The Smiling Man

by Joseph Knox

  I smiled. She had good instincts.

  By the time I got back to the office, Sutty was on his way out.

  ‘What’s happening?’ I said.

  ‘Had a call from SOCO …’

  ‘They’ve traced the cash?’

  ‘No, but they’ve worked out what it was wrapped in.’ I waited. ‘A towel,’ he said.

  ‘Makes sense, I suppose. He could easily bathe a towel in a spirit so it was ready to go up when he dropped it in the bin …’

  ‘And that’s what saved us. The spirit on the surface burned so brightly that the fire brigade were called out immediately. Part of the towel survived …’

  ‘What do you mean? Was there something on there?’

  ‘One word, embroidered, almost intact,’ said Sutty. ‘Midland.’

  ‘Like the Midland Hotel? Was he staying there?’

  ‘How should I know?’ he said, grabbing his keys. ‘I found out five seconds ago.’ We were both going for the door. ‘Question is, why would Smiley Face break into the Palace if he was staying in a hotel just up the road?’

  I thought about it as we walked down the hall. ‘He’s got to have some connection with the Palace, something we’re missing.’

  ‘Hm,’ said Sutty, pushing through a door.

  ‘Anyway, the Midland could have a record of his name, his card details.’

  ‘I’ll be sure to ask them.’

  I stopped.

  ‘The Super was crystal-clear, Aidan. You’re off the smiling man.’ He walked on.

  ‘We found that towel in the dustbin,’ I shouted at his back. ‘That’s my case.’ Even I thought it sounded weak, and he didn’t stop. ‘What about the cloakroom ticket?’ I said. He ground to a halt. ‘It could be with the concierge at the Midland. All his stuff could be there …’

  Sutty turned, pursed his lips. ‘Remind me what that ticket number was.’

  ‘I’ll tell you when we get there.’

  He half-shrugged. ‘Whatever.’

  9

  The Midland was a hotel of a similar vintage to the Palace, although certainly grander and with business still booming. Another enormous redbrick built in the early 1900s, listed, and replete with terracotta and polished granite. The hotel’s name was written in large gold-leaf letters above the entrance and it dominated St Peter’s Street, facing the central library and the square. They said that Hitler had wanted it as the Nazi HQ of Great Britain.

  We approached the front desk at a pace. It felt like the first development in the case and had fallen out of nowhere. More importantly, we’d missed what might have been vital clues and both felt it keenly. It was early evening and well-dressed couples were entering the hotel, for rooms, drinks, spa treatments or dinners. Sutty and I stood out a mile, and the man at the front desk acknowledged us like a glitch in an otherwise flawless program.

  ‘Good evening, welcome to the Midland Hotel. How can I help?’

  ‘Well we don’t want a room,’ said Sutty. ‘I’m Detective Inspector Sutcliffe and this is my colleague Detective Constable Waits. We’re here in connection with a suspicious death that occurred in the Palace Hotel three days ago.’

  The man frowned slightly. ‘Good evening, Detectives. I’m very happy to help you in any way that I can, but as far as I’m aware the Midland has no affiliation with the Palace.’

  ‘I understand that, sir,’ said Sutty. ‘But we have reason to believe that the victim may have been staying at the Midland in the days leading up to his death. There are three lines of enquiry we’d like to pursue. First of all, we’ll need to see the room our man stayed in. Secondly, we’d like to speak to the concierge for any items he might have left here. A cloakroom ticket was found in his possession and it’s our hope that it was issued at the Midland. Thirdly, we’ll need to review any CCTV footage from the duration of our man’s stay. We’d also like to speak to any staff or guests who might have interacted with him.’

  ‘I see,’ said the receptionist, looking between us. ‘May I ask for this gentleman’s name?’

  ‘Well, there’s our first problem,’ said Sutty. ‘Because fuck knows.’

  The young man at the desk called his manager. When he saw Sutty and me, he acknowledged us with the same momentary wince as his colleague. As Sutty explained again why we were there he grew pale.

  ‘Perhaps we’d be more comfortable speaking in my office?’

  ‘How many check-outs have you had this week?’ said Sutty, ignoring him.

  ‘Without a name, you’re asking the impossible. We have over three hundred rooms, over five hundred guests coming and going at all times. If this man has died, and I’m truly sorry to hear that, then he may not even have checked out at all. Even if he has, his room will have been immaculately cleaned, most likely re-booked and have entirely different people staying in it.’

  ‘Start making a list,’ said Sutty. The concierge, summoned moments before, arrived at the front desk. ‘While you’re at it we’ll check the luggage. Our man was definitely in town as of last week, and travelling alone if that’s any help. I’m sure we’ll find your office.’

  ‘Right …’ said the manager. ‘Yes, Rory, if you could help these two gentlemen, they’re looking for a piece of luggage possibly left here a couple of days ago.’

  We were led beyond the front desk, to a side room.

  ‘Do you have the ticket?’ asked the young man.

  ‘We’ve got the number,’ I said. ‘831. Would you mind handling the item with these?’ I passed him some latex gloves.

  He nodded and disappeared into the room.

  Sutty looked at me, pulling on his own gloves. ‘If it’s a suitcase filled with cash we split it, sixty–forty.’

  ‘Deal, but it won’t be.’

  ‘Makes you so sure?’

  ‘The cash was the last thing he burned because it was the least important thing to him. I think he was dismantling his life, whatever it was. He started with the important stuff.’

  ‘Like …?’

  ‘Well, he travelled here from somewhere. With terminal cancer that must have been for some desperate reason, and he knew he’d never leave. I think he sent his documents and personal effects up in smoke in the first two fires. If he knew he didn’t need them any more, and if they made him in any way traceable, they’d be the first things to go.’

  ‘So you do think he topped himself …’

  I shook my head. ‘Someone got to him first. If he’d killed himself, we never would have found him. The cancer, the fires, the anonymity. I think he was burning his stuff because he’d run out of road.’

  ‘Well, you’d know.’

  I nodded. ‘You need me on this. You couldn’t find out who he was if his passport was in his pocket.’

  ‘Someone’s getting brave.’

  ‘Maybe you’re just less intimidating than you think, Sutts.’

  ‘Why, all of a sudden? Cus there’s a price on your head?’

  I looked at him. ‘Parrs told you.’

  ‘The street told me. Who do you think spotted Blunt Trauma Billy back in January? Who do you think kicked his door in and pulled your fucking address out of his throat?’ He was breathing hard through his nose. ‘Y’know why you’re with me, Aid? In the relegation zone? Come on, take a wild guess.’

  But I already knew the answer.

  ‘You’re the only one who’d work with me,’ I said.

  ‘Following evidence to a logical conclusion. Maybe you’re not a lost cause after all.’

  The concierge emerged from the cloakroom carrying a brown leather suitcase.

  ‘Was this the item you were looking for, sir?’

  Sutty took it from him. ‘Nothing else against that number?’

  ‘Everything else is accounted for on other tickets. I did take the liberty of looking for the tickets which would have been issued immediately before or after 831, but they’ve all been collected.’

  ‘Light,’ said Sutty, holding up the case. He shook it and some hard objects m
oved about inside. ‘Let’s go talk to the manager.’

  10

  ‘How’s that list coming?’ said Sutty, as we walked into the office.

  ‘I’m afraid it might take—’

  ‘Out then.’

  The manager did a double-take and Sutty glowered at him.

  ‘We’ll only be a moment,’ I said. ‘We’d like to look at the man’s personal effects and don’t know what they’ll be yet. There could be sensitive, even disturbing or dangerous items in there.’

  ‘Well,’ he said, getting to his feet. ‘By all means disturb and endanger my office.’ He moved briskly past us, closing the door discreetly behind him. What a pro, I thought.

  Sutty laid the luggage out on the desk.

  It was a sturdy, unbranded, brown leather suitcase. The kind of vintage, worn-out steamer trunk you often see in pawn or charity shops. Completely unremarkable. It had a dark leather handle and a rigid external frame for reinforcement. There were two catches, each with a button and a keyhole beside it. It looked like it had been around the world and was scarred from decades of use, having no doubt passed through the hands of several owners.

  ‘Prepare to be a rich man,’ said Sutty, clicking open the catches. ‘Unlocked? Maybe he’s not your international man of mystery after all …’

  ‘If it was locked, it’d mean he had a key for it. With a case this old that would have to mean he was the original owner.’

  ‘So what?’

  ‘It’s unlocked and there was no key on his person. That means it’s second hand.’ I looked at the battered case, the underside edges, worn smooth by years of use. ‘Or third, or fourth, or fifth hand. Completely untraceable. I bet he’d never seen this case in his life before he bought it with cash and packed it.’

  ‘Mr Fucking Brightside,’ said Sutty. The case opened with what sounded like a sigh and we both stood there, absorbing it for a second. The stale, boxed-up smell of a lonely, cornered life. There was a thin, stained paper lining, which looked like it had been inside the case for many years. There were a handful of objects. On top was a small thread card of orange yarn. I recognized it as the same colour thread that had sewn the torn paper and cloakroom ticket into the man’s trousers.

  ‘Well, that solves one mystery,’ said Sutty, daintily moving the thread aside. ‘He did his own sewing.’ Beneath the thread were a couple of simple items of clothing. Bland, shapeless underwear and a crumpled T-shirt. Sutty only touched them to examine the labels.

  As expected, they’d been unstitched and discarded.

  ‘And he was removing his own labels, too.’ He moved the clothing aside to reveal an unusual pair of scissors. They’d been Scotch-taped shut, with the sharp edges visible at the end. Beside the scissors was what looked like a normal butter knife, sheathed in more of the Scotch tape. Using index fingers and thumbs, Sutty pulled the knife free of its ad hoc case to reveal that the blade had been halved and dramatically sharpened.

  We shared a glance.

  Both the knife and the scissors looked like vicious, hastily improvised weapons. The only other item in the case was an old hardback book.

  The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám.

  Sutty picked it up by the spine and dangled it upside down. Nothing fell out. He disinterestedly flicked through the pages, frowning as he did so.

  ‘Poetry,’ he grumbled.

  ‘Look at the back. The last page.’ He did so. It was torn, with part of the page missing. ‘That’s where the message in his pocket came from. Ended or finished. It was the end of the book.’

  ‘Hm,’ said Sutty, leafing back through the book, more slowly this time. He stopped at the front, the title page, and held it out to me. It was a neat, legible handwritten inscription.

  Indeed, indeed, Repentance oft before

  I swore – but was I sober when I swore?

  And then and then came Spring, and Rose-in-hand

  My thread-bare Penitence apieces tore.

  With love,

  Ax

  We looked at each other.

  Beneath it there was a phone number written in incredibly light pencil.

  ‘Zero one six one,’ said Sutty, squinting. ‘Local …’ I started to take my phone from my pocket but he shook his head. ‘We don’t know who or what’s at the other end. We’ll get the address and go over there, rather than give them an early warning. Too much of this case has passed us by already.’

  ‘Who do you think it is?’

  ‘Sounds to me like we’ve got ourselves a smiling woman.’

  * * *

  The boy stood paralysed in the doorway of the kitchen, the death room. Because of the light he’d flicked on, that split second he’d held down the switch, he couldn’t see in the dark any more. Instead, a neon imprint of the open-throated woman was burned into his retina, like the first seconds following a camera flash.

  When he breathed again he was suddenly retching, overwhelmed by the metallic smell of blood coating the back of his throat. All thoughts of slipping quietly through the house evaporated and he stumbled, crawled, backwards from the room, gasping, as far as he could go, until he thudded into the closed front door. He pushed himself up, choking, panicking, feeling the sweat bleed out through his palms, making them so slippery that he almost slid back down the door. His chest tightened and he crushed his eyes closed, trying to breathe. He tried to re-engage the rising, to lift effortlessly out of his body and watch this like it was happening to someone else, but the floating sensation wouldn’t come. For a moment he thought this was how his life would end, lost in the darkness, his chest caving in on itself. So similar to the blackness that his mother predicted.

  He passed through the worst of the pain, his head shaking with the effort, and his breathing began to normalize. The blood drumming through his ears served as an unwelcome reminder that he was still alive, he was still here.

  And then slowly, reluctantly, the boy acknowledged the time delay. The difference between the breaths that he could feel, moving in and out of his lungs, and the breaths that he could hear, coarse and rasping, moving in and out of someone else’s. They weren’t coming from the kitchen, the death room. They were much closer than that. Muted by something, a door, a wall.

  The boy could hear a prisoner, crying, somewhere in the house.

  The sound brought his sister to mind. He thought of her, powerless and confused, holding her bruised arm, staring at him with wide, wet eyes from the corner of a room, communicating something to him alone, and trying not to draw Bateman’s attention back to herself. He thought of her now, sitting afraid in the car, waiting for him to come back.

  He followed the sound to a closed door beneath the stairs. When he reached it the sobbing stopped. The boy leaned in and put an ear to the door.

  ‘Tracy?’ came a hesitant voice.

  It belonged to a man, but one whose mouth was filled with pain. The boy withdrew his hands from the oak, brushing against the sturdy, iron key sticking out from it and, just for a second, felt like they were looking at each other. As though the person behind the door could see through it, into him, and acknowledge that they were both prisoners. The boy took a step backwards, on the balls of his feet. He saw the aluminium pole, discarded on the floor, and picked it up. He returned to the foot of the stairs, to the job.

  ‘Tracy …’ the voice called out again.

  The boy put his hands over his ears and climbed the stairs to the landing.

  He didn’t dare turn the light on, so he edged open a door, letting the moon cast its pale glow across the room. There was a chair lying on its side and he picked it up, positioned it in the centre of the landing and stood on top of it. Then he reached the aluminium pole upward, inserted the plastic end into the hatch on the ceiling and twisted. With a pull, the hatch opened and an unfolding staircase slid down from the attic.

  The hatch above the boy was a square of perfect darkness.

  He dropped the pole and climbed up into it.

  The attic had one smal
l porthole window, through which the boy could see the moon, the only source of light. There were no floorboards so he walked carefully across the beams, breathing through his mouth to avoid the stale smell of cobwebs and dust. Following Bateman’s instructions, he went away from the light, towards the far wall. Towards a narrow rectangle that went from the floor to the ceiling, but wasn’t much wider than a football. He plunged his arm into the void, as far as it would go, and felt around. When his fingers touched nothing but air he took a breath and began forcing his body into the gap.

  His fingers brushed against fabric.

  Flattening his body, holding his breath, the boy pushed himself further inside the gap, plucking at this object, teasing it towards him. When he got his fist around it he knew he had the handle of a canvas bag, and pulled back with all his strength. The bag was heavy but he could hold it.

  Elated for a second, he tried to move back out of the gap but he was stuck. He pulled again, still didn’t move and started to panic. He thought of his sister, with Bateman and their mother in the car. He thought of the prisoner crying beneath the stairs. In a rush of anger, the boy screamed, wrenching himself free from the space and collapsing into a gap between the floorboards. He heard the buckling sound of plaster, breaking beneath his weight. As he started to move it gave way and he fell through, down on to the landing. He hit the floor hard, still holding on to the bag, trying to breathe as splinters and plasterboard hazed down on top of him.

  He rolled over, spat the wood shavings out of his mouth and got up. He half-fell down the stairs, coughing, gripping the bag to his chest, keeping his back to the kitchen, the three dead bodies. He put his hand on the latch of the front door and started to open it when he heard the voice from under the stairs again.

  ‘Tracy?’

  The person was crying. The boy thought, once again, of his sister. He thought that when he walked out, they’d leave. Bateman would start the car and they’d be lost in the endless, looping backroads, impossible to follow and never coming back. He felt the electricity in the tips of his fingers, still gripping the latch. The blood thumping through his ears.