by James Arklie
‘Not at all bad, was I? Not a single death. Not on the table at least.’
Teeth flashed again, laughing at his own sick joke.
Kline followed the new track laid for him. ‘How many bodies did you practice on? How many people did you kill, murder?’
Brown shrugged and frowned. Once again, in his mind the ends justified the means. He’d killed, but then he’d gone on to save lives. He couldn’t understand the question.
Then Kline took a blow to his gut and the confrontation moved up notch. ‘Sorry about, Jenny, Joe.’
Kline stared, swallowed, clenched his hands together in his lap. Forced his jaw to stay relaxed. Fought to hide the animal that was growing inside him.
Brown made a tutting noise. ‘Keeping Jenny alive when she was brain dead, Joe. I’m not so sure about that. It was very controlling, very manipulative. Conceited even. Was there some kind of twisted self-justification in there? That you knew better than all the specialists?’
Kline gave an honest answer. ‘I couldn’t let her go.’
Brown nodded his understanding. ‘But, Joe, you were self-harming.’
Kline squinted at him, tilted his head as a question, not understanding.
Brown went on, ‘You were dying, Joe. In a shit awful state. Trying to survive on one kidney that was about to explode. When all you had to do was flick the switch and you were saved.’ He paused again, expecting an answer.
Kline knew was right. It was no different to cutting myself or injecting drugs. He’d been deliberately putting his body under a toxic strain that was killing it.
Brown’s gaze remained steady on Kline’s face. ‘You do understand, don’t you, that I removed her life support, not to kill her, but because I had to save you?’ His eyes searched my face.
Kline looked at him, blankly. He was talking in riddles. ‘You wanted me alive? Why?’
Brown shook his head at a stupid schoolboy who couldn’t solve a maths equation however many times he was told. ‘Over and over, I’ve been repeating it, Joe? Because you have something I want.’
Point five. Being better than me, thought Kline. Self-taught and superior gives him the authority to do as he pleases. What had Cassie called it, situational psychopathy. He was pretending he liked me, but really, I was nothing more than a means to an end. I wasn’t a person, I was a ‘something’ to be used.
Without warning, Brown stood up, indicated a fresh coffee pot.
‘Take more coffee, Joe. I need to prepare a couple of things.’
Kline lifted the silver coffee pot from the silver tray and poured the thick black coffee into his bone china cup. He looked out over the grounds and then the fields of sunflowers which seemed to stretch away forever.
Kline breathed in the warm air and the scents it carried. A black unease seeped across his mind that told him he wasn’t going to get out of this. That he would get his answers, but he would never get back the three things he’d come for.
And it was about then, with the warmth of the morning sun on his face and gentlest of breezes in his hair, that the drug kicked in.
*
Kline woke to sounds he knew well. The pushhtta and the pah. The beep. The odd ting of a bell. In the darkness behind his closed eyes, he thought of Jenny, saw Jenny with her mischievous, wicked, come and get me tiger, smile. From his right came noise that sounded like the clatter of cutlery in a kitchen or tools in a slaughterhouse. Kline forced his eyes open and saw surgical instruments being laid out on a tray by a nurse in green scrubs. A mask hung loose at her neck and dark hair was pulled to the top of her head and covered.
Kline lifted his head and looked down and along the length of his body. He was opened out on an operating table in a star shape. Above him, a huge rectangular complex of lights hung like a threat, illuminating the pale white skin of his complete nakedness. Kline felt the binds on his wrists and ankles before he even tried to move. He tested them and felt another constriction tight across his chest.
Kline twisted his neck this way and that and looked round. He was in some kind of huge operating theatre. He could see another operating table, banks of machinery, and bed across the room.
Angie was propped up on pillows, frightened eyes met his, but he saw fire and strength in them. Kline tried a smile, just to show he was properly aware. He got a nod in return and a tiny sideways movement of her head.
Kline twisted his head to the left to look at the other operating table. Robert Brown was giving it a lot of attention and when he moved aside Kline saw Deborah Wilcox. The face was older, thinner, lined, not pale but white as if the sun had never touched her skin to encourage the melanocytes to produce melanin. Her hair was grey and thin and cropped short, utilitarian. She lay with the stillness of a corpse.
Intravenous drips went into both arms, the thick, clear tube of an intubator carried oxygen down through her mouth to her lungs. Machines stood like watching sentinels round her, the way they had for Jenny. Protective. Her eyes were closed and peaceful.
Robert Brown turned. Green scrubs, blue mask on mouth, eyes assessing Kline through rimless glasses, gloved hands held vertically in the air. Blood on his fingertips.
‘Great timing, Joe.’ A nurse came across to do something to Deborah Wilcox and Brown turned back and muttered something.
Kline lay still and silent in his helplessness. He closed his eyes against whatever violence was about to be unleashed on him. He listened to the sounds and breathed in the smells. He focused his thoughts on Jenny. I might be with you soon, love.
The nurse across the room lifted a mask to her mouth and wheeled across a tray of instruments. Kline heard the clattering of the trolley, opened his eyes and raised his head. He caught another glimpse of Angie. She was dipping her head to her right and shrugging her shoulder. A message, but Kline didn’t have a clue what it was. He was looking at the tray of instruments that had stopped beside his table. Ready to be brought to life by the deft hand of the surgeon.
Brown turned back to Kline and looked him up and down, his face impassive. Kline could have been a piece of meat. The nurse waited beside him. Her eyes showing interest as Brown used a finger to trace a couple of lines across Kline’s abdomen.
‘A couple of nice scars here, Joe. But this is the one I want.’
Kline looked down. It was old, very old. From the first kidney transplant he’d had as a teenager. The one that had saved his life the first time.
Kline ignored him. If he was about to die, he wanted answers. Kline turned his head and shouted. ‘Debbie. Debbie Wilcox. Can you hear me?’
She didn’t move.
He shouted again. ‘Debbie.’
Brown shook his head impatiently. ‘Joe. Please. She’s in a deep coma. She’s dying.’
‘Why the hell have you kept her all this time?’ Kline’s breathing was getting shorter.
He could feel the tension growing in his body as it prepared itself for what was coming. Then his eye caught the back of a low bench on the far side of the room. Stacked in neat rows were small jars. Each contained something. On the front of each was a white sticker.
He remembered the breast tissue, a piece of Evie, left as a teaser in the Bowie album, PinUps. Labelled with the date and the name. He kept trophies from his kills. Not trinkets, or ornaments, but tissue, organs.
Kline refocused on Debbie Wilcox. His voice was soft with horror. ‘Jesus, what have you done?’
Brown’s reply was muffled. Kline realised he’d raised his mask. It was really happening. ‘I see a light has come on, Joe. A little pressure, the nearness of death and the brain wakes.’
Kline stared at the glasses, but all they did was reflect the bright lights. He could feel the fingers of one hand stretching the skin round the scar, ready for the incision with the scalpel held in the other.
Kline wanted to delay the inevitable. ‘What is she? A sick man’s trophy cabinet?’
Robert Brown’s answer was to carefully slice into Kline’s skin. A long, lazy, incision that
swept along his abdomen in a rolling wave of pain. Kline screamed unashamedly as the blade bit and sensitive nerve endings fired panicked signals to his brain. You’re dying they screamed. The protective coat is being invaded.
Kline was panting into the pain. The nurse casually swabbed away the blood.
Brown pointed the scalpel at a TV monitor. There was blood dripping from the tip. Kline looked and caught the vomit in his throat. ‘Watch the operation if you want, Joe.’
Kline swallowed the bitterness. ‘Fuck you.’
He took some deep breaths. Robert Brown casually cut again. Kline screamed again.
‘Oh Jesus.’
Kline glanced at the monitor. He could see his insides, though God knows what he was looking at. He breathed again, deeply. ‘You murder, you take something as a trophy, and you transplant it into Debbie Wilcox. You want to keep some part of your victim alive.’
Kline heard the amusement in Brown’s voice. ‘Very good, Joe, but not quite right.’
He pointed a bloody finger into Kline’s body cavity. The nurse started putting clamps round the opening, pulling it wide. Each one hurt. Each one made him draw in breath and squeeze the pain through his eyes.
Sweat rolled from his forehead stinging his eyes with their bitterness. Kline blinked it away and looked up into the blinding lights.
Very good, Joe, but not quite right.
Flick, flick, flickety-flick. The gas in the fluorescent tube exploded into life.
Light.
Bryony James. Focus on Bryony James. And then Kline had it or had something. And then Brown’s hands invaded the inside of his body and it started slipping away. Kline could feel him exploring, thought he could hear the suck and slurp of body juices as he moved round.
Close it out. Stay here. Sharp. For Jenny, for Evie, for Charlie.
Brown spoke through his mask, voice muffled. ‘I could do this a lot more professionally, Joe. But it would be nothing like the fun of getting my hands dirty.’
He chuckled at the sour cleverness of his own joke. In that moment, through the pain and the horror of what was happening to him, deep in the movement of a serial killer’s hands twisting inside his gut, everything came together.
Kline stared into the bright lights above him and saw ALICE.
*
Kline breathed deeply and evenly. Birthing mothers pant away the pain, but that was something he knew nothing about. Nor did Jenny. They never got the chance, although they did come close, until one day…
Stay in the moment, don’t drift with the pain. The photographs on all the bodies. Kline stared at the side of Robert Brown’s face.
‘You were in love with Bryony James. I reckon infatuated. But she didn’t love you. Probably didn’t even like you. Saw you for the arrogant sociopathic prick you are.’
The hands went still inside Kline, carrying an ominous intent. Kline realised Brown could rip his insides out in a flash. Scatter torn, bloody parts of him round the room. Like chess pieces swept away in anger.
Kline pushed further into the abyss that awaited him, testing the darkness. ‘You lost her to Alan Bleakley.’ He paused, then taunted. ‘Christ, that must have been hard to take.’
Brown reached out a hand and received scissors. Slid them inside Kline. He heard the snick of the cut. Gasped into the sharp jolt of pain. The nurse moved in with a pair of clamps. Kline had the sudden urge to piss. It flowed out. The nurse glanced and pressed an absorbant pad between his thighs.
Point six. Degradation of the victim. Gaslighting. Make them feel worthless, useless to themselves and to others.
Brown paused, turned his face to Kline. The glasses hid the eyes, glittering with reflected shards of light. ‘And all the bastard did was beat her. He tried to beat the beauty out of her. I don’t know why I waited so long to kill him. To begin with, I just ruined him. Killed two of his girlfriends. Left just enough evidence and innuendo to suggest he may be a killer, but not enough to convict.’
Kline took a couple of deep breaths, the pain was pounding in his left side, throughout his insides. He tried to talk away the pain. He had to die understanding what had happened.
‘I think Bleakley beat her one time too many. Nearly killed her. Put her into a coma. Is that where the idea came from?’
There was another snick, more pain. What the hell was he doing? Kline glanced at the screen, then away.
Brown started fiddling. Lifting, pushing, separating. Kline wanted to be sick.
Brown lifted something. ‘I went and visited her every day. Like you did with Jenny. Total devotion. Complete love. That bastard didn’t. Just found himself another woman to dominate and beat.’ Brown nodded to the nurse who also reached a hand inside Kline.
‘Then I went away for a week. A conference. When I returned, she’s gone. Totally. He switched her off. Cremated her.’
The nurse lifted something from the hole in Kline’s body. On the other side of the room, Angie let out a sharp cry of horror. Her voice was a deathly whisper. ‘Oh, my God.’
Kline closed his eyes. A trophy, for the side cabinet. Send the angels, Jen.
Kline spoke into his own darkness. Spoke for the ALICE women. ‘But not before Bleakley had given her up for organ donation. Not before he’d allowed the beautiful body, the person you adored, to be carved up. Have the hands of other men all over her, inside her, discussing her. Tearing her apart like vultures, beaks ripping, looking for the meatiest….’
Robert Brown thrust his hand back inside Kline. Squeezed some part of him hard. Kline screamed.
‘I’ve had plenty of people lying here like you, Joe. I’ve learnt how to cause pain. Make them plead. I can kill you in an instant, Joe. I can ram my hand under your ribcage and rip your heart out.’ He leant towards Kline. ‘So be careful how you speak about Bryony.’
Kline’s breathing was short and harsh. His heart was racing but his brain seemed to be at peace. It was entering death mode. He was dying. He’d tipped himself over the edge of the abyss. Was there any way back from here? I’m so far into the darkness I can’t see a way out.
Kline went on, determined to get to the end. ‘Five women received organs or tissue from Bryony. Five women whose initials spelt the name ALICE. And you wanted your Bryony back. Your twisted brain decided that not all of her was dead. She was still alive, living in other hosts. All you had to do was track the women, kill them and be in a position to harvest the organ you wanted.’
Brown had removed his hands from Kline and was taking off his gloves, one over the other, seemingly disinterested.
‘And in the meantime, you took her blood samples when you left for Athens. A little something while you waited. Something for you to touch, look at ….’ A thought came to Kline, but he backed away from the horror.
‘There was no rush. The hosts would keep her alive. So, one a year over five years wasn’t a problem and gave you a chance to establish a clean reputational cover in each venue. And a place to carry out the operation.’ The pain seemed to be leaving Kline’s body and that worried him.
‘You killed them so they would be taken somewhere you could remove the organ you wanted without suspicion. Falsify records if necessary, easy for a man in your above suspicion position. But you still needed somewhere to keep the organs alive. You needed a single host. A compatible host. They were all a rare blood group. AB. That created a problem, until Sam Little identified Debbie Wilcox.’
Kline could see that whatever had been taken from him was now in a silver dish. The nurse had washed it down with a solution. Brown looked into the dish and nodded. He reached for new gloves from a box on the side. This wasn’t over yet.
Kline tried to calm his breathing and wake his brain. ‘Sam Little was a porter, the man who found you dead bodies, perhaps gave you access to the morgue, may be even helped you kill, so you could continue your experimentation. But this time, he delivered Debbie Wilcox to you alive in Athens.’
Brown pulled on a second glove with a theatrical ‘snap’
and said, ‘Six.’
Kline risked a glance at the monitor. There was a gaping hole in his side. Surgical instruments were clamped in it and round it. His insides pulsed with the panicked beats of his heart, flashing colours of red, white, grey. The clamps prevented the blood from flowing, but not from seeping. Kline needed suction; he needed sterilising; he needed drugs and he needed to be sewn up.
He knew it wasn’t going to happen.
Kline refocused on Brown whose patiently superior smile for the inferior, greeted him. Brown said, ‘Six. There was one more. By a bizarre, but totally irrelevant coincidence, her name was Audrey Waters.’
‘Irrelevant, until you killed her.’
Kline listened to infinitely patient voice again. He wondered how suddenly Robert Brown snapped and that patience became rampaging violence.
‘Another message to you, to help you identify me.’ He tipped his head sideways. ‘But you didn’t understand. Another clue passed up by you. Another waste of my time. Just like the blood on Chesney Arthur. Inside of the thigh.’
Kline heard disappointment in the voice. As if Brown had great hopes for Kline as an adversary, only to have them dashed by lack of intelligence. Then Kline opened the final gate of Chesney’s pathway. Two clues pointing to Bryony. The second clue was pointing inside Chesney. It was saying, part of Bryony James is inside this woman and that’s what this is all about. If I extracted it, there would be the anomaly of Bryony’s blood here, on the thigh. So obvious now.
But Kline had just had another challenge thrown at him. Six? What was he missing here? ‘What do you mean, six?’
‘Audrey Waters went down sick, Joe. The day she was offered the transplant of Bryony’s kidney, she had a cold. Her chance gone.’
Understanding hit Kline like a flash of sunlight from moving glass. All of this fucking game for….
Brown was wiggling his fingers inside the gloves. ‘So, step up number two. A young Joseph Kline. Suffering from a genetic kidney disorder.’ He smiled again.
