DS Hutton Box Set

by Douglas Lindsay

  Jesus. The drive's only two minutes. We won't even get as far as Disease of Conceit, although just the thought of it starts it off in my head, like a knife slamming through my brain, jabbing into my head, slashing and stabbing. How dare you think everything was going to be all right, you fucking bell-end?

  There's still that little glimmer, the voice that says, Hey, Sergeant, chill out, dude. (Yeah, the little voice that doesn't exist is as American as Morrow.) Relax, man. You know her. You know she's got nothing to do with this. In all likelihood this is either someone next door using her router, or it'll be her husband, and in that case the guy is either going to get murdered, or you guys'll get him for murder, and then she's all yours.

  Along Main Street, the rain hammering down. Going to get soaked walking from the car to the hall, even if we manage to park five yards away. A few cars dotted around when we arrive. We park about fifteen yards away. Taylor cuts the engine, doesn't immediately get out. Watches the rain.

  'Guess we're about to get the answer to one of modern life's great mysteries,' he says.

  Slowly pulled from the pit, I turn and look.

  'What kind of person goes to Bible study group?'

  He says it grimly, but it was supposed to get a reaction. I just stare at him. Can feel myself shutting down. I know how it works. I need to withdraw, retreat to the crappy equilibrium that counts for ordinary in my head, and then normal service can be resumed.

  'Having a bad day?' he says.

  Shouldn't let them notice.

  'Sorry, just distracted,' I say, finally engaging. 'Come on, let's go and meet the freaks.'

  I know she's not going to be here. I can feel her lack of presence.

  I get out of the car, step into the deluge. Stop for a moment, feeling the full force of the downpour, and then follow Taylor as he runs to the doorway.

  'Fuck,' he mutters as he stands in the small awning, opening the door. We both shake ourselves like dogs, and then walk inside. Immediate warmth. A small entrance hall.

  Voices from behind a closed door straight ahead. Taylor gives himself another shake then steps forward, opens the door and we walk in, dripping water as we go.

  There are seven people sitting in chairs in a small circle. We enter as one woman is saying, '...but you can't get the eggs...'

  She stops talking. They all turn. Around the seven of them we get a range of looks from disappointment to curiosity to annoyance.

  'We're looking for Mrs Stewart,' I say.

  'Who are you?' says a middle-aged guy, getting to his feet. The words the fuck are missing from the middle of the sentence, but he nailed the tone.

  I just think, fuck you, dickhead, but don't say anything. I've said my few words, and now Taylor can take over, as usual.

  'DCI Taylor, DS Hutton,' says Taylor, stepping past me, ID in hand. 'This is the study group that Mrs Stewart runs?'

  There are a couple of nods. The guy stands there for a moment or two, no doubt wondering whether he should call a lawyer, or maybe the bastard is a lawyer and is wondering how far to try to push us, so that he's got more to go on when he takes us to court for having the utter balls to barge soaking wet into the middle of their precious Bible study group.

  Coppers Disrupt Bible Study In New Outrage! God Seriously Fucked Off!

  Eventually he lowers himself into his seat, but you can see he's doing it in a way that implies he's doing us a favour by giving us the floor.

  'We're still waiting for her,' says one of the middle-aged women in the middle. The one in a blue cardigan.

  'What time is she supposed to be here?'

  Three of them check their watches.

  'Forty-five minutes ago.'

  Taylor looks around the room, contemptuously almost, as though it's the fault of these people that she's not here.

  'Have any of you heard from her? Did you expect her not to be here?'

  A few head shakes. No one says anything.

  'Bollocks,' mutters Taylor, which will probably offend a few of this brigade, but none of them are speaking. They are all, it would appear, rightly intimidated by having the fuzz barge in on them.

  'Is anything the matter?' asks one of the women.

  'We can give you her phone number, although we've tried it and there's no answer,' says another.

  'Tony, her husband, he usually comes too, but he's away this week. Travelling.'

  'Where?' asks Taylor.

  A few blank faces. Keep my mouth shut. Finally the only other bloke there says, 'Bishkek,' without looking at us.

  Taylor looks around the small, reluctant collective.

  'We do need to find Mrs Stewart. Does anyone have any other information that could help us?'

  Blank Faces 'R' Us. Taylor gives them a few seconds, then nods a grudging acknowledgement, turns and leaves. I don't look at them, but feel their eyes on my back as I leave too. Close the door behind us, stand briefly in the small entrance hall looking out at the rain.

  'Bishkek?' says Taylor eventually. 'Is that a real place?'

  'Kyrgyzstan,' I say.

  He looks at me in that way of his, the one that seems surprised that I might actually know something other than how many times Bob's sung Workingman's Blues in concert.

  'Huh,' he says. 'Come on. We better go back to their house, and if there's no one in...'

  He clicks the car door open from the hall, takes a moment, and then opens the door on the deluge.

  STANDING ON THE DOORSTEP, the house still in darkness. Lights on the houses all around. A regular November evening. Not raining up here, on the other side of town. Taylor's rung the doorbell twice, but we know there's no one there. Or if there is... well, trying not to think about that. Trying to keep my head empty. Not clear and focussed, there's so little chance of that. Just empty. If I could shut the thing down entirely, then I would.

  That will be for later. And not much later. Already nearly eight. Go home. Get drunk. Fall asleep.

  Taylor glances over his shoulder, looks up and down the street. No one around.

  'Look, we'll go round the back,' he says. 'Don't want to get anyone around here peeing in their pants.'

  And back doors are always easier to open.

  Round the side of the house, no gate. There's a modern conservatory, but next to it is the old wooden door, old-fashioned window split into small frames beside it. It's overlooked by the house next door, but there are no lights on in any of the windows. We should be able to go about our business without anyone calling the police on us.

  'Sergeant,' he says.

  I don't even give him the usual eye-rolling routine. Pick up a small stone from the edge of the garden. If there's no key in the lock, then this is a waste of time, but people are careless. Better to try this first than put your shoulder out senselessly banging into solid wood.

  I stand waiting for a moment, and then as a car goes past the road at the front of the house, I quickly knock the glass and the small window breaks. Smooth out the edges as well as I can, hand through, fumble about at the lock at the back of the door, fingers on the key, and we're in.

  Push open the door. It goes an inch and then jars against the chain that's been placed across it.

  'Fuck.'

  'That's what your shoulder's for,' says Taylor.

  Half a minute later we're walking to the kitchen from the small vestibule at the rear of the house. Lights on. Look around the kitchen. An empty coffee mug beside the sink, the cafetière over by the kettle. Lots of gadgets, lots of utensils in modern, chic colours. Doesn't smell like anything's been cooked in here recently. Of course, she ate takeaway Thai last night.

  Neither of us bothers shouting. Why are we here, after all? The husband is abroad, probably on a plane by now. The wife? She's not where she's supposed to be. She's not answering her phone, she's not answering her door. Either she's taken to bed because she's ill – although even then, presumably, she would have called someone from the Bible study group to let them know – or there's the other thin
g.

  The other thing is what we're not talking about.

  'Tell me about the fourth beast,' says Taylor.

  He walks out into the hall, turns on the light.

  'What?'

  'We've had the wings and the ribs in the mouth, and the more wings, albeit that was a botch-job... What was the principal feature of the fourth beast?'

  Stairs on our left, two doors on the right. He opens the first one, turns the light on. We look in. The dining room. Very elegantly furnished, minimalist, but not bare. A dining table with space for six. Modern art on the wall.

  I think about the fourth beast. The very thought of it, of what we might find, has my stomach careering up into my mouth.

  God, stop it. It's not that. It won't be that! She's not dead, for God's sake. There are all sorts of reasons why someone doesn't answer their phone. There are all sorts of reasons why people fall off the grid for a few hours. They don't need to have been murdered for it to happen. They don't need to have been turned into the fourth beast...

  I don't answer. Can't talk. He glances at me, shakes his head at my silence, and then opens the door to the front sitting room, turning on the light. The room where I spoke to Philo Stewart for the second time. The room where we laughed over flapjacks.

  She's sitting on the same sofa in the same position as when I spoke to her in here previously. Resting back, her body upright. As we walk in we're slightly behind her, but there's no question of her being alive, no question that she's fallen asleep, no chance that we can assume everything's all right.

  What's been done to her is obvious from the second we enter.

  34

  What was it I was thinking when I slept with Philo Stewart last night? That it was a little bit wrong, because I was getting involved with someone on the periphery of the investigation. The periphery, Sergeant? This is what you call the periphery? That is some tight-ass, incredibly focussed investigation, if that's the periphery.

  1.15 a.m. Standing with Taylor and Balingol over the cadaver. She's naked. The ten small spikes banged into her head to mimic the ten horns of the fourth beast, have been removed. Her hair is a tangled mat of blood. There are no other noticeable wounds or injuries.

  I feel sick. I want to run away, go back to my place and drink vodka from the bottle. I want to be bent over the toilet, puking up. I want to puke up everything. The vodka, what's left of the breakfast she made me eighteen hours ago, I want to puke up my feelings and the self-hatred and the guilt and the fear. I want to vomit and go on vomiting until every part of me is in the toilet and can be flushed away.

  'Same dose of sleeping tablets used to sedate her and then, well, impossible to tell, but it could have been the first spike hammered into her head that killed her. Who knows? Pretty sure it wouldn't have been the tenth. Somewhere in between.'

  'No attempt to fake suicide this time,' said Taylor.

  'Obviously not.'

  'Could be that the killer knew the game was up after they were interrupted the last time.'

  'Not for me to say,' says Balingol.

  Taylor turns to me.

  'You're the Daniel expert. Any thoughts?'

  I don't look at him. Still staring at the pale, cold face on the slab.

  'Maybe you're right,' I manage to say, every word a struggle. 'It could be his original intention was to fake suicide and place some sort of headgear on her, something to indicate ten horns. Then when he was rumbled before, he just thought... this,' and I indicate the matted hair and the dried-in blood.

  'Anything else?'

  'She'd had sex in the last twenty-four hours,' says Balingol. 'Seems that everyone I see on this damned slab has had sex in the last twenty-four hours. There's all this bloody sex going on... if I ever end up on this damned slab, the pathologist is going to think I'm a virgin, it's been so long.'

  Taylor gives him a glance – no one wants to think about Balingol's sex life – and then turns to me.

  'Interesting. The husband's away, and she gets to play. Any ideas?'

  I don't need to worry about my face giving anything away. I'd already known. Balingol never fails to find out when someone's been having sex. There was no shock when that was mentioned, no, 'holy fuck, man, I've been exposed.'

  He's already said that time of death was around midday, an hour either side. That means I had sex with someone the night before they died, and breakfast with them about five hours before they were killed.

  I need to tell Taylor. I should have told him already. There's not a good time to do it. There's not going to be a moment when it will be all right, no moment when Taylor will say, 'Gee, thanks, Sergeant, that's valuable information that we can feed into the investigation going forward.'

  I just need to get it out there, but I know what's going to happen. My jacket's been on shaky enough a peg for some time now, one shitstorm of hopelessness after another, on and on, with me completely incapable of getting off the rollercoaster.

  Rollercoaster? Seriously? Rollercoasters also go up. Where's the up been with me for the last three years? The last twenty years?

  I need to tell him. Not in front of Balingol, but as soon as we walk out the room.

  Shake my head.

  'We just talked about the church,' I say.

  'What was her angle?'

  'That it was like Syria.'

  Balingol barks out a laugh.

  'She wasn't far fucking wrong, was she?' says Taylor.

  Fuck. As soon as we get out the door.

  'Any clues to the age of the guy?'

  'Not yet. I'll let you know in the morning.'

  Taylor nods, taps Balingol on the shoulder.

  'Thanks, Bill.

  Balingol grunts. Taylor turns away and I follow.

  This is it. Career down the toilet. You know, sure, I didn't have anything to do with it. I didn't kill her. I wasn't to fucking know, was I? But I couldn't just fucking wait, could I? And coming on top of everything else that I've been piling up for the last year.

  Jesus.

  The door opens. Connor. Looking like I feel. Oh, the poor bastard. Must have so many of his friends upset at him.

  'Dan,' he says.

  'Just heading back to the station,' says Taylor.

  'Stay and talk me through it,' says Connor.

  'Of course.'

  We turn back. My spirits have slumped so far into the pit, that the presence of Superintendent Connor makes no difference to them. They couldn't go any lower anyway.

  'Go home, Tom,' says Taylor.

  'No, it's OK. I'll speak to you after.'

  Taylor looks at his watch.

  'We're going to be a while,' says Connor. 'Go home, Sergeant. It's an order. You look terrible.'

  35

  Me and Grace Kelly. One of us dead, one of us might as well be.

  What's it going to be? Tomorrow morning, I get in there and I tell Taylor that I fucked the murder victim. That I was in love with the murder victim. Do I tell him that?

  I thought I might come home and tip the vodka down my throat, straight from the bottle. Glug vodka until I threw up and passed out. Instead I got home, feeling unbelievably tired, but agitated with it, so that I knew there was no point in falling into bed. Opened the vodka, got a glass, got some ice, got the tonic, got a bag of crisps. Poured a large one. Drank it while I was still standing in the kitchen. Poured another, went through to the sitting room, slumped into my usual seat in front of the TV. Didn't turn the TV on.

  An hour later. Still sitting here. The ice has long since melted, the vodka and the tonic have flowed in and then back out the glass. The crisps are long gone. That was dinner. Crisps and vodka. Bob playing on the CD player. Oh Mercy on a loop. All those slow songs dredged in warm, sticky mud. Sucking me in, drawing me down to their level.

  The small red light is flashing on the phone. There's a message, but I don't want to hear it. I don't want to listen to the sound of anyone's voice. No voices, no conversation. Just the sound of Bob crawling through my
veins.

  So, what now, Slim? Ready for bed yet?

  I don't think so. I don't want to go to bed. If I lie there, I'll be lying where she was. The bed might still smell of her. And she's dead.

  Drain the glass. Bitterness washes through me.

  Is that what we want, the tragic poets of the world like me?

  Did you just call yourself a tragic poet?

  Hopeless, doomed love. So much better than that other thing, where you get to move in with the person you fall for, and everything goes smoothly, so that eventually, with nothing in the way, it grows stale and old and tired.

  I can see her smiling at me from that table. Just over there. The table just behind me. Maybe if I look round, she'll be there now. Perhaps I can imagine her there forever. Sitting at that table as I looked over my shoulder on the way out the door. What was the last thing she said?

  Of course.

  That was it. Her final words to me. Of course. Hardly eternally romantic. Doesn't matter. The thought of her, the sound of her voice, her body beneath mine, the smile across the breakfast table, it's all there and the wave of grief floods over me, breaking down the walls and I bend double, face crumpled, and Bob's singing Most Of The Time, and oh fuck, he wasn't singing about someone who was dead, but he might as well have been, and I can see her and feel her and touch her and her body is next to mine, and that agonising, tortuous pain that comes with grief, the one that makes you think you can't possibly bear to be alive for even another fucking second, the one that fills your head and rips out your heart and tears you to bits and spits in your face and crushes you, it fucking crushes you, consumes you, pummels you so badly that you can barely breathe, that pain is squeezing me, crushing me into a tiny, helpless black ball, one that is nothing but pain, and I can't think of the next morning, or the next minute, and I fall forward off the chair onto my knees, lift the bottle and now I'm tipping the fucking thing into my mouth, pouring it so that it's glugging out, as much dripping down my face as is getting in my mouth, come on you fucking piece-of-fucking-shit drink, take it away, take away the fucking pain.