Cold sunlight gleamed from mountains too sheer or barren for trees to take hold of them. Darkness had pooled in the valleys where the towns were, creeping up through the woods. From time to time he caught a glimpse of the sea, a wrinkled sheet of tinfoil. Even through the sealed train windows, he could hear the gulls. Everything was directing him towards his purpose. Why else had Baxter moved out here? He had no Welsh past or family that Jim knew of. It was a long journey from the Midlands, for anyone who wanted to find him. Shorter by car, no doubt. But on the train, with every stage along the bare coastline of Cardigan Bay taking you closer to the elements, it was a preparation.
Ritual was everything for Baxter. Timesheets, precise routines, meetings for their own sake. If your socks were the wrong shade of grey he’d call you into his office and say he’d had comments from your colleagues. Nothing ever came from him: it was always a little bird that had told him. Before each meeting, he briefed his sycophants to make whatever points he wanted to get across. Once he’d ghost-written a whole report damning the performance of another department for a junior editor to read out. No matter how late you’d worked the day before, if you were a few seconds late in the morning he wouldn’t speak to you - he’d just tap his watch twice, then turn back to his in-tray.
Coming in midweek gave Jim a better chance of finding Baxter at home, and without visitors. It was a pretty safe bet that Baxter lived alone. His failed marriage was many years in the past, and he referred to his ex-wife as the error. In his world, all women were professional victims. He wasn’t keen on men either. He didn’t flirt with his staff, let alone chase them. What he liked to do with young employees was impair them: destroy their confidence, their self-respect, their sense of purpose. His weapons of choice were the meeting and the appraisal. That ghost-written report had got Jim’s department closed down in a management review of efficiency, but at least he’d never faced a Baxter appraisal. Twelve people had been forced out of the company in nine years by having their efforts trashed in his immaculately typed reports. A few had complained to HR, and HR had advised them to leave Neotechnic.
Night was falling as the train drew into Fishguard. The silhouettes of boats in the harbour were tinged with red. The breeze off the dark water was cold enough to make Jim wish he’d matched his outfit to the bay. Its fresh, salty taste reminded him that he’d eaten nothing since breakfast. He wasn’t staying here overnight - that would be too easy to trace - but a quick meal was worth the risk. A few streets away from the station, he found a quiet pub and ordered fish and chips with a glass of Coke. The local beers called to him in melodic accented tones, but he refused to listen. Maybe afterwards, and not here. As he’d expected, the fish was excellent. But maybe his nerves were playing up, because it didn’t stay in his system for long. As he sat in a draughty toilet cubicle, pain hollowing his guts, a message stood out from the many inscribed on the back of the door: THERE ISN’T A LORRY DRIVER IN FISHGUARD WITH A DRINK OF FUCK TO SATISFY ME. That cheered him up somewhat.
When he walked back into the twilit bar, the optics added their higher voices to the choir. Jim paused, suitcase in hand, and let his eyes run across the row of pale, tortured faces behind the barman’s head. It was time to go.
~ * ~
Baxter lived in an old farmhouse several miles inland of Fishguard. Even if there was a bus, Jim didn’t want to be noticed getting off there. His Google map had some worrying blank spots, but the same helpful website had shown him the house and barn by daylight: no barbed wire or high railings, only a battered dry-stone wall between the road and the bare farmyard. Somehow, despite the rural setting, Baxter’s home had the look of an office: gravel-covered drive, entry phone, Venetian blinds. The barn, only part of which was visible in the photo, appeared to have been sealed up with metal panels. The Welsh Nationalists would have been pretty angry about an English businessman doing that, once upon a time; but maybe their measured doses of self-rule had made them more passive.
Beyond sight of the town, he could still hear the gulls and the dusty vinyl crackling of the sea. The street-lamps became less frequent and then ceased altogether. Jim had to use his small pocket torch to see where he was going. The distant barking of a dog made him break into a sweat. If anything stopped him now, he wasn’t sure he’d ever find the nerve to try this again. The weak beam showed him dreamlike glimpses of wire and stonework around fields of Braille. He kept switching it off for a few seconds to save the batteries. But he could never remember what he’d seen, because the afterimage of the torchlight kept resolving itself into the faces from behind the bar. The jury from his dream.
In the dark he cried out: It wasn’t my fault. Don’t blame me. But there was no response. That was why he’d come here. Despite the risk, he opened the suitcase a second time and felt between the shapeless underclothes for the blade. Its tip cut his finger and he licked the blood, feeling a sense of renewed control in the taste of his own pain. That was how nights like this usually went. But this time the haunting would end. He remembered buying the knife on the way home from work, after reading Baxter’s memo. A small kitchen knife with a black wooden handle and a razor-sharp blade. He could see his own eyes reflected in the steel. So far he’d cut nothing with it except himself.
Gary had been the youngest of Baxter’s victims. Everyone at Neotechnic had liked Gary. He’d been the most helpful of the IT team, the one who always found the answer but never made you feel small while doing it. A few of the designers had their eye on him, but he was happily engaged. And then Baxter took over the IT team. Within a month a shadow had fallen over Gary. He’d seemed nervous, preoccupied, much less inclined to give people his time. A colleague in his department said Baxter was “cracking the whip” on all of them. And in April, the appraisal season, Gary had been signed off with stress. Jim knew the union was defending him in a tribunal, but the details were confidential. Around that time, Baxter purchased a popular business book called The Stress Myth and was keeping it on his desk at all times. Gary lost the tribunal and was dismissed. That kind of thing was happening a lot and the union seemed unable to do much about it.
A few weeks later they’d heard that Gary had been found dead in his flat. Some of his Neotechnic ex-colleagues went to the cremation, though Baxter made a point of insisting that the usual daily targets had to be achieved. Jim hadn’t been able to face going. Funerals left him cold, quite literally: he wondered if the departing spirit took some energy from the mourners to help it cross the black river. He experienced grief as an injury rather than an emotion. No doubt that had to do with him being insane. At the funeral, one of the IT team was told that Gary had left a suicide note in which Baxter’s treatment of him was mentioned. The next day, Baxter sent out a memo to the entire site, saying: Neotechnic will not tolerate irresponsible rumours being spread to the detriment of the Company and its values. Anyone spreading such rumours can expect to be dealt with via the Company’s disciplinary procedures.
After that, Jim had dropped out of the union. Just hadn’t seen the point of dragging out more inevitable defeats. When his department was shut down, he’d taken the redundancy cheque with a sense of relief. It had got him out of there after nine years. No more of Baxter sitting vigilant at his desk, like the hawk in the Ted Hughes poem they’d included in an English textbook. No more of his mock-weary presence at the end of the day: You go home. I’m here for the long shift. It was only later, when Jim had drunk most of the money, that the anger came back. And by then Baxter had taken early retirement, sold his Warwickshire home and relocated to North Wales. He might have been hard to track down if he hadn’t put the name of the place on Facebook. Falcon Lodge.
As if that memory had a power of its own, the roadway turned upward. In the starlight, Jim could make out bare trees or telegraph poles on either side of the steep hill, and a dark mass ahead. It felt strange to see the stars clear of light pollution, adding to his sense of this being inevitable. The climb made his legs ache. He wanted to hide in
the shrubbery, curl up to sleep like a fox. But he’d promised himself the heat of blood on his hands, in his mouth. Promises to keep. At last he reached the wall, and checked with his torch: no wire or broken glass along the top, and a few missing stones that would make it easier to get over. The front gate had a tight grid he couldn’t hold on to, but that didn’t matter. There was no name above the gate, but he could see Baxter’s white Volkswagen behind it. Whatever security system the house had wouldn’t save Baxter. Jim wasn’t there to rob.
His sweat cooled as he paced around the dark wall, and he began to shiver. At the back of the farmyard, the bare ground was muddy and streaked with grass. The barn was alongside the house, a long featureless block part-cased in dull metal. Further out, trees were clustered on a slope that continued upward - he couldn’t see what to. The wall would be climbable if he left his suitcase behind, and there wasn’t much he needed from it. There were clothes for him to change into later. Stepping carefully over the rough ground, he took the suitcase into the trees and hid it as best he could. Then he crouched for a while, looking up at the house.
~ * ~
Something was moving through the trees behind him, scratching near the ground. It was probably a squirrel, but Jim hastily unfastened his case and took out the knife. He remembered that terrible morning in his Tyseley flat, a few months into his abortive attempt at going freelance. He’d been working late, drinking later. It was a wet autumn day; he carried his hangover into the kitchen to feed it some painkillers. When he opened the door his first thought was: What did I do last night? A bin-liner full of rubbish had been torn open and its contents scattered over the floor, including scraps of decaying food. As he’d knelt to pick up the dustpan, something had moved in the nest of black plastic. A grey wedge-shaped head that stared at him for a moment before its owner ran past him into the living room. Where had it gone? He never found out. Traps remained unsprung, trays of poison untouched. He’d kept all the doors shut overnight but still dreamed of rats foraging in the dark, fistfuls of clay that crept over his body and then broke into a foul wet mush.
For weeks he’d barely gone out except to buy alcohol or biscuits, done a few hours of work each evening and spent the rest of the time drinking and watching videos. The work had dried up and he’d run out of films. Friends had tried to help, but he’d ignored them. And then the dream had come. The rat dreams were endless and confused, but the dream was crystal clear and happened once only. Like a voice from something inside him that wasn’t yet dead. It had made him go to his doctor, spend months on antidepressants, spend the last of his redundancy money on a private alcohol rehab programme. Then he’d come home, sorted out the flat, and started planning the death of Baxter.
And now, sitting in the dark among the bare winter trees, he kissed the knife blade and quickly became aroused. Had he needed to want to kill in order to realise it was what he’d always wanted? Whatever, it didn’t matter, because what happened to him after killing Baxter didn’t matter. He’d stabbed the bastard so many times in his mind, he’d become a serial killer with a single victim.
In the dream, he was falsely convicted of a murder. It had to have been one of two people, and there was no evidence either way, so the court decided on the basis of character witnesses. Those on Jim’s side all admitted under questioning that he was a cold bastard who’d let everyone down. He was found guilty and didn’t appeal, because the trial had left him feeling his life was worthless. The judge sentenced him to death by lethal injection. The execution took place in a clinic that was part of a railway station, with hundreds of people coming and going. After the injection they set him free, knowing he had less than an hour to live. He wandered around the station and slowly realised the pain, sickness and dizziness were wearing off. The poison had failed. A police officer stopped him, and he told her he wanted to appeal. She said: It’s too late. All you can do is go back to the clinic and let them finish it. The world is a better place without you. Jim had woken up with the faces of the jury in his mind. They were the twelve people at Neotechnic whom Baxter had forced to leave.
The rustling and scratching in the trees had stopped. Everything was asleep. Jim checked his watch: almost two a.m. No window in the house was lit. He stood up, slipped the knife under his belt and the hammer into his pocket, then wrapped a T-shirt around his left arm and started towards the wall.
~ * ~
There was no sound from within the house, no flicker of light. Jim ran his fingers down the cold glass of a back window. Very carefully, he stretched the T-shirt over the pane and struck it once with the hammer. Fragments of glass stuck to the Venetian blind or trickled on to the carpet. If that had triggered a burglar alarm, the police still wouldn’t be here for ten minutes at least. He slashed at the cords of the blind; the plastic slats rattled as they fell. Putting the knife back in his belt, he broke enough glass away to let him climb through. There was no response from inside.
The room held a desk, a computer, a few filing cabinets. Had Baxter turned his home into an office?
After the chill of the open road, the central heating was like a blanket wrapped around him. Jim wanted to lie down and sleep. A clock ticked on the wall somewhere. He stepped through into what appeared to be the living room: the pale torch beam showed him a sofa, a monochrome rug, a bookcase. It didn’t seem real, didn’t seem lived-in. But he couldn’t expect other people to be as untidy as him. To one side, a staircase ran up the wall. It was uncarpeted, but there was no point in creeping. He didn’t want to kill a sleeping Baxter anyway.
Painfully aroused, he pushed open the first door on the narrow landing. A web of starlight in frosted glass; a long bath like a sarcophagus. The next room had a wardrobe, a chest of drawers, a single bed by the window. Knife in hand, Jim ran the torch beam up the crumpled duvet to the pillow, which bore the imprint of a head. He cried out with frustration.
Baxter must have got up after hearing the window break. He’d be downstairs, probably armed. So be it. There was no going back. Jim could smell the man’s expensive aftershave in the small bedroom. And what the aftershave had hidden: the smell of Baxter. He wasn’t aroused any more, just tense with cold rage. This was one meeting where the boss couldn’t dictate the outcome.
The trapped voice of the water-pipes moaned as Jim paced through the still house. No sign of him. Was he hiding to wait for the police? Increasingly desperate, the intruder ran back and forth, looking for alcoves and doors. Then he noticed a pile of boxes at the back of the staircase that wasn’t flush with the wall. Baxter could have squeezed in there. He played the torch along the floorboards. Nothing. An irregularity in the bare wall made him look again. Just an inch from the floor, a tiny wooden knob.
It was a cupboard, but the back had been hollowed out into a narrow passage. The torchlight was waning. He crawled into the space, which led downward beneath the floor level. If Baxter had come this way, he must have lost some weight. After a few yards the passage began to curve back upwards. He climbed painfully, unable even to kneel, until he reached a sheer brick surface. Was this a trap? Was the tunnel about to fill with rats?
He reached upwards and touched a wooden panel, pressed and felt it give way. Dazed with relief, he stood up and climbed out into what he immediately sensed was another indoor space. He shone the flickering torch around him.
In the middle of the tiny room, a figure sat at a bench. It was a young woman, dressed in faded green overalls, her hair tied back. She was operating some kind of lathe. There were some panels of metal on the bench to the left of. the machine, and some thinner strips to the right. The failing torchlight glittered from metal shavings scattered over the room. The figure was quite life-like, except that her eyes were shut. As well, Jim noticed, her left arm was badly twisted and her face had a dull blue tinge. There were smears of dried blood on her frozen hands. Was the model plastic or wax?
He reached up and touched its curved neck. It was flesh, cool but not cold. He put his fingers to
the motionless lips and felt a trace of breath.
I’m sorry, he whispered. He should call the police - and he would, once he’d done what he came to do. It was a long shift but soon he’d be clocking off, and what happened to him then wouldn’t matter.
He scanned the walls, which were lined with recent brickwork, and saw a narrow doorway behind the lathe. The door was open. He stepped around the bench, feeling scraps of metal crunch under his feet.
The next room was the same size. It held a desk where a teenage boy was frozen in the act of answering the phone. His immaculate business suit contrasted with his torn and clumsily stitched face. The grey plastic receiver was an inch from his swollen mouth. On the desk, a single bloodstained tooth lay on a pile of memos like a minimal paperweight. On the wall was a square clock, its luminous hands giving the time as half past two.
This must be the barn, Jim realized. No wonder it was sealed from the outside. The third room was almost completely filled with a tangle of black wires and pulleys. A giant toothed wheel was outlined against the wall, turning slowly. The whole system was in gradual motion. Two pale youngsters in shapeless protective clothing were almost buried within the machinery, their limbs contorted and broken. It wasn’t clear whether they were driving the machinery or it was driving them.
Psychomania: Killer Stories Page 16
