The Smiling Man

by Joseph Knox

  ‘Where was this?’ I said, taking a step closer.

  Her slip had made me feel light-headed.

  ‘Some disgusting room in China Town. He said he didn’t want money. I laughed at him and he got offended. He had the nerve to be offended. I knew he only wanted more, and I knew he’d never keep his mouth shut. So I shut it for him.’

  ‘We have a witness who says Cherry was taken from her flat by a man,’ I said. She looked up at me. ‘I think it was the same man who just assaulted Natasha Reeve.’

  ‘Freddie Coyle?’ she said with a smile.

  ‘I wonder why his wife didn’t recognize him?’

  The smile slid off her face. ‘Well, that was the problem, wasn’t it? Another problem. His solution was to meet her here and kill her.’ She swallowed. ‘That was why I had to come. Cherry was one thing. Killing Natasha was just stupid. Insane. I tried to stop him …’

  ‘You did,’ I said, but her eyes had glazed over and she wasn’t listening. ‘She’s going to be OK. If you were the one who intervened then you probably saved her life down there.’

  ‘That’s good, isn’t it?’ she said, looking down, breathing heavily. She smiled. Nodded. ‘That’s good to know.’

  She looked directly at me.

  ‘Please—’ I said.

  She let go of the bannister and vanished. I closed my eyes. There was a terrible silence before her body crashed down on to the marble floor, fifty feet below. I didn’t move for a moment. At length I opened my eyes, remembered to breathe. I steadied myself and put both hands on the bannister, hoping my senses were wrong. Hoping for a miracle. When I looked down I saw that there hadn’t been one.

  13

  The door to 413 was open. I climbed the short staircase leading to it. I heard the traffic and street sounds from Oxford Road, felt the breeze on my skin. I walked through the doorway and stepped back against the wall. The light came from a desk lamp, giving the room a moody, intimate tone. The glare of the city outside cast moving, kaleidoscopic shadows across the walls.

  At the far side of the room, sitting in a chair, facing the open window, was the solid, immovable silhouette of a man. He looked like a negative image of himself.

  ‘It’s over,’ I said.

  He didn’t move.

  The room had been completely torn apart, as though in a frenzy, a rage. Clearly the man had been looking for something. The smoking gun that I’d implied was hidden here somewhere. He turned and looked at me. I felt like I was seeing him for the first time.

  The man I’d known as Freddie Coyle.

  ‘Is she alive?’ he asked, disinterestedly.

  ‘It depends who you mean.’

  ‘Natasha,’ he said. ‘My wife …’

  ‘I’m afraid so. She’s even lucid. She didn’t recognize you, though, Freddie …’

  ‘Funny that,’ he said with a weak smile.

  ‘Which means you must have changed quite a bit in the last six months.’

  ‘Be the change you want to see in the world …’ he said, staring at nothing.

  ‘He was helping you to change identity, wasn’t he? The man you murdered?’

  He looked at me. ‘That’s quite a leap, Detective …’

  ‘Speaking of which, Aneesa just threw herself down the centre of the stairs. She’s dead,’ I said bluntly. ‘So maybe you’ll get it if my patience is a bit thin.’ It was the first time anything I’d said had registered on his face. I thought the news hit him hard and decided to exploit it. ‘Tell me what all this was about.’

  He shook his head like he barely knew it himself. I was angry. I went forward, took him roughly by the arm and marched him out of the room. ‘This is unnecessary,’ he said. ‘I don’t feel like talking.’ When we reached the landing I pushed him towards the bannister.

  ‘Look at her,’ I said.

  He gave me a desperate smile. ‘I don’t want to.’

  I grabbed him by the scruff of the neck and dragged him to the bannister. ‘Look at her,’ I repeated. He did. From where we stood, Aneesa was a shadow, a smudge on the ground floor. He screwed his eyes shut and began to shake.

  ‘Let’s get closer,’ I said, pushing him towards the stairs.

  ‘Listen …’

  ‘Too late for that. Let’s go and have a look at your handiwork.’

  ‘Don’t speak to me like that.’

  ‘Get used to it. In prison they’ll have a different nickname for you every day. Maybe that’ll suit someone going through an identity crisis.’

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’ I took him by the arm and dragged him down the stairs with me. ‘I said I didn’t want to look.’ He was starting to sound hysterical. Perhaps we both were.

  ‘There are two ways down,’ I said. ‘You’re more than welcome to follow her.’

  ‘I don’t feel well …’

  ‘I don’t care.’

  ‘What do you want? You said you wanted to talk …’

  ‘You could always try, but I want to get up close to her. See what that kind of impact can do.’

  ‘What do you want to know?’ He was panicking now, trying to pull away from me.

  ‘How did you meet the man who died up there?’

  ‘Through an old client, a man living in tax exile.’

  ‘But you needed something a little more complicated, you needed a complete reinvention …’

  ‘Freddie was ripe for it. He had no friends, he never socialized. When he started having the affair with Geoff, I found out.’

  ‘So you decided to put a wedge between him and the only people in his life?’

  ‘Just some notes sent to his wife. I couldn’t have predicted the rest.’

  ‘You must have, because the real Freddie Coyle ended up dead, didn’t he? The divorce already in progress, a lot of cash at stake, no one in his life to miss him once he split from Natasha.’

  ‘Ding, ding, ding. Now can we stop this? I’ve told you I don’t want to see her.’

  He was almost crying now.

  ‘You were the one who showed me the first picture of yourself. A red-faced, overweight man surrounded by young women. You had to lose a lot of weight, maybe even get some work done, but that only put more distance between you and your old life.’

  ‘What the fuck’s going on here?’

  Sutty was standing one flight down, staring up at us.

  ‘You were right,’ I said. ‘The smiling man did die here as a way of pointing the finger at Anthony Blick.’

  ‘Have you lost the fucking plot, Aid? That’s Freddie Coyle. Blick bled to death in the Midland Hotel.’

  ‘Right,’ I said, looking at the man beside me. ‘Then he was cut up in the bathtub and flushed down the toilet. Funny we never found any human remains, though …’

  ‘Probably went up in the dustbin fires,’ said Sutty.

  ‘But they didn’t. The smiling man was a vanisher. He helped people assume new identities. He was helping Anthony Blick become Freddie Coyle.’

  Sutty looked between us, frowned. ‘The blood …’

  ‘I don’t know what their original idea was, but half the battle was making it look as though Anthony Blick had died without providing a body. I think he and the smiling man took blood at regular intervals. More than a man could live without if was all spilt in one go, so anyone who found it would naturally assume the person it came from, Anthony Blick, was dead.’ I looked at the man standing beside me. ‘Something must have gone wrong, though …’

  Blick sat down on the stairs. ‘It was really quite mundane. He found out the money I gave him was fake. He said unless I paid up he’d expose me. I had almost everything in place by then anyway, so I spiked a bottle of whisky and gave it to him. After a few drinks he must have realized. He sabotaged everything, poured my blood out in his hotel room and came here to die. Left himself in 413 so you’d find your way back to the Midland. To me.’

  ‘Aneesa,’ I said. ‘I take it you were together?’

  He nodded, looking
at the floor. ‘That wasn’t really her down there …’

  ‘I’m afraid it was.’

  ‘I don’t want to see her.’

  ‘You’re under arrest for the murders of Freddie Coyle, the unidentified man from room 413 and Christopher Jordan, who went by the name Cherry.’ My voice shook as I spoke. ‘Also for the attempted murder of Natasha Reeve.’

  Sutty stared at me for a moment then nodded.

  He turned and walked back down the stairs.

  XI

  Something to Remember Me By

  1

  ‘So Blick lures Natasha Reeve to the Palace posing as Freddie Coyle,’ said Parrs. I was sitting in his office, explaining the case as I understood it. He was at his desk, his red eyes lit with attention. Stromer was standing in the corner of the room watching me shrewdly.

  She didn’t believe a word I said.

  ‘That’s correct, sir. According to the emails we’ve seen, he hinted at a reconciliation.’

  ‘So she goes expecting her husband back,’ said Parrs. ‘She finds a man impersonating him who tries to kill her.’

  ‘I don’t know what his plan was for afterwards. If he even had one. He attacked her but Aneesa Khan interrupted it. Then Blick went up to search room 413 for the evidence I’d implied would bring the smiling man’s killer to justice. It was a mess. He’d torn the place apart. Aneesa went as far as the room with him, probably trying to calm him down. But by the time I saw her I think she’d already made her mind up to leave.’

  Parrs glared at me. ‘She probably hadn’t decided on the express route to the ground floor, though. What did you say to her?’

  ‘I asked her about Cherry.’

  ‘This trans hooker who saw everything?’

  ‘Cherry heard the smiling man in room 413. He was ranting to Ali, about his relationship with Blick, about making his new life impossible.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘Blick was supposed to be on the other side of the world. The smiling man left his blood all over a hotel room he should never have been inside. Then he left himself, an unidentifiable dead body, in a hotel that Blick was financially involved with. At the very least Blick would be sweating for the rest of his life.’

  It was only part of the truth.

  ‘You’re telling me Smiley Face lives his entire life in secret. Anonymity to the extent that even Interpol can’t pin a name on him. But he suddenly draws attention to himself over an argument with a client …’

  It seemed that the real answer for so many of the smiling man’s actions lay with Amy Burroughs. In coming to the city perhaps he’d been hoping to make contact with her, with the son he’d never met, and been robbed of the chance. When he was poisoned he’d thought fast. Going to the Palace led us to Blick. The note sewn into his trousers led us to Amy. He knew she could deny knowing him, that she could protect herself if necessary. But that his presence in the city, and his final reference to The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám would tell her that he’d tried.

  Parrs leaned forward. ‘… And why did Blick feel the need to kill him?’

  ‘He says it was an argument over money, but that doesn’t stack up to me …’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘The smiling man was terminally ill, weeks away from death …’

  ‘You think they had a philosophical disagreement …’ said Stromer, speaking for the first time since I’d entered the room.

  ‘This began as identity fraud but turned into something more sinister. I think Blick was realizing that Natasha Reeve was a danger, that she could identify him. I think he wanted to solve that problem ahead of time.’

  Parrs smiled. ‘You think our dead man objected to her murder?’ He turned to Stromer. ‘Aidan can get very sentimental around death.’ His eyes flicked back to me. ‘This is a career criminal we’re talking about. Don’t go looking for redeeming features. That said …’

  ‘Sir?’

  His red eyes were locked on to mine. ‘The slip of paper, sewn into his trousers. Almost feels like a message to someone …’

  ‘Maybe so, but we don’t know who to. We probably never will.’

  ‘Hm,’ said Parrs. ‘And Blick maintains that the real Freddie Coyle died of natural causes?’

  I nodded. ‘But he’s not saying what he did with the body. Without that, who knows if that’s true? Either way, he took Coyle’s death as an opportunity to gain control of his assets. While the hotel was a going concern he could only take his monthly allowance from the trust. But if the trust was dissolved he’d get half of the proceeds from the hotel’s sale. Coyle was a shut-in and Blick was his solicitor. Knew his affairs inside out.’

  ‘Literally,’ said Parrs.

  ‘He faked a health scare, dropped off the radar, lost almost a hundred pounds and began to become Freddie Coyle. The real Coyle’s estrangement from his wife made it easy.’

  ‘With the help of our smiling man.’

  I nodded. ‘Apparently an expert in identity fraud.’

  ‘So Blick tells us,’ said Parrs. ‘What I don’t get is how you made the leap, though, Aidan? For this trap of yours at the Palace, you had to know that old Smiley Face was, what? A vanisher? You had to know his killer would be nervous about him sending us a message …’ I saw where he was going but I’d agreed with Amy Burroughs to keep her name out of it. I knew that she wouldn’t go on record with her story about the smiling man saving her life, and I knew that if she were forced or coerced into doing so, that it could put her in danger. Back on the radar of the people she’d spent years running from.

  It wasn’t worth it.

  ‘Through an unrelated investigation I discovered that Blick, posing as Freddie Coyle, had become a member of an exclusive gentlemen’s club in town. That was odd, given that Coyle had just painfully and publicly realized he was gay, and the club only catered to straight men. That, alongside Blick’s caginess, set off alarm bells. There was the light, repeatedly being switched on in 413 after the murder, too. It made me realize someone was searching the room, nervous about what might be found in there. That had to be someone with access to the building. Coyle was just one of several possibilities.’

  There had been hints.

  A detail which had pulled at me was that Coyle hadn’t been a big drinker. When I went to visit him for the first time, the man I met was having cocktails at 10 a.m. I’d found a vape kit down the side of the sofa and heard someone in the next room. I now believed that person was Aneesa Khan, and might have connected them sooner but had discounted the idea upon finding out Coyle was gay. When Alicia had told me he was in fact a fully paid-up member of Incognito’s Gold Member system, that changed everything. Aneesa smoking a cigarette on our drive out to Blick’s, having lost her vape kit, sent the same chill down my spine.

  Stromer detached herself from the wall. ‘What about the attack on Amy Burroughs?’

  I’d been trying to lead our conversation away from her. I was almost certain that the man with the nail gun had been Anthony Blick. Either the smiling man had discussed his connection with Amy, or Blick had followed us to her home, or both. He had every incentive to silence the one person who could provide the missing link to the case: that the smiling man was a vanisher who’d assisted him in changing identities.

  ‘It seems as though that was unrelated,’ I said. ‘A family matter. We’re looking into it.’

  Stromer looked at me dubiously. ‘What about her reaction at the formal identification? Either she knew that man, or she held something else back from us.’

  ‘She was holding something back,’ I said. ‘It turns out she was in love with this Ross Browne, the man we originally thought to be the victim. When she realized he wasn’t dead, she was so relieved she passed out.’

  ‘I know what relief looks like, Detective Constable,’ Stromer said flatly.

  Parrs sat back in his chair. ‘I’m afraid the truth according to Aidan Waits is a little like an iceberg, Doctor. What shows above the surface is only about a tenth of it. So this
nurse can’t help us with the identity of the smiling man?’

  ‘I’m afraid not, sir.’

  ‘Shame that. My challenge to you was to bring me his name. It seems like with all this Blick-Coyle-Khan-Reeve intrigue, that’s the one thing that we’re missing. What was our wager, again?’

  ‘You said you’d reassign me to a different shift. Find me a new partner.’

  ‘That was it.’ He gave me his shark’s smile. ‘So close.’

  ‘Well, I’ve still got a lot to learn from Detective Inspector Sutcliffe.’

  ‘And believe me, you’ll have plenty of time to do it.’

  ‘If that’s all, sir, I’ve requested a day’s leave.’

  ‘So I see, Detective Constable.’ He nodded. ‘You are dismissed.’

  I stood and left the room. I was halfway down the corridor when I heard footsteps behind me. I turned to see Karen Stromer and stopped.

  ‘You’ve done good work, Detective Constable,’ she said with some difficulty. ‘But if this nurse knows something …’

  ‘She doesn’t.’

  ‘I’m afraid I don’t believe you.’ She looked at me. ‘I’m only pursuing this out of concern for her position. When she identified that body she didn’t look heartbroken or in shock. Stacked up next to someone breaking into her home and threatening her, threatening her son, that troubles me.’ When I still didn’t say anything she went on. ‘Why wouldn’t you volunteer information that could save her life? Perhaps even your career?’

  I stood to one side of the corridor and lowered my voice.