Feet hammered the soft, superheated tarmac. His boots, comfortable enough at work, rubbed. His sweat poured from armpits, crotch, back, forehead, belly. A thin running man pounding the paving hard and fast in work clothes drew the eye like a man in running gear did not.
Keane didn’t care. He ran despite the jarring in his joints and his sore heels, already blistering from friction, increased by his wet boots and socks.
Thought was someplace else. This wasn’t the void he sought. This was terror. Pure, simple terror.
He ran on, not going anywhere but away. No concept of time, of pain… Nothing mattered but away. Running away.
Wasn’t he always?
Keane’s legs and lungs burned and he realized, as people stared at him and he finally felt their eyes on him, that’d he’d run hard enough that his feet were bleeding at the heel.
He had not just run away, but clear across the city.
He slowed, thinking a little more. Thinking about saving his legs. He was going to need them.
Walking now, Keane looked around himself and found that he’d ended up in Tombland, the old heart of Norwich City. Cobbles one way, Norwich Cathedral the other side, pubs and restaurants in between.
No place of sanctuary, because there was no such thing. No more. Not now. Not, maybe, until one or the other of them died.
I thought one of us had. Seven years ago.
Maybe both of them had. But then, if Keane was really dead, too, then why was he so afraid?
He sat on a bench in the heart of the city, his sweat cooling and his heart slowing and his feet and legs hurting.
He thought for a minute, and realized something fundamental had changed in him while he ran.
He could feel.
Didn’t matter what it was he was feeling. That he could feel any emotion at all, that was the important thing.
Terror so deep it had reached him at the bottom of the pit. Terror so powerful it had thrust a dirty and sullied fist into the throat of the black dog and pulled Keane screaming by the scruff of the neck out into the light. Blinking, jaded, frightened (hurt…yes…hurt) but alive.
Terror, yes, but God, he was alive. Alive at last.
Keane actually laughed. Threw his head back, laughed into the sky, looking at the spire of the cathedral proud above the old gated wall before him, cross atop gleaming in the bright, hard sky.
People looked at him and he didn’t care even a little bit.
An old lady stopped before him, curly gray hair and a tartan shopping trolley on wheels that it seemed served only to hold her up.
“Young man? Are you feeling all right?”
“Yes,” he said. Oddly, it was kind of true. He probably stank, looked insane. He didn’t care. “Thank you,” he told her. She gave him a distrustful look and moved on. When she’d gone, he laughed again, more quietly this time. Then he pushed himself up and turned back the way he’d come. He didn’t have his van or his wallet, so he set out for home in his work clothes, smelling of shit and sweat, hair mussed, with no money in his pockets.
He had nothing but his legs and his heart ticking and his mind…
He had his mind back at last, and all it had taken was a dead man on his trail.
The cold reality kicked in, then, the shock waned and his mind, returned to him like a lost set of keys or a puppy, began to work again.
The man he’d killed seven years ago, the man who’d murdered his wife, was back.
And still, Keane grinned. He didn’t know why he was grinning. He didn’t care. The grin felt just fine on his face, and he couldn’t have shifted it had he tried.
You might be going a little crazy, baby, said his wife in his head.
“Yep,” he said. But he didn’t stop grinning.
II. Three Days to Die: ’06
Some days it gets so hot your head pounds and your piss is bright yellow. You drink coffee and tea during the day and beer in a pub garden on the river in the evening, watching the sun fade away over the distant rooftops and hoping for respite from the heat. It doesn’t happen. The beer sits in your gut. You wake many times during the night, let loose a stream of luminescent urine in the half-summer’s dark. 2 a.m., 4 a.m., finally, give up. It’s 5 a.m., you’re up, not entirely awake, not entirely rested. Smelling and sweating already.
You work your tongue against your teeth and lips and palate. Finally getting some spit ready, you cough-spit a brown glob into the toilet, residue of tar and beer and dehydration.
Must take better care of myself, you think, maybe, looking down at the mess in the water, spreading like crude oil across the water. Your lungs are sore from the excess of the night before, your nostrils dry from the heat. Your mouth might as well be a cesspit. Floss your teeth and the floss stinks like the drains outside the house this long, hot summer. Brush with your electric toothbrush, for maybe five minutes. Shower. Wash your hair twice and your armpits and cock and balls three times.
Human again, the sweat begins to pour at first from your hairline, then your armpits and everywhere else, all so resoundingly scrubbed just for that feeling of cleanliness that will last about another two minutes.
You think maybe about tapping the wife up for a blowjob before you stink too bad, but you’re late for work. Click, click, you think. You’re on call, as of (you check your watch) now. 8 a.m. 48 hours on call.
Maybe no one will die. But, you think, they probably will.
7
Sunday
Life is a series of snapshots. No one remembers the connections between events and memories, but they remember those moments in time that impress. Might be an image, a smell. Schemers, they’re called in psychology. Links within the brain.
Triggers, Keane thought. Shutters.
Keane’s life was made of snapshots. First shot of the day, Teresa Reid beside him, sleeping in.
He grinned and slid out of bed quietly, loath to wake her.
He slept naked, but pulled on a pair of baggy pajama bottoms to go downstairs and make his breakfast. On the marble counter in the kitchen he cut two thick slices off a split tin loaf while four rashers of bacon spat under the electric grill. Butter, ketchup, tea with one sugar. He couldn’t eat like he used to—thirty-eight years old. Had to be careful.
He carried a little extra weight, but he wasn’t overly fat. Maybe a slight belly, but no man boobs or fat-back to speak of. His metabolism was okay. He didn’t know what his cholesterol count was, but he figured it was probably about normal. He smoked, drank, ate bacon or eggs most mornings, but he was fit enough.
Sitting at the counter in the wide kitchen, he stared out of the window at the birds on the pear tree in the garden. It was dry, the leaves speckled with parched brown. The grass, too, was brown—nearly yellow. It’d soon bounce back, with a little rain. The heat had to break at some point. Had to. It was just a matter of when.
English summer—from freezing to hot as hell within the space of a couple days. Three weeks earlier, Keane remembered, he’d been wearing his jacket to work. Now, the temperature around 86°F, he was in short sleeves with his tie loose and his ID badge on a lanyard around his neck feeling heavy against his chest.
All he wanted to do was lie on top of the sheets with the fan blowing cool air at his feet.
Instead, he put his plate and the greasy grill on the stainless steel draining board, took a last swig of tea, and padded down the carpeted hall in his socks before putting on his shoes in the porch and leaving for his job. Mostly, he was a crime scene photographer, but that didn’t pay the bills on its own.
Sunday morning, a cheap gig taking promotion shots at the church Sunday school. Crappy money, but something else for his portfolio.
His day job photos were good, too. Just not the kind of photos he could show anyone. Not that he’d keep them in the house, or a folder, or even on a hard drive at home. Not that he was permitted to take his work home, for which he was glad. He didn’t want that darkness in his house, near his wife.
Didn’t want
it seeping into him.
It would, though. Some images you can’t unsee. They travel with you, inside your mind and behind your eyes like an afterimage of the sun.
8
The Sunday school wasn’t actually in the church, but the local community hall, and therefore, that’s where Keane set up shop.
The vicar asked for natural shots of the children at study and play. The children were young—the eldest was probably around seven years old. Mainly, it seemed, as the hour-long session wore on and Keane took his shots, the class revolved around the more interesting stories in the Bible, and playing. Some of the kids couldn’t read or write, but Keane guessed their parents didn’t really care about that. It was either a way to indoctrinate their children into the ways of the Christian cult, or to get them out of their parents’ hair for an hour, for free.
A lifelong atheist and realist, Keane wasn’t uncomfortable with the situation. He didn’t believe in God, but he did believe in his mortgage, and this little gig would go some way to paying the bills.
Or it would have, had his mobile not rung thirty minutes into the shoot.
The vicar gave him a raised eyebrow. Keane nodded an apology and stepped outside to answer the call. He was on call. Kids didn’t need to overhear anything said about his other job…they didn’t need that kind of information at their age.
“Hello?” he said, holding the mobile between his ear and shoulder while he took a cigarette from the packet in his shirt pocket.
His lighter, of course, was in the last pocket he checked—his back pocket.
He never put his lighter in his back pocket.
“Need you up Mile End. Murder. Grisly.”
“I’m in the middle of a shoot…”
“You’re on call.”
“Moonlighting.”
“Well, shut it down,” said the man on the end of the line, before reeling off an address. Keane didn’t have a pen or paper handy, so he had no choice but to remember it as best he could, concentrating on the postcode.
The man hung up.
Keane put the postcode into his phone and his current postcode. The phone figured out the route, but Keane had a pretty good idea where he was going when it came to the city. Born and raised in Norwich, he knew the streets by the pubs. Up by Mile End, The Dray, The Cricketeers, The Queen’s Head, The Red Lion. Might be a few more now. It was a while since he’d had reason to go to the north side of the city. But he knew the street. Old pubs and old guys drinking old beers.
He hung up, put his mobile in his right-hand pocket and went in to make his excuses.
9
Pristine. Not a word usually associated with crime scenes. Criminals, whether thieves or rapists or murderers, were not a tidy class.
As a rule, yes, but this crime scene was meticulous. Staged, even. Everything was clean and crisp, like the killer had murdered the woman in the armchair and then proceeded to do the housework, if only within the living room.
Keane suspected that was exactly what the killer had done. Maybe, even, laid a sheet to carry out his business, some kind of heavy-duty builders’ equipment. There would have been blood and viscera, bones…other…
Keane hurled down the front of his white short-sleeve shirt. He didn’t know he was going to. There was no warning. From professional interest to sickened in the space of maybe two seconds—not enough time to make it away from the immediate vicinity of the body in the chair.
“Whoa…he’s going to blow again…” D.I. Oldman’s voice, sounding distant.
“Nah,” said D.I. Arnold. She smiled, but Reid didn’t see it. He’d never know the detective had a soft spot for him, because in two days time he wouldn’t see her again. He was quitting the job…he just didn’t know it yet.
Keane pulled himself together. “Sorry,” he said. He was doing a lot of apologizing today.
“Not to worry, mate.” Oldman took a cigarette out and lit it, an old copper’s trick to cover the odor of death. And puke.
“I’ll clean it up.”
“Shouldn’t worry too much, Reid,” said Arnold. Keane never did know her first name. “Was clean as a whistle before you puked. You didn’t foul anything.”
“Cheers.” Keane nodded, grateful for the kindness despite feeling like shit for the girl in the chair, for puking.
He finished cleaning up, took his camera out of his bag, and went to work. His shirt stank of puke, but if the two D.I.’s could stand it and not make him feel any more of a turd, he could bear it, too.
The camera clicked. He took shot after shot. The camera didn’t need to click. It was digital.
Maybe the manufacturer thought it would make the transition to digital easier for 38-year-old farts. They were right. Keane liked the crisp sound. A distraction from the scene, the eyes on his back, and that weird fucking third eye that seemed to stare at him the whole time. The third eye carved into the dead girl’s forehead.
10
Not a drop of blood had been spilled on the carpet. It could have been that she’d been killed elsewhere and the scene staged after the act, if not for the tools the murderer had used which had been left behind, arrayed on a cherry wood sideboard.
Keane took shots of the tools, too, from differing angles. And the sideboard. It was a nice sideboard.
As Keane took more shots, he felt more comfortable. He was happiest when seeing life through the lens. Life, at a remove.
It worked for him. Kept the darkness at bay. Same reason he kept his cameras in separate compartments in his large bag. Compartmentalizing. He was good at it, in practical terms, and in psychological terms. He guessed, in a way, he probably had some kind of dissociative personality disorder. Analytical and detached, by and large.
It’s not about you, arsehole, he told himself. Focus on the job.
Tools, taken. Then, neatly arranged, too—the severed and excised flesh and matter.
Teeth. Two. The incisors. Nice and white. He guessed the dead woman wasn’t a smoker. Plus, the room didn’t smell…but then it smelled of cleaning products, mainly polish, but also some kind of carpet treatment and a lingering hint of disinfectant.
Three toes. Two fingers. A section of scalp, some pale flesh, from inside her thigh, possibly. A small portion of some organ, perhaps the gall bladder.
The carved eye. He took them all.
And, lining the walls? Blown-up snaps of the act in progress: the ephemera of murder.
11
Something tickled at Keane as he processed the shots at the lab.
No. Not tickled. Gnawed.
The police would process the photographs in-house—you didn’t print shots like these at Boots. But Keane always checked the files, printed his own copies. He kept those copies in a locked file cabinet in the coroner’s office. It was the closest thing he had to his own office.
At the printer, high-resolution digital photographs spewed forth. The paper was specifically for color photographs. In some ways, it was better than a traditional shot taken by an expert with a good quality camera.
Each shot was horrific. That alone would be enough to gnaw at a man. But it wasn’t that. Keane had seen death, bodies. He’d taken shots of accidents and murders and overdoses and the result of falls from high-rise buildings.
He’d seen death plenty.
Like this? No. Nothing like this. He looked at his shots of the murder’s boasting self-portraits that had lined the crime scene’s pristine magnolia walls.
Looked through each and every shot he’d taken, over and over. Obsessing. Looking for that one thing chewing away at his amygdala.
“Fuck it,” he said. He had a cold coffee by his forearm, a headache that was sitting just over his left eye, and a numb arse. His belt was digging into his guts and it was hot. Sweat was pooling at the base of his spine and where his chest met his belly. His armpits stank. He could smell them well enough without having to scratch and sniff.
Time for a shower. A hug with his wife. A cigarette, some TV. Something to wind d
own, maybe.
Thirty minutes later, after a quiet drive though town on a Sunday night, Keane was home.
“Hey,” he said, stepping into the living room. Teresa was watching some reality thing. She looked up with a smile. Looked tired, maybe. Keane smiled.
She’s prettier, he thought, than this morning.
Wanker, he told himself at the thought.
“You okay?” she asked. She always knew when he’d been shooting for the police. Always.
“Yeah.” Same thing he always said. He wouldn’t bring it home. Never had.
She nodded. “You stink.”
“Thanks, honey.” He smiled. “I was going to have a shower, but maybe I’ll just come over and sit on you.”
“Ew. Go and get clean. You want a drink?”
Keane smiled again, thinking about the little things that made them tick. Showers, tea, sex, brushing teeth together in the bathroom before bed. Nothing huge. Not big gestures. Just the little things.
“Beer?”
“I think there’s a couple of cans.”
“Well, then, yes to beer. I’ll be down in a minute.”
He headed up the stairs to the bathroom where he did bathroom things. Just the important bits; he didn’t need a shave, and he wouldn’t brush his teeth till after his beer.
Showered, smelling 100% better, Keane finally opened his bag to put away his things and saw the photograph folded away beside his home camera.
Frowning, he unfolded it.
“I didn’t…” he thought, but then, for a moment, wasn’t sure. Had he packed the print, taken it home…broken his rules, unthinking?
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