by Ryan Casey
Always the same.
He caught a glance of himself in the mirror as he wheeled his cleaning apparatus away. Jesus, he looked tired. When the frig had he got so bloody old? Big blue bags under his eyes. Greying, balding hair. He might only be forty-nine, but he looked about twice that. Suppose that’s what all this cleaning work did to a man. All the chemicals he handled, inhaled, let coat his body, they couldn’t be good for him.
He turned away from the mirror as fast as he could and opened the creaking wooden door out of the men’s toilets.
As he walked towards the ladies’ loos, he peeked around the corner at Booths shopping centre. Completely silent, not a sound in there. He kind of liked that about working early mornings. Liked the creepiness of it. It was like a zombie TV show he dipped in and out of—the one with Riley and that fat bloke called Ted. Reminded him of being stuck in there with all these supplies. He’d handle zombies just fine. Straight to the butchers’ section, grab a few sharp knives, lure them out by tossing meat at them and thwack—voila. One dead zombie.
He had way too much time on his hands. Came from being a single, middle-aged man with no friends and a family that didn’t really give a rat’s ass.
He took in a deep breath of the clean air outside the loos before heading into the ladies. Weirdly, the ladies’ loos were always a lot worse than the men’s. He figured they were where men sometimes crept in to have a little play around with their women. Used johnnies, shits on the floor—all kinds of weird crap in the ladies’ loo. It was like a place where boundaries dropped, and being ladylike suddenly died.
He pushed his cleaning apparatus up to the wooden door of the ladies’ loos and braced himself for a shit-tip.
What he got was much, much worse.
The smell hit him first. Ghastly, worst stench he’d ever smelled. Like rotting milk had been left in a warm room for a few months, the lid finally opened.
He pulled his apparatus back. Covered his nostrils and his mouth with his hand. Took a few more gasps of the fresher air.
He readied himself. Jesus Christ, what the fuck had gone on in these loos? Some kind of filthy shitty party? He’d seen a porno like that once upon a time. Scarred him mentally, but that’s what lonely curiosity did to a single man of his age.
He pushed aside his cleaning apparatus. Stepped up to the door and prepared himself to enter.
When he pushed his way through the door, his sleeve did nothing to disguise the smell. But against all his intuition, against all the words in his mind telling him to do otherwise, he powered on through.
The first thing he noticed beyond the smell was the blood.
It was all over the mirrors. Smeared all over. Trickling around the white tiles of the floor.
Leaking from underneath the closed cubicle door.
Jeff shook. Shook and felt dizzy, sick. He should get out of here. Call the police. Summat had happened here. Something terrible.
Instead, he walked towards the cubicle door.
Curiosity got the better of him, once again.
He lifted a quivering hand to the grey door of the cubicle. It was ajar, but the lock was switched over to “Occupied.”
He pushed the door open.
When he saw what was sitting naked on the toilet seat staring back at him, he didn’t understand at first. Thought it must be some sort of wind-up. Some sort of sick wind-up.
And then the realisation clicked that it wasn’t a wind up and he tumbled away, collapsed onto the floor, almost cracked his head in the process.
The blood from the tiles covered his clothes. Got all over his hands, so that as he scrambled for his phone he couldn’t help but get blood everywhere.
He dialled the police. Dialled the police, the person on the toilet still looking at him, staring at him.
“This is the emergency services. Which service do you require?”
Jeff tried to speak but his throat seared with acid. His nostrils reeked of rot. His body, arms, everything just tingled all over.
“Hello? Anyone there?”
He felt the burning fill up in his throat and then he puked all over the bathroom floor.
All the while, the eyeless head of the little girl on the toilet looked on.
TWELVE
Brian headed into work on Saturday morning without any breakfast.
When he got there, Brad was already at the offices. He frowned at him. Squinted.
“You’re looking cheery today.”
“At work on a Saturday morning. What do you expect?’
Brad nodded and walked towards his office area.
Truth was, Brian wasn’t sure just how sarcastic Brad was being. Last night, he’d found out Hannah was pregnant. After weeks and weeks of expecting some news on their deteriorating relationship, of readying himself for her to leave for a better new model, she announced she was pregnant.
But that wasn’t even the bad news. The bad news was that she wanted to keep the kid.
Shit. He almost wished she had just been dating some toyboy after all.
Brian nodded at a few officers as he stepped through the main offices towards the briefing room, which was now his temporary office. The smell of coffee and warmed up porridge was strong. Both made Brian want to hurl. Light peeked in through the windows lining the office today. Much less grim than yesterday. A beautiful autumn morning.
Yeah. Right.
“Got some news for you,” Brad said, as Brian headed into his office.
Jesus. Not more news. “Anything on the coat?”
Brad shook his head. “Should find out about that later today. But we have another body.”
Brian almost puked up right there on the spot.
“Another body? What do you mean another body?”
“Little girl,” a voice from Brian’s right said. Samantha Carter walked out with an apple in her hands, arms folded as she crunched down on it. “Similar age to Sam. Janie Doe at the moment. Same wounds. Same murder method.”
“Jesus,” Brian said. He sat down at his desk to steady himself. Not what he wanted to hear right now.
“Down at Booths in Fulwood. Cleaning guy called us about half an hour ago.”
Brian shook his head. The news still didn’t seem real to him. None of the news did.
“So you’re probably gonna want to take a look down there. Figured I’d let you sneak in before forensics crawl the place.”
“Thanks,” Brian said.
“You okay?” Samantha asked. She frowned. Crunched down on her apple some more.
Christ—was he that obviously stressed out? You’d think there’d been two kids killed or something the way they were claiming he was acting. “Just tired,” he said. “Takes it out of you, stuff like this.”
Carter tossed her apple into his un-bagged wastepaper bin and walked away from his desk. “Comes with the territory of being a granddad, Granddad.”
Knotting of his stomach. Bad choice of words, Samantha. Bloody bad choice of words.
“Shall we head down there then?” Brad asked.
Brian stared into space. Stared at the photographs of Sam Betts, at his scooped out eyes, his disembowelled belly, the little mark where his piercing was in his ear.
“Brian?”
“Yeah. Sure. Whatever. You drive.”
Brad gave him a squinty, uncertain look, then led the way.
Brian stared at the Sam Betts photograph some more.
The Booths’ toilets were a state.
There was blood smeared all over the mirrors. A pool of blood covering the white tiled floor, hand marks and vomit in it that the cleaner, Jeff Milton, insisted belonged to him.
He was shaken up. Pale as anything, which was to be expected. Brian had him sit outside with a coffee while they took a look around. But that look in his eyes. That glazed eye look, like he’d seen something he really shouldn’t have—parents fucking in the shower, something like that. It was there. There in his eyes, etched in, like it was etched into the eyes of every police
officer.
The look of no innocence.
When Brian peeked around the cubicle door, doing all he could to keep the soles of his shoes out of the bloodied pool, a feeling that was becoming horribly familiar built up inside him again.
“Fuck,” Brad said.
There was a girl. Dark hair, wearing no clothes just like Sam Betts had been. She was spread out atop the loo.
And her belly had been opened up.
Brian looked away, composed himself, then looked back at the girl.
Her eyes were gone, just like Sam Betts. Looked like a few areas of her intestines had been nicked, too. He leaned down. Crouched down, trying not to inhale, doing all he could to avoid the stench that powered through the Vaseline he’d spread on his upper lip to dampen the smell.
He saw the hole where the girl’s stomach was missing.
He stepped back. Shook his head.
“Looks like our killer,” he said.
Brad just nodded. Nodded and stared.
Brian stepped away from the cubicle door. Looked around at the smeared blood on the mirrors, on the floor.
“Want me to call forensics?”
Brian stopped. Stared right at the red stains on the mirror. “Yeah. Get CCTV looked at too. There has to be something here. This place, it’s no Westhaven Road.”
“In what sense?”
Brian moved his hand towards the blood on the mirror, came close to touching it, trying his best not to look at the dead Janie Doe in the toilet behind him. “It’s theatrical. There’s more… more of a show to this killing. Not just the blood on the mirrors, the mess made, but the location. A shopping mall. The killer, he has to have been seen. He has to be on CCTV at some point. A man walking in and out of the ladies, that—”
“What makes you so convinced it’s a man?” Brad asked.
Brian looked back at the girl. “The marks. They add up with rape.”
“But we’ve no semen. So our ‘man’ is still just a ‘killer’ for now.”
Brian nodded just to humour Brad. “So on Wednesday, someone kidnaps Sam Betts from the dirt track off Westhaven Road. Body only found Friday. And then today, Saturday, we find this Janie Doe’s body. We need to check missing persons out again.”
“Carter’s already on it,” Brad said. His phone rang. He fumbled it out of his pocket. “Yeah, hello?”
Brian did all he could to dull down his senses, his reactions, and he took another look around the room. At the sticky blood on the mirrors, circling around the plughole. At the trail of blood that had poured out of the poor kid and onto the tiles of the bathroom. This had to have happened last night. Last night, when nobody else was around. Or someone would have reported it yesterday.
But had it happened here? Or had it happened somewhere else and the killer had moved the body?
He looked back at her. Back through the cubicle door, which didn’t have a smidgen of blood on it. Back at the poor girl’s terrified expression, the way her tongue dangled between her teeth, some of which were still little milk ones.
Her brown hair resting atop her ear.
Her earring …
“The piercing,” Brian said.
He turned and looked at Brad, who had just put his phone away. “Brian, we—”
“The piercing,” Brian said. “Sam… Sam Betts had a piercing missing. And so too does this girl. Look at her ear—it looks like the piercing’s been torn out of her. Which—”
“Brian, you need to—”
“The killer, he must collect them. Collect piercings. Some part of his sick game or… or trophies, I don’t know. But they’ve both had jewellery taken away. We need to find that jewellery. We need to—”
“Brian, the DNA from the bloody coat has come back.”
Brian’s thoughts and speculations froze right there. “The coat? The one from the dirt track?”
Brad stared at him blankly. Nodded once.
“And?”
A pause from Brad. A longer stare.
“We’ve got a match. And it’s not Sam Betts’ blood.”
Anticipation fluttered around Brian’s belly. He stepped closer to Brad. “Then whose is it?”
Brad looked over at the cubicle. Looked at the girl, torn apart as she rested on the toilet seat.
“Blood belongs to Beth Turner,” he said. “Aged eleven. Reported missing first thing this morning.”
Brian’s stomach sank as he turned and looked at the dead girl on the toilet.
“Think we’d better pay the Turners a visit, then.”
THIRTEEN
The Turners were already standing outside their front door when Brian and Brad arrived at their house.
They lived in a nice little detached house around Woodplumpton. A fair way from Westhaven Road and the dirt track where Sam Betts was found. The lounge looked warm and homely with an artificial fire flickering away, photographs of Beth Turner lining the marble mantlepiece. A flickering, soundless television played muted images in the background. The smell of burned toast wafted in from the kitchen.
Abigail Turner sat on the edge of her blue leather sofa sniffing and crying while Tony Turner held his arm around her shoulder. She was a big woman, with short dark hair and freckled cheeks. She wore a blue shirt and grey jogging bottoms, while her husband was a slight man with a bald head and a ginger beard that wrapped around his face. He had on a burgundy v-neck T-shirt that looked a few sizes too small for him, and blue jeans with little rips and tears in.
“We just thought… we just thought she was at Jenny’s,” Abigail said, lips quivering, words blubbering out. “They—they had an inset day yesterday. An inset day and… and she stayed at Jenny’s last night. And I just… we just thought she was still there. She sometimes does that. Doesn’t answer her phone. You know what kids are like. We got worried when we didn’t hear from her though. She always texts us when she’s coming home but… but… we rang Jenny’s parents and they said she’d not stayed there after all. She’d never even been round.”
Abigail descended into another fit of tears. Her husband rubbed her back.
Brian tried his best to hold as neutral and professional face as possible, but doing so was proving hard considering how damned sorry he felt for this couple. “Bridgemore High had an inset day yesterday?”
Abigail sobbed some inaudible words. Tony frowned and shook his head. “Bridgemore? No, I… I think it was just Our Lady’s.”
“Wait—so Beth wasn’t a Bridgemore student?” Brad asked.
More blubbering from Abigail. Another shake of the head from Tony.
Great. So Sam Betts and Beth Turner went to different schools. Which ruled out creepy teachers. Unless a supply teacher was involved.
And shit. Andy Wilkinson just so happened to have history as a supply teacher…
“When was the last time you heard from your daughter?” Brian asked. He looked at both Tony and Abigail.
Tony scratched at his torn blue jeans. “Yesterday morning. Friday morning. She—she got the bus to Jenny’s. Me and Abi were working so we couldn’t take her. But we gave her the money.”
“And what did she have to say?”
Tony looked at his wife then up at the police. “We—we wanted to know she was okay. She said she was. That was it. But… but she said something. Something about her—her bus breaking down. Said she was—was gonna have to walk part of the way to Jenny’s. And we worried. We worried but… but then she said she was okay. She said she was okay.”
Brian and Brad exchanged a glance as they stood there in the middle of the small living room, neighbours twitching curtains outside.
“Which bus is this?” Brian asked.
Tony shook his head. “I, er… Bus twenty-two. I think.”
“Goes from here through Broughton then right down the A6,” Brad chipped in. “And what about Jenny? Where does Jenny live?”
Through her sobs, Abigail said, “Fulwood. She—Plungington side. Ashton. With the terraced houses.”
�
��And did Jenny tell you where the bus broke down?”
Abigail and Tony both shook their heads, both held each other close.
Brian crouched down beside them. “We’ll have someone have a word with Jenny and her family. In the meantime, it’d be really appreciated if you… if you just took some time to rest. And then when… when you’re ready, we’d like you to come down to the station. To, erm… to formerly identify your daughter.”
Abigail looked at Brian with red, tear-drenched eyes. A look that cut him deep. “Do you have children, detective?”
Brian felt a tensing in his chest. Davey, and then the new kid. The new kid Hannah had on the way. “Yes,” he said. “I… I have two.”
“Then you’ll know how impossible it is to go down there and see our daughter in… in that state.”
Brian stared into Abigail’s eyes a bit longer. Looked at Tony, who didn’t give anything away.
Then he patted them both on their hands and stepped away.
“I’m sorry for your loss. I really am,” he said.
He caught a glance of the photographs as he started to walk away. Saw Beth’s smiley, cheeky face, and the purple earrings in her ears.
“Did Beth wear her earrings when you last saw her?”
Abigail smiled. “The—the little purple ones? Course. She… she went everywhere in those. Everywhere.”
Brian stared at the photograph. Remembered the way one of the purple earrings had been torn from Beth’s ears as she lay on that toilet. Remembered Sam Betts’ missing piercing, too.
“Thanks,” he said. “We’ll be in touch.”
And then together with Brad, the pair of them walked out of the front door and the flurry of nosey neighbours disappeared behind their curtains once again.
“What do you think?” Brad asked.
Brian leaned against the passenger window. Watched as the trees went by, as kids played in Woodplumpton Primary School, blissfully unaware of the horrors surrounding them. He saw those children and then he saw eleven-year-old Sam Betts and Beth Turner in his mind, mutilated and butchered beyond comprehension.
