Eye Snatcher

by Ryan Casey

  “She’s off sick,” Janet said. Took her glasses off. Turned around to organise a few papers.

  Brad shook his head. Wandered off away from the counter.

  “Right,” Brian said. “And when will we be able to speak to her?”

  “Tomorrow,” Janet said. “Maybe it would be advisable to get a warrant after all.”

  I’ll break your fucking business, Brian thought. “I’ll do that, Janet. Thanks for all your cooperation.” He scooped up the photographs of Andy Wilkinson, blood boiling. Made sure he smacked his hand against a rather expensive looking pot ornament in the process before turning and walking towards the door.

  His cheeks were hot. He needed to get outside. Outside and away from this shitty posh haven. Away from the hypnotic music, the perfume smells, the bitchy glances and—

  “Brian, look at this.”

  Brad’s voice came from Brian’s left.

  Brian kept on walking towards the rotating doors. Went to go through them, back out to the shitty rain and wind.

  “Don’t have time to screw about here. Best go get that warrant before—”

  “Brian. Here. Now.”

  Brad’s voice was stern. Stern enough to get Brian looking at him, walking over to him.

  He was standing at a little window. A window that looked through to the pool area. Through there, Brian could hear splashing, see men in speedos that were in much better shape than him wading their way through the water.

  “Come on, Brad. You can wait ‘til we get home to look at naked fellas.”

  Brad tapped on the glass. Pointed at someone who was sitting in the mini jacuzzi, feet up.

  Andy Wilkinson.

  “Brought your trunks?” Brad asked.

  TEN

  When Andy Wilkinson saw Brian and Brad entering the shower area of the Marriot Hotel swimming pools, he had that look in his eyes like he was getting ready to run.

  And then, realising there was nowhere to go, he just stopped and sighed like a rabbit trapped in the old proverbial headlights.

  “Wise move,” Brad said, as he stepped up to him.

  “Staying put is always a wise move where police are involved,” Brian said.

  Andrew Wilkinson was naked but for his little black speedos. The shower area was steamy and empty but for the three of them. Brian had to be careful not to slip on the soaking floor with his shoes on. Didn’t want to make any more of an arse of himself. Besides, Evil Janet would be on their cases in no time, no doubt. They had to get this done with.

  Andrew wrapped a blue towel over his muscular shoulder. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “That’s funny,” Brian said, smiling at Brad. “Andy here doesn’t know what we’re talking about.”

  “Doesn’t know a thing about Jean Betts?”

  “How about her son? Little Sam Betts?”

  Andy tried to step past Brian, but he put his arm on his shaven chest and pushed him right back.

  “You’re not going anywhere, Andy. Not just yet.”

  Andy looked at them both with wide, bloodshot eyes. “Look, nothing happened. It’s a private service. I—”

  “Was it a private service when you fiddled little Damien Halshaw back at Bridgemoor High?”

  Andy’s cheeks flushed as a fellow swimmer headed into the shower room then backed away when he saw the police. “Look, he wasn’t little.”

  Brad tutted and rolled his eyes. “Oh Andy, you sick fuck.”

  “I don’t—I don’t mean it like that,” Andy barked. “He was—he was sixteen. And it wasn’t like that. It wasn’t—”

  “He’s a kid still, Andrew,” Brian said. “A little student kid of yours.” He stepped up to him, got a whiff of the steam from the scalding hot shower. “How did it work, hmm? You getting off over him for years? Just waiting for him to get legal so you could bend his little ass over that desk in after school detention and—”

  “It wasn’t like that,” Andrew snapped. His cheeks were fully red now. Brian could see his heart thumping in his chest. “It… Nothing happened. Nothing untoward. I was cleared. This finished years ago.”

  Brian looked at Brad and stuck his lip out. Nodded. “Right. He’s got a point.”

  “Sure has. Finished years ago.”

  Brian pulled out the CCTV snaps of Andy fleeing Jean’s house earlier. “So why’d you flee the scene of a crime when you saw us pulling up?”

  Andy frowned at the photographs. Sweat gathered on his crinkled forehead. “Scene of… what crime?”

  “Don’t bullshit us,” Brad said. “You don’t just go scooting off without a reason. Especially when a dead kid’s involved.”

  “So why did you cycle away? And Wednesday night, you took off pretty late for a trip too. Wine trip, apparently. Although you didn’t come back with any wine. Care explaining that?”

  “Wait,” Andy said. He lifted his hand. Shook his head, as if trying to catch up with the conversation. “A… a dead kid? What are you talking about?”

  “Sam Betts,” Brad said. “Your whore’s little boy. Aged eleven. Found him disembowelled in the old Whittingham Hospital. Eyes scooped out of his skull like pickles from a jar. Little ass torn to pieces.”

  Brian flinched at Brad’s descriptiveness, but it clearly had an impact on Andy. All the colour from his face drifted away and he went a deathly pale. “I thought… I just thought…”

  “Just thought what, Andy?”

  Andy gulped. His jaw shook. He looked up—looked right at Brian in his eyes. “Jean. Is she… Oh God. Is she okay?”

  “Of course she isn’t okay. She’s so not okay that she even lied for you. Said you went to get some wine that night her kiddie went missing. Only you came back with nothing. So where were you?”

  Andy lifted his hand to his face. Shook his head. “I… I just thought he’d… kids, you know. They—they go away sometimes. They run away.”

  “For days on end?” Brian spat. “Give me a fucking break. And you’re still not being straight. The wine. What the fuck happened there?”

  Andy lowered his hand and closed his eyes. “I, I… I went to get some. And—and then Jean called me. Said she’d found some. So I turned right back. I… I cycled back to her place.”

  Brad raised his eyebrows. “Convenient.”

  “Very,” Brian said.

  “You can call her. Confirm it with her. I just…” He sounded out of breath. Like the wind had been knocked out of his system. “Oh God. Her kid. Her poor kid.”

  He was either a very convincing actor or genuinely gutted.

  Brian’s phone rang. He checked it—DC Finch. He prayed to God for some sort of slip in Jean’s story. Prayed to God that Andy Wilkinson was lying, that Jean Betts was lying, just so this case could get resolved quick and fast. He didn’t like it when cases lingered on. They did bad things to him. Turned him into a person he wasn’t fond of.

  He held his breath. “Finch. Please tell me you’ve got something.”

  “Caught up with Jean just before she got home. Says she remembers calling Andrew Wilkinson to tell him she found some wine under the stairs so he came straight back. What’s Han Solo’s version?”

  Fuck. He scratched at his forehead. “Yeah. Yeah, same story here. Thanks, Finch. Later.”

  He put the phone down. Nodded at Brad.

  “Stay away from kids, Andy,” Brian said, as he stepped to the exit of the shower room where Andrew stood all on his own, water dripping from his ruffled hair.

  Then, he stopped. “Anyway, what’s with the sudden change in tastes?”

  Andy towel-dried his hair, kept looking nervously at Brian and Brad. “What?”

  “Well, sixteen-year-old boys to women in their thirties. Escorts in their thirties. Quite a swing to have in the space of a few years.”

  Andy lowered the towel. His lips quivered. “Look at me. I’m a shamed ex-teacher with a lot of money. Nobody comes near me because they just have to do a Google search and they find the lies. I need�
� I need some way. Some way to feel good about myself. Some way to release. Don’t we all?”

  Brian pondered Andy’s words in his head. In an annoying kind of way, they made sense.

  “Keep your snake in your trousers from now on,” Brian said, as he walked out of the showers and back towards the exit door. “Men like you don’t get lucky a third time.”

  Brian and Brad made their way out of the Marriot, past snarling Janet through the cold wintry weather to the car.

  They sat down. Sat back in the seats, both of them silent for a few minutes.

  “It’s about time we clocked off for the day,” Brad said.

  Brian checked his silver Rotary watch that Hannah had bought him for his last birthday. He’d had to get another hole pierced in it as he started putting on weight again. But hell—Hannah knew he was susceptible to a belly. He’d warned her of that in the past. And he was getting on a bit. Nearly twenty years on her, so it just made sense that he was the first to get fat with age.

  Good job, too. He wasn’t fond of fat women.

  The little hand on the watch pointed to five. His stomach sank. Home time.

  “Nothing’s going to change overnight, Brian.”

  Brian looked away from his watch. Started up the car and tried to brush off Brad’s remark. “Dunno what you’re talking about.”

  “That look,” Brad said. “That look of ‘oh shit’ on your face.”

  Brian reversed out and almost clipped the back of the car. “Dunno what you’re—”

  “Just go home. Relax. Then we come back in with fresh eyes tomorrow. There’s still tracks to be searched. The coat we found—that might have something. Still things we don’t know. It’ll be a lot clearer tomorrow, I’m sure.”

  Brian indicated and turned out of the Marriot, the rain blasting out again and the sky going dark. He thought about Sam Betts. Thought about his body, his mum, of Andy Wilkinson and the pictures of him on that CCTV.

  He thought back to the dirt track. The farm track. Farmer Jack Selter.

  As he went through the traffic lights and headed towards Brad’s place in Fulwood, he knew for a fact that his mind wasn’t letting this case drop for the night.

  When Brian got home, he couldn’t shake the feeling of discontent lingering at the bottom of his stomach.

  He walked up the pathway towards his semi-detached house on Conway Drive and looked around. The Wisdom’s plant pots had tumbled over again, spilled soil all down Brian’s driveway. Outside the grey-bricked semi of Brian and Hannah’s, a hanging basket filled with dead flowers swung from side to side in the breeze. Waste of cash, hanging baskets. Flowers in general for that matter. Sure, they looked colourful for a short while, but five quid worth of colourful just to go and die a few days later? Hardly worth it.

  But hey. Relationships required compromises.

  Brian unlocked the door to his house and stepped inside. He scrubbed his feet on the welcome mat, which always seemed to do a shitty job of cleaning his shoes. Another wasted expense.

  He could smell something from the kitchen. Hotpot.

  His stomach turned.

  The kitchen door opened and Hannah stepped out. She smiled at him, with her dark brown hair dangling down to her shoulders and her iPad in her hands. She was wearing a peach cardigan with a white T-shirt underneath, which really flattered her breasts. Which were amazing as it was. She had tight blue jeans on as she stepped up to Brian, barely acknowledging him, kissed him on his cheek.

  “Hotpot’s on the table for you.”

  Brian took off his shoes. “You eaten?”

  Hannah stepped up the stairs. “Yeah. Got hungry. And I have some article to finish off.”

  “Interesting article?” Brian asked, craning his neck as Hannah continued to disappear up the stairs.

  “I’ll catch you later, hun. Enjoy your tea.”

  And then she was gone.

  Brian stood there, alone, in the darkened hallway of his house. It’d been like this with Hannah for a few months now. He’d tried to ignore it at first. Tried not to see it. But really, they were just little things that added up and when considered as a whole, were pretty lofty. The times she spent away from him during dinner doing work (she was a freelance journalist, so finding “work” was easy). The friends she went out to meet on week nights that she hadn’t previously seen in years. The little side-glances he’d catch from her when they were lying in bed.

  He was lucky. He knew that. She was gorgeous. Amazing.

  But maybe that was the problem. Maybe she was too gorgeous. Too amazing.

  He stepped through to the kitchen, towards the looming smell of hotpot. Maybe she was falling out of love with him. He was hardly the catch he was in his twenties. Sure, he got told he had some weird macho charm about him—some mysteriousness that women craved—but he wasn’t such a looker.

  Maybe she was tired of him. Maybe that’s why she was making him get therapy again, see a counsellor. Maybe she saw what she was doing to him—the paranoia she was causing within him, and trying to get the therapist to break the news of his deteriorated relationship gently.

  Or maybe he really was just being paranoid. Maybe he really did need help.

  He pushed open his kitchen door. One of the bulbs had gone, so there was a dimness to the room. Pots were stacked up in and beside the sink, Hannah’s leftover coffee half-filling the cups. That bugged Brian. It was his pet hate. How hard was it for her to fill them with a bit of water?

  But he didn’t say anything. He didn’t pull her up for it out of fear.

  He didn’t want to lose her.

  He went over to the gas stove and lifted the metal lid of a pan resting on top. The steaming mush of potatoes, corned beef and stewed vegetables stared back at him, the smell filling his nostrils and making him want to hurl.

  She made an excellent hotpot. But she made it too much. Too often. Not that he was any kind of gender stereotypist—Hannah actually enjoyed cooking. Said it gave her a buzz, like some people got from doing sports, or writing songs.

  But she was making hotpot a lot these days. Hotpot was her “lazy-ass” dish, she’d once said.

  Brian cringed as he scooped a bit of the frothy mess out of the pan and took it to the little circular wooden table in a bowl.

  He stuck a fork into it. Slurped up the mushy potato and stared into the nothingness of the rain hitting the kitchen window, making it rattle on its deteriorating hinges. As he moved a disintegrating slice of sloppy salted carrot around his mouth, he saw Sam Betts.

  Saw his opened belly, intestines dangling out.

  Saw his vacant eye sockets, flies crawling around them.

  Saw his little smile on that school photo of his.

  He pushed aside the hotpot after forcing a carrot down his throat and rested his head in his hands. He wished he was like a normal cop. One of those cold as shit bastards who could switch off when they got home. One of those morally screwed wankers who got a buzz from murder cases, played them like they were a game of fucking Cluedo rather than actual real lives.

  But he couldn’t. He never had been able to switch off. He accepted that now. Knew it was just a part of him—a part of his genetic makeup, or whatever. The obsessiveness, not the police part. His dad was a train track construction worker and his mum was a stay at home mum until she decided she didn’t want to stay at home anymore.

  But he always remembered the way his dad used to obsess about things. The littlest of things—conspiracy theories, stuff in the newspaper, things like that. Once, he pinned up the entire day’s news on the falling shares of a big British bank. Was convinced he was some kind of modern day Nostradamus, and that everyone should withdraw all their money from them and get it into another bank right away.

  Naturally, the bank his dad moved his money into went into liquidation two weeks later.

  That was one of the few funny memories Brian had of his dad.

  He scraped his chair back. Poured the barely eaten hotpot back into the pan
and put the lid back on top. He’d grab some later if he was hungry. Or maybe he’d just get in a Dominos. Dominos went down easier. And Hannah wouldn’t mind. She never minded.

  He walked out of the kitchen and into the dark coldness of the hall. Stepped upstairs to see where Hannah was, what she was up to.

  He pushed open the bedroom door and he saw that she was crying.

  She was sat on the end of the bed. Sat with her hands covering her face. Sniffing, knees close together, like she was a scared kid who’d lost her parents.

  “Han?” Brian said. He took a few trepidatious steps into the bedroom.

  Hannah moved her hands from her face. Her eyes were completely red and her cheeks were soaked. She looked at Brian with apologetic eyes. With apology—no, guilt—which Brian had seen way too many times on the job already.

  Brian waited for the news. Waited for the news of an affair to hit him. Waited for it to stab him in his big fat gut and leave him mentally disembowelled, his innards pouring out onto the floor.

  “I’m pregnant, Brian,” she said. “I’m pregnant.”

  ELEVEN

  Jeff Milton wiped the piss puddle away from the edge of the toilet seat and prayed he’d get another job sooner rather than later.

  He threw the dirty green sponge into his big black bin bag and stepped away from the men’s toilets. He’d been working as a toilet cleaner in Booths for seven years now. Seven fucking years mopping up piss and scraping up shit for a living. No wonder he couldn’t find a woman. He was hardly a catch.

  He wheeled his cleaning apparatus away from the cubicle and did a quick check of the hand driers. Automatic one on the right wasn’t working, again. Someone had drawn on a cock in red marker pen too. Shit—when Jeff was younger, he’d be the kind of guy to do jokey shit like that. Now he had to clean it up, he took back everything he did. What a little shite he was.

  The smell of stale urine and cleaning foam lingered in his nostrils, invaded his taste buds, the same way a fry-up might fill the nostrils of a normal person on a Saturday morning. Nope—every day of Jeff’s life, nothing but bogs to clean. And they were always in an awful state. No matter how many signs you put up telling people to lift the seats, to not flush paper towels down the loo, to hold their fucking flapping cocks while they pissed, they just never did.