by Gary McMahon
Business first; pleasure later. Much later – probably when she was all alone and relaxing in a nice hot bath. The kind of pleasure Benson offered would have to wait a bit longer.
"So, why are you so worried about your neighbour, Mrs Booth? Please tell us everything you can." Benson paused, letting the woman gather herself before telling her story.
"Well," she said, folding her arms across her large chest. "Mrs Johnson – Celia – goes out every day without fail. She takes a walk to the park and gets her shopping on the way back, you see. Every day. Since her husband died – he was a dentist. But I haven't seen her for two days, and so I started to be concerned. I started to worry." Again she smiled nervously, clearly afraid of coming across as a paranoid old hen or a timewaster.
"Please… continue. Be clear and concise, if you can." Benson wrote something in his notebook. Sarah nodded at the woman, urging her on.
"I didn't tell anyone in case Celia was ill or something, so I just went round there to check on her – you know, like a good neighbour. There was no answer. This was, oh, yesterday lunchtime. There was no answer when I knocked on the door, but I heard movement inside. Well, I say heard, but… it was more a sort of feeling that there was someone inside, watching me." Her slippered feet shuffled on the carpet. She bit her bottom lip. "I am being daft, aren't I? I am, I know I am. Daft."
"Of course not. You're being very sensible, Mrs Booth." Now it was Sarah's turn. She stepped forward, opening her arms and moving them away from her body – a gesture of trust, just like she'd been taught at university. "This isn't daft at all. You did the right thing. I only wish everyone could be as civil-minded as you. Our job would be a lot easier." Sarah smiled with her mouth shut, trying her best to be reassuring. She didn't like to smile; wasn't used to it.
"There's something else." The woman glanced at the floor, and then back up again, right into Sarah's eyes. "An hour ago I went outside. I don't sleep well when Charles isn't at home – Charles is my husband – and the cat wanted to be out. I was in the back garden and I popped my head over the fence. Just to check. To be sure. To see if there was anything…" She faltered, unsure of herself now that she had begun to get to the meat of her tale. "You know."
"Something not quite right? Is that it?" Sarah chose her words carefully; she was sensitive to the woman's anxiety.
Mrs Johnson nodded quickly, as if she hoped that nobody would notice. "Yes. That's exactly it." She blinked. Her eyes were large and moist.
"And what did you see over there?" Benson looked up from his notepad, trying his best to seem casual yet clearly on edge. His hand gripped the cardboard cover. His large knuckles bled out to white.
"There's a window panel missing in the back door. Just the one, but it was definitely gone. Like someone had removed it. The only reason I noticed was because the damned cat leapt over the fence and started sniffing around the door. I had to call her back before she went inside."
The rain made swishing noises outside the door; inside, somewhere at the heart of the house, timbers gently creaked and popped.
"You just wait here, Mrs Johnson, and we'll check this out. Put the kettle on, we'll be back in a few minutes. I'm sure there's nothing wrong, but it's good that you called us. We can have this sorted in no time." Benson slipped the notepad back into his inside pocket. He zipped up his jacket and turned to Sarah, nodded, then waited for her to lead the way.
"Oh, I hope she's OK." Mrs Johnson seemed poised on the verge of panic.
"She'll be fine. Don't you worry, now. Put the kettle on and we can all sit down to a nice cup of tea. Two sugars for me, none for Constable Doherty." His diversion tactic was smooth; it always worked a treat. Mrs Johnson followed Sarah into the kitchen at the end of the hallway and began to fill a kettle from the tap. "Two for me," said Benson, smiling flatly. "None for my partner."
The key was in the back door – something Sarah hated to see. Didn't these people realise that a kid or a junky with a skinny arm could reach through a skilfully shattered window pane and grab them? She turned the key and opened the door, stepping back out into the rain. It seemed colder and lighter at the back of the house; the rain felt as if it were trying to turn into sleet. Or snow.
"Over the fence," said Benson, overtaking her and grabbing a timber upright. "You first – I'll get something to stand on, just in case I bring the thing down."
Sarah nodded, turned and hauled herself over the fence, bringing up her legs in a single swift movement and vaulting over the flimsy wooden panel. She heard Benson still on the other side, rooting around in the garden for something to aid his progress. Then, suddenly, his head and shoulders appeared above the lip of the fence. He climbed over slowly, trying to keep his weight off the panels as he used the step-ladder to clamber up and over the nearest support post. In seconds he was standing next to her, one hand resting on her shoulder.
"The window panel. See it?" She pointed down near the ground, at the missing panel. There was no broken glass to be seen; whoever had done this, they had done a professional job and cleaned up after themselves.
"Yeah." Benson moved towards the back door. His voice was low, almost a whisper. "Yeah, I see it."
There were no lights on at the rear of the house. The windows were dark, and covered with either heavy curtains or blinds. The door was old, the lower half consisting of a series of glass panels and the upper part made up of a grubby section of UPVC that looked so thin a child could have kicked it in. A dog was barking nearby, from another garden located somewhere over the back fence. The sound was harsh and incessant, and it began to unnerve Sarah. She hated dogs – they were stupid and vicious and in her opinion their owners were little better. Dumb animals for dumb people, she thought. Everybody dumb together.
Benson placed his fingers on the door handle. The door opened smoothly. He turned and looked at her, his eyes wide. He nodded. Just the once. His scars shone in the meagre light from the nightlights and security lights mounted on the external walls of neighbouring properties.
Sarah instinctively grabbed her baton, removed it from her belt, and flicked it up and out so that the weapon swiftly extended to its full length. The brief ratcheting sound was too loud in all that silence; even the dog's manic barking failed to mask it. But there was no movement, nor a single sound, from within the house. It felt empty.
Even after just a couple of years on the force, Sarah had developed the knack of sensing whenever potential danger was hiding nearby. It was one of the first skills you learned when you worked the beat, and possibly the most valuable.
There was no-one here, she was certain of it, but that didn't mean the house was safe. Far from it. Because she could sense something else in there, an altogether more unsettling presence: something still and quiet and so very wrong.
In that tense and drawn-out moment, standing there on the threshold and staring at the back of her partner's head, Sarah became convinced that somewhere in the house they were going to find a dead body.
TWO
The kitchen was dark. The only light in there was coming from outside – generated by the streetlights and the drizzly layer of neon pollution that hung above the city streets. There was not even a sliver of light showing beneath the internal door. Benson went in first, checking the area for intruders. It became immediately clear that there were none in the vicinity, so he relaxed his shoulders and dropped his hands to his sides.
Sarah entered behind him, making for the side wall, where a work bench was piled with dirty pans and crockery. Scanning the area, she noted that the kitchen was slightly grubby, as if the place had not been cleaned for several weeks. A layer of dust coated the benches and cupboard doors. Either shadows or dirt stained the benches. She could see it as she eased along the edge of the room, keeping away from the centre.
Benson slowly opened the inner door to reveal a narrow hallway. Most of these kinds of Victorian houses had a similar layout: a main hallway right through from front to back, lounge and reception or dining ro
oms at the front and a large kitchen at the back. Upstairs: the bedrooms. Below: the cellars.
Sarah took a deep breath and tried to compose herself. She was usually calm in these situations, but for some reason tonight her throat was dry and her chest was slowly tightening beneath her uniform tunic. She was wearing a lightweight stab vest – standard issue these days – and it felt two sizes too small.
Benson motioned for her to follow him as he went through the door. He held his baton at the ready; Sarah could see his fingers tighten around the shaft. She had seen him use the weapon on a few occasions. He was an expert in hand-to-hand combat. Sarah had also used her own baton more than once, and it felt good in her fist. Reassuring.
They moved slowly yet urgently through the hallway. The old boards creaked beneath their weight, announcing their presence inside the house to anyone who cared to listen for such subtle telltales and giveaways. If anyone were hiding in the shadows, waiting to pounce or bolt, they would be all too aware of the location of the two police officers within the building. These old houses spoke, slowly and quietly, and if you understood their language you could build up a wealth of information.
Sarah often thought that she might possess some kind of special insight. There was nothing physical to prove this, of course, just a sort of tingling of the senses, like a breeze ghosting through her mind. Old houses, dark places, anywhere that normal people might consider staying away from, spoke to her softly yet explicitly; the intimate whisper of that phantom breeze in her ear. Police training was responsible for some of it, along with a natural aptitude for the work… female intuition? Yes, all of those things could be used to explain away how she sometimes felt. But still… still… she could not rationalise the way she felt at times like this. All she could say, if pushed, was that these places, these situations, made her feel like she was home.
Up ahead, near the bottom of the stairs, something moved. Benson did not even notice – his gaze was fixed on the doorway to their left – but to Sarah it looked like a gentle fluttering. She thought of a small bird's wing in a dark room, or the movement of lips as they flapped lightly to expel a tired death rattle. The motion was there for less than a second, and then it was gone. Anyone else might have written it off as nothing – an illusion, or perhaps a manifestation of anxiety in a tense situation. But not Sarah. She knew what it was: a warning. She had seen something – sensed something – which would otherwise have gone unnoticed. It was all the confirmation she needed of her unswerving feeling that something was wrong here. Something was out of whack.
Benson ducked his head into the doorway, and then pulled it back out again. He glanced at Sarah and shook his head: nothing of interest in there. Move on. There were two other doors leading off the hallway, and he checked each one in turn. Benson made the same deft in-and-out manoeuvre, and gave Sarah the same signal. The rooms were empty – of perpetrators, of victims, of life, of death.
Sarah looked up at the stairs, peering through the gaps in the carved timber banisters. That subtle movement she had glimpsed moments before. Had it been going up or coming down? The walls looked damp, but it was only the darkness forming yet another illusion. The walls were not really rippling – it was the play of Sarah and Benson's shadows across their tall, flat surfaces. She knew that, yet the knowledge did not make the sight any less unnerving.
She followed Benson up the stairs, staying a few paces behind in case anything happened without warning. In cadet training they had been taught never to bunch up, always to leave room to manoeuvre – fighting space – between the separate members of a team as they entered a potentially hostile location. It was a matter of common sense, of course, yet still it was surprising how many trainee constables would walk directly behind the person in front, narrowing any space in which to act if things got out of hand.
Sarah's feet fell lightly upon the stair treads. She felt watched in the cramped space. Her grip on the baton tightened, and she was once again enveloped in a shroud of anxiety. Dust swam in the air before her eyes, creating random sketches in the stairwell.
Benson paused as he reached the first landing, turning slowly to examine each side of the area at the top of the stairs, first left and then right. He moved forward to allow Sarah to access the landing, and then placed his back against the wall opposite the top of the stairs. Sarah stood at the top of the stairs, still convinced that something was about to happen, or that they were going to encounter one of the many faces of death which waited inside this house, this place of dust and shadows.
"End of the landing." Benson's voice was low, his eyes were hard. He tipped his head towards the far end of the landing, where a single door stood open. The other doors were closed – five of them in all – and each one had a dark handprint near the handle. Sarah knew without having to check that the handprints were blood, and that they symbolised a locked door – if not a physical one, then certainly a notional one.
But how did she know that? There was no time to examine the thought; Benson's urgency pushed her on.
There was a patch of blood on the carpet across the threshold of the open door. It was a large stain, like a shadow far deeper than those she'd seen elsewhere within the house: a blood shadow.
"There's something in there." She stared at the open door. "Some thing."
"You don't say." Benson's voice was louder now; he had accepted that there was no longer a reason to remain quiet. Whatever was inside the house, and if it was still alive, it already knew of their presence.
Then, slowly, as if it were drifting towards her on the air, Sarah caught the smell. It was the stench of the charnel house: the odour of bloody death. She knew it, even after such a short time on the force. They both knew it.
"Back up required…" She heard the start of Benson's radio request, and the static from the two-way in his hand, but the rest of it was filtered out by whatever intuition she possessed and was even now jerking to life. Her senses were… twitching. That was the word she associated with the sensation. It was as good a word as any other, she supposed.
Twitching.
My twitch, she thought, imagining nervous tics and facial actions. It's my fucking twitch.
She was barely even aware of her legs moving as they carried her along the landing, past the blood-barred doors, and towards the open door at the end. It was automatic, as if some external engine were powering her. Even if she wanted to stop, she would have been unable to interrupt the motion of her legs, or stop the low whispering sound of her police-issue boots on the carpet.
She had to go there. Whatever was inside wanted to be seen by Sarah, and by her alone. They had business, these two, in that dark house on a dark street after midnight. The nature of that business was a mystery, and might remain so, but the very fact of its existence could not be denied.
Sarah moved slowly along the landing, her baton held loosely now in a hand that felt limp and boneless. It flopped at the wrist, that useless hand, and waggled like an animal against her thigh. The baton dropped to the floor but she didn't stop to pick it up – she knew that such a weapon was useless here, and against such things as whatever the hell was waiting for her inside the room.
"Doherty! Come back. Get back here!" Benson's voice was harsh, yet fading. It sounded miles away, as if he were calling to her from a distant cliff top. She could hear the words, even make out what they said, but their meaning was pointless. Useless. They did not touch her.
She stood above the blood-shadow, staring at it, seeing within its depth a face whose curves and edges were familiar. She knew that face, but couldn't quite grasp whose it was. It looked a bit like her, but then it didn't, not really. It belonged to someone else… and yet she and it were connected in some way.
She stepped over the threshold and entered a vision from her dreams, a scene pulled dripping from her nightmares.
The room was bare but for an unmade single bed pushed up against one wall, and an old-fashioned dentist's chair which took centre stage. Sitting in the chair
, with its back to the door, was a figure. It was small: a small boy. His hair was messy; it looked wet. His arms hung loosely at his sides, the fingers not quite touching the floor. The posture of the body suggested that death had occurred some time ago: it was floppy and slouched, as if the muscle tone had gone and the effects of rigor mortis had faded.
Sarah moved up behind the boy. Her arms were held out, she noticed, and she stared at her hands. Her fingers flexed, and then opened. She was reaching for him. Reaching out to the boy. The poor dead boy.
The chair was mounted on a mechanism which allowed it to turn, to spin, so Sarah placed her hands upon the backrest and pulled the boy around to face her. In her mind's eye, like a trace of memory, she knew exactly what she would see before it spun around into view.
His legs shifted as he turned. One arm swung heavily, the hand open.
The boy, his skin as white as cotton and his eyes bulging wide, was strapped into the chair by thick leather braces. These, too, were old: the leather was frayed and the bonds were locked together like trouser belts, by a spike slotted into one of many holes and then the whole thing was pulled tight, tight, tight…
