by Brett Adams
Why, when at wits end, do I always head for the ocean? Because oceans can take a world of pain. They just keep on sucking it up, bearing it away, pulling it under.
But only because they couldn’t give a shit. Not one metric fecal deposit about your problems, Jack-my-man.
My phone buzzed in my pocket.
I withdrew it on autopilot, and cocked my arm to throw it into the ocean.
Then paused.
“What the fuck. In for a penny, in for a pound.”
I pressed the receive button without looking at the screen, and said, “Hey, dickhead. How’s the criminal underworld treating you?”
He breathed once, then laughed. “Oh, Jack. That is beautiful.”
I gazed at the waiting ocean, the spindrift flying from wave tops, racing the coming storm. No. That was beautiful. And utterly indifferent.
“You have reached the bottom,” said Hiero. “Sunk to the bedrock of Jack. Reached the heart of darkness.”
Now it was my turn to laugh. “Hiero, please don’t Marlon Brando me.”
He didn’t seem to hear me, just kept going. “You’re at crisis point. It’s time to see if the bottom of Jack is really the bottom for you.”
“Hiero, hurry the hell up. You’re spoiling one of nature’s greatest reminders of my impotence, and you’re killing my melancholy. You’re mixing it up with throat-throttling rage, filling my mind with images of what I’ll do to you when I get my hands on you.”
“You’re right,” he said, and actually seemed to mean it. “I’ll get off. But, here’s what you need to know. Do you remember that book by Forster? It wasn’t required reading, but I remember you raving about it, so I unearthed a copy and read it. And you were right. Your taste is uncanny. I loved it. Do you remember it?”
The wind rose, peeling back my salt-damp hair. Gone was the seaweed smell. What remained was pure, deep ocean breath. I sucked in a lungful.
I answered, “Aspects of the Novel.”
“Do you remember Forster’s argument?”
I snorted. Of course I did.
Hiero continued, “That every story holds in tension two opposing forces? The freedom of its characters and the demands of its plot.”
Drive your characters too hard to a predetermined plot and they become puppets, one-dimensional props for the author’s show; but let them loose, allow them freedom to be and to do the unexpected, and they can derail the story. Destiny versus free will.
True of story, true of life.
Ever since she’d met God, Tracey loved to remind me that story was embedded in the very word we use to describe the race we humans run: History.
Through the millennia, the arguments were always about the identity of the Author.
“Well, Jack, I’ve decided I’ve been riding you too hard. Your shoulders must ache from being harnessed to my muse.” (God, what a twat.) “So, I’m giving you a break. Time to put you in the wind. Give you a chance to see who you are. Surprise me. It’s a risk, but great literature—”
“Demands great sacrifice.” I finished for him, remembering our conversation from—when? It would be two weeks ago tomorrow.
“See, you’ve got it.”
“What do you mean, exactly.”
“You haven’t got it.” He sounded so disappointed. “I’m giving you a break.”
“How long?”
“So business-like.” He sighed. “Six weeks. You get forty-two whole days until the next item on my list. The last item.” (He was calling lives ‘items’ now.) “Time enough to gather your strength, plan your strategy, and come out guns blazing. Give me a cracking scene—strap on a utility belt, load up some magazines. Or . . . dissolve in a puddle of your own piss and self-pity. But that would be disappointing, wouldn’t it?
“I’m rooting for you, Jack.”
“Okay,” I’d gone monotone. “Six weeks. Then where?”
“The US.”
“Who?”
“Shit, give a yard take a mile. I’m not telling you that, Jack. That’s part of the dramatic tension. As Forster would say—”
I killed the call, leant back and tossed the phone. It arced over the water and struck the face of a wave with a brief flash of white.
Fine. Hiero was giving me freedom. See how he liked his first taste of it.
The rain wall finally landed, and the storm opened up in earnest.
Water ran down the back of my neck, a chill between my shoulder blades, and seeped into my eyes.
My second act of freedom was to sit beneath the naked sky and soak through.
47
“Forensics report.”
Marten glanced at the speaker, a tan-skinned man, who dropped a large manila envelope on her desk. She couldn’t remember his name. He was new, a couple months in the office, still shiny. She thought he might be of Indian or Pakistani extraction. Maybe Persian? He was a gopher between departments, and he said the word ‘forensics’ like foreign-sicks. Today it didn’t even raise a smile.
Probably had something to do with the fear gnawing her stomach.
She pushed the fear aside, and reached for the envelope. Slitting it with a fingernail, she slid the contents—a handful of typewritten sheets—onto her desk. She scanned the text for the vitals.
Jane Mary Worthington had died of cyanide poisoning. She had died relatively quickly, which was put down to a reaction with her cancer medication and complications with her failing health.
That was expected.
The information on the second sheet was not expected.
At her insistence the lab had also tested the wine remaining in the opened bottle they had found at ‘the scene’. One assay had flagged the presence of a substance.
But not a poison.
The wine had contained chemically modified 3-mercaptopyruvate.
Marten’s brow furrowed in confusion. It was chemistry. Meant nothing to her.
3-mercaptopyruvate, the report went on, spelling out the implication, was a fast-acting antidote to cyanide poisoning.
The wine, which Jane had apparently attempted to drink, had contained the antidote to the poison in her system.
Marten slumped in her chair and let her gaze wander across the vista of rain-damp Portland stone cladding framed by her window.
Jane Worthington had on the verge of death held in her hands her salvation, and Jack Griffen, according to the receptionist (who, worryingly, seemed to be regaining memory by the hour), had, when she attempted to drink it, slapped it from her hand.
Oh, god. Marten leaned forward and cradled her head in her hands.
“This is not happening. UK profiler the victim of Stockholm Syndrome.”
“Come again?”
Marten shot upright to find Collins looming over her desk. She hastily tucked hair behind her ears, a nervous habit since schooldays, and returned his gaze.
“I’m annoyed I let him get away.”
Collins rounded the desk, and pulled a chair over to sit close. When he didn’t speak immediately, Marten’s guts tightened.
“Hmm. I’ve gotta say, that statement isn’t squaring so well with the picture emerging.”
“We’re too old for games. Just come out and say it.”
Now he looked at her—and was that disappointment in his eyes?
“Why, Marten? You let him escape.”
“You’re getting this from the receptionist? She was stone—“
“Stop! Just stop. You asked her if there was a back way out of the building. You locked the door.”
Marten’s mind spun frantically.
“It was a no win—No, listen!” She stalled his in-taken breath with a hand, and barreled on. She had one shot at this. “The woman was dying. And any minute Trent was going to come charging in with all the finesse of a bulldog. And there’s me. And there’s the receptionist. And there’s Jack, who according to last known intel has a gun. Do you really want that bomb to go off? I diffused it the only way I knew how. I let him go. Hell, I didn’t let an
ything. What was I going to stop him with?”
Collins looked at her for seconds that stretched on with those grey eyes that gave away nothing. He was chewing the inside of his cheek.
“Jack?” he said.
“Griffen.”
“But you call him Jack.” He leaned forward, palms on knees. “I shouldn’t even have to ask this, Marten. You’re not some green recruit. You’re a seasoned cop. Did he get under your skin?”
She suppressed a sigh. “Look, I did what I could. Rap my knuckles, and let me get on with putting the psycho behind bars. I know what he smells like now. Should be easy to track.”
Collins leaned back in his chair again, and shook his head, the slightest motion.
“No. Not even I can get you off this one Scot-free. You’ll have to drop below the radar for a while. Take some leave. The media circus will shift to top gear after this fiasco—I’d love to know who fed the ‘Intercontinental Killer’ crap to the press. In the mean time, you’ll just clog the gears. Hell, you could do with a break anyway, right?”
Anger took the edge off her fear. “So, what, I’m suspended?”
“No, that would just bring the dogs. Look, just work with me. Take some time off.”
“Chief Superintendent Collins, if you’re not suspending me, I’ve got work to do.”
He gazed at her for a moment, then rose, returned the chair to its place.
“No one ever accused you of diplomacy, DCI Lacroix.”
“Sir,” she said, and pulled her laptop over. She barely heard the door close as he left.
She was consumed with the drive to see if one split-second decision had wrecked a career built with the sweat of years.
And, far worse: let a murderer remain free.
48
In a little lane, close enough to hear the cry of gulls stirred into the air by a storm closing over the Portsmouth harbor, a young man sat at a café table. His gaze played across the street while his fingers fiddled with the remains of a paper sugar sachet. Sitting on the table before him were a half-drunk macchiato and a sleek black laptop. The laptop was shut, but a white light embedded in its edge slowly pulsed.
The man’s thoughts wheeled, a montage of images, sounds, and other sensations. As he watched, an audience to his own freewheeling mind, a smile spread across his face.
“I’ll be damned,” he murmured. “He’s doing it. He’s actually doing it.”
A flicker of motion in the periphery of his vision disturbed his thought. He glanced that way and caught a glimpse of a bald, middle-aged man disappearing down a laneway.
Without a word, the young man retrieved the laptop and stowed it in a messenger bag, and left the café. His coffee remained half-drunk on the table.
49
Phillip Lau cursed as he reached the automatic doors to the parking lot.
Through the rain-speckled glass he could just make out the dark form of his 2003 Toyota Solara. It had been parked open air, in a drop-off bay since lunch. He would probably get a ticket. And its door seals leaked.
With a roll of the eyes, he jammed the last piece of sugary donut into his mouth, and returned to the elevator.
Inside, he extracted his keycard from its lanyard beneath his vest, and swiped it over the security pad. He caught a brief glimpse of his own photo beaming back at him from the scratched plastic. Phillip K. T. Lau, mortuary assistant. The photo was five years old, and in it his head sported decidedly more hair. He cursed again, and punched the button for level four.
The door to the cold room was lit by the green glow of an emergency light. Stepping inside, his fingers scrabbled across the wall for the light switches. With a clack, banks of fluorescent tubes clattered to life.
He could do the less used hallways of Queen Mary Hospital in semi-darkness, but he had to have light, lots of it, to look at the bodies. He thought, not for the last time, that his career counselor had given him a bum steer. He’d liked biology class. Dissections were fascinating. But human bodies? They were altogether different. They looked too much like him. The power of his imagination was too strong—he saw twitching lips, eyes that flickered open.
He walked along the face of the cold stores, breath misting in the cold, trailing a finger beneath the labels, hunting for 34-B. It was 34-B, wasn’t it?
He recalled Connie’s orders, as she’d left two hours earlier. Clocking time, and gone for a weekend of depravity, probably. Lobbing make-work over her shoulder without a care for lower-pay-grade Lau. Yeah, no one else had a life. He though again of his car sitting quiet and cold in the lot.
“Before you leave,” Connie had said. “can you check something for me? I got a call from a police detective. Wanted me to confirm there was no evidence of tampering with 34-B, that pretty young thing from Sai Ying Pun.”
The pretty young thing from Sai Ying Pun. Sounded like a song title.
Phillip’s insides squirmed. They were the worst. The ones that looked like they were asleep. Should be years from death.
His fingers found 34-B.
The latch was stiff under his fingers, but eventually it gave with a snap and he hauled the small fridge-coffin open.
34-B lay, asleep in death.
She appeared to be asleep, but—thought Phillip—thus far invisible to the naked eye, her cells were being broken down into their constituent proteins, eaten, and excreted by a riot of bacteria, despite the three degrees Celsius of the mortuary storage unit.
Hurrying now, he bent over her head, and probed her hair. He had to lean into the coffin and crane his neck. Inches below his eyes, her lips were pale. (Was that a puff of breath? No. Just cursed imagination.) He slid his hands under her head, and gently lifted it away from the steel tray.
“Nothing,” he muttered, and was on the verge of lowering her head when he saw the irregularity. He leaned closer, with her head cupped in his hands, face tilted away from him.
There, faintly visible in the silken flow of her hair—a break in the sheen. A straight cut, such as a knife or scissors would make.
Someone had taken a lock of Li Min’s hair, without a care for how it looked.
Phillip smiled as he reached for his phone. He had a legitimate reason to wreck Connie’s weekend.
50
My memory gets a bit hazy here.
My mind reaches for recollection like a hand plunging into a dark pool. It frequently comes up empty. The few memories I’m able to fish from that time—the time Hiero left me to sound my own depths—are slick with shame.
Isn’t it a rite of passage for every poet to sleep in his own vomit?
But if emptying the contents of my stomach on strangers was the worst my memory had to offer, I’d be happy. On the contrary, it turns out my brain is maliciously adept at retaining the very worst experiences I put it through.
I stole. Really stole. Not just penny pilfering from church money bags.
To begin with I stole food—grapes, beans, apples, straight from their trays. I shoplifted small, expensive items, and pawned them. Razor blades, USB sticks, batteries, perfume.
From the money I made, I bought the cheapest liquor I could find, Captain Morgan, Gordon’s Special dry gin—one step above Pine O Cleen—and got thoroughly smashed.
I like to think of this as my cliché phase. From beneath the alcohol haze, the memories are even vaguer. I do remember vomiting in a public toilet, whose walls were graffitied with layer upon layer of black text. Perhaps it was someone’s practice studio. In that toilet a woman pulled her yellow blouse down by the neck to reveal one very white breast. I think that’s as far as that went. My fingers were crusty from clutching the toilet bowl. Real mood killer.
Never before had I seen dirt collect in the creases on the inside of my elbows—little deltas of black against my pale skin. I began to be able to smell myself. That lasted for a few days and passed. About this time I noticed the power of repulsion rise. Step into a corridor, and people would slip to the side. Sit at a table, and watch the space around yo
u empty.
I stole clothes too, from Oxfam and Age. Easier than laundering the ones I was wearing. It was curious what I grabbed by raw impulse. Adidas track pants. Bomber jacket (the nights were cold). Shoes were harder. I pawned two pairs before I got the size right. And they were pitch black joggers with fluorescent orange stripes. My hair was becoming a fuzz, as the nap grew longer.
I slept in a homeless shelter. No shit, there was a place in Bristol were you could lob up and get a cot for the night, and lukewarm porridge in the morning, no questions asked. The building smelled of boiled cabbage, even though I never saw any boiled cabbage, but the bed was soft. I’d never dreamed such places existed.
That was where I got my first fist to the face, and lost my first tooth.
You can steal from the average guy on the street and it’s fifty-fifty he’ll react from sheer shock and grab you, or else freeze from a weird disconnected sense of propriety and of not wanting to make a scene.
But try stealing from the poor, and be prepared to fight.
I wasn’t. I took a blow to the jaw, and stood wondering at the meaning of the sharp pain and the accompanying cracking sound that travelled around my skull.
The tooth, which I found in my mouth like a left over popcorn husk, was fascinating. The roots were broken off, still in my jaw I guess, but there was plenty of blood on it. I used to dream of losing teeth, of having them all come popping out one morning while looking in the bathroom mirror.
I showed it to the woman who had socked me. My smile might have unnerved her, because she shut-up and hurried off after that.
You’d think I would have shown her my gun. I still had it. But I was keeping that a secret.
I stole other things, too. At the back of my mind was the idea that sooner or later I would need to crawl out of this hole, and I’d need money to do it. But for the time being, I was consumed by an odd combination of a desire to get caught, coupled with the belief I was untouchable. Funny, that. You would think that I would be feeling wretched.
