by Gary McMahon
"She'll be resting now, but in the afternoons she works over there." The waitress raised her podgy hand and pointed – she motioned over my shoulder, through the glass and out onto the street. I followed the imaginary line made by her broad, stiff finger. All the way to the first floor massage parlour on the other side of the street.
Surely it couldn't be this easy.
"She's a working girl?"
The waitress laughed. She wiped down the counter with a grubby blue cloth. The surface was already clean. The motion was like a nervous twitch. "Of course not, deary. She works on the top floor – above the knocking shop. Immaculee is a psychic."
My head went cold; my brain froze. My heart turned to ice. I felt it dripping, dripping, and beginning to thaw.
The dead; it always comes back to the dead.
The waitress laughed again, and then she began to sing along to the old man's whistled tune:
"…and I'm feeling good."
I wished that I could join in, but any attempt at harmony would have been a lie.
SEVEN
As a rule Sarah rarely drank anything stronger than cranberry juice before lunch – and then only sparingly, because she'd heard somewhere that too much of the stuff rotted your insides. Today, however, she was drinking whisky. She needed it just to get through this task.
She stared at the floor, frowning at the pile of creased paperwork she had pulled from the drawers: faded envelopes and dog-eared manila folders, all making her wish that she could set fire to the whole fucking lot. Yes, that would be good; send the old bastard's legacy up in flames. But she wouldn't, of course. She could tell herself that destruction was the way to go, but the reality of the situation was that she needed to know what was in there. Those photographs had piqued her interest; they had triggered her mental twitch and the only response was to investigate. After all, didn't she want to be a detective?
The backbone of any case, as her father had said many times, was the careful sifting of information.
Somewhere outside a dog barked. The sound was snappy, incessant, and before long it began to play on her nerves. The familiar sound of a police helicopter flying overhead drew her focus. She wondered who they were after, and had to restrain herself from going to the window to take a look outside. She was off duty: let the others deal with whatever was happening out there. She needed a break from other people's problems so that she might concentrate on her own.
Slowly, she began to play her fingers through the grubby folders and loose sheets of paper, flipping the edges. There were receipts from restaurants she'd never heard of, and from towns she had never visited. The dates on the scrappy tariffs were ancient – going back decades. For an organised officer, her father's personal files were chaotic. She remembered that he'd been in some kind of blues tribute band when she was a kid, playing rhythm guitar to ease the stress of the job. He'd given it up when she was aged about ten, and she knew that he'd continued to miss gigging for the rest of his life.
Freedom, he had always told her, was when the people you loved couldn't be with you. It had sounded like an insult, but her mother had always just laughed. Well, at least her mouth had: her eyes never quite seemed to get the joke.
"What were you hiding in here?" The question, spoken aloud in that way, took her by surprise. She had not expected it. Despite the fact that it must have been on her mind, she had no idea where such a blunt query had originated.
"Hiding…" The word tasted bad, like bitter spices in a day-old curry. Deep down, even when she was much younger, she had always known that her father enjoyed a hidden life – an existence even more degraded than the one he let her see at home. Did the evidence of this other life lie somewhere within the stuff he'd left behind, stashed away like the bent evidence of a forgotten crime?
Sarah closed her eyes. She drank a mouthful of whisky. It burnt her lips; she felt her cheeks flush hot with blood. She savoured the feeling. It made her feel close to being alive.
The phone rang but she ignored it. The sound went on for several rings, and finally stopped. Sarah didn't move. She was staring at the pile of her father's paperwork, and thinking about the rest of it that was stored around the big old house – in drawers and cupboards, the space under the stairs, the loft rooms, and the cellar. It was everywhere, the complicated evidence of his existence, and who knew what story might be sitting there just waiting to be told.
She reached out and picked up a creased folder. Inside was a sheaf of bills and receipts taken from motorway service stations, trucker's cafes, roadside diners and nameless burger bars. Her father had kept everything; he was the quintessential hoarder, a man who knew more than anything the value of detail. It must have been the detective in him. He'd always said that crimes get solved either because the perpetrator threw something away he should have kept or kept something he should have destroyed. The only sure way was to control everything: keep it close, and know when to burn it.
But he'd died before he could burn anything of his own hoard, hadn't he? Also, his enormous hubris had conspired to make him believe that he was completely untouchable.
Pride was another error he had always told her to be wary of. It was ironic, then, that he had succumbed to that very sin himself.
She put back the folder and picked up an old cardboard Kodak wallet. The photos inside were disgusting: her mother and father in various sex acts, and wearing an assortment of weird costumes. In some of the shots other men had joined in the fun, but they were all wearing masks. Her mother's paper mask did nothing to conceal the woman's terror. It was there, in her exposed eyes, for all to see.
"The bastard," she said through gritted teeth, confronted by physical proof of the depths of the man's disregard for his wife. "What else did he do to you?"
Sarah felt moisture on her cheeks. She had not cried for years – not since her mother had been put in the home. She certainly had shed no tears when her father died. All she had felt was a sense of release. And even deeper, down where the shadows lived, she had also felt a surge of satisfaction.
Before she went any further with this she had to see her mother. She had not visited the woman since the funeral – Sarah's mother had been too sick to attend, but it had been a psychological ailment rather than physical.
The time had come to reach out, to reconnect with her family and her past. Maybe then she could unravel the puzzle of her father's life, and finally understand what it was he had done. Because she knew he'd done something – something more than what had been done to her, and even to her mother. Her twitch was telling her so, along with the scant evidence she'd already seen.
A man this depraved would not have stopped with his immediate family. He would have kept the best – or the worst – for those who could not talk back.
She stood, her legs aching, spine creaking, and walked over to the telephone. She picked it up and dialled. Despite rarely ever using it, she knew the number by heart.
"Hello? Yes, my name is Sarah Doherty. My mother Helen is a patient there. Yes, that's her. Room number 12. Alzheimer's." She stared at the wall above the phone. There was a crack in the plaster, and a tiny spider squeezed out. It seemed to have too many legs, but Sarah knew that was impossible. She reached out, extended her thumb, and crushed the fucker, leaving a dark smear on the wall.
"Sorry? Yes, I'd like to come over and see her later today, if that's OK. Thank you. Yes, I'll be there around–" She checked her watch: it was now 10.30am. "How does one o'clock sound? Thanks. Bye."
She stood for a while with the receiver gripped tightly in her hand. Her palm began to sweat but still she felt unable to put it down. "Come on, you," she whispered. "Be cool. Be strong." She put down the receiver and backed away from the telephone table. His phone. His telephone table.
His house.
"You twat," she muttered. "I should burn it all to the ground." But then she would destroy everything; all the evidence would go up in smoke, even before she had gone through it. She couldn't have that. Ther
e was a mystery here, and something inside her – the same instinct which had recognised its presence – was desperate to unearth whatever it was her father had only half-buried.
The phone rang again. Instinctively this time, she walked back over and picked it up.
"It's me." Benson's husky voice always calmed her down – it was only when he was physically with her that she began to feel uncomfortable: only when he was in her bed, if she was honest.
"Hi. How's it going?"
"I couldn't sleep, so thought I'd call you. Were you in bed?" She could hear music in the background; some kind of bassheavy rock.
"No, I was just sitting around in my pants and thinking about my father."
He laughed. "Pants, you say? How about I come back over and help you out of them?"
She ignored the banter. "Listen, I'm going to see my mother this afternoon. At the home." She waited; the silence began to grow and mutate into something rather frightening. A thing which, if she allowed it to fully form, might wear the face of her father. "You know – the nursing home."
More silence.
"Oh." Finally he broke it. "I see. You don't talk about her that much. When did you last see her?"
Sarah swallowed but her throat was dry. She coughed. "Ages ago: when he died. I could use some company this afternoon, if you're not doing anything." Now why the hell had she said that? It was always the same: his voice, his manner, slipped behind her defences and made her think that she cared about him more than she actually did. That she cared about him at all. It was ridiculous.
"What time should I pick you up?" His tone had become deadly serious, just like it did when he was on the job. He was an impressive copper; she had always thought so.
"Be here for noon. I'll have coffee and sandwiches waiting, and then we can go."
"It's a date." He paused again. "Listen… I'm glad you opened up to me about this. Sometimes…"
"What? Sometimes what?" But she knew what he was about to say; she'd been waiting for it for quite some time.
"Sometimes there's, like, this wall that I can't get behind – you know? It's like you've built it to keep me out. I can only see parts of you, through the gaps in the wall."
"I know. Sorry." But that was a lie; she wasn't sorry at all. "I've always been like that. There are things about me you don't know. I might tell you about it some day. Then again, I might not. Let's just wait and see. OK? Let's take things easy."
"I hear you. No problem. We'll take it day by day. I'll see you at twelve." He hung up the phone.
God, why couldn't she feel more affection towards him? Benson was a catch by any measure of the word; he was a good and sensitive man, but also a real man – one who would protect her with his fists if it ever came down to that. She knew other women who would kill to get hold of someone like Benson. But not her. No, she was compelled to keep him at a distance, to build that wall and let him walk around it, only ever catching glimpses as she stood behind the battlements. An arm, a leg, the back of her head as she walked away…
Maybe, she thought, if he ever sees the whole thing it might scare him off.
It was now almost eleven, much too late to start rooting through her father's things. She needed to have a shower and get herself sorted out. Put on some lipstick, have another quick shot of whisky. She walked to the drinks cabinet and took out the scotch. Half a bottle left; it had been full only two days before. Then there was the bottle of wine she drank after every shift just to unwind – unless Benson was there, of course, and they would share the wine before she tied him up to fuck away the stress.
"You have a problem, my girl." She smiled at herself in the mirror above the cabinet. She was still young enough, and pretty enough, to carry it off. But before long the bags would form under her eyes and her flesh would begin to sag and wrinkle. The skull would show beneath the skin. She knew enough from her mother's habits that once a woman hit thirty, thirtyfive at the most, the bottle started to whittle away her looks.
Hopefully by then it would be too late to matter. She'd either be tethered to a man or, well, tied down or dead. It was a nasty thought, but one which was never far from her mind. It was part of the job, a fear you had to befriend and call your own. It could happen any day out on those streets, and in any given situation: a robbery call, breaking up a fight outside a pub, riot duty, a drugs raid.
There were a million ways to die in any city, and Leeds was up there with the worst of them. She had known two people who had been killed on duty, and her career was only just two years old.
They never told you about that in training, and her psychology degree had been a bit too detached from the urban grime of reality to even go near such a topic. None of her old University friends had remained in touch, not when they heard that she was a copper. It did that to you, the job: it stripped away your old life, making you anew, turning you into a brand new being. And wasn't that exactly why she had been drawn to it? To remake herself in the image of another?
The trouble was, other officers tried to cast her in her father's image, and that was something she certainly did not desire. In fact, it was the last thing she wanted.
She looked again at the pile of paperwork. "Who were you really?" There was no answer forthcoming. "Who the fuck were you, Detective Inspector Emerson Doherty? And, more to the point, who the fuck am I?"
It wasn't the first time she had asked this question, but she had never before said it out loud. Only in a whisper, in the dark, in the night: in the moment just before sleep when even she could not hear the words.
"Who am I?" This was the real reason behind her quest to uncover her father's secrets. Because if she found out enough about him, then surely answers to the questions of her own identity would follow.
She had to believe that. She needed to cling to it, if only for the sake of her sanity, because whatever happened from now on, she didn't want to follow her mother into the nuthouse.
She would rather eat a bullet.
She went upstairs to the bathroom and turned on the taps. She'd changed her mind about the shower: a quick soak would be better, more soothing.
Undressing slowly, she watched the tub fill with water. Then she opened a drawer and took out a bottle of bath oil. She poured the fluid into the water, enjoying the smell of eucalyptus. The stuff never failed to relax her, and these days she actually hated to bathe without it.
A short time later she turned off the taps and eased herself into the hot water. As usual, she tried hard to ignore the faint cross-hatching of scars on the inside of her thighs, but was unable to keep her gaze from them. The scars were faded now; barely there at all. But she could see them as clearly as if they were open wounds. Her father had caused them, when he used to hurt her to stop himself from fucking her. So many times when she was young he had come into her room after dark and stood over her bed, swaying. He had always smelled of drink, and his voice was throaty.
But he had never touched her, despite wanting to. She could feel his desire like a dry heat, even then. Instead he had cut her; lightly, but often, and with a sharp blade. A thin medical scalpel.
Sarah touched the scars with her fingertips.
When he was finished he would leave the room, locking the door behind him. Then, shortly afterwards, when she had treated the wounds, she would hear muffled screams from her parents' room. Trapped there, her head filled with the sounds of abuse, she had always been dragged into sleep by nightmares. The bedroom door remained locked all night, but when she woke in the morning it was always open, as if he'd returned and stood over her, perhaps even inspecting her wounds as she slept.
Maybe doing something else she did not want to imagine, even now.
Sarah felt her eyelids drooping. They were heavy as stones, or the pennies placed on a corpse's eyes to weigh them down.
She remembered:
This one time, when she was nine or ten years old, he had come again into her room. He moved with the usual slouched gait. In his hand he held the scalpel – a
new one; it was shiny, even in the dark. He said nothing, just pulled back the bedclothes and squatted by the side of the bed. She knew enough to pull her nightdress up over her thighs, exposing the pale flesh. It was pointless fighting: the door was locked and he >was so much stronger than her.
Lately he had started wearing the costume. It was strange, almost monkish: a long, black smock-type thing, with a white gauzy hood covering his features. There was something ritualistic about the outfit, and it made her think of prayer.
Is that what he was doing? Praying to his god?
She slid down in the bath, the hot water cradling her, keeping her safe. The water level rose around her ears, containing her within a quiet world. Her life receded, drifting away. Another scene took its place:
