The Smiling Man

by Joseph Knox

  Packed and ready to go.

  I laid the case sideways and unzipped it. Cartwright was leaving for Dubai that evening. His clothes, his monogrammed dressing gown and flip-flops, were strapped down and I carefully removed the clasps. Moving them aside, I found flavoured condoms and lubrication. Thoughtful.

  I lifted the clothes out of the case and felt around inside the lining. Once I found a gap in the material I took the bag of cocaine from my pocket and eased it into a space where it wouldn’t look incongruous, even if he decided to remove his things before travelling. Then I carefully replaced the clothes as I’d found them, re-clasped the straps and closed the case, returning it to its upright position. I backed out of the room, drew the door closed and went to the lift.

  It was one of those everything-on-red moments that I always swore off until I was suddenly in the middle of them. As the lift sank down to the ground floor I felt weightless, light, after months of docile suffocation.

  I walked back outside into the thousand-degree summer, staring the sun full in the face. I thought about all the things I’d done that I didn’t believe in. This one was different. Something I could live with. Crossing the road, I saw that someone had parked right behind me. As I got closer, the other driver started the engine, abruptly backing off before making a hard U-turn and taking the corner. I stood in the road looking after them, breathing hard. It was the same car I’d seen waiting outside my flat two nights before. I was wondering what it meant when my phone started to vibrate and I looked at the screen.

  Unknown number.

  I picked up the call to the sound of someone breathing.

  * * *

  The boy backed off from his reflection, moved round the car and walked towards the farmhouse. There were no lights on inside and all he could hear was the wind coming through the trees. The cold air went in and out of his lungs like a narcotic, and it felt like the moonlight at his back was pushing him forwards. With each step he became less afraid, less like himself.

  He started to walk faster, feeling it more certainly, this thing he’d come to think of as the rising. His transition from a small child into thin air, into the self-preservation of an out-of-body experience. First he focused on one object, like the front door of the farmhouse, then he thought about Bateman. His mouth would start to water. He’d see a haze of sunspots and gradually begin to lift above the fear, until he was watching himself from a distance. It was in this way that he could float upward when his mother gave him the belt, or drift towards the centre of the ceiling when she held his hands under boiling water. He could rise and rise when Bateman put out cigarettes on his little sister, soaring into the stratosphere until he couldn’t see the look on her face.

  He rose now.

  It felt like being perched on his own shoulder, and from up there he could see the building more clearly. A grey-brick farmhouse, ageless and meandering, like a thing grown out of the ground. He approached the front door and craned his neck. Took two wires from his back pocket and began picking the lock, automatically going through the motions, just like all the other times. He’d gone through high windows into department stores at 3 a.m. He’d broken into chemists and emptied prescriptions into bags for Bateman. He’d crawled along the floors of old people’s homes, pocketing keepsakes and cash.

  But this wasn’t just like all the other times and it never would be again. This time, when the boy’s hand brushed against the door, he almost lost his balance. This time he had the strangest sensation, like he was watching all of this from another life, like he was remembering things that hadn’t happened yet. He had the sudden fear that he’d risen too high out of his body, that he could see as far as the future. In a flash he saw the impossible, open-throated woman sitting inside this house. The slender man, bleeding from the mouth, who he knew would follow him outside. And somewhere else, even further in the future, he saw a figure sitting in a chair, staring out of a window, smiling.

  With that the boy felt a fear that he couldn’t rise up above. He started to plummet, crashing back down to earth, back into his own body, hearing the frantic, panic-attack breaths that were always on the other side of the rising. He collapsed into the farmhouse door and laughed at his own stupidity. Because those things hadn’t happened yet. They hadn’t happened yet.

  They hadn’t happened yet.

  Inside, he felt the darkness like a living thing, enveloping him, until he was indistinguishable from it. He breathed quietly through his mouth and stood still for a few seconds, letting his eyes adjust. It was in these moments that the boy wondered if he was really alive, and he found himself thinking of the night his mother caught him praying.

  ‘You’re wasting your time,’ she’d said when their eyes met. ‘There’s no heaven or God or anything like that. When you die the lights go off and never come back on. You’re just talking to yourself.’ She turned to leave but he followed her to the door, pressing her on this point, the lights. ‘Before you were born,’ she said wearily. ‘Do you remember?’ The boy didn’t move. ‘Well, death’s like that. One minute you are and the next minute you’re not. Everything goes black.’

  So in the darkness of the house, the boy ceased to exist. He breathed the shadows into his lungs and ceased to feel. He saw the outline of the stairs and in three steps he was standing at the bottom, about to climb, when he sensed something like a breath on his skin. There was a cool breeze coming down the hallway towards him. He retracted his foot from the staircase, moved around the bannister and walked towards the draught. The carpet was so thick that he didn’t need to worry about his footsteps. He walked on the balls of his feet instinctively, though, because Bateman had shown him how. When he reached the room at the end of the hall, the door was partly closed. Almost in wonder at the force that moved his hand, in awe of the motion that disobeyed Bateman, the boy edged it open. He felt the air against his face and was suddenly afraid.

  He was standing at the entrance of a large kitchen, whose windows looked out into a field. He knew this because of a faint light coming from outside, the kind that makes everything else seem darker. Because the shadows had gone through him so thoroughly, the boy found himself helplessly drawn to this light, and took a step forward, feeling the shards of broken glass crunching underfoot. His senses came alive and he smelt something familiar and metallic, an odour that registered in his brain as fear itself.

  In the centre of the room, in shadow against the light, sat an impossibility. The motionless shape of an open-necked person. Reversing out of the room, towards the wall, the boy felt something hard press into the back of his head. A light switch. Feeling the shake in his hand, he reached behind himself and placed two slippery fingers on it.

  Just a second, he thought. On and off.

  It would change his life forever.

  The room lit up with the exhaustive detail of a nightmare. The kitchen windows had been blown in. Sparkling shards of glass covered the work surfaces, the table, the floor. A thick, electric-red liquid cast crazy patterns on the glass, walls and ceiling, and his eyes swept across a gun on the table. There were two large, sack-like objects on the floor. Taking a step closer the boy saw that they were the fallen bodies of two men.

  It felt like his heart was punching out through his chest.

  The smell was overpowering now. In the centre of the room sat the impossible person. A young black woman, looking somehow pale. She was tied to a chair and her neck had been cut almost in half, spilling her blood, her life, all over the room. The boy saw in a flash that his mother was right about the afterlife. There was no heaven or God or anything like that. He recognized the metallic odour as that of his mother’s bad breath. The blood-spray smelt like the lapsed fillings in her mouth. He flicked the light off again, feeling like he’d been swallowed whole by her.

  Everything went black.

  * * *

  V

  Came Back Haunted

  1

  ‘You’re a flat tyre, Marcus,’ said Sutty, winding down. ‘The
re’s no bouncing back from this. I’m just glad we found that condom wrapper. I’d hate to think I’m gonna see that face again on someone else.’ We were in one of the boxes beneath the station, sweating Marcus Collier. Sutty had been talking, shouting, pacing up and down, uninterrupted, for fifteen minutes straight, when he finally left a pause long enough to get a reply.

  It was like watching a small animal step into a trap.

  ‘Are you finished?’ said Collier, staring at the table.

  ‘No,’ Sutty replied. ‘Now I hear it, I don’t like the sound of your voice, either.’

  ‘… All I did was get laid.’

  ‘And that’s all you’ll be doing for the next five years,’ said Sutty, slapping him on the shoulder. ‘Why d’ya think they call it Strangeways? There are blokes inside who’ll take a different kind of virginity off you every night. It won’t be their eyes they’re undressing you with, either.’

  Collier tried to ignore him. ‘Is this necessary?’ he said, appealing to me. ‘Is it? I’ve told you what I know.’

  Sutty leaned over him. ‘For the purposes of this conversation, Aidan’s your imaginary friend, pal. Ignore me again and I’ll high-five your face.’

  It wasn’t strictly necessary but, then, Collier hadn’t strictly cooperated. We’d begun, reasonably enough, by asking him to tell us about Cherry, the escort we suspected to have been in the Palace at the time of the unidentified man’s death. Collier had stared at the table and folded his arms.

  Then the pyrotechnics started.

  It was less an interrogation of him than a form of therapy for Sutty. When the storm clouds were hanging over his head, he’d often disappear into an interview room and make it rain on someone else. Collier’s flawless cooperation wouldn’t have changed that.

  I almost admired Sutty’s self-knowledge.

  The first person he spoke to on any given day would invariably take the brunt of his rage, he knew this, and had quickly tired of exhausting it on me. Increasingly, I collected him for our shifts in total silence. I knew he was holding it in, waiting to spit venom at someone he could actually break, so I kept my mouth shut and felt quietly grateful when his attention went elsewhere. It could be the girl in the coffee shop, a cold-caller or a mugger, and when he was sweating someone, the crime itself had no bearing on his mood. I’d once seen him reduce a speeder to tears and then, with the thunder out of his system, charm a wife-beater with impeccable politeness. Like a stopped clock, even Detective Inspector Peter Sutcliffe got it right occasionally, and there was a certain thrill in seeing him chew people out who deserved it. It took steel for Collier to run girls out of his own workplace. More importantly, the key card that allowed the smiling man access to room 413 had belonged to him.

  ‘I’ll appeal,’ said Collier, meeting Sutty’s eyes. ‘This is harassment.’ Occasionally we reached this point. Insults became the new normal and people got brave. This only served to fuel Sutty’s anger, propelling him to new heights of cruelty.

  He leaned over the table again and lowered his voice. ‘Allow me to explain why you couldn’t get hate mail from appeals.’

  My phone started to vibrate. An unrecognized number. ‘Excuse me,’ I said. When I closed the door behind me, Sutty was screaming at Collier, and I walked up the corridor before answering.

  ‘Waits,’ I said.

  ‘Aidan.’

  ‘Sian?’

  ‘You sound surprised …’ She laughed. ‘You deleted my number, didn’t you?’

  ‘I lost my old phone,’ I said, after a moment’s hesitation. ‘What’s up?’

  ‘I think we need to talk.’

  I looked down the corridor. ‘I’m afraid it’s not a great time.’

  ‘Right,’ she said.

  ‘I just mean I’m at work.’

  ‘Bit early for you, isn’t it? On the up, are we?’

  ‘Try the other direction. We’ve caught a bad one. We’re interviewing someone now, listen.’ I held my phone up towards the interview room I’d left. Sutty was describing Collier’s demise in biblical terms.

  ‘He hasn’t changed,’ said Sian.

  ‘I don’t know, sometimes I think he’s getting worse.’ I hesitated for a second. ‘I could see you later …’

  ‘I’m working tonight.’

  ‘I don’t mind, I could drop in.’

  There was a moment’s silence. I thought she’d been disconnected but when I heard a breath I knew I’d said the wrong thing.

  ‘OK,’ she said. ‘Ricky and some friends might be around, though.’

  ‘Ricky? The new guy?’

  ‘My boyfriend, Aidan …’

  ‘Well,’ I said, somehow unable to back down. ‘That’s fine by me, I’d love to meet him.’

  ‘You’d love to?’ She laughed again. ‘OK. Later then. Hope your old phone turns up.’ She disconnected before I could say goodbye and I rubbed my eyes. I had deleted her number, to stop myself from calling at one, or two, or three, in the morning. To stop myself from wasting her time while I was getting straight. That was simply uncomfortable. Inviting myself to meet her new boyfriend was excruciating.

  I was grateful for the distraction when my phone buzzed with an email. I’d spent the morning trying to identify the biker who might have seen the dustbin flamer. Unfortunately, he’d turned off Oxford Road without exhibiting any traceable characteristics. As a last resort, I’d requested the footage from further up the road, to see if I could find the start of his journey. That footage was now available.

  I looked up and saw two uniformed officers lingering in the hallway, listening to Sutty’s latest rant and laughing.

  ‘Find somewhere else to be,’ I said. Their faces fell and they moved along. I waited outside for another minute and, with the worst of the tirade over, opened the door and stepped back inside the box.

  ‘I wish you’d stop saying that,’ Collier was groaning.

  Sutty’s nostrils flared. ‘You can wish in one hand and shit in the other, but I’ll tell you which fills up fastest.’ In the ensuing silence the walls themselves seemed to be ringing. ‘OK, interview terminated,’ he said, removing the tape and replacing it with a blank one. As far as I knew he collected these recordings, studied them like a touring stand-up perfecting his act. When he stood up and stretched I heard material splitting. He grunted and went for the door.

  ‘Hang on,’ said Collier. ‘Don’t you wanna hear what I’ve got to say?’

  Sutty looked at him, almost in confusion. ‘No, not particularly. Aidan, with me.’ He left the box and I followed him outside, back down the corridor.

  ‘Shall we give him an hour?’ I said.

  ‘You haven’t got an hour to give, pal. Had a phone call from Parrs this morning …’

  Because I’d collected Sutty in our customary silence, this was our first conversation of the day. Our first since Parrs had told me about the hit. I thought for a second that Sutty knew about Oliver Cartwright, the drugs I’d planted in his suitcase, but that was impossible.

  I’d have been the one getting interrogated.

  ‘Oh?’ I said.

  ‘Oh. He thinks you’re wasted on Smiley Face. Wants you to focus on something more suited to your talents.’

  We stopped walking.

  ‘The dustbin fires,’ I said flatly.

  Sutty clicked his fingers and walked on. ‘You should be a detective.’

  ‘We’ve got a murder here—’

  He was shaking his head. ‘Stop saying that. I’ve got a suspicious death. You’ve got yourself on the shit list and it’s up to you to get yourself off it. In addition to whatever last night was about – and, please remember, my door’s always closed – Stromer’s been dripping poison in his ear. Something about you turning up at that canal body-dump and making a scene.’ We stopped walking to let people go by us and Sutty lowered his voice. ‘Are you on airplane mode, Aid? Get the fucking message. They want you to put in your papers. My advice is: do it. This job’s not for you.’ He carried on walking
and I watched him go. I wondered if Parrs had suggested my resignation, knowing I couldn’t do it because of what he’d told me the previous day. He’d twisted the knife in my back so often that I could recognize the brand.

  Sutty held up his pass to get through a door, even holding it open for the next person. Sated for the moment by his screaming fit, he was actually at his most rational, and would stay like that for the next few hours. He’d grow increasingly unreasonable throughout the shift, though, with his rage fully recharging overnight, like a lanced boil.

  I went to the toilet and closed the cubicle door. There were caricatures of both Sutty and me, drawn in marker pen at eye level. I was thin, sullen and simmering with rage. That looked like a compliment next to Sutty, who was bulbous, sweating, exploding with it. In the picture we were each using a magnifying glass to stare at the other’s tiny penis. The caption beneath it said:

  Slutty and Toxic Waits investigate …

  2

  Geoff Short was a man who belied the height restriction imposed by his surname. He was tall and slim, with an athletic spring in his step and a healthy, clear complexion.

  ‘Thank you for meeting me, Mr Short.’

  ‘I hope I can help,’ he said cautiously. Freddie Coyle had told me that his former lover was married with children, so I’d suggested we meet for a coffee near his Whalley Range home.

  ‘In a way, you’ve helped already …’ I explained the circumstances of the Palace Hotel break-in, and that I’d wanted to eliminate him from two lines of enquiry. In the first, I could plainly see that he wasn’t the unidentified dead body we’d discovered, and in the second, he’d been able to provide a cast-iron alibi for the events of Saturday night. His wife had been going into labour, and they’d been holding hands, breathing deeply.

  He looked relieved at having provided both answers. ‘It’s nice to help just by dint of being alive. But …’ He looked at me curiously. ‘You do know I haven’t worked with Mr Blick for the best part of a year now?’