THE SOUL FIXER (A psychological thriller)

by D. M. Mitchell

  THE SOUL FIXER

  ________________________

  A novel by D. M. Mitchell

  THE SOUL FIXER

  Copyright © D. M. Mitchell 2013

  The right of Daniel M. Mitchell to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved.

  This book is a work of fiction. Characters, names, organisations, businesses, places and events are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Agamemnon Independent Publishing

  ISBN 9781484986851

  Other thrilling novels by D. M. Mitchell available on Kindle:

  THE DOMINO BOYS

  SILENT

  MOUSE

  THE KING OF TERRORS

  MAX

  THE HOUSE OF THE WICKED

  PRESSURE COOKER

  THE FIRST D.M. MITCHELL THRILLER OMNIBUS

  Please check the D.M. Mitchell Author Page at Amazon for details of all his latest releases

  CHAPTERS

  1: The Luxury of Regret

  2: Blame

  3: Weak

  4: Silas Blake

  5: Cloak-and-Dagger

  6: Short Notice

  7: Raw, Elemental Forces

  8: The Thud of the Axe

  9: The Soul Fixer

  10: In Good Health

  11: Empty Chambers

  12: A Vile, Hated Man

  13: Deliciously Wicked

  14: The Digger Man

  15: Black Souls

  16: Family Ties

  17: One of Many

  18: A Foolish Thing to Do

  19: A Private Vision of Hell

  20: Sorry

  21: Beautiful Boy

  22: Death Warrant

  23: Hell Awaits

  24: The Nights Are the Worst

  25: Rats in a Trap

  26: An Agonised Shiver

  27: Perfect Sense

  Recommended: Gordon Reid’s THE CUCKOO’S NEST

  1

  The Luxury of Regret

  He was lost. He stood there in the empty rain-shiny street, the road looking like someone had painted it with black gloss paint, and he cursed whoever it was that built these houses, because they’d built them all to look exactly the same. The more he looked, the more confused he became.

  For Eddie Hull, confusion was a permanent state of mind. A mind that fluctuated, from mildly bemusing periods of memory loss, to the throttling grip of terrifying paranoia, and all the nasty, confusing places lodged in-between. But that’s what being off your head all the time does to you. It screws you up real bad, but there isn’t a thing you can do about it. Confusion in all its guises was a minor inconvenience compared to what he’d experience if he didn’t get a fix.

  The thought that it was unwise to stand under a street lamp in full view of anyone who happened to be nosing through curtains – because that’s the type of neighbourhood it was, all curtain-twitching, rockeries and neatly mown grass – was attempting to fight through the fog of his fuddled brain, and he stepped into what he constituted the concealing but quite inadequate shadow that dappled the pavement beneath an anorexic cherry tree. There he pulled the piece of paper from his pocket and looked at it. Shit, he thought; he couldn’t make anything out. So he had to step back into the puddle of light from a streetlamp to make out his own black biro scrawl.

  He squinted long and hard at the crumpled paper, squinted at the long line of neat little suburban houses, little caring that they’d been built to house the expanding middle class in the mid-1930s, hardly knowing when the 1930s were except a long time ago. Eddie Hull had problems relating to the twenty-first century let alone the last one.

  He heard a car, but it was in the distance, on the main road and thankfully not headed down this side street. He waited till he couldn’t hear it before tramping down the pavement again, his head swinging from side to side, sizing up the houses, sizing up the cars parked on the drives. Mainly four-wheel-drives. None more than four years old. Nothing too flash, but nothing old either. People paid good money to live in streets like this, and they worked in jobs that paid good money so they could afford it; managers, policemen, head teachers, the kind of people Eddie Hull had despised all his life, all twenty-seven years of it. They had everything he never had, and he knew never would, because they got all the good breaks and he got shit.

  He stopped, faced the house. Old green door, fancy leaded glass. Brass door knocker. Spacious bay window painted in white. Rose bush growing between the door and the window, its wrist-thick stem snaking up the wall; could be pink roses, could be white, difficult to make out under these lights. Crazy-paving path. Neatly-cropped privet hedge. Large silver Nissan on the drive looking highly polished with the rain; it was standing under a cherry tree – every house had a cherry tree – and the water droplets dripped down to the roof of the car causing a strange kind of hollow drumming sound that seemed to beat time to his racing heart.

  Eddie Hull licked his dry lips and scanned the streets. Empty. Like the bomb had dropped and everyone had been vaporised, all that remained were their former middle-class trappings. He went down the path at a crouch. It didn’t make much sense really, running at a crouch. For one, there was nobody around to see him, and second, if there were anyone around they’d most probably see him whether he crouched or not, but it made him feel better to run all hunched up like he’d seen people do it in the movies.

  He planted his back firmly against the side wall, at last in a belt of shadow that went some way to actually concealing him, and he paused to let his thoughts catch up with his panting body. He was unfit, he knew that. A short walk and a short-distance crouch and here he was gasping like a fish out of water. His gran told him he’d have a heart attack one of these days, if he didn’t look after himself. Stupid old cow. She was always bleating on at him to mend his ways, which he didn’t think were broken in the first place. She ranted like crazy about how he couldn’t be trusted anymore, that he’d rifled through her bag and stolen her pension money from her purse and she didn’t want to see him ever again till he was clean and gave up that filthy habit. He told her to go fuck herself and twisted the neck of her budgie before he left her flat. He hated that damn budgie. So fucking cheerful all the time.

  The lock on the back door was easy to bust. Some of these people were so confident their smug little middle-class world would not be violated that their locks were some of the oldest in town. Some probably came with the original build. Whatever, he gave a satisfied smirk as the lock gave way and he pushed open the door. He paused on the threshold, just in case there’d been a burglar alarm set, but it remained silent, except for the faint hum of a refrigerator, which clicked off as he entered, almost as if it had sensed him being there and was holding its breath.

  There was a smell of cooking in the air. Curry, maybe. Something spicy. The worktops were clean and tidy, everything in its place, not a thing left out to clutter it up – no cutlery, no dirty plates, no pots and pans, nothing. Not like in his flat. He couldn’t see the sink for soiled pots that had been sitting there untold days, discarded empty cartons and cardboard wrappers, and polystyrene trays covered in shitty residues of cheap takeaway crap.

  He padded quietly through the house, making his way to the living room. An unseen clock ticked away the seconds like a tired old man counting down to his imminent end. He made out a large TV screen in a corner, a DVD player, hi-fi, an array of comfy seats, framed photographs on the walls, an oil painting over the fireplace. Scented can
dles on the mantelpiece. The sweet smell made him want to puke as he went close to one of the silver-framed photographs on the mantelpiece. He lifted it off, took it to the window and drew back the curtains a little to let the light in. It was a photo of a woman and her husband, a little girl sitting between them. One of those classy pictures taken in some high-end little studio somewhere, all smiling teeth and neatly combed hair. The only photo Eddie Hull ever remembered seeing of himself was the one the police took of him when he did time for burglary. No false bookcase filled with antique-looking books in the background there, he thought acidly.

  He checked out the woman. Attractive. Worth a lay any day, he thought. Long blonde hair, big eyes, nice tits.

  He noticed the small frame had hallmarks. One thing Eddie Hull knew all about was hallmarks. They pointed the way to stuff with value. This was real silver, so he took the back off the frame, tore out the photo and stuffed the frame into his coat pocket.

  He went into the hallway. He almost cried out in alarm when he thought he saw someone standing at the bottom of the stairs, but soon calmed down when he realised it was only a harmless coat stand filled with coats. He couldn’t help but go through the various pockets to see what he could find, but, disappointed, his fingers came away with nothing. So he glanced upstairs, peered into the dark and drew in a breath that was meant to relax him but had the opposite effect. He could turn back now. He knew that. But his tortured brain was crying out for relief, for his fix, and the only way he could get that relief was to get cash, and to get the cash he had no choice but to go through with this.

  The fifth tread on the stairs creaked. So loud in the deathly-quiet house he thought even next door would have heard it. But there wasn’t a sound from the rooms upstairs, no voice raised in alarm, so he continued stealthily on his way, growing in confidence with every step, till he reached the landing, and he paused yet again as he decided which way to go, which bedroom door to try.

  His first attempt was to blunder into the bathroom by mistake, and he scared himself again when he saw a face staring straight at him, only for him to realise it was a mirror on the wall opposite. He cursed himself for getting so jumpy, and his curse unleashed his anger, at the house, at the people who lived here, for making him feel dumb; people had always made him feel so dumb and useless that at times he wanted to explode with the way it made him feel. He was primed like a bomb ready to go off right now.

  He turned the handle on the bedroom door quietly. Not a sound. Not a squeak. Like a TV with the sound turned right down, he thought. A razor-like strip of light fell onto a bed from a gap in the curtains. It was warm in here, he thought. His world always seemed cold. Even in the height of summer, especially when he shivered in a dark corner of his flat, sweat-drenched and gasping for a fix, he never seemed to get warm. Like he was dead already, a pathetic spirit wandering through the lives of the living. That’s what he thought when his mind became lucid, brief periods that cut him up real bad so that he needed to blot them out.

  A faint trace of perfume hung in the air. That was warm, too. It seeped up his nostrils and tried to soothe his brain. Clothes were folded neatly on a chair by the bed. Stockings, gossamer-thin and insubstantial in the gloom, were draped over the back of the chair.

  A woman slept soundlessly in the bed. Her arm resting on the covers, her head turned away from him. Long blonde hair flowing over the pillow as if carefully arranged for another photo shoot. So peaceful. So calm and otherworldly. As if he’d stepped into a beautiful dream. A dream that could have been his, once upon a time. A dream that belonged to another.

  For a second, Eddie Hull was prepared to turn back, to leave the sleeping beauty to her perfect, mysterious dreams.

  For a second.

  He reached into his coat pocket and took out a flick-knife. Silently unfolded the blade from its black sheath and held it before him. He swept quietly over to her, her warm smell rising from her, hearing the faint sigh of her kitten-soft breathing, imagining her dreams, wishing he was a part of them.

  And as if in a dream, his other self, the cold, shivering, drug fuelled self that had momentarily been subdued like a dog beaten with a stick, rose up and plunged the knife deep into the woman’s unprotected back.

  She started awake, but before she could utter a sound he struck her again and again and again, frenziedly driving the blade deep into her pale flesh till she did not move again.

  He stood back. Her arm was still laid on the bedcovers. Her hair was still arranged on the pillow. But she did not dream any more.

  He felt overwhelmed, but did not know what those feelings related to. Sadness? Bloodlust? The knife glistened with her lifeblood, black in the grim light. And the smell now was the smell of blood and death.

  Eddie Hull wiped the blade on his jeans and put it away into his coat pocket, replacing it with a box of matches and a can of lighter fluid. Striding over to the curtains he doused the material in fluid, lit a match and held it under the cloth till a tiny bloom of blue flame took hold. He did the same for the bed covers, sprinkling the remnants of the lighter fluid, as if it were holy water, over the dead woman. He tossed two lighted matches onto the bed, saw the flames race over the covers towards the woman’s arm. The curtains were being consumed by fire and Eddie Hull decided it was time to get out of there. But not before he grabbed a wooden jewellery case from a dressing table.

  He raced breathlessly out into the street, glancing back when he thought he was a safe distance away. He made out the ominous orange glow from the bedroom window and was gripped by that strange, overwhelming emotion again. But Eddie Hull being Eddie Hull, it vanished in an instant and it would be a long time coming back. Eventually he’d feel the prickling of remorse, like he always did, like he did when he broke the neck of his gran’s budgie. But this time it would be different, because Eddie Hull’s life would be too short to allow him the luxury of regret.

  * * * *

  2

  Blame

  It was the night Susan Carmichael’s world went up in flames. Literally.

  Everything she knew, everything she’d ever worked for, all the hopes and desires she’d poured into her life, were being eaten by a ravenous, raging fireball.

  At first she was rendered inert by incomprehension, like she was seeing something that she knew simply couldn’t be real. Her house was on fire. Her house was on fire!

  Her instinct as she threw herself out of the battered old Nissan Micra was to run to the front door, screaming out her daughter’s name, trying to get the key into the Yale lock but missing the hole on the first couple of attempts.

  ‘Becky! Becky!’ she shouted, thrusting open the door. She was beaten back by a fireball that coughed out onto the street like a ball of fiery phlegm and caused her to shriek and shield her eyes. She did not feel the pain of the burns. The knowledge that her daughter was in there was pain enough.

  At that moment a fire engine raced up, blue lights flashing, engine growling.

  ‘Becky’s in there!’ she screamed at the men as their black shapes descended upon her, hands grabbing her, ushering her down the path to safety with a garbled jumble of words she did not want to hear. ‘My daughter, she’s in there! Get her out, get her out!’

  She made as if to run back to the door but she was prevented by the burly grip of a fire officer. ‘You can’t go in there,’ he said. ‘Your daughter – you say she’s in there?’

  ‘Yes! Stop talking and save her! Please!’ She thumped at his arm, struggled to break free.

  ‘Where is she?’ he asked. ‘Please, it’s important.’

  ‘There!’ she pointed.

  The flames were ripping through the shattered bedroom window, licking into the night sky.

  He barked out orders and men flooded from nowhere towards the house. ‘Anyone else in there?’ he asked.

  ‘No. No one else. Please, what are you waiting for? You’ve got to save her!’

  ‘Please, madam, you have to come this way. You’ll be safe over h
ere.’

  ‘My Becky!’ she screamed, falling to her knees and sinking into the soft, beautifully manicured grass that she’d spent so much time tending. ‘My Becky.’

  Anguish engulfed her as readily as the fire engulfed the house and she stared at the white-hot flames that filled the bedroom, the black smoke that poured out in writhing, mocking clouds and carried off her beautiful life, and that of her beautiful daughter, into the night sky.

  Her husband turned up a couple of hours later, by which time the house was like the inside of a furnace, the roof collapsed, the flames striking up into the air. There was a cacophony of noise and flashing blue lights, a swarm of firemen was trying to get the blaze under control, police officers evacuating nearby houses, lakes of water that reflected the grotesque light. He was told that his wife had been taken to hospital and that it was possible his daughter was dead.

  Like his wife, Paul Carmichael, dragged from his hotel bed by an early-morning emergency phone call, and hurriedly climbing into his car half-dressed, collapsed inconsolable on hearing the dreadful news. It was impossible, he said; she was at university. She was in Edinburgh studying sociology. Are you sure? Where’s my wife? Is she safe?

  He was told again that his wife had been taken to hospital. And yes, his wife confirmed his daughter had been in the house alone.

  Alone? What do you mean alone? Where had Susan been at that time in the morning?

  Police told him they’d get to the bottom of how this happened eventually, but for now he needed to go to hospital, be with his wife. He refused to believe what was happening. Denied the evidence of his eyes. He’d been at a two-day conference in Birmingham, he said, as if in a dream. A pathetic, meaningless conference at which his attendance had been forced upon him out of necessity.