Acid Lullaby

by Ed O'Connor

  Miller shrugged. ‘Many different types of mushroom contain powerful psychoactive agents – chemicals that produce powerful hallucinations. I mentioned earlier that the Fly Agaric contains muscimol. Other mushrooms contain Ibotenic Acid or Psilocybin. They have similar effects to ingesting LSD.’

  Underwood frowned. The terms meant nothing to him. He was interested in the effects. ‘How do those chemicals induce hallucinations? What do they do to the brain?’

  ‘That’s a tough one. You should really ask a neurologist. Basically, your brain receives millions of pieces of information every second, right? Your sensory organs and nerves are constantly feeding data to your brain about your body, your external environment and so on. Now, your brain has the capacity to filter that information and make sense of it.’ Miller noted their blank expressions. ‘I’ll try to demonstrate. Close your eyes for a second.’ As Dexter and Underwood nervously obliged, Miller looked around him, picked up a plastic biro and hurled it at the glass window. It clattered to the ground a second later. ‘Your brain just told you that the sound you just heard was a pen or a plastic object hitting a window, right?’

  ‘Pretty much,’ Underwood agreed.

  ‘But, if the filter in your brain was switched off, that sound might appear to be anything. It might be the sound of the end of the world or of all your bones breaking. And you would believe it.’

  ‘Sounds terrifying,’ Dexter observed. She liked to be in full control of her senses.

  ‘It can be,’ Miller agreed, ‘it can make the mind very vulnerable to suggestion. Variants of Ibotenic Acid have been used as truth drugs in the past.’

  ‘You mentioned that the history of these fungi goes back further than hippies and the sixties?’ Underwood observed.

  ‘God, yeah! Ethnomycologists have shown that the recreational use of psychoactive mushrooms has been linked into human civilization for thousands of years.’ Miller peeled off his gloves and walked over to a sink to wash his hands. ‘My advice is steer well clear of them. Reality is underrated.’

  The Box of Bad Memories

  36

  Alison Dexter dropped Underwood back at New Bolden Police Station shortly after 10a.m. After leaving him, she headed for the Morley Estate. She received an update from Harrison about the search for Jensen and Rowena Harvey via her car phone.

  ‘Marty Farrell’s team is sweeping the Car Wash for forensics,’ he said. ‘They haven’t come up with much yet. Rubbish mainly. We’re checking what they bagged up for prints but I don’t hold out much hope.’

  Dexter agreed. ‘I can’t imagine whoever did that to Stark and Jack would be daft enough to leave a print behind. There was nothing on either body.’

  ‘Absolutely. The only half-interesting thing that came out of it was a suggestion that Marty made.’ Harrison had explained the theory about the killer driving an expensive car.

  ‘It’s not much to go on, mate.’ Dexter respected the logic of Harrison’s idea but didn’t see how it would help.

  ‘I know. I’ve checked the uniform patrols for that night. None remember seeing any unusual cars. We’re still running enquiries around the site of Jensen’s car crash. It’s open farmland though: hardly any houses. Nobody saw diddly-squat. Suffolk Police have been stopping traffic on the A1066 but so far zero.’

  ‘I’m sorry …’ Dexter struggled for the right words. ‘Jensen and I didn’t get on but … well, you know.’

  ‘Yep.’ Harrison didn’t want to develop that line of conversation. ‘County HQ at Huntingdon have said we can have the use of their EC135 chopper for a couple of days.’

  ‘Is that going to be helpful?’ Dexter asked. She knew the latest police helicopters were great at traffic control but she couldn’t see where one would add much value in a manhunt.

  ‘Probably not,’ Harrison conceded. ‘But apparently it has new thermal imaging equipment. It might help us locate a body in open ground.’

  Dexter could hear the edge of desperation in Harrison’s voice and decided to cut him some slack. ‘Fine. If they’ve offered it, we’ll take it. It’s your show. You run it as you see fit.’

  ‘Thanks, guv. I’ll be in touch.’

  Dexter was relieved he hadn’t asked her where she was going. It took her fifteen minutes of weaving through traffic before the stone bulk of the Morley Estate rose on the horizon ahead of her. She had determined from Ian Stark’s paperwork that he rented two garages at opposite ends of the estate. Dexter was convinced that the bulk of Stark’s drugs and business details were hidden in one of them. She sensed that was why Mark Willis was in New Bolden and she was determined that he wouldn’t get hold of them.

  She drove to the east side of the estate first. There were two teenagers sitting at the roadside next to their mountain bikes. Dexter registered that the bikes looked new and beyond the means of fourteen year olds living on the Morley. Still, she drove past. She had more important matters at stake.

  She pulled up at the entrance to a square of twelve garages arranged in two rows of six. Stark rented number five. She found it and saw it was padlocked. Dexter had expected this and retrieved a bolt-cutter from the boot of her car. She was vaguely aware that the two teenagers were now riding their bikes in circles watching her from a safe distance. She wasn’t concerned. Big estates are very territorial and the locals recognize outsiders instantly. She was an oddity.

  It took considerable force to snap through the padlock and chain and Dexter was sweating with effort by the time she rolled up Stark’s garage door. As the door immediately showered her with dirt and detritus, Dexter sensed she had picked the wrong garage. Stark obviously hadn’t been inside for a while. Carefully, she stepped inside brushing leaves and muck from her hair.

  The dismantled remains of a motorbike lay strewn across the floor and there was a powerful, sickly smell of engine oil. Dexter crouched and opened a heavy canvas bag that was bulging next to the small inspection pit. It contained tools: screwdrivers and engine spanners. She moved on to the back of the garage. There were rows of paint tins arranged along the back of the wooden workbench. She used a screwdriver to prise open each of the lids in turn and to her immense disappointment found only paint.

  ‘What do they say about great minds?’ asked Mark Willis from the garage door.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ Dexter asked, suddenly feeling very vulnerable: she had been backed into a corner.

  ‘I might ask you the same question.’ Willis smiled his tiger smile. ‘Is this an official visit?’

  Dexter leaned back against the workbench and closed her grip around a steel hammer. ‘I don’t have to answer your questions smartarse.’ She realized she had left her radio in the car.

  Idiot.

  ‘So this is Starkey’s lair, is it? Not very salubrious.’

  Willis hadn’t moved but Dexter could sense his eyes were scouring the room, just as hers had.

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

  ‘I’m not an idiot, Sparrer. You didn’t come here to strip the engine of that Kawasaki, now did you?’

  ‘What is it you want, Mark?’ Dexter could feel her anger rising, she was struggling to keep control. ‘Stark owed you something, did he?’

  ‘You might say that.’ Willis was inside the garage now. Dexter was becoming increasingly uncomfortable.

  ‘You’re in a bit of trouble, I hear,’ Dexter said, having decided to take the offensive.

  Willis looked at her, through her. His smile had gone. ‘What have you heard, Sparrer?’

  ‘Just that you’ve finally lived up to your reputation as the East End’s leading idiot.’

  Willis grinned suddenly and wagged a finger. ‘You’re very naughty. For a second there I almost thought you knew what you were talking about.’

  ‘I know about you, a hundred grand, the Moules.’

  Willis froze and stared at her in sudden fury. ‘How the fuck?’ He thought for a second, ‘Oh, you’ve been speaking to Big Daddy McInally, I suppose. Shoul
d have guessed that. You shouldn’t pay any attention to him. He just wants to put his cock in your mouth.’

  Dexter let the insult wash over her. ‘He was very keen to know your whereabouts.’

  Willis stepped closer. ‘Yeah but you didn’t tell him did you, Sparrer? I can see it in your eyes. Your eyes give you up every time. You’re a lousy liar.’

  He was too close. Dexter swung the hammer out from behind her in fury. Willis saw it coming and grabbed her wrist, twisting it away from her painfully until the hammer fell from her grip. He pulled her close and kissed her hard, trying to force his tongue into her mouth. Dexter jerked forward. She cracked her knee up hard in his crotch as they clashed heads. Willis recoiled sharply, wiping blood from his mouth.

  ‘Pussy,’ he said, giggling, ‘you taste of pussy. You have gone peculiar.’

  ‘Come near me again and I’ll fucking kill you.’

  Willis shook his head, ‘It’s a pity we didn’t work it out, Alison. We had some laughs.’

  ‘Your choice,’ she said. Her fist was still clenched. ‘It was your choice.’

  ‘Yeah,’ Willis was smiling again, ‘it was, wasn’t it?’ He shot a final look around the garage. ‘I guess I’ll be off, Sparrer. There’s nothing here for me.’

  ‘I’m on your case, Mark. If I see you again I will nick you. And McInally will be driving up the A10 looking to put your head in a vice.’

  ‘I don’t think so, Sparrer. You had your reasons for getting out of London on the hurry up. It would be a pity if some of those reasons came up here looking for you.’

  ‘Don’t threaten me, you piece of shit.’

  ‘Bear it in mind, Sparrer. Before you have me nicked by some plod for a parking on a double yellow, just bear it mind. Your nightmares must be worse than mine.’

  Willis left the garage and jogged over to his parked Freelander. Despite his confidence that Dexter wouldn’t give him up, he was irritated. He was running out of time and still had to find Stark’s stash.

  ‘Got any pills, Mister?’

  Willis looked around. There were two teenage boys a few feet behind him. They were standing on the pedals of their bikes ready to make a quick getaway. Willis smirked at the irony.

  ‘You’ve got the wrong man, lads,’ he said. ‘Now piss off.’

  The bikers turned sharply and pedalled off hard, realizing they had made a mistake. Willis suddenly realized he had made one, too.

  ‘Wait!’ he called out. ‘Come back!’

  But they were gone.

  Dexter sat on the floor of Ian Stark’s garage in a cold fury. She felt like a butterfly pinned to a wooden board. She tried to understand the mass of feelings that Mark Willis provoked: loathing, fear, excitement, frustration, loss. He was a cancer in her heart. When she had swung the hammer at him, Dexter had fully intended to do him damage. Now she felt ashamed. Would it ever stop, she wondered? Would there ever be a day when she woke in the morning without his name flickering across her half-conscious brain?

  She stood and brushed herself down. She closed Stark’s garage door behind her and sealed it with police tape retrieved from the boot of her car. She looked out across the desolate estate: the towering loneliness of its accommodation blocks. And for a moment, she remembered how Mark Willis had made her love him.

  Alison Dexter had joined Leyton Police Station in 1992. Three years later she was promoted to Detective Constable and had started working for McInally in CID. As the only woman in the group, she had been hassled from the outset. It had begun with suggestive sexual comments and flirtations, then steadily deteriorated into insidious bullying. Only McInally and Willis had let her do her job without interference. Detective Sergeant Mark Willis gradually became her self-appointed mentor.

  As the two grew closer the suggestive comments and jibes started to evaporate. McInally was highly respected throughout the department as being fair-minded and vastly experienced, but Mark Willis was feared. He had a reputation as a hard man. He had received two warnings for the use of excessive force in interrogations in his first year as a Detective Sergeant. Once the rumours started that Dexter and Willis were an item, the other CID officers started to leave her alone.

  Two months after they had started sleeping together, Dexter had been called to her mother’s flat late at night. The next door neighbour had called Alison’s mobile number after hearing screaming. Willis had driven her to the council estate on the edge of Walthamstow and waited in the car while Alison went inside. Her stepfather, Vince Stag, had beaten her mother unconscious: the culmination of a drunken row.

  ‘She deserved it,’ Vince had snarled as Alison tried to rouse her mother.

  ‘Stay back!’ Alison had shouted as Vince had lurched at her.

  ‘She’s always pissed up,’ Vince slurred. ‘She’s come in swearing, calling me every name under the bleedin’ sun.’

  ‘She needs to go to hospital, Vince, you stupid bastard.’

  ‘They can keep the filthy bitch.’

  Alison leapt to her feet and threw herself at her stepfather. However, despite his drunken state Vince was still strong and alert and his first calculated punch had sent her sprawling with a burst lip.

  ‘You enjoy that, did you?’ he snarled. ‘Thought you would have learnt your lesson.’

  ‘Arsehole.’

  ‘I always thought you might have enjoyed it really. Girls like it when a bloke cuts up a bit rough. It’s an animal thing, innit?’

  ‘I’ll have you, Vince. You’re going away for this.’

  ‘Must have been hard for you listening to me screwing your old ma. Fancied a bit yourself, I guess. Like mother like daughter. Still, wouldn’t have been right, would it? A father and a daughter.’

  ‘You’re not my father, Vince.’

  ‘No. We’re still trying to work out what happened to that prick, aren’t we?’

  Dexter hadn’t heard Mark Willis coming up the stairs to the living room. Suddenly he was standing in the doorway. He absorbed the situation instantly, noting Alison’s cut lip as it dribbled blood across her chin.

  ‘Watch out!’ said Vince, laughing and waving his whisky bottle at Willis, ‘the cavalry’s arrived.’

  Willis had crashed into Vince without warning, knocking the bigger man to the ground and raining furious punches down on his head. Vince had smashed his whisky bottle against the floor and slammed it into Willis’s leg, drawing blood. It was a desperate gesture. Willis quickly reduced Vince’s head to a bloody, snotty mess. He finished the confrontation sharply and brutally, smashing Vince’s head into the television screen.

  Alison had watched the beating with cold, voyeuristic pleasure. It gave her a charge of sexual excitement as the man who had wrecked and scarred her childhood was reduced to a snorting unconscious heap. Willis had stood over the fallen man with his fists clenched. Alison had desperately wanted him to finish Vince off. But Willis had turned to face her and smiled. They were bound in blood. She knew in that moment that he would protect her.

  Starting her car in the rain outside Ian Stark’s garage on the Morley Estate, Alison Dexter cursed her stupidity.

  37

  At approximately the same moment, Mary Colson called the police station. She was nervous, disturbed by a night of bad dreams and anxiety. She had seen the bodies again, piled high in the dark while children played nearby. She had seen the dog-man rising from the ground, his arms and legs snarling and barking. And she had seen herself inside a box as John Underwood had closed the lid. She knew she was going to die.

  Mary didn’t bother to remonstrate with Doreen O’Riordan for being an hour late. Nor did she mention the ten-pound note that had mysteriously vanished from her money jar. She was starting to feel a terrible tiredness in her bones, a rising sense that she had seen and experienced enough, that staying alive would be less natural than dying. She sat quietly, and waited for her friends to arrive.

  ‘You’ve not eaten your breakfast again,’ Doreen nagged, noticed the untouched tray on Mary’s
lap.

  ‘I’m not hungry.’

  ‘You look like you’ve lost weight,’ Doreen observed with a smile.

  ‘You don’t.’

  ‘Why don’t you have a bite of toast?’

  ‘I’m not hungry. I’m not supposed to eat toast anyway. You know that. Why can’t I have some fruit? It hurts to swallow toast.’

  Doreen did know that. ‘I can’t do your exercises with you until you’ve had your breakfast.’

  Mary shrugged. ‘They’re a waste of bloody time. Imagine making an eighty-eight-year-old woman do exercises. How ridiculous!’

  ‘It’s not done for my amusement, Mary. It’s for your Parkinson’s. Exercise will strengthen your joints and your muscles: make it easier for you to get about.’

  ‘I can get about.’

  ‘Of course you can.’ Doreen decided not to fight. She withdrew into the kitchen and sat on one of Mary’s hard wooden chairs. She took a travel brochure from her carrier bag and allowed herself the satisfaction of a quick look. The hotel she had chosen was on the west coast of Corfu, just outside Paleokastritsa. She touched the glossy half-page photograph of the crystal blue sea and green clouds of olive groves.

  Only a few weeks to go.

  She had already paid the one-hundred-and-fifty-pound deposit. Soon she would need to pay the remaining nine hundred pounds. She wasn’t unduly worried: she would have saved the money by then. The Odyssey Hotel looked beautiful, staring out across the Ionian Sea with its back to the mountains. Doreen read the description in the brochure to herself although she already knew virtually every word: ‘Follow in the footsteps of the mighty King Odysseus to our Ionian Paradise. This well-appointed four-star hotel is a sun lover’s dream. Soak up the rays in the day by the conveniently sized swimming pool and in the evening relax to the music of the Lazaros band at the “Acropolis” bar. Make your dreams come true on your very own Greek Odyssey.’