Acid Lullaby (Underwood and Dexter)

by Ed O'Connor

  ‘You saying there’s a Mental Health Act issue here?’

  ‘Fallon will need to have a full psychological assessment,’ Underwood explained, wondering who would perform the task now Jack Harvey was dead. ‘Having spoken to him and seen first hand what he’s done, I’d say there’s a good chance he’ll be sectioned and deemed unfit to stand trial.’

  ‘That’s a joke,’ Harrison hissed. ‘These weren’t crimes of passion. These were planned. He was in control. He’s still responsible.’

  ‘I hear you, but I suspect the psychologists will see it differ­ently.’

  ‘Hospital’s a soft option.’

  ‘Would you want to be pumped full of tranquillizers and strapped to a bed in a secure mental hospital for the next twenty years?’

  ‘You know what I mean. He should been chucked in a very dark hole and left there. Why should we treat him? He’s killed seven people. If he is mad then let him live with it. That should be part of his punishment.’

  ‘Let’s wait and see what happens.’

  Harrison seemed agitated. ‘Sir, I’m still curious. I don’t understand. Why decapitate the bodies and string the heads up in a line? What was he trying to say by doing that?’

  ‘He saw himself as a god. He believed that he was living the myth of this Soma figure; that he was about to father the lunar race on earth. The timing was important. Last night the five inner planets Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars and Jupiter came into alignment. He attached great significance to this. The Soma was the moon god. Fallon believed the planetary alignment portended the conception of his offspring. I think that by murdering the victims and removing their heads, he believed that he was drawing each of the planets into align­ment. Each head represented a planet. One by one he strung the heads up into a line; one by one the planets are pulled into alignment. I think he believed that, as a god, he was pulling the strings of the cosmos.’

  ‘Jesus,’ Harrison breathed, despairing that Sarah Jensen had been brutalized for such an insane purpose.

  ‘The drugs were designed to alter the way he was perceived. He wanted his victims to see him as a god, not as a man. He wanted them to celebrate in his transformation: become his disciples if you like.’

  ‘I see what you mean,’ Harrison said bitterly. ‘A trial is going to be unlikely.’

  ‘Very.’

  Underwood saw that Dexter was finally off the phone and he walked over to her office. She jumped as he knocked on the door and stepped inside.

  ‘Everything all right, Dex?’

  ‘Why wouldn’t it be?’ she snapped defensively.

  ‘You’re very quiet.’

  ‘I’m very busy.’

  ‘It’s more than that.’ Underwood sat down opposite her. ‘Look, I’m hardly perfect but you can talk to me.’

  Dexter seemed ruffled by his directness. ‘There’s nothing to talk about. You and Paddy McInally can relax. Your little girl’s untwisted her knickers.’

  ‘Then why the attitude?’

  ‘I’d just rather be alone, John,’ she said wearily. ‘The last few days have taken it out of me.’

  He decided to bite the bullet. ‘Mark Willis is a thug. He should be inside. If he’s up here and you know where he is, we should bring him in. It’s that simple. Whatever has happened between you in the past is over. Don’t let it crush you.’

  ‘It’s not a problem anymore,’ she said. ‘And frankly I’d appreciate it if you and McInally respected my judgment on the matter. I don’t need you all buzzing around me like wasps.

  I don’t need protecting.’

  ‘No,’ Underwood said quietly, ‘I guess you don’t.’

  ‘And shouldn’t you be resting?’ Dexter observed, a little less abrasively.

  Underwood clicked the office door shut behind him.

  Mark Willis was sitting in a café opposite the front entrance to New Bolden Police Station. There were two off-duty traffic policemen eating sausage sandwiches at the table next to him. He ignored them, preferring to concentrate on his full English breakfast and his view of Dexter’s car. He felt his mobile phone vibrate in his trouser pocket and withdrew it immedi­ately. He had received a text message and was interested to see it was from Dexter. Placing his knife and fork carefully on the table, he read it to himself:

  ‘Norbury Services M11. Southbound Car Park. 10p.m. tonight. Take what you want and go.’

  Mark Willis couldn’t help but smile. He slipped the phone back into his pocket and returned to his fried eggs enthusias­tically.

  69

  Doctors moving over him. White coats and unfamiliar inquisitive faces. His hands were tied down. Memory was no longer knowledge. The two had become jumbled and smashed out of order.

  Max Fallon remembered a stiflingly hot evening in India some thirty years previously. He was sitting in the back of his parents’ Land Rover as it bounced uncomfortably through the North-western outskirts of New Delhi.

  His father was driving. His mother was chattering in the passenger seat. She wasn’t wearing a seat belt. She never wore a seat belt. The show at the English School in Shiv Vihar had been a great success. He had won a prize. His costume had been the best.

  ‘What’s the best way back at this time of night, darling?’ his mother was saying.

  ‘I’m going to cut through the Rohini district and pick up the Rohtak Road. We should be back in Chanakyapuri before midnight,’ Robin Fallon replied.

  ‘I’ll never find my way round this city.’ Elspeth looked out at the cluttered pavements and maze of twisting side streets. ‘It’s too confusing.’

  ‘You’ll be fine.’ Robin Fallon half turned in his seat. ‘You already know your way around, don’t you, Max?’

  ‘Not really, daddy,’ Max heard himself say.

  ‘Where do we live?’ Robin Fallon asked his son.

  ‘Chanapooey,’ Max said.

  ‘Chanakyapuri,’ his father corrected. ‘And where’s your school?’

  ‘Shiv – something.’

  ‘Shiv Vihar.’

  ‘Well done baby,’ his mother had said with a smile. ‘You’ll be my navigator.’

  ‘Yes, mummy.’

  ‘You did so well tonight Maxy, I’m very proud of you,’ she had said.

  ‘Was my costume easily the best, mummy?’

  ‘Oh definitely!’ Elspeth exchanged a smile with her husband.

  ‘Did I really look like a god?’

  ‘I would say so,’ Robin Fallon replied. ‘You should thank your mother for making such an excellent costume.’

  ‘Thank you, mummy!’

  ‘It’s a pleasure, darling!’

  The Land Rover turned right and headed south, parallel to a tributary of the Yamuna River. The lights of the city glowed on the black water.

  ‘That’s Rohini up ahead,’ Robin Fallon explained to his wife, pointing at a row of houses ahead of them. ‘We’ll cross the river there.’

  ‘Home soon, baby,’ Max heard his mother say to him.

  The Land Rover suddenly lurched to the left. Max remem­bered being thrown against the cold glass, then he felt the sensation of falling forwards, his mother screaming, his father wrestling with the steering wheel, the car sliding down an embankment and sliding into water. Max saw himself flailing against the hard edges of the car, fighting for breath, then suddenly climbing free through the darkness as if he was scaling the side of a vast black mountain under a vast black ocean. He remembered lying on a hard road with faces swirling above him, voices shouting in a language he didn’t understand. He remembered his father clambering from the water. He remembered his mother had died. His mother had died in Rohini.

  Doctors moving over him. White coats and unfamiliar inquisitive faces. His hands were tied down. The memory had gone.

  70

  In another hospital, a dream changed that afternoon and the dog-man receded into the waters of oblivion. As the white lights of the recovery ward softened around her, Mary Colson rose above the quagmire of her pains and dri
fted.

  She dreamed she was back at home, in her favourite armchair at 17 Beaumont Gardens. The room was wonder­fully familiar, like falling into the arms of her husband. She allowed her eyes to wander along the mantelpiece, absorbing the faces of her friends and family long gone. There had been a time when she had resented outliving them all; when she had hated the idea of going on alone. Now it no longer troubled her. She had been the keeper of their memories. She had stood in the light of wisdom and experience and drawn conclusions about their personalities and lives. Time had been a luxury not a torture.

  She heard voices and imagined she was standing at a family party: words and fragments of conversation billowed around her. She heard her husband’s soft north-eastern accent, her sister’s musical laughter, her mother and father, babies burbling and crying. She was happy to be home.

  The tea trolley came by at 5.30p.m.

  But Mary Colson was dead.

  71

  Alison Dexter checked her watch. It was half past nine. She only had half an hour to wait. She wondered if she should feel nervous: a sense of anxiety at what was about to happen. However, having examined the situation front every conceiv­able angle during the previous day she eventually surprised herself. She felt nothing at all.

  The night had filled with fog beyond her window: like smoke in a glass. It reminded her of the noxious haze that always hung in Paddy McInally’s office at Leyton nick. CID had been filled with chain smokers and the stench had clung to her hair and on to her hands. Every night she used to spend an eternity scrubbing the stink from her skin in the bath; after a year of exposure she felt that she had become permanently stained with nicotine: like the once white walls of a pub or like McInally’s teeth. Mark liked to watch her in the bath. He’d sit on the toilet seat with a glass of red wine and just watch.

  She crushed the memory and kicked it away.

  Mark Willis drove as fast as he dared through the swirling white mist. The terrible conditions had scared most other traffic away but he sensed that the prize was close. Inexorably he accelerated until he could see beyond the bonnet of the car.

  The sign for Norbury Services suddenly loomed out of the mist. He indicated left, swinging across two empty lanes onto the slip road. Ever suspicious and deliberately early, he reduced his speed and drove his Freelander around the entire car park checking for concealed squad cars. Willis had an imported addition to his car radio that allowed him to hear local police radio chatter over their Mainscheme VHF radio network. It seemed to be a quiet night: the only incident of importance was a crash near Newmarket. Willis parked next to an articulated lorry and listened for a moment to the radio chatter. It almost made him nostalgic:.

  ‘… RCIU on scene,’ a voice squawked. ‘AMBO in transit.’

  Willis smiled at the terms. The plods loved their jargon. ‘RCIU’ was Road Crash Investigation Unit, ‘AMBO’ was police shorthand for an ambulance.

  ‘… Pedestrian injury,’ the same voice continued, ‘Mobile unit has one on board. You are not required.’

  ‘Acknowledged despatch,’ replied a female office.

  Willis could picture the scene. Some half-witted local failing to stop at a junction most likely. Some poor bastard trying to get home ends up in a wheelchair for the rest of his life. ‘One on board’ meant that the squad car at the scene had a prisoner in the vehicle.

  ‘Rather him than me,’ Willis mused, looking suspiciously out into the murk.

  But there were other memories too, Alison Dexter told herself, terrible scarring memories. 20th November 1994. She had spent an entire working day trying to bury her fear in paperwork; to push the baby inside her to the edge of her consciousness. It hadn’t worked. Irritated and exhausted, she’d gone to wash her face in the ladies’ toilet. The cold water shocked her into a terrible state of panic. She had studied herself in the washroom mirror, wondering how long it would be until the baby began to show.

  Dexter had decided to buy a Coke from the dispenser adja­cent to the coffee room on the CID floor. She had cracked the can eagerly and, enjoying the sugar as it massaged her mind, had rested her head against the refrigerated dispenser. There was raucous male laughter emanating from the coffee room. Dexter tried to ignore it. She found that men in general and male coppers in particular seemed to enjoy repeating the same conversation over and over again: ‘so and so got pissed … so and so got laid… so and so fucked up.’ To begin with she didn’t notice the words of the discussion, concentrating instead on the blissful cool of the drinks machine against her forehead. Then by some terrible osmosis their meaning began to sink in.

  ‘… porking her for months!’

  ‘You’re joking!’

  ‘I can’t believe you don’t know … I thought you’re supposed to be a fucking detective!’

  Dexter recognized the voices; DS Horton and DS Payne. She turned slightly to hear their words more carefully.

  ‘He’s a disgrace,’ Payne announced.

  ‘She’s a dirty little slag, apparently,’ Horton replied.

  ‘I’m not surprised. She’s got that look.’

  ‘Yeah, you’re right. Willis says she screams the place down.’

  Dexter froze in horror. Fury boiled in her throat: Willis had been talking about her; telling his idiot mates what she was like; as if she was a piece of meat, as if she was a Spitalfields whore. Dexter threw her coke in the nearest bin and stormed into the coffee room.

  ‘You fucking bastards,’ she screamed at Horton and Payne. ‘I’ll report you both. I’ll make your lives a fucking misery. There’s rules against talking the way you just did. This isn’t the fifties. I am a police officer, not some slag for you all to laugh at.’

  ‘Have you finished?’ Horton asked.

  ‘No, I fucking haven’t. If I ever hear you talk about me like that again I will personally put you on the ground.’

  ‘We weren’t talking about you,’ Horton said with a smile.

  ‘What?’ Dexter felt the ground falling from under her.

  ‘Your little squirm with Willis is old news. He’s been boffing Otham for the past two months.’

  Dexter knew Katie Otham. She was blond and cheaply decorated.

  ‘So if I was you,’ Horton advised, ‘I would go away and have a little cry. Then try and keep your mouth shut and your legs together.’

  It was past ten. Willis decided to check around outside. He got out of the Freelander and strolled through the damp air towards the lights of the service station. There weren’t many people around. He began to wonder if Dexter had merely been winding him up: raising his hopes only to dash them by failing to appear. He discounted the idea: it wasn’t her style. Dexter was a more sophisticated animal. In any case, he truly believed that some sick little part of her soul enjoyed their encounters. Willis entered the service station café. A group of tired looking lorry drivers studied him blankly. There was a pretty teenage girl serving behind the counter: Willis bought a cup of coffee and a chicken sandwich.

  ‘Busy night?’ he smiled.

  She looked up from the cash register surprised by his attempt at contact.

  ‘Yeah, I’m knackered. That’s two twenty please.’

  Willis handed over the money. ‘Girl like you shouldn’t be working here late on your own. Not with all these muppets about.’ He gestured at the group of lorry drivers.

  ‘I’m all right.’

  ‘Bet your boyfriend doesn’t like it.’

  She handed over his receipt and change.

  ‘He thinks it’s better than getting a job himself.’ Her smile was thin and humourless.

  Willis saw her life in a moment. She would have a layabout boyfriend with a beer belly. He’d rest a beer can between his legs while he watched the football. They lived in a shitty little flat that stunk of chips. She’d reluctantly do her duty on her back after Match of the Day. Maybe she’d have girls’ night out once a fortnight and screech about cocks in some tacky theme pub in a city centre. He suddenly found her very
unat­tractive.

  He took a seat that overlooked the car park and settled down to wait, aware that she was watching him closely.

  Dexter had fled from CID with tears streaming down her face. She had crashed out of the building into the anonymity of the street. Cars and buses thundered past her. Rain streamed over her face hiding her tears. She tried to make sense of the desolation inside. Now she had learned the truth. The truth had been that Willis had been doubling up on her for months. The truth was that he was shagging WPC Otham while she had vainly tried to telephone his empty flat. The truth was that his casual indifference to her hadn’t been casual at all: it had been calculated and callous.

  ‘Alison? Are you okay?’ DS Gillian Read had followed her out of Leyton police station.

  ‘I’m fine,’ said Dexter without making eye contact.

  ‘Look, I know what happened, sweetheart.’ Read put her arm round Dexter’s shoulders. ‘Why don’t we go inside?’

  ‘How can I go back? They’re all laughing at me.’

  ‘The only way to stop them is show that it hasn’t hurt you.’

  ‘But it has.’ Dexter’s tears felt hot on her face, her eyes felt ready to explode. ‘I’m pregnant.’

  ‘Oh sweetheart.’ Read enfolded Dexter in a hug. ‘Is it his?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘What are you going to do?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ Dexter watched the universe spinning out of control around her.

  ‘Does he know?’

  ‘I haven’t told anyone yet.’

  ‘You have to get rid of it.’

  ‘I can’t.’

  ‘Alison. You are not a little girl. Think about the realities. You can’t let this happen. Who can you talk to about it?’

  ‘My mum, I suppose,’

  ‘Talk to her then. Don’t throw your life up the wall for a prick like Willis.’

  Dexter nodded. She suddenly felt very cold. ‘Let me go back and get my coat. I’m going home.’

  ‘Alison, listen to me. If you are going back up there you have to be hard. Harder than you’ve ever been. Never let them see they can hurt you. If you let that happen you are finished.’