Personal

by S Thomas Thompson

  1

  Augustine reached out to take Christine in his arms. He felt like he had a duty to explain to her, but it was more than that. He felt like he had a duty to protect her. To protect all of the people in his city. The murders didn’t just affect the person who was killed. Their friends had to cope with the grief. Their family had to cope with a massive hole in their life. The person who finds the body has to deal with that vision. The rest of the city have to deal with feeling less safe in their own home. They make decisions that they don’t go out at night, or that they cut back their life in some way. Augustine had a duty to all of the people in his city to catch this monster and make sure that they could go back to their normal life. He sighed as he held Christine in his arms. The trip to the hospital and the attention of the doctors was all just in case. He had already died in the dressing room and there was no real chance of him ever coming back. Augustine knew that from the way that the eyes looked. Although he checked the pulse to make sure, the eyes gave it all away. He had seen so many pairs of eyes on people that had passed away that he knew what they looked like. Show him a pair of eyes and Augustine Boyle could tell you whether that person was alive or dead. If he had found the body on his own, then Augustine wouldn’t have made a great deal of effort to try to get him back. Because he clearly meant so much to Christine, he made every effort to make it look like he was doing something. She had a feeling that Betty was trying to say goodbye. But it was never meant to be like this.

  They walked inside and he got two cups of tea from the vending machine. He already knew they would taste like shit but they both needed a hot drink. The teas and coffees in the vending machine weren’t drunk for their quality, more the fact that they were there. In times of crisis, people reached for a hot drink. It is comfort blanket that makes us all feel better about the world and the worries we face in it. Augustine and Christine sat in the relative’s room together. He had been overwhelmed by the evening that had gone before in so many ways that it was difficult for him to take stock. From the smell of his date, to the visual bombardment of the theatre right through to finding another victim of the serial killer. The alcohol, the neon pink lights, the emotion and the blood on his shirt all added up to a night he would never forget. Christine sipped the tea like it was medicine. The taste obviously appalled her, but she took the medicine as if it would do her some good. The two -ine’s sat at the end of the night, by now the early hours of the morning, next to each other having a drink. Just like it all began. What went in between was something that both wanted to avenge.

  2

  “Excuse me…Excuse me. Are you OK?”

  He was woken by someone who shook him gently and spoke in the softest tone. It wasn’t the best way to wake someone up but as he was found in a chair where he wasn’t expected the person who discovered him wasn’t entirely sure what he was doing there. He had taken some time the night before to clean up. As much as this was a place of sanctuary and no questions asked, he didn’t want to raise suspicions. He didn’t visit the place all that regularly but he was bound to know someone if he stayed there for long enough. That was just the way it was in this community. He had washed off the blood from his arm and the little that had got onto the sleeve of his hoodie. There wasn’t much, but it would have been enough to get tongues wagging. This was a place he had chosen to be a safe haven. He didn’t want to spoil that by causing people to wonder why he was there. The jacket was on the back of his chair and was pretty much dry by that point. He knew that he could leave at a moment’s notice and just disappear. But first he wanted to let the passage of time pass. He wanted to be in this safe place and work out whether his home was somewhere he could ever go again. It would take at least a day for him to catch the news, speak to a few people and see if they were on to him. The next day at least would be spent in this place. He looked around. It was a place that he hadn’t really been in many times before but it was still familiar. He knew what he could expect in a place like this. He knew that he could sit there, talk to people and pass the time of day. He wouldn’t be asked to leave and would be provided with food and water if he needed it. He hadn’t eaten much over the last few weeks. He had been in training to operate effectively without the requirement that he ate three meals a day. The research he had done on the internet gave him plenty of examples of people who could survive for extended periods of time in conditions that were alien to modern day humans. Hunger was just one of these. He didn’t crave food and drink in the same way that the rest of society did. He just wanted to survive. He had no need for anything other than the replacement of the calories he had burned off. Nothing more.

  “Are you OK?”

  The voice was still there, stood a few feet away. He opened his eyes fully and sat up from the chair. He had also adapted to sleep in any conditions, so the discomfort of a chair that would stop most from getting a decent rest was no obstacle to him. The only thing that interrupted his sleep was the face of the detective that he couldn’t shake out of his mind. He was desperate to know what he was doing there, but his haste to prove something had already nearly ended in disaster once, so he told himself that patience was the key. He knew the voice was about to start again. He could feel the man stood only a few feet away start to prepare himself to speak again. He couldn’t bear the same question to be asked again, so he spoke before the voice could ask if he was OK.

  “I’m fine, thank you. I just needed some rest. I knew I would be welcome here,” he said to explain his presence and prompt for some patience. The voice smiled at him and spoke gently. It was so low that a passing bus drowned out most of what he said. He wondered whether there would be any point in asking him to repeat what he had just said. He knew the drill. He would be told that he was welcome to stay as long as he liked. He would be offered fresh clothes and something to eat and drink. He would be told that he could talk if he wanted to. He wanted none of these in reality, but also didn’t want to raise any suspicions. So, he said, “thank you,” and laid his head back down on the seat. It would be some time before there were more than the odd one or two bodies in the room and he wanted to make the most of the quiet time.

  He nodded off again and tried to look beyond the face of the detective that he had bumped into in that corridor. He wondered if the detective had the same visions in his sleep. He wondered if the detective was thinking about him right now. It wasn’t sleep that he got, but he felt rested with his eyes closed in the relative quiet of that room. He thought again about the detective. He wondered what stopped him from getting to sleep.

  3

  Augustine Boyle sat looking at the wall in his bedroom. He had tried to get some sleep after making sure Christine was safely home, but it just wouldn’t come. He was sure that he had been close to the killer that evening. He was now sure that the man who brushed past him in the corridor was that killer, but the fact that he had almost passed out had stopped Augustine from chasing him down. The alcohol, the heat of the building, the exertions to open the dressing room door and the sight of the blood had all worked together to make Augustine feel dizzy. It had come over him all at once, so for a few fleeting seconds both him and his date thought that he might have been stabbed by the fleeing assassin. Thankfully that wasn’t the case. The blood on his shirt was nothing more than a stain left by the killer. A stain that would probably never come out. A stain that Augustine wasn’t sure he wanted to erase. The blood on his shirt was visible in the early morning light on the hanger that was sat across the top of his bedroom door. He looked at it and thought that the shirt should go with him all the time so that he could be constantly reminded of how he felt when he was holding Christine at the hospital earlier that morning. He wanted to bottle that feeling and use it to lift him when he felt down. Maybe if he took a phot
o of it on his phone, then it would always be a few clicks away. Maybe.

  Augustine wasn’t due in the office that day. He had planned his date around the fact he was due a day off and didn’t have to get up the next morning. But he was awake, thinking about nothing but the killer and ready to make a difference. He knew the day off wouldn’t happen.

  Augustine set about getting ready for the day. He stepped into the shower before it had warmed up and felt that the cold gave him a burst of energy. He finished the shower by turning down the dial and rinsing with more chilly water. It wasn’t something he had done before, but it gave him a spring in his step that he didn’t think possible after the night he had been through. He walked to the kitchen and looked through cupboards to see what there might be. The erratic hours of the shifts he worked plus the number of times he was called out in the middle of the night meant that he rarely ate breakfast at home. He knew that he should, but it just didn’t really happen with any regularity. He found some cereal in the cupboard next to the oven and ate it dry because the only thing that resembled milk in the fridge was curdled. He remembered why he didn’t eat breakfast at home. Because there was nothing there to eat.

  All the while he was eating, the radio was on. The local radio reported that the performer Betty Black had been found killed in his dressing room after his show last night. Augustine listened with one ear to hear if they had any information that he had told the rest of his team to keep quiet. They said very little in terms of detail. Augustine was happy that Gary was on holiday that week and hadn’t been there to snoop around and brief his friends in the media. Augustine was sure this was where they got a lot of their information from. But not this time.

  He finished off what he had cobbled together for breakfast and then went back to the bathroom to clean his teeth and have a shave. Then he stumbled back into his bedroom to get dressed for the day ahead. Augustine preferred it when he was on the beat. Back then he didn’t have to think about what he had to wear. He was just provided with a uniform and expected to wear it. Now he had to make his own decisions. His bosses told him that he needed to be smart, but there was no need for a suit. Without a woman in his life to dress him, Augustine agonised over what message he might be sending out with any given choice of outfit. This got even worse as he got older. He felt as though he was still wearing the clothes that he bought around twenty years earlier. They still fit him, on the whole, and they didn’t show any signs of wear, so he saw no reason to replace them. Except the fact that he now felt like a forty-something wearing the clothes of a twenty-something. Maybe it was time for a change, he thought as he looked in the mirror. Maybe it was time to buy some new clothes.

  Augustine jumped into his car and set off on the familiar route to work. He had driven this same journey at all times of the day and night and in all weather conditions. It was close to rush hour so it took him far longer than he wanted to get to work. With the energy given to him by the cold shower, he wanted to get in to the station, talk to people, hope they absorbed some of his enthusiasm and then get down to work. But the frustration of sitting in the car for longer than he wanted was starting to play on his nerves. Augustine put the radio on. He moved away from the AM stations that he usually listened to. There was going to be too much on there about the murder he so nearly witnessed the night before. Instead he went for the music stations on the FM dial. It was warm so he wound the window down and tried to balance the air outside with the noise that came with it. The traffic was fighting with the music. It wasn’t until he came to a stop at the front of a queue of traffic at some lights that he was able to make out the words in the songs that were playing. Some kids crossed the roads at the lights and listened in to the music as it was playing. At that point, Augustine felt older than ever. He felt like an imposter. It was a small sports car, with his twenty-year-old clothes and he was listening to pop music. He wound the window back up and cranked up the air conditioning. He hated to spend money on aircon when he could just wind down the window but he couldn’t hide his embarrassment in any other way. Augustine wondered what other men of his age dressed in, what other men of his age listened to and what other men of his age drove around in. The lights went green and he stepped on the accelerator. He wasn’t far from the station. He would have bigger things to worry about there.

  4

  “Morning boss. What are you doing here?” was the first thing he heard when he walked through the door. It was Lou’s way of greeting him. Lou wasn’t at the theatre overnight, unlike the rest of the team. He had been working late anyway to help out with the investigation into the letters sent to the newspaper. He wanted to speak to the editors that had received the letters and they all worked late shifts to ensure that the paper got the latest news even in the early editions. Lou stayed around to speak to all that had seen the letters. It wasn’t more than a matter of routine but he took every part of his job seriously. Whatever task he was given, Lou did it by the letter. He had finished around the same time Augustine was leaving the theatre armed with a set of statements that might come in handy if they ever caught the person who executed the killings, and if he was also the person who wrote this abuse.

  Lou had seen a great deal during his years in the force. He started out dealing with the smallest crimes and keeping the streets safe. Community policing it is referred to now. But now he didn’t spend much time at all on the streets – he didn’t know many police officers that did. Their role was to decide which crimes needed their attention. The murder would always see more resources than the theft, that hadn’t changed since his day, but now there were so many crimes that were just left. People reported a burglary because they needed a crime number to claim on the insurance, not because they thought that any amount of resources would be put into catching and punishing the person who committed the crime. But Lou carried out his duties in the most diligent fashion. Everything deserved his full attention if he was asked to investigate. If that meant he worked several hours unpaid, then so be it. That was just the way it was. The fact that he was at the station before Augustine was testament to his dedication. Most others would have taken the hours back in the form of a lie-in the next day. Not Lou. He had a murderer to catch.

  “Morning Lou. I guess you’ve heard?” Augustine asked in a weary tone. He still had the energy flowing through his veins but he didn’t want to use it all on the first conversation. He thought his might be a long day.

  “Yeah. You okay?”

  “I think so. I’m too tired to tell really,” Augustine pretended.

  “The rest of them are here, and Gary is due back this afternoon. Shall we have the meeting then?”

  “No. Let’s all sit down together now. I can fill Gary in later.”

  Lou spoke to all of the others one by one and arranged that they all meet around fifteen minutes later. Augustine was ready to get the team going again and they all wanted to know what had happened at the theatre. The first thing they wanted to know was what was Augustine Boyle doing at the scene of the murder, but each was willing to put that to one side and listen to their boss tell about the encounter he had with the killer. He wasn’t going to disappoint.

  After the meeting, they were all energised and ready to go. The fact that Augustine was so close to the killer, even though it was by chance, gave them all hope. He was out there and active. He wasn’t the ghost that they all thought he might have been after leaving no trace at the other scenes. If they upped their presence, got out and about then they too had the same chance that Augustine had of bumping into the killer. The letters sent to the newspaper looked more and more like they were connected to the killings. This victim had the letter ‘A’ on his chest which linked to the ranting letters claiming that homosexuality was ‘Amoral’ and linking this victim to the prostitute they had found in the alleyway at the start of the investigation. It followed that the code being used was the same one for all the four crimes that they were linking together. Although there were no more murders that had the same le
tter left on the chest of the victim, Lou was looking back through murders for the last 5 years to see if there could be a link established. Maybe the killer had grown tired of killing and the link between his victims being ignored or not understood by the police. He could have expected the police to make the links, but when they didn’t the killer gave them prompts in the form of these letters. Maybe he had only changed recently to gain the publicity he craved.

  The CCTV was down to Electra. Based on the way that the killer had managed to evade CCTV images for the last killings, the whole group didn’t leave much hope of finding the murderer by this method. But they went through the meticulous parts of the job as though they would find what they were looking for. The reports were back from the forensic team and once again there was little to go on. Augustine wondered how he did it. The guy was killing people on a regular basis and leaving no clues. He even bumped into the killer and had nothing to go on. The hood on his clothing as pulled so low that he didn’t get any view of his face at all. Christine’s statement said exactly the same thing.

  Ash was sent out to the theatre to speak to all of the workers there. Augustine had spoken briefly to some of them the night before, but they wanted full statements and a longer conversation. Ash was always the right man to do this kind of work. He was enthusiastic and patient, so he could sit there all day and listen to the same story. He was skilled enough to spot the subtle differences in what people were telling him. He knew which strings to pull on that gave him more to go on and which strings would just pull and pull with nothing at the end. Augustine admired Ash for the way he went about this part of the job. All Augustine wanted to do was ask the glory questions. He wanted to know what other person knew. He didn’t have the time or the patience to draw it out of them slowly. Ash was the opposite. He could play all the games that people wanted to play when being questioned by a police officer or detective. He could patiently let them have their little piece of spotlight before pulling the rug out from under their feet. If there was anything to learn from the people at the theatre, then Ash would bring this back to the investigation.