The Smiling Man

by Joseph Knox

  ‘Did you know this other man?’

  ‘Ask Freddie.’

  ‘I will. Do you have any idea who might have sent you those notes?’

  She looked at me. ‘Isn’t it obvious? His lover, of course. No doubt he’s having a good laugh with my husband about it even now.’

  Unless he was murdered in the Palace Hotel on Saturday night, I thought.

  ‘You don’t really think they had something to do with all this?’

  Aneesa and I were walking in the same direction, me to pick up with Sutty at the site of Cherry’s apparent abduction, Aneesa to catch a cab home.

  ‘It’s pretty interesting how much they have to hide,’ I said. ‘I take it all that was news to you?’

  ‘It was, actually. And it was also none of my business.’

  ‘Do you think Blick knew about it?’

  ‘You’d have to ask him that.’

  ‘I will. He’s back next week?’

  ‘Next week.’

  ‘Why this sudden urge to find himself?’

  ‘It was one of those things that built up for a long time. Anthony’s compulsive, a workaholic. It’s the first break I’ve known him take in years.’

  ‘The timing seems—’

  ‘No,’ said Aneesa. ‘You don’t get to just throw shit at people and see what sticks. Anthony went away for health reasons, if you really want to know.’

  I stopped, looked at her.

  ‘He had a heart attack,’ she said. ‘His break’s on doctor’s orders.’ I thought of the pictures I’d seen of Blick, surrounded by young Thai women. I wondered if that was medical advice as well.

  ‘Coyle’s cash-flow situation,’ I said, changing the subject.

  She gave a small laugh. ‘He’d have to be wiping his arse with it to be running out.’ She could see me edging towards the question and saved me the trouble. ‘Annually? Comfortably six figures,’ she said. ‘Very comfortably. Anyway, you’ve said it yourself. This death in the Palace hurts them both financially.’

  So who’d want to do that, I thought.

  8

  I’d been gone for the best part of an hour when I got back to China Town and SOCO still hadn’t arrived. Sutty and I waited, listlessly, with the doors wide open, trying to stay cool.

  The acrimonious split of Natasha Reeve and Frederick Coyle ran through the case like a fault line. But Freddie’s affair, and the anonymous notes revealing it, were a sudden turn into darker territory. Someone meant them harm. There was nothing so out of the ordinary about Freddie’s affair being with another man, except in what it said about his state of mind. Natasha said he’d changed, even before she knew about his infidelity. Now he was a party animal, a drinker and gay. A man with no kids enjoying a mid-life crisis after a lifetime in the closet? Something to look forward to.

  I knew that this side of the case was becoming too unwieldy to keep from Sutty for much longer, whatever Superintendent Parrs thought. My partner was no fool, and if he found out for himself who knew what he’d do?

  I turned to him. ‘Shouldn’t SOCO be here by now?’

  ‘The Pusher’s struck again so they’re running late.’

  ‘You’re joking?’

  He shook his head. ‘Someone saw a floater from the bridge on Albion Street. They’re fishing him out now.’

  I thought of the violent scene we’d encountered inside the China Town flat.

  The missing girl.

  ‘It’s definitely a man?’ I said. He shrugged and I looked at him. ‘If it’s a woman, it could be Cherry …’

  ‘Shit,’ he said, flatly. ‘You’d better get over there.’

  I got out of the car and slammed the door before I said anything that might get me fired. It was a ten-minute walk and another welcome break from Sutty. The Pusher was just an urban myth. The heart of the city courses with aqueducts, dockyards, quays and locks, and in less than a decade almost a hundred young men have died in them, usually drowning in canals between the hours of midnight and 6 a.m. This has given rise to press speculation of a serial killer at work, The Pusher. It sells more papers than the truth. A massive student population, vibrant nightlife and open waterways. A sad statistical inevitability.

  But every crime scene has a kind of power and I felt this one before I saw it. Then I heard the sirens and saw pulsing blue lights. Uniforms in high-vis jackets had closed the bridge and were diverting traffic from both sides. I carded my way on to it and looked over the edge, down on to the waterside of the canal. The scene was confused but I could see that something had already been recovered. I waited as large lighting rigs were positioned on the pathway. When they were switched on, the light seemed to slam down on to the ground, illuminating a single black vinyl sheet.

  It was about the size of a human body.

  I gripped the brickwork of the bridge and felt the pulse passing through my hands. SOCO had finished videotaping the path but the scene itself was a nightmare of contamination. They wouldn’t be making it to Cherry’s flat any time soon. That hardly mattered if it was her body beneath that sheet, though. From the lack of activity, I guessed the pathologist hadn’t examined it yet. I looked down for a moment. The water was a still, liquid-black beneath the lights.

  I went to the waterside, approached the nearest officer and showed him my card. ‘Did you get a look?’ I said, nodding towards the body.

  ‘First on scene,’ he said, sullenly. ‘Second in two years.’

  ‘Anything you can tell me?’

  ‘Was pretty fresh, comparatively. Last one we pulled out looked like corned beef hash.’ He looked over my shoulder and took a step back.

  ‘Aidan Waits.’

  I turned to see Karen Stromer descending the bank towards us. She was already wearing the white plastic coveralls that she’d examine the body in. She set her case down and stared at me.

  ‘Let me guess,’ she said. ‘You were first on the scene again …’

  I felt the officer I’d been speaking to evaporate into the background.

  ‘I only just arrived.’

  ‘To check his pockets, too?’

  I didn’t say anything and she took a step closer, lowering her voice. ‘You’re giving me a very bad feeling, Detective Constable. Have you lost something, is that it?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Are you here to plant something? You’ve got a reputation in that direction, after all …’

  ‘I’m here because I think this might be connected to our unidentified man from the Palace Hotel.’

  ‘Smiley Face? Isn’t that what you’re calling him?’

  I didn’t say anything.

  ‘Turn out your pockets.’

  ‘Excuse me?’

  ‘It’s a simple enough request,’ she said. ‘If you want to remain on my crime scene, you’ll check the contents of your pockets. It’s no less than I expect from every officer. I’m not risking contamination or planted evidence.’ I looked at her for a moment and then at the body beneath the vinyl sheet. I reached into my jacket pocket, removing my wallet and warrant card, which I held up to her. ‘The others,’ she said. I felt inside my trouser pockets, pulling my phone out from one and feeling my keys in the other. And something else. She must have seen my face change. ‘I don’t believe it,’ she said. I pulled out the plastic zip-bag I’d found hidden in the Inn toilets, before questioning Marcus Collier. It was half-full of white powder.

  I closed my eyes. ‘It’s not—’

  ‘Leave,’ she said, moving past me. ‘Now.’

  ‘Karen,’ I said to her back. A few heads turned in my direction, including, eventually, hers. ‘I mean it, I’m here on duty. If this is a young woman then it could be connected to the man from the Palace.’ She glared at me. It felt like betting everything I had on one roll of the dice. For a moment the only sound came from the buzzing lights overhead, the water, lapping against the canalside. Finally she lifted the sheet from the body and looked at it.

  ‘It’s a man,’ she said, before turning her att
ention to it fully and casting me out of her mind. The officers gathered round either shared smiles or looked away in sympathy. I walked back up the bank to the street, feeling my face and neck burning red with humiliation. I couldn’t face going back to Cherry’s flat. Sutty had eyes and ears everywhere, and he probably knew what I’d done already. He could wait for SOCO to arrive on his own. I tried to think of anything useful I could do. Collier had mentioned the bridge beside the Palace as a meeting place for his girls, but when I went there I didn’t see any.

  So Cherry had vanished into thin air.

  When I reached my street in the Northern Quarter, I saw a car sitting outside the building. The lights were dimmed but as I got closer, the driver cranked them up to full beam, blinding me. I heard the roar of the engine and the car pulled out, missing me by inches. I went to my door and unlocked it before stopping. Remembering the zip-bag of some nameless amphetamine still in my pocket. I walked to the nearest grid and dropped it in. I paused, standing in the space where the car had been parked.

  There was a pile of cigarette butts.

  Fifteen to twenty of them. All smoked down to the filter and crushed before they’d been thrown out of the driver’s side window. Someone had been sitting here, waiting, watching, for some time. I looked along the road, wondering who it was and what it meant.

  * * *

  It felt like the car might come apart when they took the corner, but it turned off the main road and kept on going. There were no streetlights any more, and the way was complicated, impossible. It was just the four of them. The man and the woman, Bateman and Elaine, and the two kids, Wally and Ash.

  They could all feel it.

  The desensitizing effect of details, fizzing by the window.

  Wally was sitting in the back, staring out into the endless dark, until the rattle of the car, the looping, unseen turns, became hypnotic to him. It was freezing cold and he could hear his little sister, Ash, chattering her teeth in the next seat. Wally held her hand because he thought she was scared, because he knew he was. It had been a few weeks since they’d forced their way into Holly’s home, and it felt like they’d been driving ever since. Sometimes they’d stayed on the floors of strangers. Sometimes they’d parked up in lay-bys and slept in the car. Finally, they’d settled in a messy terraced house. One night the grown-ups had been arguing and, when they fell abruptly silent, the boy had crept to the door and watched. On the TV he saw an emotional man and woman sitting at a table holding hands. The sound was muted but there was a large picture of Holly on the wall behind them. Bateman had been gone when they woke up and, after a few days, the boy started to hope he’d never come back. He had, though. He had something he wanted them all to see. Now the children rocked together in the back of the car, in a trance of slow movement.

  ‘Fuck’s sake,’ said Bateman, breaking the spell.

  It was the first time anyone had spoken in hours and, because he was in the driver’s seat, the car stopped abruptly. There was just the sound of the engine turning over. There was just the blackness all around them. They reversed a few savage feet and then drove on in a different direction. Elaine, the children’s mother, was sitting rigid on the passenger side, her body not moving an inch with the motion of the car.

  The grown-ups had woken the children in the early hours of the morning and then carried them downstairs, out on to the potholed driveway, to a cut-and-shut Skoda they’d never seen before. It was a new colour, somewhere between green and rust. Once they’d fastened their seat belts, the grown-ups slammed the doors and argued behind the car. Wally and Ash stared straight ahead, listening to the hissed, 2 a.m. voices from outside. Bateman’s deep, explanatory drone repeating the same sounds over and over again. He didn’t stop when their mother tried to cut in and it sounded as if they were having two separate conversations.

  Then one of them hit the other.

  The children both jumped at the sound, like the car had gone over a speed bump. Bateman ripped open the driver’s side door and climbed in. His face was flat. That trained inexpression that gave nothing away. It was his fist, flexing open and closed, that said everything.

  He rolled a cigarette and tapped tunelessly on the dashboard. They heard their mother picking herself up off the driveway, felt the car rock slightly as she steadied herself on it. She got in on the passenger side without another word and shrank down into her seat. No one spoke as they drove along the motorway, the tension in the car rising, tightening like a knot. Now this sudden deviation into a country lane, the endless, looping backroads, felt like something coming undone, unravelling faster than they could keep track of. When Bateman killed the engine, let the headlights die out and coasted the car downhill, Elaine had shifted in her seat, looking from side to side.

  ‘We’re lost,’ she said.

  ‘We’re here,’ Bateman replied.

  They were both right.

  He eased the car into the side of the road and lifted the handbrake. It was the middle of nowhere, the middle of the night, and no one said anything at first. Through the glare of the windscreen the dark looked unreal, a shining neon black. Bateman stared out of the driver’s side window up at a farmhouse, while the children held hands in the back seat, hoping he’d forgotten them. Even now, ages five and eight, they knew all about Bateman’s stare. They were conscious of its withering effect, of all the things they’d seen spoiling and going bad under it. There was a creak of leather from his seat. He shifted his enormous body round and looked at Wally.

  ‘Just like we talked about,’ he said to the boy. ‘Pick that door and get up the stairs.’ He felt around in the back seat and passed the boy an aluminium pole, about one metre long. ‘Use this, go nowhere else.’

  The boy looked at his mother, at the back of her head. Her knotted black hair. When the silence started to feel like a held, screaming note, she turned around. There was the start of a black eye from where Bateman had hit her.

  ‘You heard,’ she said.

  Wally let go of his sister’s hand and opened the door.

  After the cramped confines of the back seat, he was overwhelmed by the space surrounding him. The car was parked off the courtyard of a large farmhouse, at the end of a lane. A mass of trees, just enormous, swaying shadows, stood behind him. Inside, he’d felt like they were protected, invisible, but now he saw how exposed they were. The moon hung over them like a spotlight, rendering the house, the yard, the car, in astonishing detail.

  He caught his own reflection in the window and took a step back, away from everything he knew, into wide open, panoramic fear.

  * * *

  IV

  Vanishing Act

  1

  I was watching Sutty through the corner of my eye. He was massaging the lumps about his face, neck and shoulders. Shape-shifting. After weeks of unbroken heat he was starting to look and smell like the larval stage for something else entirely. It felt like we were both changing.

  We’d established that 4B, the room where Cherry had been staying, was an illegal sublet. When we’d traced the woman responsible for the building, she’d been shocked to find that someone was actually living there and, although I was relieved that Cherry’s wasn’t the body found in the canal, it left us with nothing. Just a vague description from Collier, a street-name.

  Sutty and I were waiting in Karen Stromer’s office, where she’d agreed to meet us. Although I knew we were there to discuss her findings on the smiling man, I couldn’t help but feel nervous. The humiliation of the night before was still on my mind.

  Sutty stopped playing with himself and started searching idly through his pockets. When he didn’t find what he was looking for he sighed, half-stood and leaned across Stromer’s desk. He picked up a ballpoint pen and started cleaning his ears out with it.

  ‘Looking for your on-switch again, Peter?’

  We turned to see Stromer, closing the office door behind her. If Sutty was fazed he didn’t show it. Instead he collapsed back into his chair, wiped the pen on t
he desk’s edge and inserted it into the other ear. Stromer walked round her desk and sat down. She wouldn’t look at me and couldn’t look at him, so she addressed herself to the space between us.

  ‘For obvious reasons, I’d like to make this as brief as possible,’ she said, opening a report and searching for a pen. Sutty offered her the one out of his ear but she ignored him, fished inside her pocket for a biro and made a note. ‘With that said, we have rather a lot to discuss. The cadaver—’

  ‘Layman’s terms, Doc. Aidan hasn’t got his dictionary.’

  Stromer paused for a moment and then continued. ‘Our unidentified man is one of the more fascinating specimens I’ve examined in recent memory.’ She spoke with a professional detachment, as though he was an inanimate object. ‘There are so many irregularities that one almost doesn’t know where to begin …’

  ‘Could one give us the cause of death?’ said Sutty.

  ‘Preliminary bloodwork suggests multisystem organ failure.’

  He made a noise. ‘And can you tell us what caused the cause of death?’

  ‘Not as stupid a question as you make it sound, Peter. In a word, no. We’re still awaiting the toxicology report, but I believe we’ll find a foreign agent or agents in the soft tissue.’