The David Raker Collection

by Tim Weaver

  ‘What a shitheap,’ Healy said as he passed me, studying the dark front window of the house. In his hands was a torch he’d got from the back of the car. He made his way up the driveway, the concrete beneath his feet crumbling, and looked in through a hole in the glass. A few seconds later, he flicked the torch on and directed it inside. In the cone of light, I could see blackened walls, a fireplace and – at the back – patio doors.

  ‘You know how long this has been unoccupied?’ He shone the torch at the council notice on the front door, then directed the light back into the living room. ‘Three years. No wonder it smells like someone shat themselves to death in there. Half the tramps in London have probably used it as a bed and breakfast.’

  I followed Healy, checking the houses opposite. The windows across the street would be the obvious place to watch the delivery being made: high position, clear view, good cover. If he used either of the places that flanked number twenty-nine, he’d have to be more careful, but he’d have an even better view of the drop-off. Neither seemed likely, though: in the one to the right, through a pair of net curtains, I could see an old couple sitting in front of their TV; in the house on the left, children’s toys were on the windowsill and behind the closed curtains a light was on.

  Healy looked at me. ‘Better hold your breath.’

  Along the edge of the door frame the council had once run luminous yellow tape in an attempt to keep people out. He tore some of it away, stepped back from the door and kicked it open. It juddered and shifted, then swung back into the darkness.

  The hallway was small and narrow, and as black as the outside of the house. As we stood and looked in, rain swept in from behind us. It ran down the blistered, seared walls and formed puddles in the glass that lay, sparkling in the torchlight, at the entrance.

  The smell hit us about three feet inside. The thick stench of fire. The stink of urine, sweat, alcohol and vomit. Healy shone a torch into the living room. Two men were lying on the floor under blankets, one facing us, one facing away. They were both drunk. He whistled at them. The one facing us opened his eyes; the other didn’t even move. He looked vaguely in our direction, unable to focus, then his pupils rolled back in his head. A second later, he was still again.

  There were patches of carpet on the floor beneath them, but mostly it was exposed floorboards and – in some places – black holes where the fire had eaten its way through. Beyond the men, tucked away on the other side of the room, was the staircase. The steps were destroyed, and more council tape had been placed across the entrance to them. Close to the staircase was a fireplace, and beyond that was the kitchen.

  Both men on the floor stirred, one mumbling, one making a sound like he was suffering his last, dying breath. Between them were a succession of empty cans and bottles. One of them had wet himself.

  ‘Bloody hell,’ Healy said quietly. ‘It’s like St Patrick’s Day in here.’

  We moved back across the living room. Healy headed straight for exit, but I stopped to look up the stairs. I could see some of the landing: walls were burned through and full of cracks, and holes came right the way through the ceiling into the living room.

  The torch swung back in my direction. ‘You coming or what?’

  I ignored Healy and moved towards the fireplace.

  ‘Give me the light,’ I said.

  He held out the torch. I glanced at him, not moving, waiting for him to bring it to me. Finally, he shook his head and moved across the glass shards and broken wood, to the fireplace. He slapped it into my hand.

  ‘You after a new fire?’

  I ignored him for a second time and used the torch to light it up. It was a standard gas fire: fake lumps of coal sitting in a tray, inside a once-smart silver surround. It wasn’t plumb to the wall. A half-inch gap ran all the way around, and when I directed the light in behind, it looked like it was just an empty space. No fire interior. No wall cavity. No insulation. Just space.

  ‘Give me a hand,’ I said, and Healy went to the other side of the fire. We both fed our fingers into the gap and pulled the silver surround away from the wall. It stuck at first, making a dull scratching noise as we dragged it. Then it popped free, the coal tray coming with it.

  I picked up the torch again.

  There was a hole in the wall about three feet high and four feet long. I shone the light into it. Through the hole, the bricks, insulation and wall cavity had all been knocked through.

  On the other side was the house next door.

  55

  I got down on to my hands and knees and crawled through the space, through plaster and dust, glass and chunks of brick. Healy followed.

  On the other side, the layout was exactly the same as number twenty-nine. It was sparsely furnished: a tall lamp across from us, currently on and plugged into a timer; a worn sofa; a brand-new TV in the corner on a cabinet, with a DVD player and a very old VCR; VHS tapes underneath that. The kitchen had cutlery on the worktops and food packets half open. The stairs were uncarpeted.

  By the front windows were two mannequins. Both were naked, though an arm was missing from one – and something was hanging off its face. It looked like a sheet of thin plastic, part of it glued to the side of the mannequin’s head.

  I stepped closer and touched a finger to the plastic.

  But it wasn’t plastic.

  It was latex.

  One side of it was smooth and creamy, almost polished. The other side had more colour and texture. I pulled it across the face of the mannequin and Healy came around behind me, looking over my shoulder.

  ‘What the hell is that?’

  I smoothed it down, over the ridges of the mannequin’s head. ‘It’s a face.’

  We stepped back, children’s toys scattered along the windowsill behind us, teddy bears and plastic animals poking out between the curtains. Everything was here to create silhouettes. To make people outside think normality existed on the inside.

  But it didn’t.

  In front of us the mannequin looked back, its dead gaze peering through the eyeholes in the thin latex mask. Small, pursed lips were visible through the mouth slit. The mask started to slip away again, the glue not strong enough to hold it any more. But not before both of us had realized who was looking back.

  Milton Sykes.

  I ripped the mask away from the curved plastic dome of the dummy’s head. Healy stood beside me, both of us looking down at the latex approximation of Sykes.

  It was a skilled piece of work. Not perfect by any means – some of the colouring had run and there was glue and globules of varnish on parts of the skin – but it was good enough to convince. The mask ran from the top of the forehead to either ear and down to just below the chin. Whoever made it had ensured that the forehead was thicker than the rest of the mask to match up with Sykes’s most prominent feature. The depth of the latex at the forehead was almost four times as thick as it was on the rest of the face. If anyone had managed to get close enough they might have been able to tell that something was off. But through the glitchy, staccato black-and-white of the CCTV camera in Tiko’s, it had looked perfectly lifelike.

  I remembered the man at Markham’s flat. The weirdness of his face: how his mouth and eyes had moved, but the rest of him had remained perfectly still.

  Now I could see why.

  We searched the living room. No clay. No sculpting tools. No liquid latex. No paints. No reference materials or pictures of Sykes. There was nothing to suggest the mask had been created inside the house. With something as complex and time-consuming as moulding and styling a latex mask, there would be evidence. Instead, the house was half empty. So it must have been brought here.

  Healy walked across the room and looked up into the darkness of the staircase. He flicked on the torch, waving it up and down the steps to check they weren’t in the same state of disrepair as the ones next door. Then he tried the light switches next to him on the wall. None of them did anything. He glanced at me and nodded that he was going to have a loo
k around upstairs. I nodded back. As he disappeared into the shadows, just a cone of light as his guide, I headed to the rear of the house.

  Clackclackclack.

  Something moved in the darkness of the kitchen. Left to right. I side-stepped and leaned left, trying to get a better view around the counter. But there was nothing now. No movement. No sound other than Healy moving around upstairs, the floorboards creaking under his weight.

  I took a step forward.

  Clackclackclack.

  Then there was a faint squeak, like a rusty hinge moving.

  I took out my phone, flipped it open and directed the light from the display into the space on the other side of the worktop. A rat scurried away, its claws making a clackclackclack noise on the linoleum. It headed through a hole between one of the cupboards and the cooker.

  As I went around the worktop I saw a second rat, its fat pink tail visible, the rest of its body hidden by one of the units. It wasn’t squeaking and it definitely wasn’t moving, but there was still a noise. A different one: moist, wet, like it was chewing on something. To my left I spotted Healy coming down the stairs, the torch in front of him. He looked at me and shook his head. Nothing upstairs. Then a fly buzzed past my face. As I went to swat it away I felt another, dozy and unresponsive. A second later, I could hear more.

  They were everywhere.

  And then my senses opened up: animals, blood – and decay.

  I flipped open my phone again, swinging the blue light around to the space behind the counter. The rat moved this time, following the path of the other one.

  Clackclackclack.

  Except this one left a trail: a series of tiny red marks.

  Footprints.

  Lying on the floor, half slumped against the kitchen units, was the body of a man. His arms were at his sides, palms up, fingers curled into claws. His eyes stared off into the night, wide and pale, and his clothes, and the lino around him, were covered in blood. His T-shirt had been torn open about halfway down, and on the skin of his chest I could see a series of knife wounds, probably made with a serrated blade: long and thin, thrust in so deep and pulled out so quickly that flesh, muscle and fat had come with it. His trousers were riding up either leg, and one sock was on the other side of the kitchen, among blood spatters that looked like arterial spray.

  ‘So what the fuck are we supposed to do now?’ Healy said from behind me, shining the torch into the face of the man on the floor.

  We’d found Daniel Markham.

  56

  Healy traced Markham’s dead body with the torch, careful not to disturb the crime scene. Eventually we’d have to call it in, but first we had to clear our heads. Press Reset. Our best lead was lying in a pool of his own blood on the floor of a derelict house.

  ‘Difficult to tell how long,’ Healy said, ‘unless you want to shove a thermometer up his arse and take his temperature.’

  He moved the torch beam down Markham’s arm, blue veins prominent below the skin. The blood that hadn’t left his body through his chest had pooled in his legs, his feet and the small of his back. Healy used the torch to signal one of his calves. The area directly in contact with the lino hadn’t filled with blood. The area just above it had.

  ‘That’s hypostasis,’ he said.

  Once gravity kicks in, your red blood cells head south and settle; but the skin that’s in direct contact with a surface won’t fill up because the capillaries are compressed.

  He swung the torch around the kitchen.

  ‘The body hasn’t been moved,’ he continued. ‘Once the red blood cells drop, they stay dropped. If he’d been turned over from his front, the blood would be in his shins, knees, top of his thighs and the front of his chest – not where it is now.’

  ‘Looks like he’s got rigor mortis too,’ I said.

  Healy stopped, turned to me, eyes narrowing. ‘So what else am I telling you that you already know?’ He was angry that we’d hit another dead end, and he needed someone to offload on. ‘You going to tell me how it is you’re a part-time pathologist as well as a part-time policeman?’

  I let the insult slide.

  ‘Huh?’

  ‘What are we arguing about, Healy?’

  ‘I just like to know who I’m dealing with.’

  I rubbed my fingers across my forehead. I’d only known him for a short space of time, but Healy was nothing if not predictable.

  ‘I wanna know who I’ve got along for the ride,’ he said. ‘I don’t want surprises. I don’t want a knife in my back.’

  I stared at him. ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

  ‘You know what it means.’

  ‘I don’t even know what you’re getting your knickers in a twist about. So I know what rigor mortis looks like. So what?’

  ‘So, I don’t trust you.’

  ‘You don’t have to trust me. You just have to work with me. When this is all over, I’m sure there’ll be plenty of time for us to find a cosy corner somewhere and discuss what we do and do not know about the human body after it dies.’

  His eyes narrowed again. ‘What the fuck do you know about death?’

  He realized what he’d said within about a second of it coming out of his mouth, but Healy wasn’t the type to apologize. The best he could do was a vague flattening of his mouth. It was a typical Healy moment; a pointless argument borne out of him realizing he wasn’t in complete control.

  He fixed the torchlight on Markham’s face.

  ‘Yeah, he’s stiffened up,’ he said quietly.

  Rigor always starts in the facial muscles, before crawling its way through the jaw and the throat and then out into the rest of the body. It can give you an approximate time of death, but even a pathologist would have struggled to pinpoint it exactly based on the kind of conditions we were dealing with. The fact that rigor mortis had set in certainly put him at under thirty-six hours, and the hypostasis in the lower parts of his body was a dark purple. I’d shadowed the Forensic Science Laboratory in Pretoria for two months as part of a feature I was writing about post-apartheid South Africa in the late nineties, and had been to a few crime scenes. Maximum lividity occurred about six to twelve hours after hypostasis set in. Which meant Markham was alive when he woke up this morning.

  ‘If we call this in, it’s over,’ Healy said, the torch back on Markham’s body, running the length of one of the knife wounds. ‘This whole thing goes down the toilet.’

  I nodded. He was right. At the moment, we were ahead of the curve and the police were playing catch-up.

  I started pulling the room apart, pushing furniture aside, dragging the sofa out from the wall, trying to zero in on anything that would give us a lead. Healy started as well, stepping around Markham in the kitchen, and opening and shutting drawers.

  Moving to the TV cabinet and the stack of videotapes, I knelt down and started pulling them out of their sleeves, tossing them away one after the other.

  Then, midway through, I stopped.

  The second from last tape was in a bright red case, different from the others, and had no printing on it at all. I pulled the cassette out. Written across the label in the middle was a message in black marker pen.

  It said, Help me.

  We didn’t speak as I switched on the VCR, slid the tape in and turned the TV on. Blackness. And then, seconds later, the set was filled with a shot of Markham.

  He had tears in his eyes.

  His brown hair was shorter than in the photo I’d taken from the youth club, and he’d lost the horn-rimmed glasses. Dark eyes like chips of wood gazed out at us; stubble bristled as his hand traced the line of his jaw. He looked in good shape and was dressed well too: a name-brand polo shirt and a pair of jeans. No shoes.

  He sniffed and then took in a long breath. His eyes drifted off camera, before coming back again. It was recorded during the day, in the middle of the living room. In the background we could see the kitchen, and a little of the stairs. He ran a hand through his hair, as if he didn’t know where
to start.

  Then he cleared his throat.

  ‘My name is Daniel Markham,’ he said, his voice wavering, his eyes watering, his face etched with unease. ‘And this is my confession.’

  The Doctor

  Eleven months ago

  Daniel Markham opened the door to his office and stepped inside. It was too warm. The hospital was always either stiflingly hot or freezing cold. Never in between. It was the beginning of November, and the weather had been unseasonably mild for a week, but still the central heating in his part of the building hadn’t been adjusted properly. He’d put in two complaints, neither of which had been met with any kind of response. It was the NHS in full working order.

  He hung up his coat and went to the windows, opening them as far as they would go. A faint breeze wafted in. Sitting at his desk, he booted up his computer and started going through his unopened mail. At the top of his in-tray was an appointment diary, which his secretary filled in for him at the beginning of each week. Without her, he would be lost. He remembered the faces of his patients, but not always their names and certainly not the times they were expected. The only appointment he did remember was the one at Barton Hill Youth Club on Monday afternoons, where – as part of a drive by the hospital to get consultants out into the field as volunteers – he spent five hours with the parents of kids suffering from cerebral palsy, helping where he could.

  Initially, he’d seen the volunteer work as wasted hours. In fact, when the email had first gone round, he’d thought it was a joke. In a hospital system that could barely cope with the ratio of patients to staff as it was, an afternoon field trip seemed like an idea that would only ensure fewer people were seen and more complaints rolled in. But the hospital trust were determined to carry through the commitment they’d made to the community in an expensive PR campaign the previous year, and – after some initial scepticism – Markham had grown to love the time he got to spend at the club. The parents of the kids were so different from the patients he had at the hospital; so positive, despite the heartache they’d had to endure. His patients tended to be the opposite: most of them were antagonistic and cynical and only looked for ways to head further down the spiral.