Acid Lullaby (Underwood and Dexter)

by Ed O'Connor

  ‘Get me out of here,’ she implored.

  Underwood heard a creak above him and looked up, his torchlight penetrating the darkness and illuminating the face of the descending Soma: a needle glistened in the sudden light. He advanced to the foot of the staircase. Rowena Harvey started to scream. Dexter emerged from the library hauling a wooden desk chair.

  ‘Get to the car,’ Underwood snapped as she came along­side him. ‘Get her out of here.’

  ‘Welcome to the incarnation of the lunar race,’ announced the Soma, raising his arms in joyous benediction to the strange new figures below him.

  ‘What about you?’ Dexter asked.

  ‘Just get on with it,’ Underwood hissed, beginning to climb the stairs. The Soma had come to a halt on a small landing halfway between the first and ground floors. He ran his hands along the frame of his favourite oil painting, savouring the sensuous touch of the carved wood. He wondered how he should treat his new disciples, imagining the delight in their eyes at the moment that he took Rohini. A man was standing before him, awash with colours at the heart of the light show.

  ‘Don’t you kneel before your God?’ asked the Soma.

  Underwood watched the figure closely. He could see the syringe held tightly in the killer’s right hand and tried to anticipate the angle of the attack.

  ‘Why do you insult a power you cannot understand?’ the Soma asked in fury.

  ‘I understand,’ Underwood replied, ‘you are the Soma: God of the moon.’

  The Soma paused and felt a sudden surge of joy. Truly they were his disciples. Angels sent to bear witness to the insemination of Rohini. Below them, there was a crash as Dexter slung the chair against the sash window. Fragments of glass exploded across the ground outside. However, most of the wooden frame remained. She wrenched the chair from the window and repeated the movement. The Soma watched impassively.

  ‘I have come to help you,’ Underwood said. ‘You cannot complete your task alone.’

  ‘I am a god,’ hissed the Soma angrily. ‘What the fuck would you know?’

  ‘If you are a god,’ Underwood replied, ‘make time stop. It’s after eleven-thirty. The planets are moving out of align­ment. You are too late.’

  The Soma tried to assimilate the information. Chaos was returning to the brief order of the heavens. Demons had come to delay him. This was not an angel.

  ‘You see,’ Underwood continued, ‘you can’t make time stop. So you can’t be a god. Your transformation is incom­plete. You can hang heads in a line like the planets hang in the sky but you have no control over time. You are not a God. You are a man. And you’ve failed.’

  Another crash resounded from the hallway. Dexter had finally split the interconnecting struts of the window frame. She broke away the splintering wood and, once she had created an adequate space, grabbed Rowena Harvey and pushed her through. There was blood on her hands from the smashed glass but she felt no pain.

  The Soma lunged at Underwood and the two men fell to the floor. Underwood used both his hands to grab at the syringe. In the darkness he misjudged the movement and the needle punctured the palm of his left hand, pierced the flesh and emerged from the top of his hand. He felt the contents of the syringe empty harmlessly over the skin of his left arm. Infuriated, the Soma engulfed him in a rain of punches, spitting and hissing his fury. Underwood tried to block the blows with his undamaged arm but soon realized that he was unable to defend himself. He wasn’t trying to win the fight, merely create time for Dexter and Harvey to get away. As the punches grew in ferocity Underwood found himself beginning to lose consciousness.

  Sensing victory, the Soma stood in naked triumph. The assault had disorientated him and he steadied himself as he rose from the stairs, nausea sweeping across his drugged mind. Underwood blinked through the blood at the image of the figure standing above him. Behind the man was a large oil painting. The picture seemed somehow familiar. It showed a hunting scene: a horse rider clad in scarlet at the head of a huge pack of hounds. The Soma staggered back against the picture as he tried to balance himself: to Underwood’s battered consciousness, it seemed as if the two images had become fused. The pack of dogs seemed to be flowing from the man’s body. Through clouds of distorted vision and pain Underwood realized that Mary Colson had not foreseen her own death. She had foreseen his.

  A car engine started outside and Underwood allowed his eyes to close. The Soma, having cleared away his dizziness, left him on the landing and headed downstairs.

  Dexter allowed herself a final look over her shoulder at the house. Rowena Harvey sobbed in the seat next to her. She felt a terrible guilt about leaving Underwood behind. She hesitated for a moment, on the point of unbuckling her seat belt and returning inside. Then she saw the naked figure of the Soma emerge from the front of the house and rush towards the car.

  She started the engine and crunched into first gear. Gravel sprayed from behind the car as the wheels slid. She pulled away, checking in her mirror as distance began to open up between the car and its terrible pursuer. The Mondeo accelerated down the twisting drive for a few short seconds. Dexter’s eyes lingered too long in the rear view mirror. Too late, she saw the police squad car directly in front of her, blocking the exit to the drive.

  ‘Fuck!’ she shouted, slamming down hard on her brakes.

  The Mondeo crashed into the Volvo at thirty miles an hour. Dexter and Rowena Harvey were flung forward. The Soma skipped in delight and sprinted hard across the gravel, ignoring the pain as it dug and tore into his feet. Stunned from the impact, Dexter saw the shape running towards them in her mirrors. She tried to clear her mind and forget the pain. She had to act quickly. She had no weapons. She was uncer­tain how long it would be before help arrived.

  Make a decision.

  Dexter slammed the car into reverse gear and pressed down hard on the accelerator. The Mondeo wrenched away from the Volvo and surged backwards. The onrushing Soma had no time to react. Dexter closed her eyes as the impact came, she heard his legs break and winced as his body thumped down on the roof of the car before sliding onto the driveway. Her heart was pounding. She unlocked her door and stepped outside.

  The Soma lay on his back on the gravel, staring at the sky he no longer controlled. Dexter saw that both legs had been mangled, twisted out of shape by the force of the impact. She looked into the staring blue eyes. They blinked and looked at her. The Soma was alive. Satisfied that he no longer posed a threat, Dexter ran back to the house.

  Fifteen minutes later, Underwood woke to find himself surrounded by people: ambulance men, uniformed police officers. He found his position, lying flat out on the stairway, an embarrassment. He tried to sit up but a strong hand restrained him.

  ‘Stay put, mate,’ said one of the paramedics.

  ‘I’m fine,’ Underwood replied.

  ‘You’ve got a needle through your hand. Stay still while we take it out.’

  ‘Be careful,’ Underwood warned. ‘There’s poison in the syringe.’

  ‘We know. Don’t worry.’

  Underwood winced as he suddenly became aware of intense pain.

  ‘You all right, guv?’ Dexter was crouching over him now. He was pleased to see her.

  ‘What happened?’ Underwood asked as the paramedics worked on his injured hand.

  ‘I got him.’ She thought for a second. ‘Well, the Mondeo got him.’

  ‘Is he alive?’

  ‘Yep. Broken legs and some busted ribs but he’ll live. We’re sending him to Accident and Emergency at Addenbrookes. I got two uniforms going with him.’

  ‘Rowena?’

  ‘She’s okay. Evans was stabbed in the stomach. He’s in a bad way. Dawson was cracked on the back of the head. He’s conscious.’

  Underwood winced as the needle was slowly drawn out through the flesh of his hand. He concentrated on the picture of the dog-man hanging a few feet above him.

  66

  The ambulance rattled at speed through the flatlands north of Cambridge.
Max Fallon’s acid-soaked brain tried to seek explanations for the disastrous events of the night. It was hard for him to see beyond the excruciating pain in his legs and chest. He was gasping for air: dragging oxygen from a face mask into his lungs. His broken bones shifted agoniz­ingly with every bump of the ambulance. To Fallon, the pain manifested itself as colours: white in his chest, red in his legs. Those colours were blinding and bright; they mixed with the green eyes of the car that had reversed into him, that had cut the universe from beneath his bleeding feet.

  He was being punished. Daksha had cursed the Soma with consumption for favouring only one of his daughters. He tried to remember how the story had finished. Daksha’s daughters had begged their father to be lenient and the creator-god had mitigated his punishment: the lunar god’s disease would be intermittent, reflected by the waxing and waning of the moon.

  The pain was growing more acute. The colours became more vivid and frightening as Fallon’s body was swathed in great washes of fire and light. He realized that there was no one to plead for leniency. His pain would be perpetual. There would be no mitigation.

  67

  Alison Dexter eventually returned to her apartment shortly before three in the morning. She checked the outside windows carefully before entering. The flat was empty. She had cleaned up some of the mess that Willis had created earlier in the day but was unable to contemplate going to bed until the flat was immaculate again.

  She vacuumed the splinters of broken glass from her hall carpet and brushed up the rice that Willis had thrown across the kitchen floor. After an hour of agitated domestic labour, Dexter allowed herself the luxury of a shower and wrapped herself in her favourite dressing gown. She knew that it would be difficult to sleep. The dramatic events of the day would take a long time to be filtered out of her mind. Besides, she still had work to do.

  Dexter knew that Mark Willis had become an addiction. She had fallen for him at a vulnerable moment in her life: a time when she was struggling through a painful transition. For a time, he had softened the edges of her world and given her the protection she had always lacked. Then she had become addicted to not being with him. For eight years, she had allowed her mind to wander into dark places with him during her weakest moments. The memory would give her an emotional hit and she would place him back in a safe part of her mind where she could control him. She wondered if she had relished the controlled pain; if thinking of him had been the psychological equivalent of cutting her arms. Seeing him again had thrown her game into chaos.

  Mark Willis was a black hole in her mind: a fixation that sucked in sanity and offered nothing in return. Dexter retreated to her bedroom and found her latest journal. She wrote down the day’s events tersely and accurately. She realised that she was ordering her thoughts to try and conjure a solution to the problem: like a mathematician progressively resolving stages of some impossible equation. She began to understand that her memories of Willis had been based on an unreal idealization of the man. Dexter bitterly recalled a moment after Willis had left the force. She had discovered by accident that the Parc de Buttes-Chaumont, the location of her most treasured memory, was itself an unreality. The steep verges and grass-covered enclaves were in fact sculpted onto the remains of an old quarry and landfill site.

  Dexter had come to the understanding that the memory was built on shit: her mental construction of Willis had been artificial: the daughter she killed was conceived on a rubbish heap. She knew that it was time to excise Willis from her life once and for all. She had written two phone numbers into her police notebook after Willis had left her in tears the previous evening.

  Now, with exhaustion tightening its grip on her belea­guered mind, Dexter drifted to sleep wondering which one she would call.

  Burial

  68

  The following afternoon, Underwood sat in CID at New Bolden Station sipping a steaming coffee from a polystyrene cup. His wounded hand was bandaged tightly and his bruises ached. He had found that his damaged ribs prevented him from lying down comfortably. Once he had realized this grim fact in the early hours of the morning, he had resolved to ignore medical instructions and spend the day at work. Sitting bolt upright was just about tolerable and he wanted the distraction of work to numb his discomfort.

  Harrison sat opposite him reading through some of the notes Dexter had made that morning based upon paperwork they had discovered at Yaxford Hall.

  ‘So tell me about him,’ Underwood instructed.

  ‘Maxwell Fallon. Aged thirty-eight. Unemployed. Formerly, Director of Bond Trading at Fogle & Moore Investment Bank. Fired for gross misconduct in August 2001. This wanker was clearing over a million a year.’

  ‘Unbelievable,’ Underwood muttered.

  ‘Most people don’t see that in a lifetime.’ Harrison returned to the notes.

  ‘Bought Yaxford Hall in September 2001. Sold his apart­ment in Chelsea at roughly the same time.’

  ‘Next of kin?’

  Harrison checked through the pages. ‘It doesn’t say. Although it seems the body on the stairs was his father. We found a driving licence and credit cards in the deceased’s trouser pocket. Looks like a strong, positive ID.’

  ‘Do we know anything about the father?’ Underwood asked.

  ‘He was quite a big fish,’ Harrison replied, ‘Robin Fallon. Born nineteen forty-four. Eton and Trinity Cambridge. Twenty years in the Foreign Office. Worked in Pakistan, the Philippines and was deputy Ambassador to India from ’seventy-six to ’eighty. Retired from the FCO in nineteen eighty-four and became the director of various companies. He’s in Who’s Who?’

  Underwood thought for a moment. ‘Jack Harvey was at Trinity, Cambridge. He’d be about the same age as Robin Fallon.’

  ‘Interesting,’ said Harrison. ‘I’ll check if they were there at the same time.’

  ‘It would explain why Harvey got involved in this mess,’ Underwood said sipping at the scalding coffee. He looked through the glass wall of Alison Dexter’s office. Dexter had not emerged from her room for nearly two hours. She sat with her back to them, scribbling notes onto a pad with her tele­phone jammed between her right ear and shoulder. It was unusual for Dexter to isolate herself from the buzz of the office. He sensed something was wrong.

  ‘Do you want to hear what else we found?’ Harrison asked, noticing Underwood’s attention was drifting.

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Obviously there were the five human heads in the library. The only ones that have been positively identified so far are Jack Harvey and Sarah Jensen.’ Harrison tried to sound matter-of-fact although the image and his emotions still tore at him.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Underwood said flatly.

  Harrison nodded. ‘The others have not yet been formally identified. Based upon age and sex of the victims, Leach reckons they’ll match up with the bodies we found on Fulford Heath. We also found some personal effects amongst the rubbish on the floor of the library: a wallet, some credit cards and a Fogle & Moore Photo ID card. We’ve made some provisional guesses as to the identities. You want to hear them?’

  ‘Go ahead.’

  ‘One of the heads belonged to a middle-aged man. That fits the profile of Victim A from the Heath. Fallon apparently had a caretaker living on site at Yaxford Hall. The wallet we found belonged to one Roger Dean. Driving licence gives his date of birth as 23rd June 1948. It’s a fair bet that Victim A was Roger Dean.’

  Underwood remembered the chronology of deaths that Leach had explained. Victim A had been killed at the end of January or beginning of February. ‘Is Dean on a missing persons list? If it is him, he’s been dead for some time.’

  ‘Not on any of ours,’ Harrison replied. ‘If he lived at Yaxford Hall, there’s a chance that he wasn’t missed.’

  ‘Unlikely but possible, I suppose,’ Underwood commented. ‘What else?’

  ‘Victim B from the Heath was a woman. One of the heads in the library belonged to a young female. Best guess is that we are talking about
an Elizabeth Koplinsky. That was the name on the Fogle & Moore ID card that the SOCOs found. The picture resembles the head in the library. I spoke to a personnel manager at the Bank. Koplinsky left work four weeks ago. She was about to be transferred overseas and had a month off. She was only reported missing when she failed to turn up in their Frankfurt office last week.’

  ‘Tell me about the other guy, Victim D,’ Underwood asked.

  ‘Well, by a process of elimination, we think his name is Simon Crouch. We found two credit cards and Amex and a Visa in that name. I checked him out too. Guess what?’

  ‘Another Fogle & Moore employee?’

  ‘He resigned at the end of last summer.’

  ‘Victim D was killed recently right? In the last week?’

  ‘Correct.’

  ‘Have you located next of kin for these people?’

  ‘Working on it. Like I said, personnel at Fogle & Moore have been helpful.’ Harrison thought for a moment. ‘Interesting that he didn’t decapitate his father.’

  ‘Robin Fallon. The body on the stairs. Broken neck?’

  ‘Yeah. Seems a waste. You’d think it would have saved him some effort,’ Harrison muttered bitterly.

  Underwood couldn’t explain the anomaly. He was concerned that Harrison was sinking. He feared that the memory of Sarah Jensen and the inexplicable destruction of her life was beginning to overwhelm his Detective Sergeant. ‘Don’t strangle yourself looking for logic. Sometimes logic just breaks down.’

  Harrison looked at him, surprised by Underwood’s insight. ‘What’s left then? How else can you explain this kind of shit?’

  ‘Emotion. Insanity. Chaos. Take your pick.’

  ‘All I know is that we have enough evidence to see this sick bastard banged up for the duration of his sorry life,’ Harrison replied, clenching a fist in anger.

  Underwood shrugged. ‘If this ever gets to trial.’