Head Case

by Ross Armstrong

  I grunt-scoff in return.

  It’s unlikely that he could come up with anything I haven’t already, so it’s probably just a bargaining chip to find out what else I’ve got up my utility jacket.

  ‘Sure. By the way, did you notice those blue markings outside on the curb, Emre? Blue circle? Two diagonal lines?’ I say.

  ‘Err, maybe. Always assumed they were to do with gas pipes.’

  ‘Yeah, that’s what I thought you’d say,’ I say. Because that’s what I thought he’d say. And I stay quiet about my assumption until I’ve got a compelling picture of exactly how wrong he is on that.

  Speak of the devil; not long after we utter his name, he appears before us. We don’t usually come so near to Turan’s beat but Levine had radioed us to make a request as we left the Da Silva house. There had been some petty vandalism on Green Lanes, which everyone else was too busy or important to take a look at. As we had reached the phone box and stared at the last bits of jagged glass that clung to it, Bartu had decided it was time for some fried chicken.

  We had a thought that maybe we weren’t supposed to approach him when in the field. When I hear the name Turan I always get images of this slick, cocktail stick in mouth, leather jacketed man moving silently through crowds like a shark navigating bare ankles close to the bay. But for whatever reason, he seems never to have pursued the role of detective and the mufti that goes with it. As he waited for his chicken dinner at Perfect Chicken, in his white shirt and black tie, clip-on for easy removal, it seemed safe to assume anyone watching was well aware of the role for which he was being remunerated.

  After we’d spotted him it would’ve been almost impossible not to say hi. It’s a bit like going to a costume party dressed as a bear and seeing another guy there also dressed as a bear. Sooner or later you’re going to have to at least give him a nod, and the longer you wait to do it, the weirder it gets. So with immediate thought of getting on the front foot, I chime in as soon as I open the clammy chicken shop door.

  ‘Hey, how you doing?’

  The look I get back tells me everything isn’t quite right. No recognition drifts across his face, only a flick of his eyes to our uniform. It’s only when Bartu taps me on the shoulder that I realise Turan is at the other end of the counter and the man who I’ve tapped on the back is merely some other tanned man in an unpressed shirt. Bartu gently places a hand on my back and turns me towards Turan who looks up from the other end of the counter and gives us a look that could never be described as respectful. I turn back to the man that doesn’t own an iron as Turan’s food arrives and Bartu goes to sit down.

  ‘Sorry mate. Just checking in.’

  The thick smell of batter and oil fills my senses and makes everything cider coloured. I feel the texture of gravel against my skin and the gentle of hum of an A flat. It overpowers, the room taking on a murky quality, like it’s covered in dark orange smoke, but I try to push it away as I head over to my new friends.

  At the ripped red leather booth, Bartu and Turan are already into smoother conversation than I was expecting, probably largely due to my late entry into the fray.

  ‘So what you doing this end?’ Turan says, chicken bones between his fingers.

  ‘Kids smashing shit up again, we were sent down to check it out. Your PCSO is on other duty, and it’s not in your job description, I reckon,’ says Bartu.

  ‘Ha, yeah, could say that. These kids around here, I gotta tell ya, they’re a different breed. It’s not like nicking a bag of sweets or even sawing the lock off a bike with a hacksaw from DT. That’s nineties stuff. That stuff… you could understand it. They wanted something, they didn’t have the money, they nicked it. I get it. It’s raw economics.’

  ‘Different now round here, uh?’ Bartu says.

  His voice changes, lowering a semitone. They both seem to have dropped into a new groove I feel excluded from. I’m a local boy, but I’m not from right here, not exactly. Travel a mile down the road in any London borough and you’ll find a different culture, not just in terms of race. They speak in inferences and with an easy cool that’s lost on me and that I’d be foolish to try and replicate.

  ‘These fucking kids, destruction for its own sake. It’s next level,’ Turan says.

  ‘I’m sure you’re right. We just collect the information and hand it on, mate. Ours is not to reason why,’ says Bartu.

  ‘That’s right. It’s not. You stick to your fucking remit, boys.’

  He nods as he chews, agreeing with himself as he brings a fistful of serviettes to meet his mouth, before breaking into a smile to show he’s not entirely serious.

  ‘Whatever you say, Inspector,’ Bartu says, giving him a mock salute. Turan’s smile disappears as his teeth plunge into more chicken. Then he smirks again, keeping the mood as light as he can in the silences between the words, while revelling in his implied authority.

  Then his head turns towards a man who has just entered wearing a bomber jacket, shades and a baseball cap. He’s not over-layered for the time of year but it’s getting later on one of those murky days when the sun has hardly risen, so the sunglasses seem a bit droll.

  The cider colour fades as another scent enters the mix. But the smell of oil fights back and covers it over, the orange mist thickening over whatever this man has brought with him.

  He has a bolt-upright posture like he’s a straight, clean line, but when he sees Turan looking up at him he instantly turns away and his shoulders drop a touch, I notice. Then he takes in the faded pictures of chicken behind the counter with an excessive level of interest.

  ‘All right, fella?’ Turan says.

  The man turns and gives him a stiff nod, when a ‘Hi there’ might’ve been warmer.

  Turan frowns in our direction, hinting that either he isn’t keen on this stranger’s etiquette, or conversely that this is a man he knows, and he isn’t taking too kindly to being snubbed by.

  The door slams, the man has left without ordering. As Bartu’s chicken strips arrive, I see Turan’s look linger almost imperceptibly longer than is necessary, as he goes, suggesting he’s keeping him under close watch, another tiny moment you might miss if you weren’t as keen on the little things as I.

  He’s plugged into the community all right, he seems to know all the local characters.

  ‘Anyway, you don’t need to worry. You’ll be running this place in no time. Keep your head down here, get bust up to constable, then on and on in a place like this. They need guys like you, no doubt. Know what I mean?’ Turan says, glancing at both of us.

  I know what he means. A local Turk and a man of questionable mental ability. We’re good for the statistics. Hell, we’d even look good on a poster together advertising diversity, doing some sort of high five to show how ‘down’ we are with our differences. We both know our USPs and we’ll stay in control of them, thanks. He doesn’t need to say it.

  ‘Okay, boys, that’s me done, better get out of here,’Turan says.

  He wipes his mouth and stands and so do we.

  We turn left, back towards the phone box and shattered glass. As Turan crosses the road. The same direction the man in the baseball cap was headed, I notice.

  *

  We get a call about something that’s been found in Tottenham Cemetery. A man apparently stumbled across it while walking his dog. That’s why I’m jogging my version of a jog.

  Despite the fact I don’t like to have work dictated to me these days, and today has already seen us suffer one unwanted detail, we have a feeling this might be important. And Bartu was not unreasonable in stating that if we were going to go, we should get there before anyone else does.

  The dog, named Treacle, was apparently being characteristically wayward and bounded deep into some nettles, not far from the cemetery’s mini-waterfall. Ordinarily we’d be having a chat about keeping canines firmly on leads when in the graveyard. Out of respect for the dead and all. But this time Treacle stumbled on something that looked from a distance like a large dead
animal. His owner pulled him away and called us instantly, not wanting to brave the nettles or the possible gore himself.

  ‘Give me a… I can’t… catch my catch…’ I say, my aphasia dropping half the words I’m looking for in any given sentence as we run.

  ‘No. No! We always go at your speed. If we keep being pushed away from everything we won’t have anything to work with.’

  ‘… Agreed,’ I say, as we reach the entrance and break into a more respectful walk. I know this place pretty well. But I haven’t been in a long time. Not since well before the incident.

  ‘And you’re going to stop holding out on me,’ he says, as we walk past assorted grave stones of concrete, sandstone and granite, some better kept than others, and I struggle to catch my breath.

  ‘Okay. Tell me your thing first,’ I say.

  ‘No, yours first!’ he shouts, disturbing the peace and a line of rooks on top of a family tomb that’s evidently seen more moss than upkeep of late. I’m not going to disagree with him in this mood. He’s newly charged with a determination, injected by the possibilities of what we’re about to see.

  ‘I know you see more than you tell me. No more secrets. Give me everything as you see it, now!’

  I was going to say ‘not here’. But as we head towards the slightly more unkempt end of this burial ground, it seems as appropriate a place as any.

  ‘Three girls. Our man was seeing them all,’ I say, my voice rasping as my breath crawls back to normality. ‘Showing them they were all special in a way they’d never had before. A fifteen-year-old, a sixteen-year-old, a seventeen-year-old. He’s methodical, he likes the game of it, but he also can’t help his little patterns. Since the injury, his brain just works like that. He gives them tiny keepsakes. He knows he can’t get into their houses, but he can put a piece of himself in there. That’s part of the game.’

  I feel a sickness somewhere in the back of my head. I’ve put this all together internally. Speaking it out loud hits me in the gut and spreads out to every other part from there. I wipe the sweat from my brow as we see our dog walker, pointing fearfully into the weeds and overgrowth.

  ‘He gains their trust, gives them things their parents wouldn’t, like a puppy or a fireworks party, so they gradually learn to put him first. He knows he wants all of them, wherever he has them, at once. He wants them to go missing day by day, that’s part of the game, the pattern. And he wants people to see that he’s left next to nothing behind. Just a few photos that are nothing but a boast.’

  We wave back to the dog walker as we approach. Treacle straining to get at whatever he sees, breaking up the otherwise restful place with his stark, wild barks.

  ‘So they exchange gifts and gestures. These men tend to like trophies. They’d even trade something as substantial as the puppy in the car for a piece of clothing,’ Emre says.

  ‘Exactly, it served its purpose as soon as it allowed him access to her car,’ I say, whispering to almost inaudibility as we nod to the man and survey the scene from his vantage point.

  ‘Hello, mate. Have you got any closer than this at any point?’ Bartu says, as I approach the edge of the heavy morass of untended green.

  ‘No bloody way,’ he says, somewhere behind me.

  ‘What did you think it was when you first saw it?’ Bartu says.

  ‘Pff. A big dog? All cut open. But there was no hair. So then I thought, maybe a pig?’

  I stand on tip toes and see the size of it, laid bare. The surface layer of blood on top, and the flesh below.

  ‘What about a teenage girl?’ I say.

  ‘Oh God. I…’ he says. ‘No, God, I didn’t think that.’

  Bartu says nothing. I kick down the nettles, getting closer. My hands getting stung as I stamp through the stingers and thistles. Then I see it, lying there in front of me. A long, messy lump.

  ‘It’s not,’ I call back. ‘It’s not a girl.’

  There aren’t any bite marks on it. If he got close, then Treacle was kind. It stares up at me. Dumped. Abstract.

  ‘It’s not big enough,’ I say, failing to hide the darkness in my tone.

  ‘Then what the hell is it?’ The man says, as Bartu wades in to join me.

  ‘It’s part of one,’ I say.

  ‘Oh no. Oh fuck,’ Bartu says as soon as he sees it. Detached from its owner. Lying there. Its top part broken open to the bone.

  Chh… ‘Jarwar…we’re first on the scene at the cemetery. I think you’d better come and look at this. Over.’

  Chh… ‘Tom. I’m already on my way. What is it? Over.’

  Bartu has distanced himself from it as I analyse exactly where it has been cut. That’s the part of the picture that stands out to me above anything else.

  Chh… ‘It’s a …it’s a girl’s leg…it’s still in its sock… Over.’

  Chh… ‘Okay, Tom. Err… Okay. I’m coming. Over.’

  The man has staggered away next to a tree, stroking his dog, who now appears to be whimpering, high and pained.

  ‘It was sawn through, at the very top,’ I tell Bartu. ‘I can see the femoral artery.’ If it comes out a little cold, it’s because I’m in a partial trance. He shakes his head, then punches his thigh a few times in anger.

  ‘How does this fit with anything?’ he says.

  ‘Oh. I don’t know,’ I say, my hand over my mouth.

  ‘Do you think a kid like Asif is capable of something like this?’

  ‘I can’t count him out. He’s old enough to drive. He could’ve made the girls keep a secret. Secrets are sexy in an age when everyone’s constantly sharing their souls with each other from behind a screen. What’s left of their souls, anyhow.’

  He wipes his face. Our breath is high in our chests now and the emotion touches us. That was somebody’s child once. Another layer of all of this has been stripped, and beneath it the puzzle drops away, and only the horror of flesh and bone lies in front of us.

  I don’t know whether to get angry, or be sick, or cry hot tears. Neither does Bartu, but he’s keen enough to take the reins.

  ‘Stay there please, sir. An officer will be with you very shortly,’ he says as he walks and I follow. Jarwar will be here any second and we’d both rather avoid that tête-à-tête again. It would be more of a tête-à-tête-à-tête-à-jambe to be exact. A head to head, plus another head, and a leg. My mind plays games to stave off the darkness.

  ‘Where are we going now?’ I say.

  ‘We’re going for a drive,’ he says, taking out his keys.

  ‘And why’s that, Emre Bartu?’ I say, as he pulls the picture from his document holder.

  ‘Because I think I know where this is.’

  Documented Memory Project #1

  At Christmas I received between five and ten books. Which I soon realised had stamps in them, that told me when they should be returned. It gave me a time limit and a challenge, to know that I must consume Roald Dahl and books about astronomy, within a certain date, or receive a hefty library fine. With the fear of not getting a proper Christmas if I didn’t enjoy them all, and without the knowledge that you could renew, I would start reading right away.

  After my parents stopped this practice I read much less, so I suppose I have to thank them for this. They would at least get me one action figure of my choice every year, too, which didn’t look quite right and I reckoned was a knock off from the market. But then, they got each other little, if anything, seeing Christmas as a materialist event they wanted no part of.

  By the time we started delving inside the body in biology, I already had a pretty good grasp on things, owing to various colourful books on anatomy mum had loaned for me. I remember sticking my hand up and answering every question before the teacher even got there. The pretty blonde girl next to me, hair dangling in her eyes, scowled continuously, but I think somewhere in there she was impressed. I wish I could remember her name. It escapes me.

  Kids are always afraid of falling down and cutting their wrist, once they hear that it holds t
he key to so much blood. But you’d get more rich, oxygenated blood out of your femoral artery. It’s very close to the surface, around the groin area. If you put your hand on it now you should be able to feel a pulse. It’s where you’d insert a cardiac catheter. It’s where a mortician would pump embalming fluid to preserve the body after death. People think the source of life, your centre, is your heart. But I think of it as that fat, elastic femoral artery. After that lesson, our whole class became morbidly obsessed with it.

  About a month later on a school trip I was taken to the first aid point in the visitor centre of a castle. I’d been running around and smacked the bridge of my nose into a bar of scaffolding. It hurt like hell and the blood came thick and fast. It only didn’t break because the contact was so high up. But I was surprised to be eclipsed in the drama stakes by another girl from school already in the medical room. They were taking whatever was wrong with her very seriously. As she was engulfed by teachers and staff from the castle, she looked at me through the crowd. It was that same blonde girl from biology class. Sarah, I think her name was. Yes, Sarah. She had sliced her femoral artery. Some say she did it herself, out of curiosity or a dare, but we never found out for sure.

  Later that summer, I ended up in full-blown hospital. I had to have my appendix out and after the operation my parents arrived to see a made–up bed. Dad instantly began to fear the worst and cry, yet mum, cooler of head, asked around and soon found that there were no complications. I was around the corner in the next ward. A nurse had taken a particular liking to me and found a small black and white TV with built-in video that could play Top Cat, and had set it up for me. I can still remember the doctor counting down as I succumbed to the ether. I coughed hard and then the next thing I knew was the crackling TV screen.

  It was Ryans who advised that I should write descriptions of the first memories that came into my mind when I closed my eyes. This was the first piece that made any sense, which I began shortly after my encounter with my own reflection.

  It was only later that I found out that, as I wrote, somewhere in a not too distant room, Ryans was describing me as having only a one in fifty chance of returning to a normal job. Six months after an injury like mine, you’ll get some idea of where the patient is heading. After two years the brain’s recovery process slows and wherever you are at that point is likely to be all you get. Three months after the bullet, and after warnings about forcing recovery too soon, I was back at work. I’m told that at twenty-nine I was just young enough for the brain to still benefit from a certain youthfulness that makes recovery by natural plasticity and self-healing more possible. So you could say it all happened in the nick of time.