The Nightmare Place

by Mosby, Steve

  He looks down at the phone in his hands.

  The plastic feels polished and awkward, as though it might slip from his grasp like a smooth pebble. He purchased it, along with a pay-as-you-go SIM card, from a dirty newsagent’s just outside the city centre. It came pre-loaded with a thousand minutes. No need to enter credit card details or talk to a salesperson or set anything up. He doesn’t even need to know his own phone number. He paid for everything with cash.

  And now, his heart leaping, he turns the phone on and forces himself to calm down. One last check around, but there is nobody nearby. All anyone in the distance will see is a man talking on a mobile phone, having an emotional conversation. If they see anything at all.

  He takes out the flyer, unfolds it, and dials the number, then presses the phone to his ear as it rings.

  ‘Hello,’ a woman’s voice says. ‘This is Mayday. My name’s Jane. How can I help you today?’

  Twelve

  ‘He’s doing this on purpose,’ Chris said.

  ‘No, he isn’t.’

  Late morning, and we were waiting in the reception area at the city’s morgue and pathology department. We’d arrived on time for the appointment, but the pathologist, Sam Dale, had yet to appear. Under different circumstances, I might have agreed with Chris’s interpretation of the delay: I quite like Dale, but he can be a prickly little bastard. Today, however, I doubted it. The pathologist had fast-tracked the post-mortem on Sally Vickers, working on it through the early hours of the morning. If nothing else, he’d be eager to get home.

  While we waited, I walked over to the windows. The unit is situated on the eighth floor of the hospital, and one wall is comprised entirely of glass. Beyond the hazy width of the river, and the white eyelash curls of its folding currents, I could see the estates, the distant foundries and factories, even the beginnings of the countryside. The sun was invisible: just a brilliant white stain hanging over the city. The river below was still draped with the morning’s mist, but the light made it look more like steam.

  Jonathan Pearson.

  He was back at the department being interviewed right now, but really, that was a formality. I’d already established everything I needed to know at his house. Pearson had denied being questioned by the police near the nursery, and I believed him, because it hadn’t been him. It seemed fairly clear what had happened: our real man had given the officer a fake name. For his part, Pearson had no idea how the man could have got hold of his driver’s licence. He’d misplaced it a long time ago – last year sometime, he said – and ordered a new one. But he had no idea where or even when he’d lost the old one.

  The only positive thing to come out of the development was that we now had a reasonable description of our man’s face. Presumably he had picked Jonathan Pearson because there was a superficial resemblance between the two of them that would pass if he was confronted. But that was far from positive in reality, because beards could easily be shaved off. Long hair could be trimmed short.

  ‘Ah! Good evening, lady and gentleman.’

  I turned to see Dale poking his head out of a door to the side of reception. At first I thought he was implying that we were the ones who were late, but then I saw how tired he looked. In terms of hours spent upright, it was probably approaching midnight to him.

  ‘Join me.’

  Chris rolled his eyes at me, and we followed Dale along the corridors that led to the autopsy suite. I remembered the way, of course. We’d been here a few times, although it’s rare for either of us to attend a post-mortem, or – as now – turn up after one. In reality, there’s little point. You’ve seen the victim at the scene, and you’re not a medical expert, so it’s generally a more productive use of your time to wait for a report to land in your actions tray, while you get on with things you’re good at. Today, though, I had wanted to come.

  We stepped inside the suite. The lights were very bright, and the room had a sealed quality that made our footfalls clop and echo on the white floor tiles. On my first ever visit, it had actually reminded me of a large high-tech kitchen. Most of the surfaces are polished steel, all kept spotlessly clean, and there are sinks and cabinets along the walls, and islands lined up down the centre. One wall is all metal, covered with a grid of what look like oven doors. Except they’re not ovens, and, of course, the islands are dissection tables, with bodies lying under white sheets. The nasal sting of chemical detergent in the air doesn’t quite mask the smell of death. It’s a memorable combination of turned meat and old flowers.

  Dale beckoned us impatiently over to the island at the far end of the room. He’s a short man. Most of his head is bald – today reflecting the overhead lights – but there are neat dabs of brown hair at his temples. He also has ears that stick out almost perpendicular to his face. Chris once described him as looking like a monkey that had been shaved, and the image is appropriate enough. Dale has a wiry strength about him; you could easily imagine him hanging from things.

  ‘Here she is,’ he said, removing the sheet.

  And yes. There she was.

  I did my best to ignore the angry stitch marks left by the autopsy itself, and allowed my gaze to move over Sally Vickers’ remains: forcing myself to see her as an object now, a person-who-once-was. It felt like a kind of betrayal to do so, because that was precisely what the man who had killed her had done, but sometimes it’s necessary.

  Her skin was hideously pale. Leaning closer, I could see thin tendrils of blue and red spidering below the skin: an intricate mottling and marbling. She was naked. The blood had been sluiced away now, but, if anything, its presence at the house had helped occlude the injuries she’d suffered, damage that was plainly visible now. Stark and there. It was most obvious on her face, where both eyes were swollen shut, the openings just tiny slits barely a centimetre across. A jagged swathe of skin was entirely missing between her top lip and her nose, exposing the teeth and ridged pink gums. Her jaw was lopsided, disconnected from its hinge below her right ear. The ear itself looked to have been half torn off at the top.

  My gaze travelled down her body. The bruises and contusions were obvious, even though her heart stopping beating had halted their full bloom. They were still vivid: blue and green blossoms, a similar colour to the aquamarine clouds from my dream.

  Looking down at her, even Sam Dale seemed more subdued than usual.

  ‘Cause of death.’ He gestured with a gloved hand to the damaged ear: a delicate movement. ‘You can see the more obvious injuries for yourselves, but there’s a bad fracture around the hairline area here.’

  ‘A blow to the temple?’ Chris said.

  ‘Yes. Her skull has been badly fractured. It’s likely she lost consciousness immediately at that point. She would have died shortly afterwards.’

  ‘Would her killer have been aware of it?’ I said.

  ‘That she was dead? Oh yes. I would think so. It wasn’t necessarily deliberate, if that’s what you mean. He didn’t necessarily intend to kill her. We see these types of injuries quite often, as I’m sure you know.’

  I nodded. We did, albeit in different circumstances: drunk men locking antlers and getting into fights, not understanding that they don’t happen the way they do in the movies. In the real world, you hit someone, they fall over, catch their head badly on the pavement, and die. You didn’t mean to kill them, but you did.

  ‘Of course, there’s no doubt he meant to strike her,’ Dale said. ‘And repeatedly. But I don’t know if you could say he was intending to kill her. He used his fists, for one thing. But obviously it’s not for me to say. Anyway. Let’s do the tour.’

  Dale talked us through his interpretation of what had happened, referencing the injuries, the likely causes of them, what had been done to Sally Vickers. The results of an autopsy are always reminiscent of a story being told. As police, you arrive at The End, and you don’t know for sure what transpired before that. The post-mortem helps to fill in those blanks with some degree of certainty. It gives you snatches of inf
ormation – words here; whole sentences there – and if you’re lucky, there’s enough there for you to construct some kind of narrative, one that’s at least close to what actually occurred.

  So as Dale spoke, images and impressions formed in my head, whether I wanted them to or not. I pictured the attacker striking at Sally Vickers’ head and face and chest with blind ferocity. Hating her. Taking pleasure in hurting her. That was what all the living victims had reported: the strength, the aggression, the violence. Something that was more like a monster than an ordinary man. I saw him as a vast shape, punching her as hard as he could, putting his body weight into it; striking her the way a man would hit another man. Then crouching over her: watching her. Listening, perhaps, for breaths that gradually stopped coming.

  And what had he done next? Stuffed her down the side of the bed. Had it been a gesture of contempt, or had the act of pushing her body into the gap been a reaction to what he’d done? Not panic, as such, but because he realised he’d murdered her, and this was a subconscious attempt to hide her, even though he must have known how pointless that was.

  It was possible, but the image that kept flitting into my head was from Poe’s story about the murders in the Rue Morgue. The orang-utan, monstrously strong, stuffing its victim up the chimney.

  ‘The rape was pre-mortem?’ Chris said.

  Dale nodded. ‘As far as we can tell. And it was with the other victims, wasn’t it? They didn’t die, of course. But the rape preceded the assault.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  In fact, while the ferocity had increased, the attacks had all followed a predictable pattern. The women were invariably slight, and the size and manner of the offender were exceedingly intimidating. He hadn’t required anything in the way of overt physical violence to subdue them before raping them. They had been so terrified at finding this man in their bedroom in the middle of the night, and so frightened by the sheer aggression of him, that they had done exactly what they were told.

  The violence had happened afterwards. He didn’t need to hurt the women in order to rape them, but he did.

  As Dale and Chris continued to talk, I tuned them out and stared down at Sally Vickers’ remains. Looking her over. Seeing her. I wanted to store the image of her away. Even though her body looked so alien now, and whatever she had been in life was long gone, I also wanted to believe it was possible she might know that someone cared. That this escalation would be where it stopped. That we were going to get him.

  Amongst the thousand blank pages that would never be filled was what was going through her head as she was attacked and as she died. In one sense, that wasn’t important to the investigation. In another, more nebulous one, it was the whole point of it. And so I chose to fill it in now, just for myself. I chose to imagine that, while she was still able, Sally Vickers had heard an inexplicable voice sending an impossible message to her. My voice, right now; the message not spoken out loud but thought at her with all the intensity I could gather.

  We are going to get him for what he’s done to you.

  Thirteen

  When the call was over, Jane sat very still for a few moments, unsure what to think or feel. She was blank. Stunned into silence. Every call involved leaving herself behind slightly, but she always came back again straight afterwards. This was different. It felt like she’d astral-projected out of her body, and someone had cut the cord so she couldn’t find her way back.

  After a while, she glanced at the clock on the desk. The man had been on the line for nearly half an hour. She had listened to everything he’d told her, interjecting when necessary, but the whole time that blankness had been creeping into her, alongside the horror of what he was saying.

  She realised she was shivering, and that brought her back to her senses. Was it possible to suffer shock as a result of hearing something? Perhaps it was.

  She turned her head slowly, and looked across the room towards the other desk. Rachel was listening to someone on her own phone. She caught Jane gazing over and mimed a yawn, then made a yadda-yadda gesture with her hand. Jane continued simply to stare. Rachel frowned, then mouthed: are you all right?

  Jane shook her head, more to clear her mind than in reply, then looked away, back to her desk.

  You need to talk to Richard.

  Her first coherent thought since the call had ended.

  Yes. That was exactly what she needed to do.

  But there was something else first, and once the thought tumbled into her head, it became pressing, then urgent. She searched the desk for a piece of paper and a pen. There weren’t any, of course – why would there be? But then she remembered she’d brought some translation work with her, in case calls were sparse, so she reached down to her bag, unzipping it and rifling through.

  Come on, come on …

  The calls weren’t recorded. Unless she could note down everything the man had told her, the conversation might as well never have happened at all. And she needed to do it quickly, before she forgot anything: before something important got lost.

  She pulled her translation pad out, but it was harder to find the pen – an agonising few seconds. Just as she got the pad open to a fresh page, the phone in front of her started ringing. She stared at the flashing red light on the set, almost not recognising what it meant.

  Ignore it.

  She began to write as fast as she could. The whole time, out of the corner of her eye, she could feel Rachel looking over at her, struggling to keep track of her own conversation.

  Remember.

  She had to get down every detail she could, but it was difficult: languages aside, her memory had always been a little fuzzy. She did her best, not starting from the beginning of the conversation, but writing down the things that had had the most impact on her, then using them as poles to build outwards from: what had led to them; what had come after. It took a couple of minutes to scrawl out the general content of what the man had told her. By the end, looking down at the sheet, she thought she’d captured most of it.

  The words, anyway.

  But then nothing was going to capture the crawling sensation on her skin as she’d listened to the man – the sense of horror not just from what he was telling her, but from the tone of his voice as he did so. It would have been easier if he’d been gloating; she might then have mistaken it for a particularly grim sex call, and ended it with her usual breezy send-off. But the man had sounded so disgusted with himself as he told her what he’d done. Right until the end of the call, at least. At that point, he’d sounded almost peaceful. Just before hanging up, he’d actually thanked her. It was as though the awfulness of what he was describing somehow had been in the words, and by speaking them down the phone line to her he’d let it go. Passed it on to her instead.

  Reading through the sheet again now only raised ghosts of those feelings, but the details themselves still seemed dangerous. On the surface, they were like something from the crime novels she occasionally translated, but there was an authenticity that was lacking from the pieces she worked on. Because she had believed the man. And she still did. These weren’t inventions. These things had really happened.

  The crimes on the news.

  ‘Jane?’

  Rachel had finished her call. She pulled off her headset and stood up, obviously concerned and about to come over.

  Jane closed the pad before she could see it.

  Afterwards, she would wonder about that: whether she had been shielding Rachel from what had been written there, or if she was protecting the details themselves. Strangely, it felt more like the latter: as though the man’s story was something important that had been passed to her, like a treasure map, and it belonged to her now and had to be kept safe.

  She pulled off her own headset and stood up.

  ‘I’m okay.’

  ‘You’re not.’

  ‘No, I’m not. I need to speak to Richard.’

  She was cradling the pad to her chest, she realised. As she left the room, she was almost
huddled over it.

  When she knocked and walked into his office, Richard was playing Tetris on the computer. He made a token effort to turn the screen away, but it was old and stiff, so he gave up and shrugged apologetically.

  ‘Gets boring in here sometimes.’

  Jane didn’t reply – just closed the door behind her and took a seat across from him without waiting for an invitation. She put the pad down on the desk in front of her and patted it repeatedly.

  Richard frowned. ‘What’s wrong, Jane?’

  ‘I had a call. A bad one.’

  ‘Oh.’ He leaned forward slowly, resting his forearms on the desk. ‘A SIP?’

  She shook her head. ‘Worse.’

  Much worse.

  She opened the pad and read out the details the man had given over the phone. As he listened, Richard began to look increasingly uneasy. At a couple of points he pulled a face and muttered Christ under his breath. Jane nodded in agreement as she carried on. It felt wrong – surreal – to hear such ugly words and sentiments coming out of her own mouth. Oddly, it also made it all seem more distant. The man had told her the story, and she had written it down, and now she was telling it again. Just words. But behind them there were real women who had been attacked and badly hurt.

  She did her best to speak slowly and carefully, but by the end of the report, she was rushing it. She finished almost out of breath, her heart thudding.

  Richard was silent for a moment. Still. Like she had been.

  Then he came to life again.

  ‘Jesus. That’s horrible. I’m so sorry you’ve had to deal with that, Jane. That’s really very bad indeed.’ He shook his head. ‘How are you feeling?’

  ‘I’m pretty shaken.’

  ‘That’s understandable. Do you want to take the rest of your shift off? I can cover if needs be.’

  The words struck a slight alarm bell in her head. But she didn’t yet understand why.

  ‘Well, no. I mean, I suppose it depends …’ She trailed off.