Reaper

by Jon Grahame

  The first car arrived within ten minutes. By that time, he had opened the front window and had hung the body half out of it so that the cleaver, still in place in the back of Morris’s head, could be seen. That should give the police marksmen an incentive. The Armed Response Unit arrived 30 minutes later. By this time there were two police cars outside and a searchlight was aimed at the front of the house. Officers had tried to evacuate the homes on either side, although one family wouldn’t go. He listened to them arguing: the son and daughter were in bed with flu and their mother wouldn’t move them. He couldn’t see much because of the light in his eyes but he waved the hammer and the replica Colt .45 to show his intent. No one fired.

  No one shot him. There was no release.

  The light hurt his eyes and a disembodied voice that invited him to lay down his weapons and step outside annoyed him. He took another can of lager from the fridge – how many had he had? – and went upstairs to a back bedroom to rest in the dark. When dawn came, he would put on a show of provocation. He lay on a single bed that had no bedding, just a mattress.

  A second wave of exhaustion swept over him. He felt no emotion, no triumph, no regret. He had done what he had set out to do. What he had had to do. Vengeance is mine . . .

  The police found him asleep. He awoke as they put plastic cuffs on his wrists to hold his hands behind his back. They were not rough with him and he suspected they knew who he was and the circumstances that had led him to do what he’d done. He corrected them when they charged him with murder. ‘It was an execution. He should have suffered more.’

  ‘You’re probably right, but whatever you call it, you killed him.’

  He was taken to Police Headquarters. He declined a doctor and was put in a cell. It was strange returning to his place of work for the first time in three years.

  He had planned to be on a mortuary slab by now.

  Even though his plan had gone awry, the satisfaction of the kill had eased the perpetual pain inside. It was four o’clock in the morning and he expected the place to be busier; have more officers, more clients, more drunks, more noise.

  The next morning, he was questioned by a detective sergeant and made a full confession. He spent another night in the cells and then made an appearance before a magistrate. He was remanded in custody for two weeks. The wheels of justice were operating on a skeleton staff. No one was available to transfer him to a proper jail and he remained in police cells.

  Charlie Benson was the custody sergeant, an officer he had known for years. He brought him meals from the staff canteen. He was sympathetic. They all knew the background.

  ‘I’d have been tempted to do the same,’ Benson confided.

  A second bobby in the corridor outside coughed.

  Benson called over his shoulder, ‘Take your germs out of here. I don’t want your flu.’

  ‘It’s not flu. I don’t get flu. It’s just a cold.’

  ‘Everybody seems to be going down with this bloody flu,’ Benson told Reaper, ‘Even the villains, which is just as well. We’re short-staffed ourselves.’

  Reaper was not interested in the outside world. He hadn’t been for a long time. Even before Morris was let out, he’d only read the papers out of habit and to pass the time. The release of the kill was fading and he was sinking into despair because he himself was still alive.

  During the first week of remand, he noticed the situation within the station get worse. Even fewer lags, fewer staff. In the second week, there was a 24-hour period when no one came to his cell. Then Benson opened the door. His eyes were red rimmed and he was breathing through his mouth. He held a handkerchief to his face. He dropped a couple of pre-packed sandwiches onto the bed.

  ‘They’re out of date, but it’s the best I can do. It’s crazy out there.’ He coughed. ‘Bloody SARS! I’d like to get me hands on the swine who started it. Look, Jim. Everything’s falling apart. The courts have stopped operating. All custody remands have been extended. I’m not going to lock that door again. It could be there’ll be no one around to open it. There’s even been a riot up at the infirmary – people demanding a vaccine. Bloody armed police to disperse them for chrissake! We’re on our way to hell in a hand basket. God alone knows where it will end. I’ve opened all the cells. Sent three on their way. I’m off home to bed. God knows. You hear stories . . . you don’t know what to believe. I’d stay here if I was you, Jim. Use the canteen. When things get back to normal, it’ll stand you in good stead that you didn’t do a runner.’ He coughed again, long and harsh. ‘ If things get back to normal.’ He looked at his hand and his handkerchief and said, ‘I won’t shake hands.

  All the best, Jim!’

  Reaper nodded.

  Benson left and Reaper opened the packet. He ate a cheese and tomato sandwich washed down with a glass of water. He sat on the bed, back against the wall, feet stretched out in front of him, and listened.

  Somewhere distant a door banged. Someone called out.

  Someone coughed in reply. Time didn’t seem important. He lay down and slept. When he awoke he ate the other sandwich, ham and pickle. It was stale but it was food. He sat and waited. No one came. No more sounds except, like the song, The Sound of Silence.

  He got up and stepped outside his cell. The corridor was lined with cells. All the doors were open.

  He walked to the end of the corridor and found the custody desk unmanned. The three other doors that led out of the area all had coded key-pads but they had been propped open. A noise on another level. A door? He went back to his cell and lay down.

  Had he been mistaken? Perhaps he had really been shot and was he now dead, or dying in a hospital bed?

  Had the last week been a bad dream, an illusion? Was death a deserted police station? He had thought death was nothingness, blackness, sinking into an endless sleep. How did this equate? Maybe drugs. Maybe he had been shot and had been pumped full of drugs?

  Like that TV series, Life On Mars. He tried to burst back into reality, to tell the doctors to turn off the life-support system and let him go, but nothing happened. He fell asleep again, hoping that this time he would wake up in the real world.

  His eyes opened and he stared at the ceiling. A nondescript ceiling. An institutional ceiling. A ceiling that could easily be in a hospital. He looked around and saw he was still in the cell. He was hungry and felt dirty. When was the last time he had showered? He got up and went to the custody desk. Still silence.

  Three open doors of silence. He shouted. ‘Anybody there?’ No one replied.

  He went through a door that had been propped open with a waste bin, and walked along a carpeted corridor, past the interview room where he had made his confession, past small offices, through an open plan office that had been abandoned. The clock told him it was 11:50. He went round corners, along another corridor, and he was at the front desk, which was unmanned. Swing doors led to the outside. He stood near the glass and stared out onto the dual carriage ring road that ran past police headquarters. The sun was high. The body of a man in civilian clothes lay on the steps. There was no traffic.

  He went back into the station, climbed some stairs, and saw a senior officer in an office. Reaper knocked, then went inside. The man was dead, slumped over his desk. Reaper carried on walking, exploring the station.

  He found three more bodies. What had happened?

  Hunger drove him to the canteen. He cooked bacon, eggs, beans and toast, and wondered how he could possibly have an appetite. It was as if whatever had happened was of no concern to him. He had stepped outside the bounds of society when he had killed Morris. He was alone and maybe there really was a God and His punishment was for Reaper to live in a land that had ceased to exist. Except for the bacon, eggs, beans and toast. Or maybe he was in intensive care in hospital and just tripping on morphine.

  Reaper went back to his cell and lay on the hard mattress. He dosed, woke and lay in a state of vegetation for a long time, trying not to think. He had wanted a conclusion when he had
set out to kill Morris.

  He had expected by now to have been consigned to the nothingness of death. Instead, he didn’t know whether he was alive or not. He had a drink of water, used the lavatory and used the custody section bathroom to have a shower and wash his underwear and socks. He went behind the custody desk and found the locker that contained prisoners’ property. An envelope with his name on it was the only property there.

  He opened it, took a single photograph from his wallet, replaced everything else and put it back in the locker.

  He went back to his cell, switched off the interior light from the outside, and went back to sleep.

  When he next woke, he got up and had another shower. He was delaying decisions through mundane routine. He dressed and retraced his steps of the day before, or was it two days before? The lights in the station were permanently on, but outside it was dark.

  He went to the canteen and cooked himself a bacon sandwich and drank tea. The bananas had gone rotten but the apples were edible. There was no rush. He drank more tea and wondered where he was; wondered if this was a different reality to the one in which he had killed Morris.

  Had God banished him to an alternative universe?

  Probably not, because he didn’t believe in God. He had lost that belief three years ago. The fact he didn’t believe, of course, did not mean God didn’t exist. Reaper could even see the humour in such a situation. Would he still deny His existence if he was ever called to account on Judgement Day? In the unlikely event of it happening, he would welcome such a confrontation.

  He would be able to ask where God had been when his family needed Him – and to hell with salvation: he knew all about hell and nowhere any God might send him could compare.

  He walked down to the front doors and went outside.

  The body of the man was still on the steps. Streetlights were lit and he could see the roads outlined in orange dots as they climbed the hills opposite, beyond the limits of the city. House lights showed sporadically and in the clear night air he could see smoke rising from a fire down the valley. He could smell burning from a lot closer, probably a building in the town. He sat on the steps, a few yards away from the body, stared out at a night that was still and peaceful and listened to the sounds of insects and the rustle of leaves in the light breeze.

  The possibility he hadn’t wanted to face pushed forward from the back of his mind. The flu or SARS pandemic had crippled the country, possibly decimated the population. Perhaps people had retreated to safe havens or been herded into medical compounds for treatment. What was that report he had half heard?

  Quarantine areas? Perhaps the city had been so badly affected it had been declared off limits. Perhaps armed police and soldiers still protected the hospitals and were keeping the infected at bay until the disease had run its course. How long would it be before they returned to the streets to clear the houses of the dead?

  Part of his mind said this was the only logical explanation, while another part refused to fully accept that England had fucked itself up quite so completely. What had happened? Hadn’t the Government stockpiled enough Tamiflu or whatever it was that they needed?

  Had there been selective prescriptions? Perhaps that’s why the police station was empty. Most of the officers could have been given the necessary drugs and were now in those safe havens, waiting for the time to return.

  The irony was, of course, that he had survived without so much as a sniffle. If he had waited two weeks, the flu would probably have taken care of Morris without Reaper having to dispense his own justice. Too late now and anyway: he was glad he had killed him; glad it was his hand to have dealt the blow and not some anonymous virus.

  The crash of breaking glass from somewhere in the town came as a shock. He twisted his head sharply like a crow and tried to work out the location. Breaking glass meant people. There was a male shout and a female scream – then another male shout and the female screams continued. His blood ran cold as he sat, remembering. He listened to the screams, interspersed by angry male shouts and guttural laughs. Eventually the screams died down to be replaced, first by sobbing and groaning, and then silence. On a still night when only the insects sang and no traffic disturbed the peace, sobs and groans carried a long way. Their echoes remained in his soul.

  Still sleeping, God?

  God was dead, had never lived in the forms imagined by Buddhist and Jew, Muslim and Christian and all those who had worshipped the sun and rocks and Mother Earth. God was an accident of cosmic energy who had grown from a dream and a hope by a mankind looking for a means of escape. A mankind unsatisfied with a temporary burst of life, had gone looking for eternity. They prayed that when they died, they would sit at the right hand of God and live forever in peace and harmony and love; states they had never been able to achieve in any real measure during their lifetimes.

  What a shock when they discovered the right hand of God was just a black hole of dreamless sleep.

  Reaper went back to his cell, lay on the hard mattress and tried to rationalise the situation. He decided that he did not know enough to make an informed assessment. Come the daylight, he would find out more. He slept fitfully, the screams of the woman replaying in his mind.

  Chapter 2

  THE MORNING DAWNED SILENTLY OUTSIDE the police station that had become his womb. He showered, ate breakfast and stood by the reception desk at the front door for a long time before leaving the building’s safety. The sun was shining and the office clock said it was 11am.

  He stepped outside, walked to the corner and turned left towards the town. The street was lined with parked cars, but deserted. He felt vulnerable, as if someone might be watching from a rooftop or a window, and he crossed the road to be in the shadows. He went carefully, listening for sounds, looking for life – fearful of finding it.

  Near the town centre branch of Sainsbury’s, he heard breaking glass. He approached from the far side of the street, hiding behind parked cars, but could see nothing except that one of the large windows had been smashed open and the shards cleared for easier access.

  This had been done earlier; it was not the recent sound of breakage he had heard. He crossed the road and peered inside. Stock had been spilled in the aisles and he could hear the clink of bottles. The sound of a trolley being pushed got louder.

  ‘Why do I always get one with funny wheels?’ slurred a man.

  Reaper was watching for the trolley to appear and didn’t see the woman come out of another aisle with boxes in her arms.

  ‘Bugger off!’ she shouted. ‘This is ours!’

  The woman was middle-aged and large and looked even larger in a fur coat. Her blonde hair sat strangely on her head and he realised it was a wig. Her face was flushed and she was angry. Possession was nine tenths of the law, her expression declared, and they possessed Sainsbury’s.

  ‘What is it?’ shouted the slurring man, the trolley increasing in speed and suddenly coming into view. It was filled with cases of beer and bottles of spirits and wine. The man was Reaper’s age and he wore white jogging pants and top and new trainers. He was tall with broad shoulders and a large belly. With him was a younger, smaller man in designer jeans and T-shirt.

  He was skinny with ratty eyes and carried a Samurai sword. The large man stopped the trolley and lifted out a cricket bat that he wielded threateningly.

  ‘What do you want?’ he demanded.

  The first on the streets were the pillagers and rapists.

  Honest folk would be cowering in their homes waiting for authority to reassert itself. Reaper said nothing, but backed away to the street and moved out of sight.

  He continued on his way, taking great care not to stumble upon another such group: people who, a few weeks before, might have been law-abiding enough because of the strictures of the society in which they lived, but now, because of shock, loss, lack of social cohesion and absence of police, had decided to take what they could, while they could. He suspected that if anyone stood in their way, they would ha
ve no hesitation in using whatever weapons they carried.

  He heard other sounds of breaking glass in the distance as he walked. After some five minutes, the sound of running feet caused him to withdraw into the shadow of a shop doorway and he watched as a young couple scurried up a side street, followed a short while later by two older men. He reached Albert Square.

  Much of it was a paved area, with benches and flowerbeds and ornamental lamps. The railway station and its forecourt dominated the north side. The three-star Albert Hotel was to the east. The other two sides were imposing, with Victorian architecture in the grand style; office buildings on the west side, while South Parade had upmarket shops, café bars and restaurants at ground floor level, and flat conversions above for the young and upwardly mobile. There were still, surprisingly, three taxi cabs at the rank outside the station, but only one contained the body of a driver.

  Reaper crouched by the taxis, waited and watched.

  Two of the bars on South Parade had smashed windows. He went into the Albert Hotel and heard a voice speaking in normal, conversational tones. He was surprised and felt a surge of relief – then disappointment when he realised it was coming from a television. He followed the sound into the Tudor Bar that had once served a fine pint of Timothy Taylor. The décor was mock Tudor with exposed beams, chunky tables and well-upholstered seating and a large TV screen was fitted to the wall. A barman, in pale blue jacket and black trousers, lay dead in a club chair, with a half empty bottle of vodka and a glass in front of him on a table. He looked peaceful. Perhaps the pills had helped; there was an empty blister pack beside the bottle.

  The man on the television screen was vaguely familiar. Perhaps a minor figure in the Government?

  Reaper guessed what he was seeing was being repeated on a loop. There was a message of ‘God bless and good luck’, a fixed stare and the screen went blank before the loop started again. A message was shown and read by an anonymous presenter: An announcement on behalf of Her Majesty’s Government by the Right Honourable Geoffrey Smith, it said.