by Ryan Casey
The red light flashed, and he was prevented entry.
He started to turn away when he remembered something Dan, the night manager, had told him. They had a system in place where the code automatically rejected twice. A third time, and an alarm went off. Maybe that’s all this was.
Was he going to risk setting an alarm off in this place?
Screw it. Of course he was.
He entered another code. Again, he was met with a red light of rejection. He started to get more nervous, like he really shouldn’t be here.
He entered a final code. Held his breath.
A green light flashed.
The door unlocked.
He let go of his breath and pushed the door aside. Right off the bat, he got that whiff of dust and damp that reminded him of the first time he’d stepped in here, following Dan up the stairs above and to that awful discovery. Part of him wanted to turn around and go back. He didn’t want to go up these steps and face whatever was up there—if there even was anything up there.
But he was in, now. He wasn’t turning back.
He climbed up the steps. The further he got up them, the more urgent he became to get this done with and get the hell out of here. He reached the top of the stairs and tried the code of the next door.
That red light.
He tried again, fully accepting that the system was faulty.
Another red light.
He went to try it again when something caught his eye to the right.
There was a little patch of material on the step below him. On it, the letters: AGH’S
He squinted at the navy blue material then keyed in the numbers again.
A third red light flashed.
“Oh, shit.”
The alarm sounded. He turned around and backed down the steps, away from the door. He could already hear footsteps trudging their way towards him from below. He had to get out of here, fast.
He opened the door to the main floor and he saw a security guard opposite him.
Brian sighed. “I’m sorry. I’m police. I was just—”
“Come on,” the security guard said, putting a hand on his back. “Time to get you out of here. And you’re not to return under any circumstances without an official warrant.”
By the time the security guard had escorted Brian out of the hotel, he’d forgotten about the navy patch of clothing with AGH’S on it.
Twenty-Eight
If there was one place Brian didn’t expect to be visiting after being escorted out of Baker’s Inn, it was the block of flats at the opposite side of the road.
He was late back in work. His phone had rung a few times, but he’d ignored it. Screw it. He was retiring in a few years anyway. He’d served the police for decades. If he had an extended lunch break once in a blue moon, it wasn’t exactly crime of the century.
It was warm outside, but the flat he was inside was completely cold. The curtains were pulled to. There was camera equipment pressed up to the window. All around the lounge area, there were old pieces of footage, archaic tape. There was no television. There were no bookcases. The only form of entertainment in this room was that videotape.
“You know, you’re playing a dangerous game showing a police officer this. Hate to think how many laws you’re breaking right now.”
The man opposite Brian was called Tommy Beevers. Tommy being a rather ironic name for an obvious Peeping Tom. He was short and chubby. His hair looked like it’d been dreadlocked once, but now it was just a thick mess of tight strands. He was wearing a Nine Inch Nails T-shirt, which was too big for him, and his jeans were ripped, not in any fashionable way either. “I just wanted to show you what I saw. Figured it could help you.”
Brian caught a whiff of faeces from the guy. Faeces mixed with sweat. Tommy was a big lad, so that wasn’t so surprising. “Well, you better get speaking, mate. I don’t have all day.”
Tommy scuttled over to the camcorder, which was propped up against the window. Brian was trying to act like he didn’t care about whatever Tommy had to show, but that was a lie of course. What Tommy told him interested him very much. If it was true, well… it might just mark a turning point in the case.
He’d approached him just as he was leaving the hotel. He’d told Brian he’d seen him looking around the hotel a few times now, and that he’d been thinking about contacting the police but didn’t have much faith in them, so was worried they’d just shoot him down. Brian kind of knew how the lad felt.
“So this is what I saw at midnight on Wednesday, May 24th.”
He pointed at the camcorder lens.
Brian went up to it. “Do I have to—”
“Just look into it,” Tommy said, scratching the centre of his chest nervously. “You’ll see what you have to see.”
Brian leaned down into the lens. He saw the footage that had been recorded in some kind of green night vision from Tommy’s window. It was of the hotel opposite. He was focusing very closely on a woman and her fella having sex. “Jesus. You really are in the shit for this.”
“Just wait.”
Brian watched the couple fucking a little longer. He started to question the possibility that Tommy was just a nutter after all. It wouldn’t be the first nutter he’d dealt with from these flats.
Then, Tommy panned upwards a little, and Brian’s skin crawled.
He focused on the corridor of the top floor. On that corridor, Brian could see a shadow moving. He didn’t have to see the person themselves to know that it was Elaine Schumer.
He swallowed a lump in his dry throat. After a few seconds, Elaine drifted into view. She was kicking and punching at the air. She looked even more terrified from this angle, even more frustrated.
Then she jumped. She spun around.
Brian tensed his fists and waited.
Just as described, he saw Patricia emerge. She had a mixture of surprise and concern on her face. She said something to Elaine, but Elaine didn’t say anything back. Eventually, Patricia walked past Elaine, just like she said she had all along.
Elaine stood still, put her head in her hands. It looked like she was crying.
She stayed like that for a few seconds. It was only when Brian caught a whiff of that shitty sweat again that he broke out of the reality of the video footage and realised he was still in Peeping Tommy’s lounge, and very late back to work. “This all, mate? ’Cause there isn’t a thing we don’t know on here.”
“Wait for it,” Tommy said.
Brian waited a little longer. And the longer Elaine stood there, totally still, head in her hands, the more convinced he became that the video had frozen.
Then he saw a shadow.
The door up to the roof opened. Brian couldn’t see who was standing there, but Elaine lifted her head and looked towards that door. She muttered something that he couldn’t make out. But whatever she said, there was no denying the facts.
There was somebody at that door.
Elaine shook her head. Tears rolled down her cheeks. It looked like she was saying “It’s over. It’s over.”
But then after a few moments, she walked hesitantly towards that door. Her shoulders were slumped. She looked totally deflated. Like she’d received some very bad news.
Brian wasn’t looking at Elaine now. He was too focused on the door. It was open, and there was someone standing in it. Someone waiting for Elaine.
She walked towards the door and stopped right in front of it. Elaine shook her head, muttered another few words.
Then, an arm emerged from behind the door.
It grabbed Elaine’s arm. Elaine let it rest there.
Then she followed whoever it was through the door.
The footage stopped.
“That’s it?”
Tommy nodded. “All I’ve got.”
“What about the roof? Surely you got footage of the roof?”
“I thought it was weird, but something else caught my eye.”
“Like two more people screwing?”
“I only realised what I’d caught earlier when I started to think about it, after all the news of the girl dying and that. I figured it could help you out.”
Brian looked back in the lens. “Can you play it again? From when the arm appears?”
Tommy fumbled around with the camcorder. “Sure. Let me just… there.”
“Pause.”
Brian looked at that arm, stretched out, the hand holding on to Elaine’s arm.
He looked at the navy uniform and he saw those letters again. AGH’S. So that’s where they’d come from. That’s where they’d been torn from, whatever they were.
“There’s something else, though. Something I think you’ll wanna see.”
Tommy removed the tape and slipped another one in. “This is from earlier.”
It took Brian a few seconds to adjust. But when he realised it was the front of the hotel, it clicked exactly what he was looking at.
And when it clicked, he wasn’t sure what to feel about it.
Twenty-Nine
Brian raced out of Peeping Tommy’s flat, the truth of what he’d seen on that video recording spinning around his mind.
It was warm outside, warmer than he remembered. The traffic had eased, which meant the time for lunch breaks had ended long ago. But it still sounded like there were tons of cars all around him, honking their horns. It still felt like he was exposed, and like everyone was watching him.
He called Annie and lifted his phone to his ear, ignoring the other six-bazillion missed calls. He’d deal with them in time. He’d found something very interesting out right now.
Annie answered on the third ring. “McDone? Where the hell are you?”
“It wasn’t Bobby Wisdom,” Brian said, as he rushed down the street towards the bus stop.
Annie paused. “What? You were supposed to be back here forty minutes ago. Marlow’s going mad here.”
“Annie, listen to me. I saw some footage from a flat across the road.”
“What sorta footage?”
“Footage of Elaine Schumer. Footage of her outside that lift. Footage of her walking towards the doors and towards someone dressed in blue. Letters on his sleeves. AGH’S or something.”
“You’re not making any sense.”
“Get down to Tommy Beevers’ place opposite the hotel and have a look for yourself. There’s something else on that footage though. Something more important than anything else.”
“It better be fucking good. You’re in big trouble right now.”
“Bobby Wisdom had nothing to do with Elaine’s death.”
“We’ve been through this, Brian. Bobby’s been released on bail, but for how long? Well, until we find more evidence to—”
“He left Baker’s Inn a whole hour before Elaine went through that door towards the stairs. Before Patricia Atkins saw her in the corridor. He was completely out of sight by the time Elaine died. And I strongly, strongly believe she died on that roof now. I’ve seen the evidence. That’s how it had to have happened.”
“But that doesn’t mean Bobby didn’t rape her.”
“Maybe not,” Brian said. “And we’ll bring the sleazy shit in for that, for sure. But there’s something else. When Bobby leaves, he passes by a man dressed in navy blue. He’s hard to see from the footage. But that man makes his way upstairs, around the back, through that fire escape you were on about. He isn’t seen again. Not until someone opens up that door and Elaine follows him right into it. And, oh. The guy takes the underwear from Bobby’s pocket. There’s that, too.”
Annie paused. Brian could hear someone having a go in the background. “We’ll check the Tommy Beevers thing out. But seriously mate, you need to get back here.”
“I can’t do that.”
“What? You have to do that. There’s no way around it.”
Brian stuck a thumb out and signalled for the bus. “I have to speak to Bobby.”
“Wait. You don’t—”
“I have to speak to him and I have to find out about that guy. About whether he got a good look at him. He said he heard someone else in the bathroom when Elaine was in there. It can’t have been this guy because this guy only showed up later. But there’s a chance it was this guy Elaine was speaking to on the phone. But if he can give me anything else, he might be able to help.”
“You’re flying too close to the fucking sun, Brian. Just wait until we bring him in. Wait before you go rushing into questioning him.”
Brian stood at the front of the bus and held on to a metal pole as he was driven in the direction of Bobby Wisdom’s house. “I tried calling him, Annie.”
“You did what?”
“I tried calling him. I left messages. I can’t get hold of him.”
“He’s hardly going to just answer to you, is he?”
“I have a bad feeling about all this,” Brian said. “And I’ve been in this job long enough to know when it’s worth chasing up bad feelings.”
“You’re breaking procedure, Brian. Think about how this makes us look in the press. Releasing a rapist then using him for evidence in the same case? Paying him friendly visits? Just imagine what’ll happen if the Lancashire News get wind of this.”
Brian smiled. “Honestly, I stopped giving a shit about the Lancashire News a long time ago.”
He cancelled the call and held his breath as the bus took him in the direction of Bobby Wisdom’s house.
It took him forty minutes to get to Bobby Wisdom’s.
The journey was usually just fifteen minutes, but roadworks had slowed his trip right down. He’d considered getting out and just giving up. He’d tried Bobby again a few times, but no answer. He didn’t like that. He needed Bobby alive because he might be able to help. He’d seen the man ask Bobby something—for a light, presumably—then Bobby had handed him one.
Then he’d seen the man take the underwear from Bobby’s pocket and walk inside the hotel.
Brian hopped off the bus and jogged down towards Bobby’s house. He lived in a decent little spot, in all truth. Just outside the village of Broughton on the crossroads opposite the pub. The houses were quaint, and there were always cars stuck in the traffic parked right outside, which must’ve been irritating. But Bobby had done alright for himself.
Brian knocked. “Bobby. It’s Brian. Brian McDone. I… I just want to talk.”
No answer.
Brian knocked again. “Seriously, Bobby. I think I might be able to help you. I know you didn’t… I know you didn’t kill Elaine.”
Brian heard something then. The clinking of a plate inside. Rustling. Someone struggling.
Brian banged harder against the door. “Bobby!”
He reached for the handle out of reaction more than anything.
The door opened.
Brian pushed it aside slowly. He didn’t want to go in here without permission. But he was worried about Bobby. If he thought he might be put down again, then he might do something stupid. He’d already tried to kill himself three times in the past when he was inside, according to records. He’d even held up an entire motorway once, threatening to jump off it.
But when Brian looked across Bobby’s lounge, he didn’t see him swinging from a rope. He didn’t see him lying there, wrists slit, eyes open wide.
Instead, he saw Bobby sitting on his sofa.
Blood pooled out of his lips. In his chest, there was a knife. Across the rest of his body, there were tonnes of knife wounds. He looked like he’d been pierced like the plastic film on the top of a ready meal.
Standing over him, there was a man.
He was tattooed all over. Muscular. Very well built, with a shaven head. He didn’t look like he was budging.
“He deserved it,” the man said. “For what he did. He deserved it.”
The man spat at Bobby.
Bobby gargled up a phlegmy blob of blood.
The light faded from his eyes.
Thirty
Brian might’ve been a dad for over a decade now, and he might
be raising a new kid, but meals out that involved his two-year-old son would never not be nightmarishly bad.
It was lunchtime. Two days had passed since Brian discovered Bobby Wisdom dead—murdered, in fact—in his home. He’d been suspicious at first, wondering why the guy was standing over him with a knife. He’d been curious whether it had anything to do with Elaine Wisdom’s murder. But it turned out the guy who killed Bobby was just a general shit. He’d done time in the past, and he’d do it again. Before he murdered Bobby, he went on Facebook professing that he’d get “justice” for the “nonce’s actions,” presumably referring to the information the media kindly leaked about Bobby Wisdom’s past.
Bobby was a dreg. No doubt about that.
But he wasn’t Elaine’s killer. And he might’ve been able to give Brian a description of Elaine’s killer. So for that reason, his murder left a very bitter taste in Brian’s mouth.
“Are you going to help me chop up Sam’s food or are you just gonna sit there and gawp out the window?”
Brian looked around. At the opposite side of the pub table to him, Hannah sat with Sam on her knee. She was trying to scoop some weird looking mush into his mouth, but he wasn’t having any of it. Brian couldn’t exactly blame him. It didn’t look the most appetising grub. “Sorry. Pass me the spoon. Let’s see what Daddy can do.”
Brian scooped up some of the food and swirled it around in the air like it was an airplane heading for Sam’s mouth.
Sam just stared at it as it approached. When the tip of the spoon touched his lips, Sam just butted his little head against it, knocking the spoon from Brian’s hands and all over Hannah’s black skirt. “Don’t want!”
“Brian,” she said.
“Sorry. The airplane thing used to always work with Davey. Kids must be more tuned in these days. iPads and that.”
As Hannah wiped the fallen food from her skirt, Brian found himself staring out of the window again. The pub they were in was quiet and homely, and there was that amazing smell of freshly laid carpet. Brian had demolished a good lunch of vegetarian sausages, mash and gravy, and he was all ready for his caramelised apple pie and custard.
