Personal

by S Thomas Thompson

  “Augustine, I’m going to stay a little while longer,” Lou explained. He wanted to test a few theories and carry out some research. Also, he had nowhere else to go that appealed to him.

  “No, Lou. We all need a break from this. You’re coming with me. I need a drink and you could do with one too. No arguments,” Augustine countered before opening up to the rest of the group, “you are all welcome to join us.”

  A few mumbles went around the room. Nothing that was particularly enthusiastic, but also nothing that was negative either. Augustine waited by the door for two reasons. Firstly, he wanted to make sure they had all left and secondly, he wanted to see who was coming with him. It was the whole team. Augustine looked up at the poor-quality strip lighting that his team had to endure all day long. It flickered every now and again, but not that any of them noticed while working. The lack of quality light in the room was a concern for Augustine. He read a lot of architectural magazines out of personal interest and they all talked about the benefits of natural light. Even in the offices of Scandinavia, where the sun didn’t rise above the horizon, they had taken into account the need for natural light. Augustine couldn’t get his head around any point in time in the past where this wasn’t considered important. Obviously the 1960’s, when this particular police station was built didn’t feel the needs of the people on the inside.

  Even Gary had hit the floor during the day. They all thought they had some form of containment on the killer with the relatively recent nature of the crimes. But the possibility that this new body brought of the killer being active for several months and having hidden a body changed the way they had all been thinking. Up until that call to Sally, they had thought that killing significant (to him) figures in public places were the modus operandum and the body count was at 4. But now this could be any number and all the people of the city were potential targets. They all lined up by the door to go for a drink. Augustine told them all to leave their cars at the station. They would walk to the nearest pub and get a taxi home. With pressure on the team to provide a solution he couldn’t afford any scandals of drink-driving in his small but (mostly) dedicated bunch of people.

  They set off together across the road while there was still no sign of nightfall. Augustine looked up to the blue of the sky directly above and looked for the first sign of stars in the sky. It had been night when all of the previous murders had happened, as far as they could tell. He wondered where the killer was and when he would strike next. He also wondered how many bodies would visit him in his sleep that night. Then he looked down, through the orange brightness of the near horizon and through to the rest of the team walking in front of him. Augustine wanted a result in this case for them as much as him. He was the one that took on all the obscure cases with a small chance of success. It was his decision that led the rest of them to the low point they were feeling then. It was his responsibility to lead them from this to a success or two every now and again. Solving this case would be the biggest success any of them would have experienced in their career, including him. They turned right into the beer garden of the first pub they came across. Augustine took the orders and went to the bar with Gary. He was being unusually helpful and this made Augustine even more nervous. Like having children – when they are quiet is the time you should worry most about what they are up to. The two of them carried the drinks back to the rest of the team and they all took a long sip before any conversation began. Augustine could see this might be a long night for him.

  20

  Andy Lane stood in front of the door. In his early days in the police force, he had been taught that you should always knock on a door rather than ring the bell. Using a bell could leave you wondering. If you didn’t hear the bell, you might think that it wasn’t working, or it wasn’t very loud or it was only heard inside the house. This inserted a delay and prompted a repeat action. You might end up listening very close to the door to check out whether the bell sounded. There was no such ambiguity with a knock. You knew that you have rapped hard on the door and that the sound would travel into the property. Andy Lane knocked so hard that the door opened. At first, he wondered whether he had broken something as the door swung slowly open, the hinges giving a creak of desire for oil on the way. But on closer inspection, he could see that the door hadn’t been locked. Andy looked through the hallway in front of him. It gave him a view of most of the house from one vantage point. PC Andy Lane looked straight ahead and saw a small kitchen that was in need of modernisation, as the estate agent’s patter went. But it was clean from what he could see and there was nothing left out of place. Andy wondered whether there was anyone living there at all, whether the person he met in the street had given him a false idea of where he lived to put him off the scent. On the right was a living room that had wallpaper that was peeling on the top edges. It hadn’t got so bad that it needed to be ripped off but it could have done with some wallpaper glue and a bit of pressure. PC Andy Lane had learned that a bit of pressure resolved a lot of issues. In his line of work pressure on the wound of someone he found after an emergency call could very well keep them alive. It would stop them from losing too much blood and provide a window of hope for the medical team. Pressure on a suspect when questioning would often lead to them giving up answers that they hadn’t intended. ‘Keep them talking’ was a motto he had heard used a lot in his basic training, but once on the job he found that there was more to it than that. Let someone talk and they could go on about the weather, the latest football results or the state of the economy. Apply some basic pressure and you can get someone talking about what you want them to talk about.

  “Where were you at 3PM yesterday?”

  “How many times have you been to this area?”

  “Where did you get that watch?”

  These were all questions that when repeated, often yielded different answers. The cracks in a made-up alibi would start to appear and you could eventually drive a lorry through the gaps that had been left. Pressure would change the balance of power in these situations. The pressure on the wallpaper would only need to be applied for a few seconds, but would bring the room back to life. Andy couldn’t help but feel that the neatness of the kitchen felt different to the slightly ragged edge of the living room. Maybe the person who lived there didn’t use the living room. There was a seat that didn’t look sat-in and the absence of a television was another clue that this room wasn’t in regular use.

  To the left was an empty room. It was too small to be a dining room and too big to be a study, so it was probably difficult for the person who lived there to decide what to do with. Andy saw that they had decided to do nothing with it. The door was open and there was nothing in the room. The walls were painted magnolia, a sign that the property was rented, and the carpet was cheap cream one that was mirrored throughout the areas he could see in the house. Another sign of a rented property. Only landlords bought that much magnolia paint. Where it was sat on the stairs, it was starting to pull and looked saggy. Cheap carpets always do after a few years of even the lightest wear. The room had nothing else, not even curtains. PC Andy Lane could see that this was a house that wasn’t lived in by a family, more likely a single person. It could be his man.

  Up those stairs was a door that was halfway open and he could see the room in front of him from a low angle. He could make out a desk of some sort and what looked like several monitors. Without moving he tried to scan all that was there to see in the room. The walls we covered, but not with receding wallpaper like the living room he had just looked at, but with what seemed like post-it notes, newspaper clippings and pieces of paper. It looked like an office rather than a bedroom. He looked around the ceiling of the hallways and tried to estimate how many other rooms might be upstairs out of his view. He estimated 2 or 3 bedrooms plus a bathroom. If his theory about only one person living there was correct meant that this room could be a study or office and the occupant would still have space to have their own bedroom. PC Lane stood and thought about his nex
t move. Walking back out again would leave him with many questions unanswered. He had been at the door of the property for around a minute but wanted to know far more about what he could see. As a child, he had been a story writer. He would meet a person or see some aspect of life and then write a whole story around it. He still did it in his head to that day. He would see a room, a photograph or speak to someone for a few seconds and then write their whole life story behind it. His imagination would construct a backstory, a series of events and contact with an imaginary set of characters. The questions that the rooms he could see in this property would conjure up would give him a whole novel to write in his head if he let it. Stepping further into the property would answer a lot of these questions for him.

  The other option was to explore further. He had already radioed back to let the control room know where he was, so it wasn’t as though he would be expected anywhere else. If nobody was in, it would only take a couple of minutes to look at what was inside and satisfy himself. He wanted to see a photograph of the man he has spoken to or to find a utility bill lying around so he could call back and check his identity. Anything to resolve the unanswered questions in his mind. He decided that he should find out if anyone was there, so he called in a midrange voice, “hello. Is there anyone here? Can you hear me?” Andy Lane realised at that point that there was no sound at all. There was nothing from the house, from the neighbourhood or the streets that would be crisscrossed by cars only a few hundred yards away. It was eerie. He asked again, the same words but a little louder. Still nothing. He walked into the hallway and made a decision. He turned off his radio. He didn’t want to be disturbed. The upstairs room that had all the items on the wall was a better prospect to find the information he wanted than the rooms downstairs that were empty. He slowly walked up the steps with his eyes down on his feet. The carpet was worn through in places and it was clear that the tacks underneath were not holding it in place. It was the kind of staircase that you expect to creak with every step, but there was no sound at all, continuing the silence Andy had observed and then broken a few seconds earlier. He listened out for the sound his muscles and bones might make when exerting the pressure on his feet to climb the stairs but nothing.

  As he neared the top of the stairs, PC Andy Lane slowed to make sure he wasn’t disturbing anyone. At the top of the stairs was another window that had no curtains and he peered out of the window in the direction of the street. In the garden of the next-door neighbour was the bike of a young child, turned upside down and rusted from several years exposure to the elements. Andy wondered what the child might be doing now, in his usual manner. He thought for a few seconds that they could have fallen off the bike and been injured, grown out of it and just discarded it or something more sinister might have happened. It felt like the kind of neighbourhood where something sinister could have happened in the past, swallowed up by the silence. Andy Lane pulled himself back into the room – he didn’t have the luxury of being able to go deep into his imagination at that point. He wanted some information and then to go. There were two other rooms to his right as he got to the top of the stairs in addition to the one he could see from the front door. He walked towards the two rooms that sat adjacent at the end of the corridor. He walked past the room that had made up his mind that he should go upstairs. Andy wanted to investigate them all but the lure of the room at the top of the stairs meant that this had to be the first one to enter. He turned back and walked towards the door.

  As PC Andy Lane walked into the room, the enormity of the information struck him. There were newspaper clippings, notes, printouts and maps all over the walls. There was so much information that PC Lane went into overload and didn’t take any of it in initially. He thought that the occupant might have been a train spotter and was collecting masses of information. He looked at the map on the wall, drawn on a whiteboard and considered what all the lines and dots might mean. The map was of Washington and then small pockets of what was Newcastle if he wasn’t mistaken and there were colours all over it that must mean something significant to the person who drew it. They were a talented artist, as the map was as good as anything that could have been printed. Andy stood for a while and admired the artwork. It was a sight to behold for someone who could barely hold a pencil. In art classes at school nobody wanted to sit near Andy. Not only was he nothing of an artist, he was also by far the most likely in the class to knock over the pot of water or spill paint on whoever was sitting next to him. The talent to draw a map of the city, presumably freehand, was something way beyond his comprehension. He studied the detail that he could figure out instantly from the map. He had never been great at reading maps but could see where the hospital was that he had taken his mother to time after time as she fought the cancer in her lungs that finally took her life. He saw the police station where he began his work every day. He saw the Museum of Innocence that his father took him to several times a year, where his interest in the world stemmed from. The museum was marked in red, as was the theatre where he had been sent in the aftermath of the killing of the entertainer. PC Lane found this odd. He looked for more areas marked in red on the map. There was a small wooded area near to the street he was at now, as well as an alleyway off the main street.

  While he was looking at the map, something caught the corner of his eye. At first, he thought it was movement but soon realised that the sun glinting through the window was catching on a photograph that was pinned to the wall. On closer inspection, there were many photographs. With each one was a series of notes that seemed to describe details about their life – where they travelled, at what times, something interesting about them and then something nasty about them. For instance, under the photograph he had first noticed was a note that said, ‘8.45am home to work @ Concord arrival at 8.55am. Return journey from 5.10pm to arrive home at Park Lane at 5.20pm. Monday to Friday only. Never uses an umbrella. Ties her blonde wavy hair up in the rain and exposes her throat. Slept with 6 people she works with.’ It was the last sentence on every note that made Andy Lane feel uneasy about the wall. There were comments that made him feel judgement was being passed. The person who wrote these, and all were in the same handwriting, was setting targets, that much he was sure of. There were a few gaps on the wall, where it looked as though pins and Blu Tack had been used to secure more photographs, more notes, more abuse.

  He wondered why those people had been taken down. He wondered why the abuse had been removed, but he didn’t wonder for long. As PC Andy Lane looked to his right he could see a wall that was roughly the same dimensions. The squareness of the room had escaped him up to that point but it was now obvious. In the exact same places as the gaps on the wall where the desk was placed were photographs and notes on the wall to the right. The first photo was someone he recognised. It was Jeff Caine, the politician who was killed a few weeks earlier. Lane looked back across the room to the wall opposite and saw the red mark in front of the building of his political organisation Britain Excelsior. He quickly put all of these pieces together and assumed that this was the killer they had been looking for. He wanted to check his assumption was right. One more face from the wall. Again, the photo he checked was one he recognised. It was the entertainer from the theatre. He already knew here was a red mark there. He already knew that this was the scene of another killing. Slid behind the photographs were newspaper clippings. They were placed neatly so the photo held them up against the wall and they could be accessed at any time. Andy Lane took one from behind the image of Jeff Caine and it was a newspaper report about the killing. Along the border were the words ‘killed because he oppressed me’ and the political party underlined wherever it appeared in the article. There were six mentions and, along with the words in the margin, all stood out in red ink against the black and white of the newspaper.

  PC Andy Lane started his radio up. It was an old model that he was given when his went in for repair. It always took a few minutes to charge up and be ready for use. He would wait for it to charge and the
n call for help. This was something that he couldn’t handle on his own.

  21

  Augustine and the rest of the team were drinking slowly. None wanted to be the first to leave but also none wanted to get drunk. They had moved from the beer garden to the inside of the pub. The beer garden had been great to begin with. The smell of barbecues from those that were making the most of the warmth wafted across where they sat and mixed with the alcohol and the last of the evening heat made for a pleasant combination. Augustine found that it made him hungry and got a few packs of crisps with the next order. This hadn’t filled the hole and he considered asking the rest of them if they wanted to join him at the nearest curry house. Then he decided that they all had better things to do without even asking them.

  Inside the pub was a mix of the old and the new. The carpet looked like it has been there for decades, with a swirling blue pattern. It had stood up remarkably well to the test of time and the patter of drunken feet across it, not to mention what had been spilled over the years. Augustine was impressed that it didn’t show signs of wear in any part he looked. Even near the bar, where he assumed the most number of feet would have walked, it looked as though it was new. Maybe that was the idea behind the pattern – it drew your attention away from any wear. The atmosphere inside the pub was less summery than outside. The building had been there at least as long as the carpet and the light was almost non-existent. Another building that the Scandinavians wouldn’t have put up with, Augustine thought to himself. And as such it felt cold. The summer clothing that was evident outside was replaced with jackets and long trousers. People who had been to the pub before, and the clientele looked like they were regulars, knew that the weather outside had little bearing on the conditions inside. All came prepared.