Cold Cuts

by Douglas Lindsay

  Cooper ran a hand through his hair, drummed the other on the desk. The tired good humour of earlier was gone. That had never been going to last.

  “Yeah, I suppose you’re right. This shit isn’t going anywhere,” he said, then added, “So what’s the early prognosis?”

  “Very early,” she said, “still got a lot of digging to do. Looks like Whittaker, Moyes and Abernethy — both Abernethys — ran the porn business. Whittaker decided to take the others out, and use it to close down the factory in what she thought might be an advantageous way. She used Chantelle for her purposes. Too early to say, though, if she intended to get rid of Chantelle, or vice versa. Also too early to say the level of Hannity’s involvement. She may have been working with Chantelle all along, we don’t know yet.”

  Cooper nodded grudgingly, then looked past Pereira’s left shoulder out to where Bain, his back to Cooper’s office, was sitting at his desk.

  “Take it you and the sergeant want to head home?”

  “We’ve issued the press briefing, and we’ve called the conference for eight in the morning.”

  “I’ll take that,” said Cooper quickly, and Pereira nodded.

  “Of course.”

  “So I’ll need the full brief on my desk by seven-fifteen.”

  “I’m just writing it up now, sir. I’ll send it across when I’m done, then I’ll be back in at six-thirty to get on top of things. I can add to the brief if there’s anything new.”

  He glanced past her again at the clock, ran his hand across his face. Shook his head.

  “Hannity’s downstairs?”

  “Got her a bed for the night. Asleep already, apparently.”

  “And the kid’s in the room with her?”

  “For the moment. Social didn’t want to get into it until the morning.”

  “Poor kid,” said Cooper.

  Pereira thought of the boy, the cold eyes burrowing away inside you, and thought that sympathy was the last thing she felt for him.

  Driving back to the station, Hannity and her son in the back of a separate police van, Bain had said that he wouldn’t be surprised if it turned out the boy was the killer.

  “Lack of stature’s just about the only way he gets a pass,” he’d said.

  “When we’ve wrapped,” said Cooper, “we’re going to have a look at how you handled this case, Inspector. We’ll need to know if there was anything that should have been done that wasn’t. If there was anything you missed. Four people died here, and we need to understand if we could have prevented some of that. We’ll need to know how it was that you had no idea about Hannity up until the point where you more or less found her with a knife in her friggin’ hands. We’d been treating her like a damned bereaved widow.”

  “They weren’t married,” said Pereira.

  Pedantic, but she wasn’t going to get into any of it. She’d done plenty of thinking in the past couple of hours, and she wasn’t sure what else she could have done. Apart, perhaps, from looking through those porn DVDs a bit more quickly. There was that.

  “We’re not living in Minority Report,” Bain had also said in the car, as though he could see the thought processes unfolding in Pereira’s head.

  “What?” said Cooper. “Yeah, right, sure, makes all the difference.”

  He held her gaze for a moment, then broke it and the discussion, with a shake of the head.

  “Right, I need to get some sleep. Finish whatever you’re doing, then be back in here sharp in the morning.”

  “Sir,” she said.

  Nothing to add. She’d already told him she’d be in early, he hadn’t needed to issue the instruction. She turned away quickly before he could say anything else, and was back at her desk, writing at her computer, by the time Cooper followed her out the door, shoulders hunched and scowling at the night, a minute later.

  *

  She walked into her sitting room. The electric fire was still on, the room warm. There was a single light on, the small lamp beside the CD player, which leant the room a dull, orange light because of the colour of the shade. Like having a street light inside, her mother had said. But at the end of the day, when all she’d wanted to do was curl up on the seat and go to sleep, that was the one light she’d left on.

  And there her mother would have to stay. She wasn’t going to send her home at this time of night. She’d have been happy for her mother to have fallen asleep in her bed, but they’d had that argument before, and she knew it was never going to happen. She was not, however, going to place a blanket over her where she now slept, as that would wake her up, and she really couldn’t face the conversation.

  She watched her mother for a minute, and then turned away and began walking up the stairs. She needed her mother to take the kids to school in the morning, so she would have to have the conversation at six a.m.

  On to the upstairs hall, past the large framed photograph of her and the kids and Lena, taken two years previously on holiday in Crieff, and then she walked into the kids’ room.

  Anais was in the same position she’d been in when Pereira had left a few hours earlier. Robin was now sleeping on his stomach, his legs bent at the knee, his feet in the air beneath the covers. The way she’d so often seen him sleeping, almost since the day he’d been born.

  She watched him for a while, then bent down and kissed him on the forehead. He did not move a muscle. She touched his dark hair, a soft, lingering, sorrowful touch, and then straightened up, glancing once more at Anais. She walked over beside her bed, reached down and gently touched her hair, and then turned and walked out of their room.

  As she stood in the bathroom, in front of the mirror, she checked her watch. 02.29.

  One more day, then the weekend. Saturday was free, that was what mattered. Her and the kids, and something fun that they could all agree on. Cinema, the beach, the park, it didn’t matter. And then Sunday, church in the morning, handing Robin over to Lena for the afternoon.

  First of all, however, there was a Friday to be taken care of, and the Friday was now starting in less than four hours.

  She splashed water on her face, rubbed hard, more water, then she began brushing her teeth.

  02.29 became 02.30.

  *

  The short, white corridor was silent, although there had been something of a ruckus thirty minutes previously when the last of the night’s drunks had been brought in.

  Eight cells in all, four on either side. Solid white doors with a panel at head height. Each cell contained four CCTV cameras, so that the entire cell was covered. There was no escaping the vigilant eye.

  Unusually, only three of the eight cells were occupied. When Jacqueline Hannity had been brought in, the decision had been taken to clear the corridor. This was a serious enough business that it was felt she should be held here, on her own, overnight. That two of the cells had since been used was purely down to a lack of space at the other facilities in the area.

  Nevertheless, Hannity had one end of the corridor to herself, the cell next to hers, opposite and diagonally opposite all vacant. Although, of course, she wasn’t actually alone.

  2.33 a.m. As DI Aliya Pereira was finally crawling into bed, Hannity was still fast asleep. Her back turned to the door, a single blanket drawn across her body, her breathing heavy.

  Another bed had been brought into the narrow cell for the use of her son, leaving only fifteen inches of space in between.

  Kingdom Hannity was not asleep. Kingdom Hannity, as observed by the two officers in the small control room at the end of the corridor, was sitting on the bed, his legs dangling over the side. His hands were placed on his thighs, fingers together and resting at precisely the same point on each leg. He was looking at his mother.

  Although the microphones in the room were not picking up any sound, the two guards had noticed that his lips were moving. Singing a silent song, or talking quietly, either to himself or his sleeping mother.

  Jackson, sitting to Penman’s left, lifted his mug of tea, without ta
king his eyes off the screen, and drained the last of it, screwing his face up at the cold, milky liquid.

  “That kid,” said Penman, finally finding his voice as though Jackson’s move to lift the mug had broken the silent deadlock in which they’d become trapped, “is creepy as fuck.”

  Jackson didn’t reply. In the renewed silence he cocked his head slightly to the side, listening. Penman looked at him for a second, then turned back to the video screen.

  “Keep waiting for him to turn and look at the camera,” he said.

  “Shh,” said Jackson.

  “You can’t hear him,” said Penman.

  They listened to the silence again, absolute in the dead of night. The light in the room was low, the feed from the cell not the best quality, but the rhythmic movement of the boy’s lips was still clear, as though he might be repeating the same thing over and over again.

  Penman, despite trying to dismiss the possibility of hearing him, found himself straining to catch any sound. He was aware of the hairs beginning to stand on the back of his neck.

  “We can turn the volume up,” he said a short while later.

  “I know,” said Jackson.

  Penman didn’t think to ask why Jackson hadn’t done it, if he’d already thought of it. He knew why. Even though they were sitting here straining to hear what the boy was saying, they didn’t actually want to know.

  Almost unconsciously, it seemed, Penman reached out to the volume control, and turned it up. Finger on the dial, until it was at its highest setting. Jackson felt his throat dry, his heart beginning to beat a little faster.

  The white noise of the microphone on full volume uncomfortably filled the room, yet the voice of the child was immediately obvious, buried deep within the static.

  Both Penman and Jackson leant forward, straining even more than they had been previously, trying to pick out the words.

  They got the rhythm of it first, round and round, words spoken in a monotone. They listened closely, their eyes both on the boy’s lips to see if that might help them pick it up.

  Gradually, as the seconds dragged out to minutes, and they sat completely still, the words began to come into view, as though they were slowly approaching the shoreline through fog.

  Penman got them first, the rhyme finally emerging from the soup of sound. He swallowed, his gaze dropped. Jackson noticed the movement, as it was the first time either of them had done anything in a few minutes, and with the knowledge that his colleague had worked it out, instantly so did he, and the words became clear.

  In the cell, Kingdom Hannity sat perfectly still, his hands on his knees. Lips barely moving, eyes wide, staring at his mother.

  “Chop the flesh … stab the head … cut the neck … now they’re dead. Chop the flesh … stab the head … cut the neck … now they’re dead. Chop the flesh … stab the head … cut the neck … now they’re …”

  He stopped. A moment, and then he turned and looked directly into the nearest camera.

  “Dead.”

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