by Emmy Ellis
Oliver babbled, leading him inside to the kitchen, spewing the last few minutes out into the air. “I can’t believe he bloody killed himself.”
“A lot of them do.” Langham sat at the table. “They can’t handle prison, yet they can handle killing people.”
Oliver leant against the worktop. “It doesn’t make sense. If you’ve got the guts to kill, why would prison worry you?”
“Because they can’t kill anymore. For most of them, it’s in their blood.”
“But Alex was made to kill. The drugs.”
“I reckon, with him, he’d have killed eventually anyway. He wasn’t your average human, was he?”
“No.” Oliver sighed. “You going to call Sasha’s death in?”
Langham nodded and grabbed his phone. He dialled, speaking quickly, his words tripping over one another as he gave the location of the man who had killed Sasha and where they could find her body. He ended the call. “You want to come to the bypass with me?”
“Yes.”
“Get dressed then. After we’ve rounded him up, we need to go back to the station. Someone will be alerting the Spanish police about Gideon Davis, but I’ve got a shitload of interviewing to do—child suspects coming out of my arse—and too many things to get sorted. Let’s wrap this bloody thing up. It feels like it’s been going on for days.”
* * * *
In the murky light that was predawn, Langham drew the car up to the kerb behind a string of police cars. Coppers were strategically placed along the top of the bypass and at either end of the square tunnel below. Had they been instructed to wait for Langham before they acted, or had another detective or senior officer gone down the muddy incline and discovered the killer there? Maybe the man licking blood from his hands had drawn a weapon, holding up his arrest.
Oliver followed Langham to a sergeant standing on the rise and asked, “He been arrested?”
“No. He’s asleep. Thought we’d better wait for you. Knew you were coming, see.”
“Right,” Langham said.
They walked away from the sergeant and down the slope.
Oliver said, “Maybe they thought, because this is supposedly the last drugged-up killer out there, you’d want to be the one who brought him in.”
Langham slipped on a particularly wet sheet of mud and nearly went down on his arse. “Yeah,” he said over his shoulder. “But fucking hell, what if I don’t want to be the one?”
“It’s your job to be the one.” Oliver nearly slipped on the same patch even though he’d braced himself not to. “Like it appears to be my job to listen to the dead. Not what I’d have chosen, but there you go.”
They came to a stop on a path strewn with tiny pebbles, loose dirt, and a smattering of rubbish. A supermarket receipt fluttered by, the long trail of paper undulating, an eel. Someone either had a big fucking family to feed or had bought food for a party. The paper seemed to go on forever, then finally fucked off and disappeared inside the tunnel.
Oliver stared into it, stomach rolling. Beneath there, in the darkness and shadows, was a man fast asleep—asleep after butchering an innocent woman.
How do you kip after something like that? How do you live with yourself?
Langham walked ahead, approaching the tunnel on near-silent feet. He stopped to whisper to a pair of officers situated to the left and out of sight of anyone inside, nodded, then turned to face Oliver. “Stay there.”
The darkness scoffed Langham and the other two officers whole, and Oliver could only hope it didn’t chew them up and spit them right back out again. He didn’t have to wait long. Langham’s echoic voice emanated from the pitch a few seconds after a torch blared to life, the beam illuminating what looked like a heap of clothing on the ground.
“Asleep? A-fucking-sleep? Who the hell checked this guy? It’s obvious he’s sodding well dead!”
Without waiting for permission, Oliver sped into the tunnel, coming abreast of the three standing men. He stared at the corpse, its face frozen in an expression of innocence, as though the blood covering his skin was just makeup, that it didn’t belong to Sasha Morrison. Had the man, a vagrant by the look of him, been given the drugs on the street then told where he needed to go when the urge to kill took over him?
Bloody hell…
* * * *
Something Oliver had learnt early on in life was, despite wanting something so bad and praying for it, you sometimes never got it—you know, peace, a quiet life. Langham’s request to have him as an aide was accepted. Oliver had no formal police training, didn’t get hunches or have any desire to actually be a copper—it wasn’t in his blood, wasn’t the thing that shoved him out of bed in the morning, ready to wade through another case, another day full of sick people with no regard for others, catching them and making sure they had a stint behind bars. Him going around with Langham more often was daunting, so the fact that the dead hadn’t contacted him lately was a Godsend—it meant he hadn’t been up close and personal with the harsh side of policing since Sugar Strands.
After that case had finally ended, Gideon Davis apprehended after being watched, after painstaking investigations to find evidence that had actually led the authorities to conclude he was the mastermind behind it, Oliver had been knackered beyond description.
With his sleep no longer interrupted by death’s call, he spent his days well-rested and alert. He left his old job, wanting something new to do, and started a part-time position as an editor’s assistant for the local rag—tea-making boy, more like—his boss agreeing that if Oliver was needed by the police in future, he could go on a moment’s notice and also on the proviso that he gave reporters inside information on any high-profile cases he worked on. He’d checked with Langham on that, and Langham had said he’d give Oliver as much information as he could without compromising the investigations. Oliver’s boss had been content with that.
So, all round, everything had worked out pretty well, although Oliver had a hard time keeping the images of the Sugar Strands case out of his head. Even though he’d told himself he didn’t need answers, he apparently did. His subconscious asked for them when he slept, and he woke in a sweat, streams of queries flapping through his mind, same as that supermarket receipt he’d seen. There were too many victims, that was it. Too many bodies had stacked up, all owing to an arsehole named Gideon Davis, who wasn’t spilling the beans on anything he’d done or why.
Before all this shit, Oliver had only had to deal with one dead body at a time—that of the spirit who contacted him—and that had been hard enough. If a dead person did manage to get a hold of him again in the future, he hoped it would be like it had always been. Just one.
He sat in the police station’s public waiting area, legs open, hands between his knees, gaze fixed firmly on the needs-a-bloody-good-wash linoleum. Langham would be finishing work soon—five minutes max he’d said about half an hour ago—and they had a table booked at Grisotto’s, some new Italian place in the city, where they’d catch up, stuff their guts, and enjoy a bevvy or two. He glanced up. Those behind the glass pane of the front desk milled about, some on phones, some with their heads bent over paperwork.
All he seemed good for nowadays was making tea with four sugars, filing old news stories, and listening to his boss waffle on about needing new and exciting leads, nudge-nudge, wink-wink, get the dead to speak to you, boy. Oliver sighed every time, explaining he couldn’t just summon the dead people whenever he bloody felt like it.
He felt lost without the dead. Yes, when they’d contacted him in the past it had sometimes been a bind, too much for him to handle, but their silence, their utter, deafening silence was worse. As though he was useless, had no purpose.
The swoosh of the door leading to the innards of the police station had Oliver turning his head. An officer swept by, seemingly oblivious to him sitting there.
A policeman behind the desk tapped on the glass partition. “Langham’s caught up in some last-minute things. Said he’ll meet you at yours in about an hour.”
On the walk home, he thought about the drugged kids, how they’d been reunited with their parents once they’d been given the all-clear by doctors and the police. None of them remembered who’d given them the drugs—none except Glenn Close, now living in a secure kids’ home, living a good life she should have had right from the start. She was young enough that the horrors could become a distant memory if enough happy times eclipsed the bad.
As he rounded the corner, a cat zipped out of a bush, streaking across his path with a glance over its shoulder. In his house, the scent of a good old British breakfast, stale now that hours had passed since it was cooked, welcomed him in. He walked down the short, no-room-to-swing-a-cat hallway, then into the living room, where he slumped onto the sofa, a beige velour thing that squeaked with every movement. He rested his head back and closed his eyes, wondering if a court date had been settled yet for Gideon Davis. For the first time, he wanted to follow up on the bad guy, visit the public gallery and see how things went after people had been caught.
He sat like that for a long time, opening his eyes when a knock rapped on the front door.
Langham held up a six-pack. “Sorry I’m late. Finished laying the groundwork for a new case that came in when I was meant to be leaving. Still want that grub?”
“Yep. Come on, let’s go and get pissed.”
Oliver needed that. A good old beer sesh before the next dead person spoke to him.
He had a feeling it wouldn’t be long before they did…
