The Smiling Man

by Joseph Knox

  ‘Because that might be the one thing that could put her in danger. I won’t insult your intelligence, Karen, but if asked I will deny this conversation ever took place. I’m telling you this because I hope you’ll understand. As long as Amy Burroughs isn’t compelled to go on the record or draw attention to herself, she’s safe. After what she’s been through she deserves that much. You were right, she wasn’t heartbroken or in shock. She was scared for her life.’

  Stromer’s expression softened and she nodded. Gave me her thin paper-cut of a smile. ‘Perhaps I was mistaken about her reaction in the formal identification,’ she said. ‘Perhaps people aren’t always what they appear.’

  ‘Perhaps not.’ I wanted to acknowledge the moment, and the trust she was putting in me, but my phone had started to vibrate in my pocket. I knew with a heavy certainty who it would be. ‘Thanks for all your help, Karen.’

  2

  We turned off the main road and kept on going. The way felt complicated, impossible. Meandering roads became unmarked streets, then lanes and then nothing at all.

  I drove.

  Bateman sat in the back seat but we could both feel it now. The desensitizing effect of details, fizzing by the window. We’d left the city in the late afternoon, with at least a two-hour drive ahead of us. The weather forecast had predicted that the heatwave, the shared fever dream that had passed more like a nightmare, was ready to break.

  It hadn’t happened yet.

  Every object, building or person we’d passed was alive under the sunlight, looking like the best version of itself. When the landscape began to change, blasts of green foliage after miles of failed, grey towns, Bateman dug a pint of whisky out from his jacket and started sipping at it in silence. He was a brooding, ominous presence. Like a tumour on life itself, and I knew that this trip couldn’t really be about the bag, or whatever he thought was in it. It was about me and him. It was about power and fear. Neither of us had spoken as we drove along the motorway, the tension in the car rising, tightening like a knot. Now this sudden deviation, these endless, looping backroads felt like something coming undone, unravelling faster than I could keep track of.

  So far nothing but the feeling had been familiar to me.

  As I made the final turn towards White Gate House, all of that changed in an overwhelming rush of memory. I stopped the car in the narrow driveway, the engine still running. Bateman stirred. Shifted to stare over my shoulder, through the windscreen. It was early evening now, but still bright out and it was clear that the farmhouse had been abandoned. Perhaps as long as we’d been away from it. I drove us closer, parking beside the enormous bank of trees I remembered so vividly. I’d turned the rear-view mirror so I couldn’t see Bateman, but when I switched off the engine I could hear his loud, rasping breaths.

  It felt like he was inside my head.

  I opened the door, got out, and started towards the house.

  ‘Where you going?’ he said bluntly.

  ‘I want to look around.’

  He snorted and followed me.

  I tried the door once and then pushed my shoulder into it. When it didn’t move I stepped back and Bateman kicked it in with one powerful boot. I tried not to look rattled by it. The interior was as I remembered, but warped by time and damp.

  ‘After you,’ said Bateman, drooling down himself, still breathing like an old bulldog. The windows in the kitchen were just holes in the wall and the sun, descending in the sky, blinded us both. I walked towards it, into the death room. It didn’t hold the same power I’d expected it to. Buildings forget. When I turned, I saw that Bateman was watching me from the doorway, as though he didn’t want to cross the threshold.

  ‘What happened in here?’ I said.

  His good eye moved on to me. ‘They killed her.’

  ‘Fisk’s wife? Why?’

  He shrugged. ‘Fisk wouldn’t talk,’ he said slowly. ‘Wouldn’t tell where the bag was …’

  ‘How did you know where it was, then?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I said how did you know where the bag was if Fisk wouldn’t talk? You drove us out here and told me exactly where to go …’

  Bateman’s proportions seemed to change, like those of a shape-shifter, and he drew himself up, filling the doorway.

  ‘Where’s the bag, Aidan?’

  ‘If you’re honest with yourself, I think you already know.’

  He smiled. ‘All gone …’

  I nodded. ‘I fell down a bank and hit the stream. When I heard the gunshot I threw the fucking thing in.’ He was nodding like he understood. ‘If you knew that, then why all this? Following me, phoning me, fighting me …’

  ‘Even walking round your flat while you were out,’ he said with a smirk. ‘Reading your mail, drinking your drink. If you’re honest with yourself, I think you already know …’

  ‘I was only here because you dragged me out of bed. I was a kid.’

  ‘A man now,’ he said. ‘Knew bag gone. Years gone. Life gone.’ He drew a hand tenderly across the ruined face that had once made women weak at the knees. ‘Gone,’ he said. I remembered then that Bateman had no internal life. Outside of cruelty, he ceased to exist. ‘You shouldn’t have come here, Aid …’

  ‘You broke into my sister’s house, you didn’t give me a choice.’

  He smiled, nodded.

  ‘I wanted to talk to you, y’know?’ I was backing away. ‘I thought I’d try and talk to you about violence, where it comes from. It’s usually a cycle. One bad choice after another. If a few people started breaking the chain we could probably be without it.’ I’d backed all the way to the window. ‘I trace the violence in me back to you, I’d be interested to know where yours came from?’ Bateman snorted so I went on. ‘Anyway, like I said, it’s a choice we don’t have to make. I thought I’d tell you I won’t do it any more. I’d say that if we came here to fight then you win. You can kill me, I’m better than it.’

  ‘Moving …’ said Bateman, taking a step inside the kitchen.

  ‘You turned on the other kidnappers because they didn’t want to hurt Fisk’s wife. They didn’t want to kill him.’

  He took another step.

  ‘Stay the fuck away from me,’ I said.

  He roared with laughter. ‘Mr Non-Violent. Mr Break the Cycle …’

  ‘You’re not listening, Bateman.’ He took another step. ‘I said that’s what I thought I’d do.’

  ‘But I killed a woman,’ he said, miming tears with his hand.

  ‘You killed us both,’ I said. ‘You did this to yourself.’ He scrunched up his face in question. ‘You broke into my sister’s house, you didn’t give me a choice,’ I repeated.

  We both heard it then and he stopped.

  The sound of a large vehicle coming up the path.

  Bateman turned, stomped down the hall to the front door and saw the top of the white van coming towards us. He started to laugh. Not the cynical snorts and twitches from before, but the real stuff, right from the gut.

  ‘Back-up?’ he said, putting his wrists together miming his arrest. ‘For what? Being mean to you on the phone …’ Most of his speech impediment had fallen away now, and I saw that it had always just been for effect.

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘Not for that.’

  ‘For breaking and entering? I’ll be out before you’re back in the city …’

  ‘I know,’ I said, walking down the hallway towards him. He reached behind my ear and, instead of a coin, produced a crumpled-up piece of paper, dangling it in front of me.

  I saw my sister’s name.

  An address.

  He dropped it at my feet.

  ‘Keep that, I’ve got it memorized,’ he said, spitting in my face.

  I looked past him. At the doorway he still had his back to. ‘What would you say your eyesight’s like, Bateman?’

  He turned to look.

  Nicky Fisk Junior had climbed out of the van’s driver side. He walked round the cab and opened the passenger-side doo
r, helping out the thinnest man I’d ever seen.

  His father, Nicholas Fisk Senior.

  Bateman’s broken mouth fell open. He took a step backwards, tripped and fell heavily on the floor. He scrambled to his feet, grunted and ran the other way, down the hall towards the kitchen and the wide open spaces where the windows should be. I heard a wet thud and saw him stagger back into the hall holding his bloody nose. Donny Fisk emerged from behind him, holding a claw-hammer, as his father reached the front door.

  ‘Hello, Bates,’ said Fisk. ‘You’re looking well …’

  Bateman stood, breathing blood into his cupped hands for a moment, then burst towards the door. Nicky dropped him with a devastating right. Then he picked him up by the legs and his brother took the shoulders. Where Fisk Senior jerked and bucked, his sons flowed like shadows. They went to the cellar door under the stairs. Where I’d turned the key on their father so many years before.

  ‘This the one?’ asked Nicky. Fisk nodded and they disappeared into the pitch-black rectangle of the door.

  I looked at Fisk.

  He hadn’t stepped inside the house and, for a moment, kept his eyes locked on to the cellar where he’d been held prisoner. He looked down the hall to where his wife had been murdered. ‘If it’s all the same to you, I think I’d rather wait outside,’ he said.

  I didn’t know where the two of us stood, but I was glad to join him.

  I took his arm to offer support as we walked down the path into the perfect, still day, away from a muted sound that might have been a man screaming. I hadn’t been certain that they’d come. And hadn’t known that Donny was already in position when we arrived. I still didn’t know what they planned for me, but it felt likely I’d follow Bateman down into that cellar.

  It was a chance I’d had to take.

  His aggression towards me had been one thing. His move against my sister was another. Fisk and I had only walked a few feet when a gunshot cracked, unmistakably, through the air. Then another. He gripped my arm more tightly and we went on without comment.

  ‘That bag you took from the attic …’

  ‘I threw it in the stream,’ I said, too quickly.

  He eyed me shrewdly. ‘You didn’t look inside?’

  I shook my head. I wondered if my life depended on it.

  Before he could say anything else his boys emerged from the house, walking towards us. They went to the van, took two canisters of petrol each and walked, wordlessly, back, disappearing inside. When they re-emerged, Nicky approached their father and handed him a slip of paper.

  ‘Found this on the floor,’ he said.

  Still leaning on me for support, Fisk used his long, thin fingers to massage the scrunched-up ball of paper open.

  ‘What is it?’ he said.

  ‘It’s my sister’s name and address. He was threatening to hurt her.’ Fisk looked at me for a moment then extended the piece of paper. I took it and balled it back up. I walked to the house and dropped it in the doorway.

  When I turned, Donny was staring at me, gripping the bloodied claw-hammer.

  ‘Guy said he’s your dad, by the way. That true?’

  I think I shook my head.

  Unable to look at them any more, I went to the car and sat inside it. I was blocked in by their van. Fisk leaned on one of his boys, said something to the other and watched him disappear inside. At length, plumes of smoke emerged. Fisk and Nicky walked past me without a look and climbed back inside the van. They started up and began to drive down the lane, back on to the main road. When I heard another engine I realized that Donny had been parked in his own car around the back. I started up and followed the van.

  Donny followed me.

  In the middle of the lane the van’s brake lights flashed red and our strange convoy came to a sudden, claustrophobic stop. I looked in my rear-view. Saw Donny’s car right behind. I looked left and then right. Acres of wide open fields either way, tinted by the day’s dying light. There was nowhere to go. One of the van doors opened and I saw Fisk climb out, leaning on his stick as he walked towards me. I was gripping the steering wheel, trying not to panic. When he reached the car he draped himself on the roof and used his stick to tap on the window. I buzzed it down.

  He gave me a hard look and then held out a fist.

  Inside it was the scrunched-up piece of paper.

  He dropped it into my lap. ‘The boys think this is careless,’ he said. ‘Use it or don’t, but I wouldn’t leave anything of value in that place.’ He nodded back towards the house and when I looked into the rear-view mirror I could see flames drifting out of the windows and doors, reaching for the sky. ‘It was just a pair of gloves, by the way,’ he said.

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘In that bag you stole. They were my dad’s. Hidden away cus Trace hated boxing. There was never any cash here. I just told your old man about it cus it was all I could think of …’

  ‘He wasn’t my old man,’ I said.

  Fisk squinted. ‘There’s a certain resemblance, but my eyesight’s not what it was …’

  He walked, laboriously, back to the van and climbed inside. They started up again, signalled for a turn and went right. I followed for a few miles, with Donny driving close behind. Then I pulled over and let him pass. He didn’t look at me.

  I killed the engine and sat a while, watching the light change.

  I jumped at the first tap on the glass, and saw with relief that it was just a fat spot of rain. There was another, then another, until the weather seemed to break all around me, pelting the windscreen and enveloping the car. It sounded like a hundred thousand voices, screaming in the distance.

  XII

  Kill For Love

  1

  It was late by the time I got back into the city. I’d spent something like ten hours behind the wheel of a car. My eyes burned and my skin smelt salty, and I drove around for a while deciding what to do. Helplessly, I opened the ball of paper and looked at my sister’s address.

  I was nervous when I parked up, two streets over from her house. I imagined knocking on the door and introducing myself to her, for the first time in over two decades. I ran through what I might say, how she might see me. How she might react. I forced myself out of the car, dropped my keys trying to lock it and had to laugh at myself.

  The house was a terrace that it looked like she shared. There were a couple of lights on inside, the muted sound of a television. I checked the time and saw that it was just after 10 p.m. Just about respectable. Walking up the path I saw a haze of sunspots wash in front of my eyes. For a moment I thought I might start to lift, effortlessly, from my body and watch this as though it were happening to someone else.

  I didn’t, though.

  When I got to the door and raised my hand to knock I saw my own reflection. The dark, lived-in suit. The bags under my eyes that I could never quite sleep off. The deep cuts and bruises from my fight with Bateman, like he’d reached out from inside my head and made the mental scars physical. I waited for my face to warp and alter in the glass but it didn’t change. It had finally settled on a look and, after months of doubt and confusion, I suddenly recognized myself so well.

  I was my father’s son. The violent man I thought I was pretending to be.

  I waited a moment, feeling the electricity leave me, and took an unconscious step back. Then a conscious one. Then I was walking down the path, away from myself.

  Two young women passed me when I was out on the street. They’d been talking, laughing. I kept my head low but felt my breath catch as I went by. One of them had looked familiar. Untameable, curled hair and big, thinker’s eyes which I felt pass over my face. I thought I’d seen her expression change.

  I kept on walking.

  Oliver Cartwright and Guy Russell were each handed life sentences for attempting to smuggle drugs into the United Arab Emirates. As far as I knew, they were still waiting to hear if they could appeal. Russell’s daughter, Alicia, took ownership of Incognito. She relaunched the club as Ru
ssell’s, shaking its existing clientele as she did so and forging her own path. When I returned to St Mary’s to speak to Amy Burroughs, I was told that she’d handed in her notice and left. Late one night I called her former lover, Ross Browne, to find out if he’d heard from her. When a familiar voice answered the phone I smiled to myself and hung up. I only saw Sophie and Earl again once more. They were walking through the city centre, talking, holding hands, smiling. They looked young again. Anthony Blick maintained that Freddie Coyle had died of natural causes right up until the day when remains were discovered, buried in the back garden of Blick’s former home. Coyle’s skull had been caved in. Natasha Reeve decided to take the Palace off the market, reopening it under a new name as the sole owner.

  And Nia gave birth to Zain Carver’s daughter.

  They named her Catherine. Nia couldn’t have known what that name meant, and even I wondered at Carver’s motive. Was it remorse or revenge? Or another long-game piece of manipulation? I wondered if he planned on replacing every girl who’d vanished from his life.

  I returned to the night shift with my superior officer, Detective Inspector Peter Sutcliffe. It was a few weeks later when I saw a request from Cumbrian police cross our desk. A dead man had been found in the cellar of a burned-out farmhouse. He’d been kneecapped by a high-calibre handgun and then left to burn alive. They were looking for any information that could help identify him but there wasn’t much to go on. I was reading the request when Sutty tore it out of my hand, balled it up and dropped it in the bin. He said he only wanted to investigate people with full names from now on. So Bateman became the stuff of legend. Joined those other enduring mysteries. The lady in the Afghan coat. The smiling man.

  The missing missing.

  When I got to the corner I stopped and looked back. The two young women I’d passed were standing beneath a streetlight, twenty feet away, and I could see them both perfectly. They’d also stopped, turned to look at me. My sister was frozen, pale, her mouth open, her eyes wide with recognition.

  She was unbelievable.