Her Cold Eyes

by Tony Black

  ‘No. I’m not.’

  ‘This is an undertaking of a particular section of the elite that like to push the boundaries of their occult rituals. It’s strictly for those at the very pinnacle of the cabal, those that take an extremely perverse interest in the suffering of their victims.’

  ‘I’m struggling to see how what you’ve already told me could be any worse, but go on.’

  And so Rickards went on. ‘There’s an adrenal gland in the neck that secretes a particular chemical called adrenochrome. This gland produces the substance under one set of circumstances alone: fear. When a human being is exposed to the very limit of terror, the gland’s production is believed to be a delicacy by the highest order of the elite.’

  ‘This shouldn’t shock me, after learning of the child sacrifices and the blood drinking and flesh eating, but somehow it does.’

  ‘Could it be because you see where I’m going with this?’

  ‘I want to know what this dangerous game is, Kev.’

  ‘Not any game, the most dangerous. In its most simple term, for people like you and me, it’s hunting. We’re talking about putting another human being through the same torment and torture that animals are subjected to for perverted pleasure.’

  ‘Hunting people?’

  ‘That doesn’t do it justice. Remember, Abbie McGarvie was a child. If you found her the way you did, I’d wager she’d been stripped, abused, and was limbering up to be sacrificed in the most terrifying of occult practices.’

  ‘Who would do this?’

  ‘Someone with a taste for adrenochrome. Someone who, in my experience, would most definitely know exactly what they were doing. Those people aren’t bottom feeders; they’re the ones holding up the keystone. I’ve never heard of a victim of the most dangerous game to have been found. If you have a victim’s corpse to prove this practice took place then you can be guaranteed that something went very, very wrong.’

  2017

  I don’t like to talk to anyone at school now. The playground’s noisy, all the silly kids running around and screaming. They don’t have a single thing to scream about. I want to scream back at them, tell them to stop, but they’re only little kids. You can’t harm little kids, I could never do that. Not ever.

  I turn up the cuffs of my sleeves and try to put them over my ears, but the noise doesn’t go away.

  I can still hear everything. All the running, all the screaming.

  I turn to face the wall and try to look away, but it doesn’t help. I’m still here. I’m still me, there’s nothing in the world that can change that and it makes me sad inside.

  There’s all kinds of pictures moving through my head. I scrunch up my eyes and try not to see them, but they’re still there. They never go away.

  I see blood and babies. I hear the baby wailing. There’s a man in a hood. He has little white hairs poking out of his chin, and his teeth are cracked and dirty. I push him away but I’m not strong enough.

  ‘No . . . No.’

  I know I’m mumbling. I talk to myself all the time now and sometimes people hear me.

  My teachers say: ‘Stop that at once!’

  But sometimes I can’t. Sometimes I can’t stop anything. I wonder, is there a thing in the whole world I can control? One thing. Just one thing that I can keep from hurting me.

  The baby cries again. It’s bleeding, blood spilling every-where.

  ‘Stop. Please stop. Please go away.’

  I want to cry now, but I know that I can’t. If I cried then somebody would see me do it and that would only make things worse. I can’t make things worse, I can’t bring any more attention to me. I’ve been warned so many times that one day I’ll be made to really suffer. I have to get my mind right, that’s what they tell me.

  ‘Stop all this behaviour, or you will suffer for it.’

  ‘Stop it, at once.’

  ‘Do you hear me, Abbie? Do you want to bring more pain upon your soul?’

  The noise is starting to get louder and louder now.

  Kids running, everywhere.

  I’m starting to tremble, that sometimes happens, and my breath gets heavy. I try to catch my breath but I can’t, I just can’t.

  Nothing helps.

  I gasp and gasp.

  But nothing helps.

  Everything goes dizzy, and I feel hot then cold.

  The air’s all stuffy, even though it’s chilly out.

  My knees wobble and then give way. The ground beneath me seems to slip and I’m falling, falling into a deep hole.

  I see clouds above, white fluffy clouds, on a pale blue sky.

  There’s a loud thud, like a bang, behind me.

  My head hurts. I scream out.

  It hurts.

  Really hurts.

  But I can’t see anything.

  ‘Abbie . . . Abbie . . .’

  There’s two dark, round eyes over me. I try to focus on them and soon I see a full face.

  ‘She’s fine,’ says Mrs Thompson, and she eases away.

  ‘Where am I?’

  ‘You’re in my office.’

  I look around and see my feet tucked up on the couch. There’s a blanket over my legs and a cold, damp facecloth on my head.

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘You had a dizzy spell. Don’t worry, it’s nothing to concern yourself with.’

  She says she has to go; she’s got a class to teach. She steps away and puts her hands on her hips, she’s staring at me and shaking her head as she speaks again. ‘What in the world are we going to do with you, Abbie McGarvie?’

  I bite into my lip. I don’t know what to say.

  ‘Oh, don’t make that face. Your father would be ashamed of you.’

  ‘Why?’ I want to take the word back but it’s too late, it just popped out.

  ‘Because you are causing nothing but trouble for everyone.’ Her voice has a kind of angry echo and I look away. I think she’s seen my face, and knows what I’m thinking, and that’s when she starts to smack the pillows, pumping all the dust into the air.

  I start to cough and then she stops. There’s more words from her but I don’t listen. I’m starting to get sleepy and it’s like I cannot even fight it as my eyelids start to close.

  I dream about the babies. I always dream about them now.

  The only dreams I have are about babies or men in dark hoods with spiky little hairs on their chins. Sometimes the babies bleed and sometimes they cry and once a baby cried out for the Master.

  I dream and dream, and even though I want to wake up I can’t. It’s like I’m trapped here in my dreams, just like in real life. There’s no way out, no escape at all. And all I can do is suffer.

  ‘Abbie.’ It’s a man’s voice. ‘Wake up.’

  His hands are on me, under the blanket. When I look up I pull my legs away from his sweaty hands, but he only smiles.

  ‘Hello.’

  ‘Who are you?’

  ‘I’m Malcolm. You can call me Malky.’

  I’ve seen him before, around the school. He wears one of those mustard-coloured coats like the janitors, but I don’t think he is one of them. He does something else.

  ‘What do you want?’ I pull up the blanket to my chin.

  ‘Just to be friends.’

  I shake my head.

  ‘I was friends with Paige.’

  ‘What?’ I haven’t seen Paige since she was taken away. I miss her, I really do. It makes me sad to think of Paige and where she might be now, or what might have happened to her.

  ‘She used to come to my parties.’

  ‘What parties?’

  ‘Didn’t Paige tell you? I’m the party man.’

  I don’t know what he’s talking about and he makes me feel queasy. His hand slowly starts to work its way under the blanket again and soon I feel it touching my leg, rubbing and stroking.

  ‘No,’ I say.

  ‘It’s all right, don’t be nervous.’

  I let him touch me. His hand goes all
the way up my skirt and into my knickers. I want to pull away, but he watches me to make sure I don’t. He has the eyes that tell me, one false move and I’ll hit you. I don’t want to be hurt, so I stay still as he puts his fingers where he wants to.

  ‘There, see,’ he says. ‘I told you it was all right.’

  I hear people outside the door, walking in the corridor. He hears them too and looks over his shoulder. The noise troubles him and he yanks his hand from under the blanket. When he stands up his mouth is twitching, curling down at the corners and showing his bottom row of teeth. He looks angry, but only for a few seconds, and then he turns back to me and starts to smile again.

  ‘So, do you want to come to my party?’ he says.

  I shrug. ‘Will Paige be there?’

  He laughs out. ‘No, I’m afraid Paige’s partying days are over.’

  I don’t know what he means. ‘Where is the party?’

  ‘I don’t know if I should tell you.’ He moves his head from side to side, then starts to rub at the back of his neck. I know he’s only teasing me now. ‘It’s in a big old house, out in the country. Do you like the sound of that?’

  I shrug. ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Do you like planes? This house is next to an airport, you’ll be close enough to see them landing.’

  ‘I’m not interested in planes.’

  ‘Well, what about dressing up? Do you like fancy dresses?’

  ‘Tell me about Paige.’

  He looks away and I can see him rolling his eyes. ‘She’s gone, right.’

  ‘Where’s she gone?’ I really want to know where she is.

  He starts to get angry with me again. ‘Stop asking about that stupid bloody girl!’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘You won’t see her again, ever.’ He pulls away the blanket and starts to wave his hand. ‘Up, c’mon. Get up. You’re coming with me.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘I told you, didn’t I?’

  ‘To the party?’

  ‘That’s right, yes. To the party in the country.’

  ‘But it’s a school day.’

  ‘Don’t worry about that.’

  ‘What about my dad?’

  He tips back his head and laughs. ‘Your dad’s the one that sent me, Abbie. Now, come on, hurry up, we’ve got plans for you tonight.’

  25

  Clare was sitting with her feet up on the couch, flicking channels on the television. A slight curl played on her lip as her husband walked in the room, but there was little else by way of an acknowledgement. She settled on a show he’d never heard of, it seemed to be a re-run from daytime television. A stout woman in pink was lambasting another so-called celebrity about her choice of words; it was all false, the same propagating of political correctness he’d heard a million times before.

  Valentine looked at his wife – she was smiling now, laying down the remote control, content with her choice of entertainment. He looked towards the window and stared into the garden at the thick shrubbery and the carefully pruned trees. He wondered what it was all about. Was he only working to maintain an illusion? Playing happy families just to signal virtue to the outside world? An outside world he was growing to hold in contempt. He retreated back through the door and closed it behind him.

  In the kitchen he listened out for movement in his father’s room but couldn’t hear anything. Knocking on the door, he opened up and peered round the jamb.

  ‘Hello, Dad.’ The old man was seated at a green-baize card table, the deck in front of him laid out in a game of patience.

  ‘Oh, hello.’

  ‘Mind if I join you? Clare’s watching Loose Women.’

  ‘That sounds like your kind of thing.’

  ‘It’s a very deceptive title.’

  Valentine walked in and joined his father at the card table.

  ‘You fancy a game of whist? Or maybe rummy?’

  ‘Whatever. You choose.’

  His father started collecting up the deck. ‘How was your day?’

  ‘I wouldn’t know where to begin answering that.’

  ‘No improvement?’

  He shook his head: how should he reply? Their last conversation, that morning, had been a comfort to him – they always were – but he didn’t like leaning on the old man. At his time of life he should have been beyond sorting out his son’s troubles. But there was nobody else he could turn to. ‘I caught a member of my team lying to me.’

  ‘Oh, dear. Did they have a good reason?’

  ‘I’m not sure.’

  ‘Should I ask what the lie was about? Feel free to ignore me if I’m being a nosy old bugger.’

  ‘It’s fine.’ Valentine picked up the cards his father had dealt him. ‘He’s new to the team, and he’d told me he was a single man, but I found out he actually has a wife and three children that he’s estranged from.’

  ‘That’s a tricky one. In my time, there was some shame attached to that sort of thing, but I wouldn’t have said that was much of a factor today.’

  ‘There’s a void where shame used to be in our lives.’

  ‘It’s a concept that’s been cut from our vocabulary.’ His father’s eyes wandered from the cards in his hand. He appeared to be deep in reverie for a moment, a subtle warmth emanating from him.

  ‘It made me think. A lot of things have been making me do that lately.’

  ‘The passage of time does that. Don’t despair; things have a habit of changing, good principles can quickly come around again.’

  ‘But, I can hardly process how everything I see around me has changed already. In my brief lifetime. Goodness knows how you must feel.’

  ‘Hey, you cheeky swine!’ He smiled. ‘I’m not that old.’

  ‘Sorry, I didn’t mean . . .’

  ‘I’m only teasing you. When I think about the world today, son . . .’ The faraway look returned. ‘I do wonder what my own father, and his generation, would make of the mess we’ve created.’

  ‘What do you think he’d say?’

  ‘That we’d grown weak, that we’d confused comfort with civilisation, something like that. He didn’t mince his words; he might have only been a miner but he was still a learned man. He had a good eye for the truth of the matter; I think the war taught him what people were capable of. There’s one thing I can say for sure that he would have said: the war he fought wasn’t for this mess. He always said he thought his generation had been sold a pup, but he’d be bloody horrified watching the news today, even the sanitised version of events we get.’ The card game seemed to have been abandoned. ‘My late father would be sickened by the stories you bring home time and again.’

  Valentine doubted that sharing his work had been a good idea. ‘Don’t worry yourself, Dad.’

  ‘Oh I don’t.’ His response was sharp. ‘I’ll be shuffling off soon enough, and without a care for this bloody place. It’s those girls of yours I worry about. They’re the ones my heart goes out to.’

  Clare appeared at the doorway holding the cordless phone. She balanced her free hand on her jutting hip, her elbow poking out to the side as she spoke. ‘You have a call. It’s your lady friend.’

  ‘What lady friend?’

  ‘The one you spent the night with on Arran.’ She had the tact to cover the mouthpiece as she spoke.

  ‘Clare, please.’ He rose from the card table and took the phone but kept a hard stare on his wife. ‘Hello . . .’

  ‘Oh, hello, boss.’ DI McCormack’s voice was emotionless and he immediately recognised the formal police tone, it was always used to mask seriousness.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘I’m afraid it’s not good news.’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘Phil’s on his way to the hospital. There’s been an incident.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘He was trailing Malcolm Frizzle, sir. Something appears to have gone wrong, there was an altercation in a car park behind some hotels on the beachfront.’

  ‘A fight
between Phil and Malky?’

  ‘It’s all a bit confused at the moment, sir. All I can confirm is that we have Phil en route to hospital and, I’m afraid, we also have a deceased person at the scene.’

  ‘Dead?’

  ‘It’s Malcolm Frizzle.’ She paused. ‘I can send a car for you, if you like.’

  ‘No, don’t do that. I’ll make my way there now. Meet me at the scene, I’ll follow my nose.’

  As he hung up Valentine felt a surge in his blood. The ground beneath him swayed slightly as he headed for the door, snatching his jacket from the hall-stand.

  ‘Are you going out again?’ yelled Clare.

  He didn’t reply. By the time he reached the car, his thoughts had settled into a torrid rhythm, beating on the inside of his skull. The idea that an officer of DI Donnelly’s standing would be stupid enough to confront a scrote like Frizzle was preposterous. But confrontations happened all the time, they were part of the job. And he had a scar as thick as his index finger running the length of his chest to prove it.

  He slid behind the wheel and slammed the door. He drove in a daze, getting stuck behind a blue Toyota whose driver seemed lost, alternating between slowing and speeding with no apparent reason. At the beachfront he followed his own instinctual directions, first down a narrow, cobbled street and then a broader road that was lined with Victorian villas, all converted into guesthouses.

  In the rear car park Valentine was waved through a taped-off cordon by a uniformed officer holding a flashlight. More uniforms and a smaller number of white-suited SOCOs were already in position, darting beneath the ten-foot-high poles supporting the lighting fixtures, which cast ghoulish shadows on the wet tarmac.

  White canvas, draped over a boxy skeleton, flapped in the wind as he approached the scene. ‘Hello, sir,’ said DI Davis. He was emerging from the top of a low embankment where dark shrubbery masked a thick copse of trees.

  ‘What’s that you have there?’ said Valentine.

  Davis held up a clear plastic evidence bag. Inside was a small dark shape that, even in the dim light, couldn’t be mistaken for anything other than a handgun. ‘Automatic, boss. It’s a SIG Sauer.’

  ‘McCormack didn’t say anything about a firearm.’