Bright Spark

by Gavin Smith

  “It’s Murphy. No positive ID but he looks like his prison photo. SOCO still there. Scene sealed off. Lots of miserable motorists being turned around. Pig of a scene to get to. Might end up closing the bypass for the undertakers. Pathologist en route.”

  “And the new prisoner? The bridge man?”

  “He wants to be locked up and we need to keep him just in case. His account is mostly cobblers. In my amateur opinion, there was nothing to suggest anyone had drilled high velocity rounds through Dale. We can however be certain that he dropped unexpectedly into Mickey’s world from enough of a height to do something unpleasant to his upper body. As to whether he fell or was pushed……”

  “This Mickey,” asked Brennan. “Think you let anything slip? Gave him ideas? Fuelled his imagination?”

  “Not impossible,” volunteered Slowey, sensing Harkness’s reticence. “We made an….erm….comfort break when we were called out last night. Happened to see Mickey snoozing in the bus shelter nearest the bridge. He may have overheard us discussing the call-out, but we didn’t know much ourselves at the time.”

  “Still on Dale,” interrupted Harkness. “No obvious smell of petrol or smoke, but he had what could have been interior window keys on his chain. Odd. Very odd. Could mean nothing. Could mean something very nasty. Asked SOCO to compare them with 13 Marne Close.”

  “Ok, brilliant.” Newbould’s pen squeaked a frantic pace across the whiteboard. “While we’re on the subject of dead Murphys, what can Ron tell us?”

  “Positive ID on the wife and kiddies from the in-laws. Her parents are cruising in the Med. Still working on that. As for his parents, brought them in from Nottingham and installed them in a travel tavern on Newark Road. They don’t know about their son yet but it won’t be long before the press get a whiff of the new body.”

  “Good call, Ron. You’re the man to break the news. Again.”

  “Walked into that one, didn’t I?”

  “What do you make of his parents?” asked Brennan.

  “Middle-class from so-so suburb. Father a skinny type, accountant or something. Mother a pudding who thinks Dale is some sort of saint. She’d commute here every day to wipe his arse if he asked. Thought he could have done better than Suzanne. Didn’t come right out with it but blamed her for everything from not seeing the grandkids to the price of diesel. Both in bits about the kiddies though. Took some doing to stop them holding a candlelit vigil at the house.”

  “Looks like their day could still get worse. Ok. What’s next? Interviewing the prime and now only suspect. Who wants that?”

  Biddle and Harkness exchanged glances, both stony-faced and communicating nothing.

  “Lawyered up…”

  “No commented…..”

  “Saying nowt…..”

  “Not an ideal arrest………”

  “Timing an issue…..”

  “All got a bit too aggressive….”

  “Quiet,” shouted Brennan, banging his empty mug on the desk like a gavel. “I will have order here, you pair of chimps. Ray, summarise please. Looks like there’s next to cock all to say anyway.”

  Harkness recounted Firth’s chaotic arrest, the search of his flat with its tantalising but equivocal seizures, his contretemps with Snelling over ethics and Firth’s utterly absent response in interview. He omitted the Braxton connection for now – he wanted complete discretion in handling what could either be too trivial to mention or so crucial he should have pounced on it much earlier. Biddle felt compelled to detail the stable fracture of Firth’s right tibia and the heavy pain-killers the duty doctor had prescribed him.

  “Next is forensics and HOLMES stuff.” Newbould unzipped his document case and handed out a glossy, full-colour schematic of the enquiry office’s progress so far.

  “The key to the diagrams is on pages seven through ten. Crime scene samples and prints are off to the lab tomorrow. And before you ask, I’m including samples from Firth’s flat and the man himself. No footprints at Marne Close.

  “Gravel doesn’t hold them. House to house still being input but nothing sticks out. One or two people not in but teams are going back tomorrow. Post mortem report also due in tomorrow; the first one anyway. Hopefully we can get a bulk discount from the lab.”

  “Rob,” said Brennan, cutting Newbould off. “I’ve seen the letters from Firth’s flat. I’m assuming you’ve been to see Sharon Jennings. Did you get anything and what kind of complaint will I get this time? Bullying, groping or assault?”

  “I got a full and frank denial that the sensitive, misunderstood Nigel had anything to do with any of this. But she’s nervous about something, so I’ll keep pushing. You never know. I need to statement her family which is a happy coincidence.”

  “Ken,” said Newbould, handing another form to Slowey. “Need you to fill this ‘injury on duty’ form in when you’ve got a minute. Not desperate. First thing will do.”

  “I’m fine, thanks,” grumbled Slowey. “Want to know about the pub?”

  “Which pub?”

  Slowey crossed one knee over another, opened his notebook, smoothed down the pages, licked his index finger and recounted both of his visits to the Friars Vaults, sparing no detail of how he came by his bruises but speaking so impassively that he could have been reading the back of a parking ticket.

  “So,” he concluded, “Firth was in the pub. We know that. Nobody saw exactly what either Firth or Murphy did when they left. And as for the little fracas, well I don’t think I earned my bumps just for a couple of hundred quid’s worth of fags.

  “Here’s the thing: Why wear balaclavas and nick the CCTV system? We do have some fuckwits in that neck of the woods, but footage of our incident being nicked from there at that time…..well, it just can’t be random.”

  “Two men attacked Ken – at least he saw two,” said Harkness. “Wasn’t Murphy – he was cold by then, or maybe crippled and on his way out. Firth? Obvious, but who’d stick their neck out for him? And of all the things he did that night, is showing his face in a pub the one he’d worry about? Enough to find the kind of friend he’s never had and stage a burglary?”

  “That’ll do. You three piss off home. Sleep. Eat. Wash up. Back here by seven. Oh, and Rob.”

  “Boss?”

  “Your own car. Sober. No new injuries. To you or anyone you happen not to like. The last bit goes for you as well, Mr Slowey. Especially you; you’re the grown up.”

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Every day and every night, in every gaol, prison and institute, one or two could be guaranteed to boil over with the precise and mysterious rhythm of geysers. The last trickles of noise would seep into the linoleum, concrete and steel then the silence would sag, ready for the next outburst. It always came, when the tears boiled away, when the knuckles stopped throbbing, when memory lost its battle with the rage at being trapped in this place, this body, this time. Like super-heated water that hissed and slithered and pounded and bulged its path through a thousand fractures in rock and mud to spume into empty air; more metronomic than climactic.

  Sometimes it was booze, that laxative of the emotions, the powerhouse of pent-up, punching passion. Sometimes it was cocaine and amphetamines, the dynamos of the dissolute and distracted. Sometimes it was the gasp of grievance that the world could have got it so wrong, so often; no fine, moral debate this, just the rage of the caged and uncurbed.

  There was always at least one. If there were more, then the angriest would set the others off, a rabid wolf on an enclosed plain. Tonight, Firth knew which one it would be and he wasn’t disappointed. Lying naked beneath blank, breathing walls, skin slick on rough vinyl that had been sloughed and sweated on by a thousand others like him, he did not rage, not even inwardly in the space that was only his.

  They didn’t know. Didn’t, couldn’t understand. These cells were no more their cages than their own bodies. Both just crude matter, miniscule particles suspended in space by exotic energies, walls and bones just emptiness and remembered connect
ions creating the illusion of substance.

  The books had made it all so clear; how much mattered and how little. He was just borrowed energy. So were the ashen dead. Rendering it all back to the cosmos would simplify and cleanse. Matter didn’t, couldn’t matter. All of it, the ugly and the sexy and the happy and the sad, was just energy trapped but certain to be freed very soon to rejoice in the freedom of chaos.

  “Grruarghhhhh…” Kevin Braxton’s opening note penetrated the steel and concrete, bringing a smile to Firth’s lips.

  “Fuggin fuggin cahnt you cahnting fuggin faaaaackers…”

  From panting bass notes to spitting shrillness in one breath, like cattle queuing for the shambles and finally understanding the odour of blood, the shuffling anxiety of the others and the metallic crump drawing closer now. He smiled. Kevin Braxton was a drama queen behind it all. It was creamily delicious to hear him suffer, even for no good reason; all the sweeter to glimpse the fear behind the rage.

  Bone slammed against steel and steel jarred against concrete and the door hatch grated in its mounting as Kevin Braxton began punching his cell door. At least Firth assumed he was using his fists. With luck, Braxton was beating his own brains to paste, assuming that hadn’t already happened at someone else’s hands.

  Demonstrative: That was Braxton. A good word for him. All piss and wind; all fists and filth. So different, he and I, thought Firth. During his silent week in the witness box at Crown two years earlier, Firth’s barrister had repeatedly described him as undemonstrative. He may have meant the jury to read this as quiet, modest and misunderstood, testament to the stoicism of the downtrodden. Such qualities were after all consistent with the poor traumatised man held here at the jury’s mercy because of one desperate, thoughtless act which had stunned him into silent remorse; an act without calculation or murderous intent; an act without precedent and never to be repeated. Or some bullshit of that calibre.

  The barrister had also used the word as a sly indictment of his taciturn client. Firth’s silences had always been selective. Thinking was always better than speaking. Speaking infrequently made people listen when you actually did speak. Letting people think you were slow-witted or damaged then confounding them with a modicum of insight made it hard for them to write you off or put you down or peg you into a category.

  Life had stunned him into silence many times over: His wretched mother excusing herself from parental duties by roasting herself in an alcohol-fuelled fire. Then a succession of children’s homes and foster parents educating him properly: Being quiet earned you a beating; reading earned you a beating; being different earned you a beating. Playing by the rules; joining in with the games; stealing; beating on others; getting nicked - that all meant surrendering part of yourself, the part you needed to protect with silence.

  Better to lurk and watch and read and read until your eyes couldn’t focus any more; glad that at least he’d been taught to read before he fell through the trapdoor. Better to tolerate the price of protection; the middle-aged, pitiful youth worker with his pendulous belly and pubic hair like silver wire wool. He’d known the value of silence and Firth got all the books and cash and protection he needed in exchange for the furtive, gasping degradations of a body for which he cared little anyway and which would in time be purged in flame like all corrupt flesh.

  With half his mind on the prison counselling he’d received later, he’d toyed with calling himself a victim of systematic abuse at the moist hands of this man with his squirming desires; but that would have been to confuse cause and effect. His education had worked by the only yardstick that mattered; turning him from victim to victimiser.

  Two years ago, his solicitor and his barrister and the dewy-eyed jury had chosen to believe that he couldn’t really have intended to immolate Daphne and the boy she’d chosen to fuck with sweaty, bellowing abandon on the other side of a plasterboard wall from Firth. It was felt by those twelve good men and true that sexual jealousy fuelled by drugs and booze could not have allowed him to form a clear intention to kill, and that his actions should be seen as reckless rather than murderous.

  While their hand-wringing equivocation had yielded Firth a far shorter stretch inside than he might have received had they seen into his heart, he still despised their naivety. Yet in his more forgiving moments, he envied them their chin-stroking self-indulgence; after all, how easy and insulated must their lives be for the desire to channel rage and hurt into carnage to be so alien?

  Daphne had seemed so different. In the DIY store where they’d shared shelf-stacking duties, he’d found welcome anonymity. She’d seemed to see his watchful silences as self-possession, his intensity as desire. They flirted, in as much as she told him smutty jokes and he smiled and didn’t bolt. They exchanged cigarettes in the loading bay and weed in the stock room. He carefully overheard the canteen gossips depicting Daphne as a flake, a wanton, a druggie, the store bike. He was encouraged; everyone needed chemical assistance to get through the day, and he wanted sex on the simplest terms, without coercion, without lies and without having to negotiate complex needs and niceties.

  He had drafted his proposal with the care of a solicitor preparing an appeal, learned his words then went to work with the speech folded carefully in his back pocket as a talisman and failsafe. A shared spliff of unusually expensive quality made her giggly and tactile and guaranteed privacy. A second made her quiet enough to listen while he eulogised the special connection they shared and the spark that made her so different to the others, so much more alive and aware. He really needed – not wanted, needed – to get to know her better. Such a rare connection in the infinite chaos could not be wasted. Her eyes shone as she drew on the spliff and exhaled into a smile whose gentle bow would open for him and his desires without question.

  She’d invited him to her flat on the fifth-floor of a ten-story block. He’d walked there buoyed by the promise of riotous and unexpected good luck and tingling with ardour. When the door had been answered by the pretty boy with the bunched muscles and the army tattoos, stripped to the waist and leering, something cracked inside him, rage breaking free, looking for a target and prepared to start with his own stupidity.

  He’d been introduced to the half-dozen characters there as the ‘grass man’, some latter-day hippy with a good line in weed and ‘all this astrology bullshit’. As per his training, he watched, listened, spoke rarely, accepted whatever money was proffered for the last of his weed, sank can after can of strong lager that tasted like piss and rust, and sank through the carpet into vaults of misery.

  Had she known his mind all along and played with him? When had she worked it out? It didn’t matter. She’d petted with pretty boy in front of him, grabbing his hair, thrusting her tongue into his mouth and grinding her pelvis against his. He didn’t know how long it had lasted. It went dark. People left. The music grew louder, the bass thumping jackhammers of pain into his skull. Cans proliferated on the floor at his feet. She’d had plenty of time to show him mercy. To apologise, put him in a taxi; even a shared joke about the floor supervisor would have soothed him. He hadn’t wanted sex any more, just something to staunch the wound.

  But they’d performed for him instead, ostensibly ignoring him, letting him sleep it off on the sofa, while they took their game into the bedroom next door, with a parting wink from pretty boy. He’d made himself listen to every gasp, groan and creak, every piercing rasp of ecstasy, through the hateful wall that had seemed to amplify rather than stifle the humiliation. They couldn’t know he’d grown from victim to victimiser; now he knew his own kind, knew what they deserved.

  Vodka flared very nicely, as did many kitchen products found beneath the average sink. After soaking the curtains and the ancient sofa, he’d set his lighter to them and allowed himself an orgasmic sigh of his own as the radiant heat leapt into being; an avatar of pure will. Pausing only to topple a bookcase and drag it across the bedroom door with an unexpected strength, he’d left the flat and walked calmly away into a night e
nlivened by the crackling of flames and the sing-song bustling of sirens.

  They had of course lived. Pretty boy had been strong and resourceful and had forced a safe passage from the flat. The fire brigade had enjoyed practising with its turntable ladders and high-pressure jets. A dozen or more neighbouring residents had been hospitalised briefly with smoke inhalation. The local authority repair bill had been considerable. Two goldfish and a hamster had died and a cat was missing presumed dead for the ninth and final time.

  Of course nobody had died, Firth’s barrister had pointed out. The situation was eminently escapable, born not of a cold desire to kill, but of unthinking and passionate outrage. After all, who in their right mind could want to see someone burned alive just because they’d chosen someone other than them for their dalliance? Firth was, according to the psychiatrist’s report, demonstrably sane and had by his own admission sought only to frighten the other occupants of the flat.

  Firth had mustered his own mute summing-up, weary of the prating hypocrisy he’d had to rely upon. Nobody knew better than Firth how absurd and meaningless sex acts were, had to be, if you wanted to keep your mind intact and your mind your own; but there were still rules. Daphne had chosen to impale herself on the cock of some pretty boy she barely knew and wallow in Firth’s shame. All Firth had wanted was to feel her envelop him in an intimacy they’d both chosen, to convince him that sex wasn’t just blanked out shame and jettisoned fluids and pacification. Her betrayal had to be cause enough for a cleansing. She had her weapons and he had his.

  It had certainly been cause enough for the old electricity to spark behind his eyes and across his spine, to make his fingers clench and unclench and his balls shrivel, at the image of flames like bounding, snapping wolves, starving and savage, circling then closing to tear skin from muscle and muscle from bone, to howl with joy at the purging, deserving pain of their feasting.

  Had he been a sentimental man, he might have conceded that Daphne had hurt him profoundly. He’d been sodomised on a routine basis in care, but that was impersonal and he’d made an accommodation of sorts. He’d been mocked, harassed and eventually brutalised by Murphy in clink; while that was deserving of retribution and might yield some useful compensation, it was still largely a matter of two damaged men playing out their given roles. Daphne’s hurt had been of a different order.