Lost in Shadows

by Alex O'Connell

  “We’re both victims, Mrs. Wheeler.” Johnston had used her married name for the first time. She felt even more violated by this than by any of his physical atrocities. She hated the fact that he knew her name; she wanted it to be a secret – like the ancient Egyptians she felt that it gave him a power over her, made him somehow superior. She hated how it made her feel. She hated being a victim, too. She hated the ascendancy that he, her fellowvictimwielded so brutally over her.

  “We’re Frankie’s victims. And that’s all we’ll ever be. Until we stand up to him and put a stop to it for once and for all. He stole our lives from us. You and me. But now we’re taking them back from him. I know you understand that. We’re very alike. Kindred spirits really.”

  Of course, Mel didn’t understand him. It was just second rate psycho babble; an ignorant attempt to justify his unjustifiable actions. No more than that. If Johnston had been bright enough to analyse his words, he would have known that too. But Mel couldn’t argue. She was the silent, dumb witness to a carnival of horrors and he was the master of ceremonies. His face was now closer to hers, perhaps less than an inch away. She felt his breath, sticky and putrid, almost with a stench of death, assault her face. He stayed this close as he raised his knife to her eye.

  She recoiled back involuntarily as soon as she saw it, now so close to her eye. It was a carving knife. She had one very similar in the drawer in her kitchen. It was twelve inches in length with a utilitarian black plastic handle. She saw his knuckles tighten and whiten around it as his grip increased its intensity. The serrated blade glinted like silver in the harsh, all seeing artificial light of night. As the twin points of the vicious blade pierced her eye she tried to scream. But no sound came out. Even without her gag, it would have been no more than a silent scream, a scream that reached beyond the senses of our breathing, human world. It called out to an older, darker place. A place where evil lives.

  At first as Johnston gently, almost lovingly eased the blade through the outer layer of the conjunctiva and the pupil, no blood flowed. But then he eased it upwards and back, slicing through the ciliary body and severing a myriad of tiny blood vessels. The whole eye turned instantly scarlet and tears of blood trickled like tiny raindrops from the corner of her eye. Johnston then raised the angle of the knife’s handle and as he did so, he twisted and pulled it forward. At that moment, Mel’s eye fell onto her cheek. It was only the fibrous spiral of the optic nerve that held it sort of in place. There was no vision left of course. Not any longer. There was far too much damage for that. A whole new pain wracked Mel’s being. As bad as before, worse perhaps, but this time subtly different and yet more terrifying. Although she could not articulate her thoughts, she prayed for the dark freedom of unconsciousness. For the relief of a death which didn’t come.

  The knife had been to frighten her. Perhaps even to sever her little finger, if necessary. Johnston hadn’t planned to do this. He didn’t even know why he had done it. At school, he vaguely remembered that he had been told of the old maxim of an eye for an eye, of measure still for measure, but that’s not what he had had in mind. Perhaps unconsciously it may have been, but he had never articulated it to himself. As he surveyed his handiwork, confronted by the dejected parody of a woman that he had turned Mel Wheeler into, he tasted the acrid, bitter spew of bile in his mouth. He heaved, retched involuntarily and vomited forth a hideous, foul smelling yellow semi liquid mucous. It hit Mel square on her face; it mingled with the vivid red blood pouring like a torrent from the gaping socket of her Oedipal eye. It ran over the orb itself and tenderly kissed her full sensuous mouth. It covered her chin and seeped down and spread insidiously over the floral pattern of her pretty yellow spring dress.

  Johnston could not bear to watch but neither could he draw his eyes away. She held him fixed, entranced, in a vision of his own brutality. At last, he could look no more. The knife, which he now held limply at his side, brushing his trousers and staining them a sticky, gory scarlet with Mel Wheelers’s blood, he raised once more and he cut the optic nerve. Mel’s eye, which had been swinging with increasing violence as her body went into spasm, now fell to the floor. It was deflected by her arm and dropped onto the shoe of Johnston’s artificial leg. He pivoted, as best he could, and kicked it violently towards the corner of the room and out of sight.

  Mel was in a clinical state of shock. Thank God. It saved her from the full, grotesque realization of what had been done to her. Her silent screams had now given way to audible groans, but they were weakening as she lost more and more blood. Still she wept but it was now a tearless keening, like the sad, lonely song of a whale, conveying gigabytes of information, more than any man’s brain could ever process. It was something primordial and base, yet at the same more complex than could ever be imagined or understood. She was now drenched in her own blood and the stain on the carpet was extending wider and wider. Johnston had turned this pleasant suburban living room into an abattoir and he could no longer bear the sight of Mel and of what he had done. He pushed the black masking tape back across her eye but it just fell into the empty socket. It would not have stuck as her blood continued to flow like a river. It wasn’t able to clot and coagulate properly, the wound inflicted by the carving knife had been too wide for that and a major artery had been severed. The blood was draining from her at such a rate that within a few minutes, Mel Wheeler would be dead.

  Micky Johnston did not watch. Her blood had covered him too but it seemed as though it had gone even deeper. It had permeated his greying, greasy skin and was seeping through his body, mixing with his own and stating to course through his veins. It had both infused him and drained him, with her. He sat down on the settee and he pulled up his leg and lay there, in a foetal position, with just his prosthetic limb extended. He faced the back of the sofa and turned his thoughts as far away from Mel Wheeler as he could.

  He had been there for almost another hour when he was brought out of his reverie by the clear, sharp alarm of the doorbell.

  Chapter Fourteen

  The call from Micky Johnston had been the very last thing that Doyle had expected. He had been waiting, patiently as usual, for Don Bellini to come. It had been hours, he could have sent word. The police turning up – that also wouldn’t have been too much of a shock. But Micky Johnston? An hour or so before the call, Doyle had heard a siren. His hand had instinctively reached for the gun that lay within easy reach and his index finger stroked the trigger expectantly. His excitement became tinged almost with regret when it passed by and he heard its mournful wail fade into the middle distance. It had other wrongs to put to right that day, other criminals to bring to book. Then it was back to the seemingly endless mind-numbing boredom of waiting. Doyle didn’t mind it, he was quite used to a numbed mind but even he raised a sight of relief when his phone started to ring. Thank God for that, it must be Bellini finally, but no, he was wrong. What did the little shit think he was playing at? What he had done to Micky Johnston had just been business. Johnston knew that as well as anyone, he was in the same game after all. If you cheat a man like Don Bellini you have to make sure that you’re bloody good at it. Or lucky. But either way, you have to make sure that you don’t get caught or you will surely have to face the consequences. Doyle knew that it had been a mistake not kill Johnston on the spot, but Bellini hadn’t wanted him to do that. Not that he was soft, even back then. No, he merely wanted him to stay on the manor – nice and visible – being pushed around in a wheel chair or hobbling painfully on crutches.Pour encourager les autres. That’s what he said. Doyle remembered it clearly. It was a stupid idea; nothing wouldencourager les autreslike killing him and dumping his body in the street. But he hadn’t argued. Don Bellini is, after all, the man. Whatever he says goes.

  Doyle had played it cool when Johnston phoned. Or he had tried to and not show the full extent of the shock that that the call had caused. It was his instinct to end the call as quickly as possible. He didn’t know what to say to the bloody little monkey. But then h
e had called back. Why had he gone to Melanie? Doyle hadn’t even thought about her for years. It had taken him a moment or two to register who Micky had even meant. That was all buried deep in the past and the past was a land to which Francis Doyle rarely ventured. He had still less thought of the future either, all of the dreams and aspirations for a better life that he may once have harboured, had long since been dissipated in the harsh mists of reality without him even really noticing. It had happened long before he reached adulthood. He lived squarely, unthinkingly in the present, the here and now. It hadn’t been a lie when he told Johnston he didn’t care. Of course he didn’t care. He and Melanie had broken up years ago and even then, when it was fresh and new, even then he hadn’t ever cared. Not for her and certainly not for the boy. Why should he when he couldn’t even care for himself? He was surprised that Johnston had really thought that he would rush to Melanie’s rescue. Perhaps on another day, he thought, one when he was not holed up from the police in this shitty little hovel in Kilburn, waiting, as ever, for someone to tell him what to do, to make his next move for him, he might even have gone to 29 Gravesend Road. Not to play the hero for once in his life. Just to finish off Johnston for once and for all.

  In the peace and quiet of his solitude, Doyle began to casually reflect upon what Johnston had told him. 29 Gravesend Road, Southend. So that’s where she was living now, is it? It sounded so respectable and suburban to Doyle. He turned the address over and over in his mind, constantly repeating it, each time with a slightly varying inflection. It became inexorably lodged there. He thought he even knew where it was, roughly. Bellini had had business dealings in that neck of the woods and, in the past, he had called on Doyle to lean on some of his associates. This had happened on more than one occasion. Each time he went, after his various dirty little deeds had been done, he would wander down to the sea front and walk along the shore, shoes in hand, feeling the cold kiss of the waves rush towards him and gently engulf him, wetting the bottom of his incongruously rolled trouser legs and making him feel like the child that he had never really been. He’d stop sometimes, just for a minute, and look up at the seagulls circling above. He felt drawn to them by their plaintiff cries. That was how he felt, too. And they had a freedom, of a sort that he would never be able to experience. But even their freedom, just like his bondage came at a price. The one thing that Doyle was sure of was that in this world everything came at a price and, sooner or later, you are called to account and have to pay. As he mused on these feelings, ensconced in his dreadful isolation, just for a moment, a very brief, fleeting moment, one that fluttered on the wind and was banished almost as soon as it appeared, he felt that he wanted to see Melanie again. Not to ask for her forgiveness. In his own mind, he hadn’t done anything wrong. All he had done was to react to situations that he otherwise could not deal with in the only way that he knew how. But nonetheless he wanted to revisit that long forgotten country, to look at her face, look into her eyes, one last time. To see if she was still beautiful. To see if things might perhaps have been different for them, if they could have lived in the sunlight, like the rest of humanity, and not in the half light, a twilight existing somewhere between day and night, of his under world.

  He would meet up with Johnston when things had calmed down. Micky clearly was not prepared to accept that he had been lucky to be allowed to live. There was no way, he thought, he would make the same mistake again. He gave no thoughts to Johnston’s threats to torture Melanie. He could tell from the tone, from the fevered high pitch of his voice that Johnston had been looking over the edge of a deep, dark precipice. He was certain that his threats had been serious and he had no doubts that he would carry them out. Or, at any rate, he’d try to. If he had the balls. He also knew that if he did, Melanie would almost certainly die. ‘Torture’ as a word, devoid of the brutal callousness that underscores its actuality, comes easy to the layman – any concentration camp guard or cinematic German dentist could have a go at it. In fact, everyone always thought that it was something that any evil little bastard with a bad enough grudge can turn his hand to. Doyle knew that it was not. He had served his apprenticeship in the late sixties with real professionals and had developed all the obscene skills of the worst of the Korean guards at the Japanese prisoner of war camps in World War II. He had been taught by men who inherited their demesnes in the wake of the disbanding of the Kray and Richardson terror gangs. Men who had, in their turn, served their time and learned their art. They were skilled. Master craftsmen. There is a very fine line. One you must go up to, touch even, but never cross. Not until you have what you want – be that information, vengeance, retribution. The thresholds of the tolerance of the human spirit varied from person to person. You had to be able to read the often almost imperceptible signs. No when to press harder and when to ease back. He doubted if Micky Johnston would be skilled enough to recognize the line. He had been nothing, a nobody, just a figure of fun among pros, among the real hard men in Bellini’s organization. He was someone who you could give the little jobs to, but he was never entrusted with anything serious. Doyle considered. By this time he expected that Melanie would be dead. Unsurprisingly, he felt nothing at this realization. In his own way, he was, after all, even more dead than she was. He had been for years.

  He sat in the dark. The house may have been ‘safe’ but it had no electricity. Thank God he had picked up a spare battery for his phone at his flat, and that this one was fully charged. He longed for a television or a radio. Anything would do, just to give him some sign of life, something to make him feel slightly less isolated. Bellini had had plenty of time by now to fix up their alibis. Why hadn’t he been in touch? Doyle realized that if he was picked up without being briefed, he wouldn’t have a clue what to say. He could really drop them all in the shit. Especially as the Old Bill were going to be thorough in a case like this, a case that involved one of their own. In Doyle’s experience, the police were far more bothered about other coppers than they ever were about civilians. He could understand that. They were bound to be, it was the natural order – protect your own. It worked for coppers and crooks alike – some of them. Bellini, he knew, would be questioned and cross questioned over and over again. Hammered over minute details. But he was still far too sharp for them, Doyle was sure of that, even given the severity all his present problems. And that lawyer of his was like a razor, too. He’d look out for Nate and the other lads, as well. Mr. Bellini had never let any of them down before. He wouldn’t do it now. Doyle had faith.

  His stomach rumbled. He hadn’t eaten anything at all that day. He normally skipped breakfast, especially when he had a job to do, and afterwards things had become too hectic to think about food. He had time on his hands now though. Plenty of time. He thought about the chip shop he had passed earlier, on his way to the house. It was no more than ten minutes away at a brisk walk, down the Kilburn High Road but Doyle knew he couldn’t risk it. Even with the alibi that Bellini would have concocted for him by now, the police would want to give him the third degree and see if they could shake it ….. and him. But he still didn’t know what that alibi would be. Until he heard from Bellini he was in the dark and would have to hold tight and do nothing. Perhaps he might not be in touch until morning, he thought to himself. It’s possible he still being interviewed or maybe the Bill are turning over his offices. And he’s got all the other lads to look after as well. Yeah, that’s bound to be it. There’s nothing to worry about.

  Doyle made his was across to the window and looked out at the street between a crack in the thick plywood sheets that boarded up the window. The night was dark, a gentle rain was softly falling and the low cloud cover had obscured the full moon. The street was deserted. There were few cars about at that time and fewer people. Everyone was either safely at home after a hard day’s labour or else they were out enjoying themselves. For the first time in a long time, perhaps even for the first time ever, Doyle envied them. He envied them their cosy uneventful little lives and their happy set
tled families. His thoughts wandered casually back to Melanie for just a moment but he brushed them hurriedly aside when he remembered little Frankie and he allowed his old friend, the comforting ease of resentment to creep back into his bitter, black heart. He would never be able to forgive that boy, that baby for wrecking his life. Without him everything – well, it wouldn’t have been alright, not really – but it could have continued as it was. Perhaps it might even have been bearable for both of them. Without him, Francis Doyle might have had an element of normality in his life. It’s always comforting if you can find someone, anyone to blame for everything unsatisfactory in your life. He moved back to the sofa, where he had been sitting and he held tight to that thought.

  He wasn’t sure how much later it was when he heard a gentle rapping at the front door. He had dozed off, despite his best intentions to remain awake, alert and ready for action, and it took a moment for the knock to register in his semi conscious brain. By the time of second, heavier rap came he was standing beside the front door, which led straight into the room, gun in hand, poised ready to respond instantly to any threat he faced. He reached to the latch and slowly released it but he made no attempt to pull the door open.