apart at the seams.

  "Well?" She didn't mean to sound so angry, but she was unable to hold it back. Eddie, she felt, was wasting her time. She had better things she could've spent that two grand on. She unfolded her arms, letting them hang, her hands making tight little fists at her sides.

  "For fuck's sake, can't you see? You coppers… how the hell do you expect to solve anything when you can't even take the time to stop and look at your surroundings? Take another look at the fuckin' pictures." He was angry too; angry and frustrated, and, yes, even slightly disappointed. And there was a tone of sadness in his voice that she had not noticed until now.

  Sarah looked again at the walls, puzzled yet eager to discover what Eddie was talking about, what he so desperately wanted her to see. Most of the men depicted in the drawings had beards or stubble, and they all sported dark rings around their eyes. Even in these idealised pictures, the men (no women: just men) looked tired, worn out and drained by the harshness of their lives. Then, finally, she saw it. She felt like an idiot for not noticing it at once, but it wasn't something she would have expected, not here, in this place.

  One of the drawings was of her father.

  Stern and unmoving, he stared down at her from the wall, his eyes blazing like embers. Even when he was happy he had looked aggrieved. It had held him back, that inability to express anything other than an inner rage. His superiors held him in awe, his peers suspected he was always on the edge of a burnout, and everyone else was afraid of him. His family feared him most of all.

  "Oh, shit. It's him. What the hell's he doing up there?"

  "Well done." Eddie stood and took a step away from the bench, then stopped, as if he was uncertain what to do now that he was on his feet. "Congratulations, you can now call yourself a detective. Have a badge." Beneath the humour, there was a thinly disguised note of bitterness, even contempt.

  He laughed again, but this time the sadness was held at bay – or perhaps she had imagined it after all.

  Eddie walked over to her, moving slowly, with tiny steps. "He was a hero to a lot of people, you know. If you think you can change that, I'd think again. Nobody wants to hear about him doing anything but solving crimes, giving money to his pet charities, and maybe fronting a few sex and poker parties. People like their heroes tarnished. It makes them more believable. What they don't like is to have their heroes ruined."

  Sarah turned to face Eddie, her shoulders sagging. She felt weak, almost ready to give up. "Like I said before, I have no intention of dragging anybody's name through the mud. I don't want to damage his reputation – this is just for me, for my own piece of mind. I feel like I'm going mad, and I need to find out why. I want to
know
, damn it!" Her strength returned as she spat out those final words, and she clung to her rage as if it might help her continue her search.

  Eddie nodded. Then he turned back to face the room, slipping his hands into his trouser pockets. There was the quiet jingle of loose change, the music of a man's meagre possessions.

  When Sarah looked back at the drawing of her father, he was wearing a white cowl over his head. His shoulders were draped in black. His eyes were hidden. She blinked, and then she saw his face again, uncovered. The hood was no longer in place. She could have sworn that this time he was smiling.

  "Come here," Eddie moved back towards the bench he'd only just vacated. He moved quicker now, as if he were nervy and on edge. "Sit with me for a while. I think we understand each other now."

  Sarah followed him and sat down. The bench was cold and hard; the cold seeped through the seat of her trousers and into the meat of her buttocks. She wriggled her backside on the concrete, trying to get comfortable. "Yes. Yes, I think we do, Eddie. All I want is a little truth, you know. No more lies. No more bullshit. Just some honesty, so I can put that bastard and what he did behind me."

  Eddie was staring into her eyes. His face was open and appealing; in that moment he looked kind and generous, as if he really cared. "A little truth," he said, mulling over her words.

  "He used to hurt me, Eddie. He cut me – slashed my legs to stop himself from doing other things, sex stuff. And he beat and raped my mother. Now you tell me that he abducted and kicked the crap out of criminals, and maybe even killed one of them? Can you appreciate why I need to know –
what
I need to know? He was my father. What if… what if, like you said back there, the apple doesn't fall far from the tree?" She lowered her head. She had the impression that Eddie was reaching out to her, his hand hovering close to her head. Then she felt the hand move quickly away, as if he had relented and dropped it into his lap.