Acid Lullaby

by Ed O'Connor

  Dexter resented the imposition and struggled – only half-successfully – to contain her anger.

  ‘This is a police station. We are professionals. Jensen is not a stripogram, she is a CID officer and should make the effort to look like one. Since you’ve chosen to be defender of the faith maybe you should read the regulations too.’

  Harrison mouthed an obscenity at Dexter’s back as she left the office.

  21

  Jack Harvey sat in the consulting room that he had constructed in the extension to his house. He hunched over his computer typing up his conclusions regarding the treatment of John Underwood. His comments formed part of an email message to Chief Superintendent Chalmers at New Bolden Police Station:

  ‘DI Underwood has made significant progress in therapy during the last twelve months.’ he took a long drag on his cigar. ‘His relapse at the end of 2000 seems largely to have been the product of his marriage breaking up. Underwood was at this time co-ordinating a full-scale murder hunt and seems to have been unable to cope with these combined pressures.

  ‘He has been receiving prescription anti-depressant medication and attended weekly therapy sessions with myself during the last year.’

  There was a knock at his door and Rowena Harvey appeared.

  ‘Hello darling, I’m off soon.’

  Jack looked over his shoulder. ‘You look fantastic,’ he said.

  ‘Hardly! This skirt makes my legs look enormous.’

  ‘That’s ridiculous.’

  ‘That cigar stinks, Jack!’

  ‘I’m allowed one vice.’

  Rowena Harvey walked across the room and kissed the bald patch on top of her husband’s head. ‘What are you working on?’ she asked.

  He turned quickly in his swivel chair and slipped his arm around Rowena’s waist, pulling her onto his lap. He gave her a long, hard kiss as she giggled. ‘I know what I’d like to be working on,’ he whispered.

  ‘Jack! I’ve just got changed. I’m meeting Petra in ten minutes.’

  ‘It only takes me a couple of minutes!’

  ‘I can’t.’

  ‘Spoilsport.’

  ‘When I get home tomorrow!’

  ‘I’ll be knackered by tomorrow. Pressure of work. Men of my age have to seize the moment. I might not be able to get it up tomorrow.’

  ‘Now who’s being ridiculous?’ Rowena pulled away and kissed her husband’s forehead. ‘I’ll be home in the morning.’

  Then she was gone.

  Jack turned back to his computer screen. The house was quiet now. The window rattled against its frame.

  Ghosts.

  He tried to concentrate. ‘The symptoms and causes of DI Underwood’s depression appear to have receded. In my opinion, he no longer poses a physical threat and would benefit from an immediate return to light duties.’

  Harvey looked around his little consulting room. He had an uneasy and powerful sense that he was being watched. His case files lined two walls, filling three bookshelves. Many contained private ghosts and personal horrors, including John Underwood’s. Sometimes the ghosts liked to play tricks with him. His telephone rang suddenly. Then stopped. Harvey waited for a moment then continued typing.

  ‘I would recommend a reduction in DI Underwood’s consultations to one session every eight weeks. I have also decided to take him off of his course of anti-depressants. DI Underwood is an experienced and skilled officer and can still be an asset to the force.’

  That was good enough. The Superintendent knew that Harvey and Underwood were friends. Harvey sensed his report was veering dangerously towards eulogy. He attached the Word file to an email and sent it immediately to Chalmers’ office address. Next, he called John Underwood and left him a message on his answerphone.

  As he hung up, the telephone rang immediately. He answered.

  ‘Harvey.’

  ‘Is she on her period, Jack?’ asked the caller before the line went dead.

  Jack Harvey ran to the window and looked outside. There was no one outside: no one visible anyway. His heart was racing. He had recognized the voice.

  22

  Jensen parked near one of the two central accommodation blocks of the Morley Estate. Dexter surveyed the grim expanse of concrete. It was a desolate place. Two miles north-east of New Bolden, the Morley was familiar to most local police officers. Dexter looked at the graffiti on the building walls, the upturned shopping trolleys and the rubbish that blew aimlessly past the line of steel garage doors. For a second it reminded her of Hackney, or of Broadwater Farm in Tottenham, or of some of the soulless council blocks in Leyton. Desperate.

  ‘Let’s get this over with,’ she muttered as she opened the car door.

  ‘Even the social workers call this place the “capital of cruelty”,’ Jensen observed as they approached the optimistically titled ‘Hope House’. ‘They get more calls out here than to anywhere else in Cambridgeshire.’

  ‘I’m not surprised.’ Dexter pressed the call button for the lifts. ‘People get brutalized living out here.’

  The lift door opened. It smelt of piss.

  ‘There’s at least half a dozen animal neglect cases out of this estate every year,’ Jensen continued. ‘Pig ignorance. Man buys puppy for girlfriend. Puppy gets big. Puppy gets irritating. Man argues with girlfriend. Puppy gets locked in a broom cupboard and forgotten about. Place starts to smell of shit. Neighbours complain.’

  ‘It’s a cruel universe.’

  ‘Neglect’s worse than outright cruelty, I reckon.’

  Dexter said nothing. She knew that it wasn’t.

  Ian Stark’s flat was tidier than Dexter had expected. It was small with one tiny box bedroom and a kitchenette adjoining the main living room. Jensen started checking cupboards. Dexter sat at a small desk and began to riffle through Stark’s papers.

  Electricity bill, gas bill, mobile phone bill. A five-hundred-pound mobile phone bill.

  Dexter flicked through its itemized pages. Dealers lived via their mobile phones. It was a potential goldmine finding the bill. Stark’s numbers could prove very useful when cross-referenced with the mobile operators’ records.

  ‘Nothing here except dirty laundry,’ Jensen observed from a small airing cupboard.

  ‘Try the kitchen,’ Dexter replied, moving into Stark’s bedroom. It smelt stale. There was a poster of a Ferrari taped to a wall with a girl in a bikini draped across the bonnet. On the bedside table Dexter noticed a pile of pornographic magazines and a clod of tissue paper.

  ‘Charming,’ she said quietly.

  Instinctively, she opened the top drawer of Stark’s bedside table. Inside was a Navy blue 2002 diary. She immediately turned to the page showing the previous day: 29th April. It was blank. She smiled to herself – that would have been too easy. Dexter flicked to the back of the diary and found pages of initials and phone numbers. Stark’s client list seemed the most likely explanation. There were no full names.

  She thought for a moment. What did Stark have lined up for the coming week? 30th April was left blank but there was a single entry for 1st May: ‘MW. 2200. MCP. 07911 4112370.’

  Dexter started. The number was familiar. She felt a cold hand reach inside her and tear something out.

  ‘Guv, you need to see this,’ Jensen called from the kitchen.

  Dexter picked up the diary and hurried through into the living room. Jensen had placed a shoebox on the dining table. It contained a small amount of cash and some plastic bags filled with multi-coloured pills.

  ‘What do you reckon they are?’ Dexter asked.

  Jensen held a bag up to the grey light of the window. ‘God knows. ‘E’s I’d say at a guess. That’s what most of the clubs round here specialize in. To be honest, I thought we’d find more than this.’

  Dexter didn’t agree with Jensen’s observation. Stark wouldn’t have left his entire stash of drugs in his own flat. He wasn’t that stupid. ‘Stay here, Sarah. There’s something I need to do. I’ll call for a team to help.’
/>
  ‘No problem.’ Jensen suddenly realized that Dexter had never called her by her first name before.

  On her way to the door, Dexter collected the itemized mobile phone bill from Stark’s desk. Once outside the flat she ran down the filthy stone steps to the car park and unlocked her Mondeo.

  Sitting in the passenger seat, she opened the diary again to 1st May.

  ‘07911 4112370’ stared back at her.

  She turned to the itemized phone bill and ran her right index finger down the list of calls, trying to remain calm.

  ‘07911 4112370’ stared back at her.

  Lastly, she opened the glove compartment of the car and withdrew her personal mobile phone. She selected the ‘phonebook’ option and scrolled down to ‘M’.

  ‘07911 4112370’ stared back at her.

  She sat back in her seat and looked out through the rain-specked windscreen. The sky was darkening outside as the clouds began to thicken overhead. The desolate spaces and litter-strewn alleyways of the Morley Estate stretched around her. In their misery, ugliness and futility Alison Dexter saw that she had been turned inside out.

  23

  Jack Harvey awoke with a start. He looked at his watch. It was late. Just before midnight. He was still in his consulting room. His computer hummed efficiently in front of him. He had a terrible pain in his neck from where he had fallen asleep sitting upright in his chair. Jack tried to blink away his exhaustion.

  The front door bell rang again. Just as it had to wake him up ten seconds previously. His immediate thought was of Rowena. Had she returned home early without her keys? Was his wife as forgetful as Underwood? Wearily, Jack rose from his seat and left his consulting room. He flicked off the light as he left and climbed the three steps into the main hallway of his house. It smelt of Rowena’s perfume. The smell was reassuring and arousing.

  ‘Who is it?’ he called through the door.

  There was only silence. Jack peered out through the frosted glass. It distorted his view but he couldn’t see anybody outside. He was suddenly nervous and hesitated. He had a decision to make: open the door and find out who – if anyone – was outside, or remain inside and face a night of anxiety starting at every shadow and sound. He chose the former and opened the door. In a second he was engulfed by the wrath of the Soma.

  Harvey regained consciousness half an hour later. He was aware of an acute pain across his shoulders. He was lying down on his consulting room table, his wrists tied painfully together beneath it. He strained hard but found that he was unable to move.

  Max Fallon tore around the room in a fury. He pulled Harvey’s case files down from the shelves and flung them to the floor. He tried to swat the demons from the air around him as they tormented him for his impotence. Paper spread and slid across the floor. Fallon grunted and mumbled obscenities in his frustration. He sat down at Harvey’s computer and tried unsuccessfully to log in.

  Eventually, he gave up and kicked out furiously at the PC monitor. At his fourth attempt his foot smashed through the glass. He stormed over to Harvey, desperately trying to blink away the lights that swooped and swirled behind his eyes.

  ‘Where is it?’ he spat the words at Harvey.

  ‘Where’s what? Get me out of here!’ Harvey hissed back at him.

  ‘My file. All those banal fucking notes you made during our so-called sessions. I want them now.’

  ‘I destroyed them.’

  ‘Bullshit.’ Fallon grabbed Harvey’s neck. ‘Tell me where they are now!’

  Harvey tried to remain calm. He knew Fallon was volatile, that he was capable of violence. He would try to calm him down.

  ‘Okay! Okay!’ Harvey coughed for breath. ‘The file isn’t here. I keep my private client records elsewhere.’

  ‘I’ll bet you do,’ Fallon sneered, ‘bet the taxman would be interested in your little asides. Does that horny little wife of yours know that all the jewellery that drips off her has been paid for by the manias of the independently wealthy?’

  ‘This has got nothing to do with Rowena.’

  Fallon watched him closely for a second then started laughing. He laughed so much it hurt him. He sunk to his knees and crawled out of the room on all fours, tears coursing down his cheeks. He returned two minutes later carrying two large blue cool-boxes. He was still giggling.

  Fallon placed the boxes in the middle of the room and pulled up a chair so that he sat close to Harvey’s head.

  ‘So how are you feeling, Jack? Still worried about going bald?’ he giggled. ‘Don’t panic. Some women find it sexy apparently. Personally I think it looks bloody awful.’

  ‘Max, you have to let me go.’

  ‘Don’t call me that. Don’t call me Max. You should know better. I am not your friend, dickhead. Now, what did you write about me in those files?’

  ‘Let me go and we’ll talk about it.’

  ‘No. Let’s talk now, buddy boy. All those mind-numbing hours I spent in here while you poked at my mind and wondered how to spend my daddy’s money. I explained my incarnation to you and you just sat there nodding and disbelieving. I thought that you might have the vision. I thought you might be the sage of the gods. You couldn’t diagnose a headache. You did write down lots of things though. Now it’s time to deliver. What did they say?’

  ‘If you are a God, you’d already know.’

  ‘You had no clue about me, did you? I bet you sat there writing sexy little notes to Rowena while you were supposed to be helping me.’ He leaned in closer and whispered politely in Jack’s ear. ‘By the way, I’m planning to copulate with her once you’re out the way.’

  Max exploded into a high-pitched giggle. His saliva spat across Harvey’s face. Jack struggled frantically to free his hands.

  ‘I wrote that you had a drug problem,’ said Jack, desperately playing for time.

  ‘Brilliant!’ Max spluttered through his hysterics. He bent down and opened one of his cool-boxes. ‘What extraordinary insight. I know about the drugs. I told you about the drugs. Daddy didn’t really get value for money with you did he, Jack?’

  ‘You think that you are becoming some kind of god. You have the same recurring delusional fantasy.’

  ‘Delusional? Hmmm. That’s better. Keep going!’ said Max as he continued to rummage in his cool-box.

  ‘You’re like a scratched record. You keep replaying the same loop in your mind. You have to break the cycle.’

  ‘You still don’t accept the notion that I have entered an alternative plane of consciousness: that I have unlocked the memory of my former divinity and translated it into certain knowledge.’

  ‘No, I don’t. Your father told me you had a drug problem. He told me you had lost your job after some psychological episode last summer. He believed it stemmed from the loss of your mother when you were a child.’

  Max withdrew a clean syringe from the box, one of the twenty he had taken from the pockets of Ian Stark. He also withdrew a medicine bottle that was half-filled with dark cloudy liquid. He opened the bottle and drew its contents carefully into the syringe.

  ‘What the hell is that?’ Jack asked, suddenly terrified.

  ‘If you truly understood me, Jack, you’d already know,’ Fallon observed, pleased with himself.

  ‘Max, stop this now.’

  Fallon was staring at the syringe, mesmerized. ‘It’s interesting that you called it a drugs problem, Jack. Drugs aren’t necessarily the problem. They can be the solution. You prescribe drugs to help people, right? Your sad little patients with manias and neuroses.’

  ‘That’s completely different.’

  ‘Did you know that in many ancient cultures, tribal leaders used drugs as part of religious services?’

  ‘Max, we’ve been through all this. Let me go and I’ll promise to help you.’

  ‘The theory is that the drugs activated a certain part of the worshipper’s brain. This allowed them to transcend the mundane limits of the imagination, unlock the memories of our former existences and eve
n behold the face of God. Guess what, Jack?’ Fallon held the loaded syringe in front of Harvey’s terrified eyes. ‘Your flight is ready to depart.’

  Fallon held Harvey’s head steady and injected the contents of the syringe into the psychiatrist’s neck.

  ‘Welcome to mass, Dr Harvey. Only a benign God would allow you to take this journey. Only a generous God would let you see his face. Don’t be afraid. I will be your guide on your journey to the godhead.’

  Half an hour later, as Harvey began to spasm violently on the table, Fallon reached into his cool-box again. This time he removed the power saw he had found in a shed behind his house. Placing the saw on a table, Fallon began to whisper into Harvey’s ear. Prompted and petrified, Harvey’s mind washed in and out of consciousness. Unguarded, unable to filter Fallon’s suggestions from reality, Harvey began to live the nightmare. And he started to scream.

  An Unlikely Prophet

  24

  1st May

  The bungalow was neatly arranged and smelt vaguely of lavender. There were lines of photo frames organized on the main mantelpiece. Many contained black-and-white photos, some of men in uniform.

  PC Sauerwine sat on the edge of Mary Colson’s two-seater sofa. The sitting room was becoming familiar to him now. This was, after all, his third visit in two weeks. His mates at the station thought he was gold-digging, trying to muscle in on the old lady’s inheritance. That was harsh, he told himself. Mary was a frightened old age pensioner and part of his job was reassurance. Besides, she cooked a mean egg on toast.

  ‘You spoil me, Mrs Colson,’ he called out to the kitchen.

  There was no reply. Sauerwine knew that she was slightly deaf, that she watched his lips closely when he spoke. He unclipped his radio and called in.

  ‘Seven-eight-one in attendance at seventeen Beaumont Gardens. Clear in ten minutes.’

  ‘Control to seven-eight-one acknowledged. Make sure you look under the mattress,’ squawked the control centre derisively.