Sacrifice of Fools

by Ian McDonald

  ‘I’m done,’ she says, stretching locked joints and stiff muscles.

  ‘What’ve you got?’

  ‘Four.’

  ‘I’ve got three.’

  Dunbar has her mobile out.

  ‘Hold on,’ Gillespie says. The cross-check takes fifteen seconds and reduces the list to three. Meshinkan Unshevret, from South Wales, in the transients’ house at Annadale Hold. Genstevra Tolamang, from The Hague, in the transients’ house in Mount Charles. Sinkayang Huskravidi in the transients’ house on Palestine Street. Two hes, a she.

  Gillespie spreads hardcopies on the desk.

  ‘One of these is our Fool Killer,’ he says as if he doesn’t believe it can be that simple.

  The unseen hunter. The shadow in the rain, with the maser and the gutting knife of the Fool Slayer. Kids. Eleven-year-olds. Do you know what your children are?

  ‘Any favourites?’

  ‘Could be any of them. Sex doesn’t matter. It’s not like human serial killing, where it’s almost always men. Could be a male, could be the female. They’re all well-positioned.’

  He’d visited the Palestine Street house. Stood on the doorstep and asked questions of a young Shian with a patient expression who might have blown half a dozen people apart.

  They look at the three sheets of paper.

  ‘I’m feeling a little anti-climactic,’ Gillespie says.

  Dunbar has her mobile up.

  ‘DCI Willich, Roisin Dunbar. Boss, get yourself and the team over to the Welcome Centre. We’re also going to need search warrants, squads and I think three weapons teams.’ A lengthy pause. ‘Andy Gillespie has found us our murderer.’

  The NIPS excel themselves in University Street this time. Four Mobile Support Unit vans, five armoured Land Rovers demothballed, five squad cars and a dozen assorted Fords, Nissans, VWs, and Ian Cochrane’s white Toyota. The heads are out in the Holiday Inn again.

  Willich has the warrants. He divides the teams up. He and Cochrane will take one squad to Annadale; Darren Healey and Tracey Agnew will go up the road to Mount Charles; Dunbar and Littlejohn will call round on Palestine Street.

  ‘Littlejohn says that it’s highly likely there will be other, innocent, people in the houses. So knock first, smile second, say please; then sledge-hammer. But if something goes wrong, for fuck’s sake get out of the MSU’s way. Do not take any risks. Remember, we may be dealing with a stealth assassin. I do not want anyone coming back to me with no head or any other body parts missing, thank you. Got your paperwork? Good. We want to hit the targets simultaneously; we’ll go in at half past exactly. I’ve got twenty past five.’

  ‘Seventeen twenty, boss,’ Darren Healey jokes. Whistling past the graveyard. Times are synchronized. Willich leads his team off first. They’ve the furthest to go. Then Healey’s squad. Andy Gillespie demands that Roisin Dunbar take him on her team.

  ‘I found the bastard. You owe me this.’

  Dunbar tells him he’s done enough, get away home, rest, recover from the shock of the hahndahvi contact in the sacred space.

  ‘Littlejohn’s going with you.’

  ‘We want to minimize civilian risk.’

  ‘The fuck you do.’

  She resolves the issue by calling up her sister and asking her to drop Stacey and Talya at their father’s flat, 28 Eglantine Avenue.

  ‘You don’t want them sitting on the doorstep.’

  ‘Bitch. Let me know what happens.’

  ‘Don’t worry about that.’

  She sends a uniform to make sure he goes straight home. And then she rounds up her squad and they move out and University Street is free and open again.

  It’s a small, red-brick Victorian terrace house, two storeys, flush to the street, no bay. Its only characteristic is the yellow brick around the door and windows.

  It looks like a classic serial killer’s house, Roisin Dunbar thinks as she glasses it from her car. Ordinary houses, ordinary people, no one ever notices them, everyone’s surprised when they find out that the next door neighbour has thirteen bodies under the patio, or heads, hands and spleens down the drain. They were so quiet, kept themselves to themselves. We thought it was just a transient house for Outsiders, well you know how they come and go. We never suspected.

  ‘Scared?’ Littlejohn asks. He’s noticed the binoculars are shaking.

  ‘Shitless. What time is it?’

  ‘Go go go time.’

  The MSU Transit comes down the street. The squad cars come up the street. There will be two more cars moving into position at each end of the entry at the back of the terrace.

  All the vehicles stop.

  ‘Go,’ Roisin Dunbar says quietly into the radio. And then, as she finds herself in the middle of Palestine Street with an MSU in full combat gear, four uniforms, two detectives and a consultant xenologist behind her, ‘Jesus.’

  People are gaping but of their windows. They’re quitting their afternoon tea, getting up from the television — what’s going on out there? It’s so embarrassing.

  The MSU move to cover her as she rings the door bell of Number 25. A figure moves behind the glass. The door opens. She fights an insane urge to say ‘Hello, Avon calling.’

  She shoves her warrant at the Shian face in the open door. Is that bewilderment, or some other Outsider emotion?

  ‘Detective Sergeant Roisin Dunbar, Donegal Pass police. We believe that Sinkayang Huskravidi is resident here. We have a warrant to search these premises. Please step aside.’

  Pushed aside is more accurate. The MSU goes in like gangbusters. They are gangbusters. Roisin Dunbar pushes the Shian into the front room. It looks strangely cramped in the low-ceilinged, jerry-built Victorian parlour. Littlejohn’s on her right, Kev Barret on her left and there’s a uniform with a submachine gun, just in case the alien suddenly fades into the Laura Ashley wallpaper and starts blowing heads apart, but her hand strays to her piece inside her coat.

  God, this is scary.

  ‘Are you Sinkayang Huskravidi?’

  ‘I am Ounsunjot Beshedden. Sinkayang Huskravidi is not back from work yet.’

  ‘She’s what?’

  ‘Today is her late shift at Europa Hotel Bar. She will not be home until seven.’

  They are going to have to come back and do it all over again.

  ‘Fuck.’

  Her mobile rings.

  ‘Dunbar.’

  Willich. Scratch Meshinkan Unshevret at Annadale. He and five others have got together in a nice cosy little Hold and headed off down to Kerry in an old container truck to set up an oyster farm. Anything from Darren Healey? Nothing yet. Her? She bites the bullet. They’ve fucked up in Palestine Street.

  ‘Sergeant Dunbar!’ One of the MSU black shirts is calling from the landing. ‘Up here. Back room.’ She takes the stairs two at a time. The team are on her heels. She makes it three steps into the little box room overlooking the yard and stops dead.

  ‘Boss, I think you can recall Darren Healey.’

  The MSU torches swing across the room. Walls, ceiling, floor are covered in photographs cut out from newspapers and magazines. The windows are pasted over with clippings. The radiator, the back of the door, papier-mâché of pictures. Snip-pings have been stapled to the curtains. There is no bed, no chairs, no wardrobe or chest, no lamp, no light bulb in the ceiling rose. In the centre of the floor is a pile of sheets and throws, torn and knotted together into long strips and woven into a nest.

  ‘Someone like to poke that?’ Roisin Dunbar ventures.

  The torches lock on to the heap of fabric. Assault rifles move to cover as a policewoman prods the nest gingerly with her gun muzzle. She flips over the wound cloth. A gust of stench sends the police a step back; musks, aldehydes, sweats and secretions and body odours.

  ‘Clean.’

  The police move into the room.

  ‘Can we get some light in here?’ Dunbar asks. Someone unscrews the landing bulb and passes it in.

  ‘Jesus,’ Roisin Dunbar whispers
as the ceiling light goes on. The cut-out photographs are all of prominent people. Politicians, churchmen, sports personalities, entertainers, business people, lawyers, judges, police. Willich is up there, an Irish News photograph of him crossing the car park to the station. Roisin is just out of shot. ‘There must be thousands of the things.’

  ‘No shortage of newspapers in a hotel,’ Kev Barret says.

  Peter Robinson; Kenneth Branagh; James Galway.

  ‘George Best,’ Dunbar says.

  Robert McCartney, Barry Douglas, Gerry Cordon, Gerry Kelly.

  ‘No shortage of fools either,’ Littlejohn says. He’s found his own picture, a shot from a press conference. ‘If I remember rightly, I was telling the world that it was biologically and socially impossible for the Shian to be serial killers.’

  Gerry Adams. Gerry Anderson. Mary Robinson. Tony Blair. King Charles III.

  ‘Littlejohn, can you make anything out of this?’

  A thread of black scrawl is wound around some of the photographs. It looks like writing, lines of it lead off to lasso outlying images.

  ‘Shinshan script,’ Littlejohn says. ‘It’s a formal mode of the standard Narha syllabic form. Looks like it was written by a five-year-old.’

  ‘Eleven-year-old,’ Dunbar corrects.

  ‘Noticed anything about it, Rosh?’ Kev Barret says. He traces some of the tributaries back from main stream to source. ‘Look at what they’re connecting.’

  ‘Fashion mag pictures of Sounsurresh Soulereya. This one’s from Mizz. What does it say, Littlejohn?’

  ‘ “The beauty space; unpleasantness in the heart of the beauty space; the wrong clothes, they’re wearing the wrong clothes, the hat is too tall, the shoes too wide; wrong clothing demeans us all,’ ” Littlejohn reads. ‘Gillespie could give you this better. Reads like a diary of the Fool Slayer’s dream communications with her hahndahvi. Stream of unconsciousness word salad.’

  Dunbar follows the stream of jibbering forwards, explores down the narrow backwaters.

  ‘ “Muskrahvat and Seyoura Harridi accepting a cheque for twenty-five thousand pounds from the National Lottery Heritage Division to help develop their Shian Welcome Centre in Belfast.” There’s a bit torn off the edge of the photograph. And here, “Members of the Shian Welcome Centre meet with Unionist leadership.” There’re dozens of the things.’

  ‘Hundreds,’ Littlejohn says. He’s studying a patch of wall seven feet up, close to the corner. ‘Looks like there’s an order to this. McIvor Kyle and his clan are up here. Smiling their heads off.’

  Kev Barret laughs.

  ‘Ah,’ Littlejohn says unexpectedly. ‘Rosh, I think you should have a look at this.’

  The change of tone in his voice is so marked that Dunbar forgives Littlejohn’s use of her diminutive.

  ‘I think I know who’s next,’ Littlejohn says.

  Once you know how to see the lines of frenzied scribbling, the patterns become obvious. Entangled in black ink are fifty clippings of Doctor Robert Littlejohn of the Department of Xenology, Queen’s University, Belfast. Littlejohn speaking. Littlejohn sitting. Littlejohn giving police press conferences. Littlejohn crossing the road to Donegal Pass police station. Littlejohn in the Xenology Department prospectus. Littlejohn in the background of the summer graduations in the Ulster Tatler.

  ‘It seems that humans who get too close to Shian are as dangerous fools as Shian who get too close to humans,’ he says in that same strange tone of voice. ‘The human who thinks he can get inside an Outsider’s head. Kind of a perverse compliment: that this Fool Slayer thinks I’m such a danger to her people I have to be eliminated.’

  ‘Where is your family, right now?’ Dunbar demands.

  ‘Um, my kids are both in England,’ he mutters. His smug has failed him. His arrogance has come apart. He’s afraid and vulnerable and his powers are useless. Dunbar is sorry for him.

  ‘I need to know addresses, places of work. This bitch tracked down McIvor Kyle Junior and killed him in his own room two days before she did the rest of the family. Your ex-wife?’

  ‘She’s got a new boyfriend, she’s nothing to do with me. I haven’t seen her in six months.’

  ‘They take out the whole geneline. That’s what you told me. They stop the fool gene being passed down. Littlejohn, you call your family, tell them to lock the doors, stay exactly where they are until the police arrive. Kev, call Willich, get him to put protection on to Littlejohn’s ex-wife, and alert the local forces in England. Tell them this is deadly serious. Tell them — tell them they’ll need infra-red.’

  ‘Sniffer dogs,’ Littlejohn says very quietly. ‘Something with a nose as good as a Shian hunter.’

  Barret takes Littlejohn out on to the landing to get addresses and make the call. Roisin Dunbar surveys the room. It’s cold, but that’s not the reason for her shiver inside her big raincoat.

  ‘Right team, I want you to take this fucking place apart. We’re looking for a maser, and a Cloak of Shadows, whatever the hell that looks like. I’m going to have a word with Wee Lad downstairs; I cannot believe he doesn’t know what’s been going on up here.’

  ‘Rosh.’ Ellen Moran, fresh out of uniform into plain-clothes, is on tiptoes staring up at the junction of wall and ceiling. ‘Found something. Here, here, and here, and down here; there’s writing, but there are no pictures.’

  A line of policepersons forms, facing the wall, tracing lines of script. A reverse identity parade. There are fifty holes in the fabric of faces. The sticky fixers are still clean of dust and airborne dirt.

  ‘They were up, they came down,’ Ellen Moran says.

  ‘Who was up and came down?’ Roisin Dunbar asks. Then she sees it, caught in the crack between the floorboards and the skirting, a tiny flag of newspaper. She pulls it out. It’s tiny, a thumbnail image clipped from a larger picture.

  Obsessive dedication to minutiae gives her the creeps.

  She holds it under the light. A face, little more than a blur of half-tone dots. But she knows it.

  Andy Gillespie.

  She’s already moving.

  ‘Call the Europa Bar, check Sinkayang Huskravidi actually turned in for work today,’ she shouts to Ellen Moran from the top of the stairs.

  ‘Where are you going?’ Barret shouts over the bannisters.

  ‘Twenty-eight, Eglantine Avenue. It may be nothing. I hope it’s nothing, but get an MSU together anyway.’

  Who is the greater fool, the one who imagines he can get a human mind inside a Shian, or the human who can get the Shian mind inside a human?

  Stacey and Talya are pissed off with him. You have good reason, Andy Gillespie thinks. I am guilty, I am very very guilty, but it’ll be a few more years before the sight of parental guilt will be its own reward. At eleven and eight, it has to be edible or entertaining. Preferably both. He can’t afford either.

  Dunbar’s sister is pissed off with him too, but that is probably because she’s had to drive a complete stranger’s kids five miles through rush-hour traffic when she should be attending to the needs of her own family.

  ‘Can I give you something for petrol?’ Gillespie offers, hoping she’ll say away with you, no.

  ‘No, it’s all right.’

  She almost smokes the tyres in her haste to get off.

  ‘I’m sorry about today,’ Gillespie says, opening the front door. ‘We’ll have that jungle picnic in the Palm House tomorrow, I promise. I really really promise. It’ll be good.’

  ‘We had it in Aunty Emer’s,’ Stacey says. Aunty, is it? ‘We built a big house out of chairs and sheets and pretended we were explorers in the jungle and had our picnic in the tent.’

  Virtual reality jungle. He never had much imagination.

  It’s starting to rain. Gillespie herds his small tribe into the hall. ‘Mind the bike.’ They step carefully over it. Some day, some day soon, he’ll dump that fucking thing outside upstairs’ back door and see how he likes it.

  ‘I’m sure you’re tired,’
he says, opening the flat, hoping they are and that they’ll go to bed with no fuss because he’s fucked, absolutely fucked senseless, and his plans for the evening are to drink much Guinness, watch brain-drip TV and fall asleep in his chair. ‘Now, what do you want for tea?’

  He closes the door on the world, thank Christ, and is halfway to the kitchen, girls skipping ahead of him, when something makes him pause a moment.

  There’s an odd smell in his flat. He knows his own smell. This is not single-man, small-apartment standard ming. He pauses, sniffs. It’s most unusual. Most distinctive. Like musk, and leaf mould, and whiskey when the glass is dry, and strange, electric things. He knows this smell.

  Shian.

  ‘Come on girls, out, out now, quickly.’

  The air beside the door boils. It curdles, thickens into an Outsider in black leather. She has something in her hand. It’s black, it shines, it flows like liquid in the three-fingered grasp.

  ‘Oh, Jesus,’ Andy Gillespie says. ‘Oh, Jesus God, oh no, not us, not us.’

  The girls have their mouths open to speak. Gillespie scoops up Stacey and Talya and runs for the back door.

  ‘Mr Gillespie.’

  There is something pressed into the back of his neck. It’s warm and soft but it’s not flesh. Nothing like flesh.

  ‘Please set the children down and turn around to face me, Mr Gillespie. You must face me. You must see me, and I you. That is the rule.’

  He drops the girls, turns, swinging. The Outsider dances away to the far side of the kitchen in a twitch. He pulls out the genro staff, shakes it out to size.

  ‘This is against the rule, Mr Gillespie. The hunted does not turn on the hunter.’

  The children are screaming. Someone will hear. Mountain Bike upstairs will hear. He’ll help. He’ll call the police.

  ‘Help me!’ he bellows. ‘They’ve got my children! Help me!’

  The Fool Slayer swings the black nose of the maser a millimetre. A cardboard carton of milk left to rot on the worktop explodes. Sour milk sprays the kitchen. The girls scream again.

  ‘You’re going to kill us all anyway!’ Gillespie shouts, deafened by the detonation.