BURN, BABY, BURN

by Jake Barton

  Donna coughed and he started violently, as if she’d touched him with a cattle prod.

  "You still don't get it, do you?" Clive snorted, wiping the sweat from his eyes with a podgy hand. "I’m scared stiff at the thought that he's somewhere out there. If you knew what I know about him, you'd be the same."

  "So tell me then. Stop giving out vague hints about incest and what may or may not have been an accident to your dad." The words were brutal, but she couldn't help that. It was time to shock Clive into giving up his secrets.

  He looked at Donna gravely. "You're tougher than you look," he said, a hint of admiration in his voice.

  "Tough? I’m not tough at all, but I gave my word to Celine’s mother. Said I’d find Celine. I have to try. So, come on, Clive, tell me the real story. If it’s as scary as you say, I’ll probably shit myself, but tell me anyway."

  He produced a great rumbling laugh, like a flatulent rhino raising one enormous cheek, then his face turned severe and he reached out and enfolded both Donna’s hands in one of his own vast paws. She stayed very still, conscious that he could crush her hands without even trying, but his grip was merely to assure her complete attention.

  "He told me once how he killed his own father and made it look like an accident. He was proud of that. He was only six years old when he did that. Six!"

  "It may not be true, Clive. Perhaps he was trying to impress or frighten you."

  "No!" Clive shouted, then glanced at the door and lowered his voice again to its former level. "It wasn't that. Marcus isn't like that. I made that mistake once. I know now that he doesn't boast or exaggerate. He doesn't need to do that. And there's something else..." He hesitated. "I’ve never told anyone this. I’m going to tell you because I still don't think you are taking Marcus Green seriously enough for your own safety. He told me about girls he had taken away to his den. They never came back again. He killed them."

  "Where was his den?"

  Clive shook his head. "I don't know. He also told me that he killed his baby sister when he was five. That was all before he moved here, but I believed him."

  Donna felt her mouth gape open, but was unable to do anything about it. He looked across at her, and then continued, obviously satisfied that she was paying attention.

  "The little girl wandered off when someone left the garden gate open. That was the story that was put out, apparently. She never turned up, despite a massive police search. They weren't ever likely to find her. They were looking in the wrong place. She never left the grounds. Marcus buried her in the garden." He broke off for a moment, visibly collecting himself. "I know that's true, because I found her body. Exactly where he said it was."

  "Jesus!"

  "Got your attention now, haven't I? I went to the place he used to live. The house is long gone, but the gardens still the same. She was in the exact spot he described to me. Buried vertically, face down, in a flower bed."

  He stopped talking and swallowed deeply. His grip on her hands tightened. "She was alive when he put her in the ground. He told me she never even cried out. He dug the hole, carried her outside and pushed her in. Then he filled it in again with soil, washed his hands, and went to watch television. Oh yes, he went and opened the garden gate so his parents would think she'd wandered off somewhere. He enjoyed all the excitement that followed, and all the attention he was getting, but most of all, he liked the feeling of out-witting everyone. That was when he was a five-year-old child. Can you imagine what he will be like now?"

  "When did you find the body?"

  "When I knew he was safely put away for a good long time. I didn't tell anyone. I'd only have been about fourteen then, but I always knew he'd come back one day, so I kept it to myself."

  '"You mean she's still there? You left her there?" Donna gasped.

  "What did you expect me to do?" He looked surprised.

  "I don't know. Tell someone about her, I suppose. The police?"

  "Oh yeah, really put my own head in the noose then, wouldn't I? I always knew he'd get out one day. He's much too clever to be locked up forever. And I was right, wasn't I? He’s back. I’ve seen him with my own eyes. I’ve not been out of this room since. Get it into your head, he's bad news. Keep well away from him. Even his kids’ games were scary and he's not playing kids’ games any more. He won't be camping out on the island torturing the ducks, he'll be hurting people now."

  "You've lost me."

  "Marcus was fascinated by the boating lake, especially the little island in the middle where the ducks roost at night. He'd creep out at night and sail a homemade raft out to the island. When the ducks came to roost, he'd strangle them. That was his idea of fun."

  "The lake in Ashton Park?"

  "Yeah. It's only just the other side of the hedge from his garden. It’s only a farty little lake, a glorified duck pond. Looking at it now, I could wade out to the island, but when we were kids, he loved it more than anything."

  He finally released her hands and Donna put them on her lap, out of the way.

  "Clive, can I ask a favour?"

  He recoiled, his face expressionless. "Like what?"

  "Can I bring my boss to talk to you?"

  "No, you bloody well can't."

  "He's a good bloke, he really is, and he will know what to do. He used to be a copper and..."

  "I might have known," Clive interjected. "I won't talk to the police. Haven't you bloody well listened to anything I’ve said?"

  "He's not with the police now,"

  "I don't care. Get out now and don't come back. If you do, I won't talk to you, and you can tell your boss I’ll deny everything I said to you."

  Donna stood up as he rose from the bed, his fists clenched. Donna was too scared to move. Really big men scared her. Perhaps because she wasn’t confident of doing them enough damage to stop them grabbing her. Where would she start with a bloke this size if he got nasty? It didn't bear thinking about. "Last chance," Clive said. "Leave now and forget about Marcus. Do you think I want you on my conscience as well as the others? He’s dangerous, Donna. Forget him."

  Donna froze. His words chilled her to the bone, but she couldn’t get Paula Dobson’s tear-stained face out of her mind.

  Clive broke the spell by walking over to the door and throwing it wide open, Donna managed to put one foot in front of the other and make her exit with a pathetically feeble impression of dignity.

  *****

  An hour later, she'd scrawled a few notes in her pad, tried three times to reach Dexter on his mobile without success, and eaten a cheese and chutney sandwich. She sat in the passenger seat and watched nothing in particular. The houses all down the road were Victorian three-storey jobs, all solid redbrick with bay windows on the ground and first floors. Quite the thing in their day, she imagined.

  A couple of teenage girls came out of one of the houses and stood chatting on the pavement. Tottering on thick-wedged shoes, and shivering in short skirts, bare legs and skimpy tops. The nearest was tall and skinny, borderline anorexic, her friend the complete opposite, putting up a good three stone overweight in racing parlance – braless under a skin-tight Black Sabbath tee shirt. Big mistake, and not just in her fondness for throwback rock-band dinosaurs. A lad about the same age walked by on the other side of the road. He'd dressed to the opposite extreme: many-layered clothing, Doc Martin boots and a black woollen ski-cap pulled down over his ears.

  He probably thought he looked cool.

  To Donna, he resembled some pathetic failure of the care-in-the-community system. One of the girls whistled, two fingers hooked in the corner of her mouth, and he raised a languid hand in a peremptory greeting, but slouched off without breaking stride.

  The girl who'd whistled tugged at her tangled mane of black hair, pursed her full lips, and mimed a convincing parody of the sex act at his retreating back, before hugging her friend as they dissolved into fits of giggles.

  Donna decided she'd let enough time go to waste, slid over into the other side of the car, a
nd drove as far as a service station, filled up with petrol, and went to the rest room for an urgent call of nature. If it hadn't been urgent, she'd have gone elsewhere. There was no toilet paper. There hardly ever was in these places, but Donna carried her own supply in the pockets of her jeans. When she knew she’d have to be reliant on other people's facilities, she planned ahead. Desperate as she was, she still had to go through her usual routine carefully laying over-lapping sheets of tissue around the circumference of the bowl, checking to ensure not a trace of porcelain was showing, before perching gingerly on the tissue-clad throne. She stood up and brushed the tissue into the bowl before flushing. Eleven sheets of paper wasted. If the rain forests are in danger, blame Donna O’Prey.

  The washbasin was filthy, a grey scum covering the bottom of the bowl. A wastebasket beneath the sink was filled to overflowing with green paper towels, but the dispenser was now empty. A couple more toilet paper sheets from her precious stock went to join their fellows.

  On a whim, Donna went back to where she'd just come from, locked the car, and decided to have a poke around the back of Mrs Green's house. What had seemed a good idea at the time seemed a pretty piss-poor idea ten minutes later. About as bad an idea as she'd ever had. The dry rasp of leaves, crunching underfoot, and the occasional snap of a small twig, were the only accompaniment to her progress. The air was still, no animal stirred in the darkness of the surrounding trees. At the very edge of her senses, Donna could just about discern the presence of water. Whether it was dampness in the air, or the sound of a faint lapping, she couldn’t tell, but she knew that the boating lake was close by.

  The main problem was that she was completely lost. Reluctant to make a direct approach, she'd decided to enter the bushes at the far end of the park and work her way along until she found the back of the house. As a theory it was fine. In reality Donna had no bloody idea where she was, where she'd been, or where she was supposed to be going. The air was damp and heavy, like wearing a heavy woollen blanket draped across the shoulders. An earthy smell assaulted the nostrils and speech would have an eerie muffled quality, as if in an underground cellar.

  A sudden crashing deep in the dark woods startled her, not quite to the point where she wet herself, but it was a close call. She felt the sting of hot salty tears on her cheek, more from humiliation than fright, although fear was in there, too. No doubt of that.

  A shape materialised through the trees and Donna caught her breath as she realised the house was immediately in front of her. More by luck than judgement, she’d found the back of the house. A narrow gap in the bushes showed signs of recent usage, although whether by human activity or some animals Donna had no means of knowing. She pushed her way through the bushes and stood in deep shadow on the grass, looking at the house.

  A single faint light showed, almost under the eaves, but otherwise the house was dark and distinctly forbidding. One thing surprised her – the house was much larger at the rear than she'd surmised from the front view. It extended a good way back from the road with a long narrow garden, most of which was obscured by overhanging trees. Donna walked forward about ten metres or so until she reached the line of sight from Clive's window in the house next door. His room looked to be in total darkness, but Donna shuffled around the edge of the tree line just in case he was keeping watch.

  At the very back of the house, not connected as such, but right next to the back wall, was a sort of summerhouse, almost derelict, but with a pitched roof that allowed some measure of concealment. Cautiously, Donna walked through the part-open door, clutching her only concession to the burglars' art – a laminated video shop membership card with which she hoped to open any Yale locks she might come across. She didn’t dare risk her credit card as the prospect of the Hole-in-the-Wall cash dispenser rejecting it as damaged when she was both skint and desperate for a pizza was too awful to contemplate. The video club card was expendable. The stippled texture of the walls, rough as Desperate Dan’s chin, would strip flesh from a carelessly placed hand. The rank air smelt musty and stale. It was eerily quiet, silent as a country graveyard at midnight.

  She'd no idea what she was looking for. The place was bigger than it looked. A corridor, perhaps thirty feet in length stretched away in front of her, with the shadows of two doors at the far end, standing out in stark relief. At the far end of the corridor one of the doors yawned open with a sudden creak. Donna blew out an explosive breath and hunching her shoulders, moved tentatively towards the door, shards of broken glass crunching beneath her feet. A bead of sweat ran from her armpit, the icy trail searing across her ribs. In the half-light, shadows were vast swirling monsters, a surrealistic landscape where demons lurked and all Donna’s fears were gathered together and magnified a hundredfold.

  She began to shake, a thick shroud of terror settling over her with only a single chink of light available to persuade her to take another step.

  Reaching the door, Donna pushed it wide open. As it brushed against the wall, she licked dry lips, running her tongue in a circle round her mouth. The darkness here absolute and Donna was reduced to feeling her way through the gloom. She'd just about decided to turn back when her left hand touched an unfamiliar object.

  Typically, she'd set off without a torch, which was where she'd left it, in the boot of the car. She felt sufficiently curious though to fumble in her pockets for the box of matches she kept along with a couple of cigarettes in a crush-proof pack. Another lesson from Dexter – always keep a couple of ciggies around as nothing helps a reluctant witness talk more than the offer of a cigarette.

  Donna flinched at the sudden spark of light and the strong smell of sulphur in such a confined space, but dropped the match as the light revealed the objects she had been touching. A row of squirrels, each tiny corpse fastened to a wooden beam with bright shiny nails. There must have been fifty or sixty bodies, all pinned through the eye and all recently dead, some with fresh blood still dripping to the floor.

  She saw all this in a momentary glance, and then the tiny body at the end of the row moved. It was nailed to the beam, but was still just about alive.

  At the realisation, Donna was out of there, running like a mad woman for the sanctuary of the woods.

  *****

  A couple of hours later, back in Chester, they were getting nowhere fast, at least as far as Donna was concerned. She tried to keep her annoyance at bay, but it was bloody difficult. Kate was bringing Dexter up to date on the progress of her research and Donna was left completely in the dark. Yet another set of baffling initials spewed forth.

  "I’ve had a quick browse through the SAI, but no joy so far."

  "Sorry," Donna said. "SAI?"

  "Sexual Assault Index," Kate said, turning apologetically towards her. If she wondered why Dexter had once again dragged his dim sidekick along, she was too polite to say so. "It’s supposed to be the national index of sexual assaults. It’s a good idea, but of limited value in practise. Limited by whether the report is recorded properly, or even recorded at all. If you want the job done properly, the last person on Earth you’d pick to do it would be your average constable."

  Dexter frowned, but didn't venture any disagreement. Kate shuffled papers frantically and passed a great wad of computer printout over to him.

  "Those prints you asked Abbott for, the shoe prints? I was doubtful whether he'd have much chance to do it, so I scanned the photocopy into my machine here, and it’s turned out not too bad. Took me a while, but I’d say definitely Nike. I’ll print off the comparison for you to have a look at. I’m ninety percent certain, but you’d better let Abbott have a look at it himself. They haven’t come up with a match yet, or if they have, it’s not down on the case log in the incident room."

  "Fucking Hell, Kate, how do you get all this stuff?"

  She shrugged. "I log on to the police computer system. The incident room log is no problem to hack into. Not even a password. Surprising really, because that DS Ferguson is shit hot at keeping records. He’s even encr
ypted the Christmas booze-up savings club list and his personal file. Not too well, mind you, he uses his mother’s maiden name if you ever want to know how much they’ve got in the Christmas Club kitty. He’ll get a result on the shoe comparison eventually, but you could let them see what I’ve got if you want to be helpful. Don’t tell them where you got it though, it’s a bit tricky to explain."

  Dexter sucked his cheek. "Obviously."

  "Want more? The trainers, size nine. Don’t read too much into it, but I’ve dug out the details on record from the time a certain Marcus Green was inside, height, weight, shoe size, it’s all recorded." Kate turned to Donna. "Your turn, I think?’

  "He’s size nine, isn’t he?" Donna asked, perching on the edge of her chair.

  "Yep. As I said, don’t go overboard, it’s just one more detail that checks out."

  "How did you get it? What make of trainer it was?" Donna asked.

  'The usual way, hacking into systems. I use NCIS a lot, that's the National Criminal Intelligence Service. It has all the details relating to high profile crime: gang-related offences, major drug dealers, forgery and counterfeiting, money laundering, paedophile groups, serial killers and rapists. I don't restrict myself to what I can find in this country. This one I’ve been looking at for the shoe print, for instance, is a real goody from over the pond – the FBI index – more detailed than the British database and a damn sight easier to follow."

  She lolled back in her chair, fingers interlaced behind her head, the very picture of indolence.

  Dexter snorted. "You can go down for this sort of thing," he said.

  Kate burst into peals of laughter and passed a sheet of paper over to him. Dexter shook his head, accepting the printout as if the slip of paper were red-hot.

  "If you don't like the way I get things done, you shouldn't keep asking me," Kate said.

  "Is it safe?" Donna wondered aloud. "Hacking, I mean without getting caught."

  "Oh, sure, I have to cover my tracks, and it’s getting harder all the time. Hacking is one of the great bugbears of the age, but most people don't really understand what's involved. At least, I don't live in China. They dish out real sentences over there. Death sentences."