by David Haynes
“Boss, I wrote up the surveillance authority but it was in my bag. If he knows what he’s looking at, he knows we’ll be watching Night.” Each syllable stretched her mouth and made it sting.
Hargreaves stared at her for a moment without speaking. He was deciding what to do.
“Have you saved them?”
She nodded.
“Give me your password and I’ll start the ball rolling. We’ve got nothing to lose and he might not be bright enough to realise what he’s got in that bag.”
Jane thought about her mobile and all the personal things on there. “I hope not.”
“Have you got anyone who can look after you for a couple of days? Someone at home?” Hargreaves opened the rear doors of the ambulance, revealing a crowd of officers and CSIs moving quickly back and forth. Beyond them, Jane saw a bank of photographers and cameras pointing in her direction. At some point in the last few hours it had grown light and the vultures had descended.
“No, but I’ll be fine.”
He helped her down. “Sure? I can have a marked unit...”
Jane shook her head. There was no need for that. “Honestly, I’ll be okay. I’ll be back in the office in the morning.”
Hargreaves led her to her car and stopped beside it. “We’ll see about that. Keys?”
“In my bag,” Jane replied. “I’ve got a spare set at home.” It didn’t really help matters now though.
He nodded. “No problem, I’ll drop you off and bring your spare set back so someone can drop your car off. Plan?”
“I’m okay, really. You need to be here and I need that surveillance sorting as soon as. All I need is someone to take me home.” She touched her eye and almost yelped. “I’m not going to be driving for a while anyway.”
He’d looked at her and tried to smile. “This is shit, Jane. All of it is complete and utter shit.”
She could hear the emotion in his voice. It sounded like he was about to crack up.
“We’re going to get this bastard,” she had said, looking toward the cameras and journalists. “I’m going to get him.”
*
Jane lowered her body into the steaming bath. The water was so hot it nearly took her breath away; just how she liked it. She was exhausted, totally and utterly done in, her body aching terribly. Her legs felt like she had just done half an hour on the treadmill, and her biceps had done curls with weights that were double her usual maximum. She knew part of what she was going through was shock, mixed in with hunger, dehydration, lack of sleep, fatigue and stress. The latter factors were normal, things that she coped with on a daily basis. Not always that well, but she could cope.
But the shock was new. For such a small word, it carried a whopping punch. It had hit her harder than a clown’s punch ever could. She had to regroup. Put her head and body back together before she would be any use to Hargreaves.
She slid forward, submerging her head. The water slipped effortlessly over her swollen eye and lips, soothing the constant ache. She could feel the heat gliding over her skin, trying to bring relief to her muscles. She could hear her heart beat. A steady, solid and dull thud in her ears. The water helped everything. It soothed, caressed and deadened the sound of the outside world.
But it couldn’t muffle the sound of White’s screams. It didn’t lessen the sound of the clown’s knife cutting through his flesh, grinding as it hit bone.
Jane rose to the surface, thrust her head over the side of the bath and relieved herself of the cold beer she had just drunk.
The water couldn’t scrub those sounds clean any more than it could take the clown’s crazy patchwork face from her mind. His smile which seemed to stretch so wide, almost from ear to ear, was made from bits of the men he had killed, from Newman, Stu and Crawley. And now there was one more slice of flesh on there.
She heaved again and climbed out, the brief enjoyment of the bath and the beer gone in an instant. Her legs felt like rubber as she stumbled against the sink. She held onto it for a moment and then cleared a small patch of steam off the mirror. Saw for the first time how truly bad she looked.
Each time the mirror steamed up, she wiped it clear. Again and again, leaning closer and closer each time. She looked wretched, almost as bad as the clown himself. He was connected to all of them: Newman, Stu, Crawley and White. She allowed her reflection to disappear behind the steam finally. But how was he connected?
She padded to her bedroom and fell onto the bed without drying herself. Was Night connected to them too? She pulled her legs up and lay on her side. It would all end with Night, she was sure of that. Somehow it would all end with him.
She closed her eyes and wrapped her arms about her body. For the first time in her life, she wished there was someone there to hold her. To wrap his clumsy, untidy, noisy and affectionate arms around her until she fell asleep.
The pillow was already wet from her hair, but tears soaked into the fabric long after her hair had dried.
*
“Sarge?”
Jane walked through the office and sat down at her desk. She felt the eyes of all the officers fixed on her. She was angry with herself for being late but when she finally drifted off to sleep, she had slept like the dead; eighteen hours straight through. When she woke up cold and naked on her bed, she felt as if she had been run over.
“Are you okay?” She recognised Lewis’s voice.
Jane held her hand up and tried to smile, but the balloons where her lips had previously been made it look like a grimace.
“Fine,” she replied in a voice that wasn’t quite her own. She wasn’t fine, she was far from it, but that was what she was supposed to say.
She logged onto her computer. “Have I missed briefing?”
“Starts in five minutes.”
Jane nodded and opened up the log of enquiries. It was growing by the second. As she scrolled down the screen, HOLMES populated the log with yet more queries. Even with a team five times as large, it would take years to work through them all.
She heard people leaving the office and slid her chair away to follow them. If she could make it through the day without crying or fainting, she’d be doing well.
Jane slid into the briefing room in the middle of the crowd. She wanted to avoid seeing Hargreaves for as long as possible. She had a feeling he might try to send her home and she didn’t want that. The room wasn’t particularly large but it was full, officers standing around the edge of the room. She filed in and stood beside an officer she had never seen before.
“There was no briefing yesterday for obvious reasons,” Hargreaves began. “In my twenty-three years of service I have never experienced anything so... so... utterly shocking as what happened to John White.”
I didn’t even know his name was John, thought Jane.
“He hadn’t been with us that long and it was probably the first time many of us had worked with him, but he was one of life’s gentlemen, an honest, hard-working man with...”
Hargreaves paused and their eyes met. He looked away, back to the crowd. “He was just a good bloke.”
There were a few murmurs of agreement around the room. More than there had been when White spoke about Stu. Silence had greeted his epitaph.
“But what we need to remember is that there’s a job to do here, a really difficult job.” Hargreaves walked to his computer and started a slideshow which played on a giant screen. He clicked through scenes that the officers all knew well: Harvey Newman’s house, Stu Kelly’s and Jim Crawley’s. They were shocking images but everyone in the room was acclimatised to them, immune to the blood and the hellish mutilated expressions of those the clown had killed.
They swam across Jane’s eyes like a nightmarish carousel. Her head spun.
Hargreaves paused the display and looked at her. He chewed on his lip for a second then continued. Even before the first image flashed up, she knew what it was going to be – the scene inside White’s bedroom. Blood on the walls. Blood soaked into the beige carpet, turning it
a muddy brown. His chair turned to face the mirror on the door of his wardrobe. The sparkle of a camera flash on the edge of the mirror. And in that sparkle, the ghostly image of a disfigured clown, laughing at her with that oh-so-wide grin.
She felt the image sliding away, sliding slowly off the screen and falling to the floor. Only it wasn’t the image, it was her. She was the one who was sliding, falling away into the abyss of his diabolical smile.
She rubbed her eye and levelled herself with the sharp burst of pain it provided. She needed to get out, to leave the room before she was sick. She sidled out of the room, noticing only the slight turn of Hargreaves’s head as he watched her, walked straight into the toilet and vomited her breakfast into the basin.
Her desk was at the far end of the office. To get to it, she had to walk past all the officers who had seen her leave the briefing. She managed only a dozen steps before Hargreaves called her.
“Jane? Have you got a minute?”
She stopped walking and closed her eyes. He was going to send her home, she knew it, but she was going to fight it.
She turned and tried to smile again before following him into what was White’s office.
He waited at the door and closed it behind her. “I’d like you to go home, Jane.”
He walked around the desk and sat down. He motioned for her to take a seat.
“It’s too much. Finding Stu and then this, it’s too much for anyone to cope with. Is there nobody who can stay with you? No...”
“Boyfriend? Partner? No, there’s nobody,” she interrupted to save him the embarrassment. “And I don’t need anyone.”
“Parents?” he persisted.
The thought of spending any period of time with them would drive her insane. “They live abroad,” she lied. “Look, I really don’t need to talk to anyone about it. This job sterilised me, emotionally, years ago.”
He sighed. “Well whether you like it or not, you’ve got to have some form of counselling. It’s policy but more importantly it will help. Whatever you say, Jane, I saw you yesterday, I saw what it did to you. What it did to me too, for god’s sake. You can’t just shrug this one off. It won’t work.”
“Will you let me stay if I agree?”
He smiled. “Are you kidding?”
“No,” she replied. “I want to stay. I want to help.”
He sighed again and shook his head. “Jane, you...”
“I’ll stay out of the evidence chain. I’ll sit over there and keep my head down.”
He chewed his top lip. He was thinking it over.
“There’s a link here, boss,” she started. “And I want to find it. I am going to find it. Just give me free rein to work through it all.”
She could see he wasn’t sure. She wasn’t in great shape, physically or mentally, but she was still better than anyone else he could bring in while she convalesced. She knew the investigation from top to bottom. If he did have to bring someone else in, it would be like starting from scratch. They didn’t have the time for that.
“And if I throw up or pass out then I’ll let you drive me home.”
“How exactly did you get here this morning?” That was a good question. He was past thinking about her suitability to be at work, he was onto something new.
“Taxi. I’ve got my keys here, if someone could take me I’ll drive it...”
“You’re not driving anywhere. You can’t see out of that eye, Jane. I’ll have one of the team collect it.”
She opened her mouth to argue, but if that was the only concession she had to make, she’d take it.
“You come to me with anything, okay? No going off on your own. Anywhere.”
She nodded. She didn’t want to go off on her own anywhere, in the same way as she didn’t want to be at home on her own.
“Are you running it now?” she asked.
Hargreaves nodded. “Yep. Saves bringing in another DI who doesn’t know the case. It’d be like bringing in another DS, wouldn’t it, Jane?” He winked at her.
She smiled, knowing it looked like a grimace, and turned around. “Oh, I nearly forgot.” She turned back. “Surveillance?”
Hargreaves nodded. “Two teams. Ben Night is all tucked up and if he leaves, we’ve got another team standing by. If anyone goes near that place then we’ll know about it.”
“When did they go in?” she asked.
“I don’t know exactly, but it was authorised at just after eleven yesterday morning. I’d say a couple of hours after that.”
“Great.” She opened the door and walked to her desk. She felt eyes on her again but ignored them and sat down. Somewhere in all this was the link. Somewhere in all this was a name.
20
Maldon huddled in the dark and pulled the hood over his head. It was cold, and his body ached from sleeping on a hard floor. At least he was safe. At least he was hidden. The music just kept on going around and around and around without pause or break. Note after note after note of plinky plonk out-of-tune clown music rattling around in his brain. It itched and it scratched and it was driving him insane.
“Turn it off, Sparkles,” he whispered. “Turn the music off.”
“You love it really, you lurrrrve it, don’t try to deny it, Mouldy.”
“Don’t call me that,” Maldon hissed.
He pressed his temple with his palms for as long and hard as he could but the music wouldn’t quieten. If anything, it grew louder.
He reached into his pocket for the mobile phone; the one he had taken from inside her pocket, from that warm, cosy and gentle pouch on her thigh. He lifted it to his cheek and imagined it was her skin against his.
Something spiked him and he nearly dropped it. Underneath the mask, he knew his skin was in a bad way. It felt strange, loose somehow, like beneath Sparkles’s patchwork mask his own skin was dying. Was he dying too? Was this all the clown’s plan? So he could take over completely?
He could feel huge volcanic spots erupting underneath the mask. In small areas, he could feel them trying to force Sparkles off his face. Little spotty defence mechanisms that were simply too weak to help. Small and weak, just like him.
None of it mattered anyway. He was Sparkles now. Sparkles the killer clown.
For a while he had listened to the police radio, holding it close to his ear with the volume on as low as possible. Listening to them talk to each other, he could imagine the panic they were all in. Rushing about like headless chickens, trying to work out in which direction he had gone. But he was already far away by the time they worked it out. Long gone.
Just as they found the burning car, the chatter stopped. Sparkles told him they had trackers on the radios and they knew where he was going, so he threw it in the river along with the bag and ran across the fields. He missed the voices and the strange beeping sounds the radio made. If only because it drowned out the constant loop of music in his head.
He pressed a button on the side of the phone. He had sat in the darkness for so long that the screen was dazzling and made him blink. A coastal image. In the foreground was a beach and waves, and in the background high cliffs rose steeply up to a blue, cloudless sky. He had never been to the seaside. He had never actually seen waves or stepped on sand in his entire life. And as for the sky, well, he never looked in that direction to see what colour it was.
He swiped his finger again and looked at the icons. They looked so colourful and cheerful, but she was probably like that too… happy, full of laughter. He touched the orange icon with ‘Album’ written beneath it.
“You don’t want to look at that shit! We’ve got work to do!” Sparkles squealed, but he ignored him. It was getting easier to ignore his voice, if not his persistent music.
He scrolled through the images one by one, more than fifty before he found one of her. He was shocked to see how red her hair was. When she had attacked him, it had been dark and he hadn’t taken much notice of the colour of her hair. He had been too busy trying to defend himself.
The phot
ograph showed her at a wedding. Not hers by the look of it, but she was beside the bride and as the sun hit her hair, it sent sparks of red into the sky. It was like fireworks. He couldn’t take his eyes off her beautiful hair. It was like nothing he had ever seen...
Only he had seen hair like that before, hadn’t he? Someone he knew, someone special, had the same incredible hair. Someone he had loved. Love? Why had that word crept into his mind like that?
“Stop it, stop it, stop it!” Sparkles screamed.
Yes, he could see her face now. He could see her smiling at him, touching his cheek with a wonderful warmth.
He knew who it was now. His mum had red hair, just the same. And in the sunshine, in the garden at their house, the sun bounced off it and made fireworks in the sky too. He smiled and touched the screen until it went off for good. Then he put it in his pocket.
He looked up. Wafer-thin slivers of light like shooting stars jagged across his sky. They did little to illuminate the room but they told him whether it was night or day. By his reckoning he had been there for two nights, if you counted the remainder of the night after fighting with the red-haired police officer.
There had been noises from below. The sound of a single person wandering about a house, going about their business. There was the dog too. He seldom heard it but he had seen it before. He liked dogs but they never liked him.
He waited until he heard the sound of steps retreating down the stairs, then lowered himself out of the hatch. The house was far too large for one person to live in. It had too many unused and forgotten rooms. Rooms with loft hatches.
He lowered himself down and tried to listen for a sign that he had been heard. But he could hear nothing but the music and Sparkles whistling along to it. If you broke into someone’s house and concealed the method of entry, they would never know you had been in there. That you were still inside. He would have to remember that. Not that there would be a next time.
He walked slowly toward the stairs, holding the knife by his side. The blade was rust-coloured now. Not from the weather but from blood. It seemed to weigh more after each use, like the blood was seeping into the metal. It was impossible but that was how it felt.
