The King of Terrors (a psychological thriller combining mystery, crime and suspense)

by Mitchell, D. M.

  She pointed to a cup of tea. ‘Already fixed, thank you.’ Her accent was hard to pin down. Not Mancunian though. Not from around here.

  ‘I bring my own,’ he continued, unscrewing the lid of the flask. He almost screwed his eyes up in pain at his abject failure to kick-start a proper conversation. The ice remained resiliently unbroken. All the best lines he’d been mulling over for weeks had been wiped clean from his head, as if her presence was like a very strong magnet put too close to a computer hard drive.

  ‘It’s Beth isn’t it? Beth Heaney?’

  She packed away her sandwich, folded both newspapers and rose from the table. ‘My break is over,’ she apologised, and left him to feel the silent heat of the mocking weirdos.

  That wouldn’t stop him, he decided. He wasn’t going to be snubbed by a young tart like her. He had plans. He bragged off regardless, both at work and outside, how he and Beth were seeing each other. An item. Which nobody believed really. But this first meeting continued to trouble him like a niggling little splinter in the finger; hard to remove, hard to ignore.

  Billy Crudd put on his hateful lime-green coat and marched down the length of the supermarket. Shelf packers were busy, and silently, opening up boxes and slashing plastic covering and filling up gaps. The aisles were littered with discarded plastic, cardboard, paper, cages of stock wheeled in from the warehouse lined up and ready to empty onto the shelves.

  Morons, he thought, avoiding contact with most of the people there. He took a detour, however, down Beth’s aisle, paused by the cage she was emptying and admired her curvaceous rump as she bent to her haunches to fill a lower shelf.

  ‘Hi, Beth,’ he said. She returned the greeting with a nod. ‘How are you doin’?’

  ‘I’m doing just fine,’ she said. Which was about all she ever said.

  He remembered how it felt when she declined his invitation to a date six months ago; there was a film showing he thought she’d like. She said thank you but no, and it cut him like a blade because she didn’t know how much it had taken him to pluck up the courage to ask her.

  ‘Another night, maybe?’ he said hopefully.

  ‘Another night,’ she echoed. But he knew there would never be another night.

  Billy Crudd went to his aisle, checked what the lazy fuckers on the day shift hadn’t done and went out to the warehouse to collect a cage of stock. One of the weirdos was standing there, looking out onto the open warehouse yard. In the distance, beyond the high walls of the yard, above the satellite dish-infested roofline, there was a faint orange glow in the sky.

  ‘What’s that?’ asked Billy. ‘Someone’s house on fire?’

  ‘Who gives a shit?’ said the weirdo and dragged his cage to the shop floor.

  But Billy thought something was wrong. He knew trouble when he saw it.

  * * * *

  11

  A World Gone Mad

  He took his Stanley knife and slashed down the strip of tape to open the cardboard box’s guts. Dog food. He hated being put on the pet aisle. It’s almost as bad as the arse-wipe aisle, he thought acidly. What you stacked said a lot about who you were here in this twilight zone. Billy Crudd was down with the dogs.

  But as always to alleviate the numbing monotony of it all he thought of Beth, only a few aisles down the store from him. All that blonde hair. She reminded him of the hot one from Abba, Agnetha. His dad had admitted to having a crush on her in the ‘Seventies.

  What Beth didn’t know was how much Billy knew about her. Oh yes, he knew some things alright. It had all started out of curiosity, following that very first snub at the canteen table. He found he couldn’t concentrate on much else; even his Big Plan seemed to be elbowed from his thoughts by her. She occupied his every waking moment, made all the worse by her having declined his advances, which instead of pouring cold water on his fiery ardour appeared to fan the flames of his obsession all the more.

  So early one morning, when they’d all finished their shift, he followed her home. She lived quite some distance away and she took him through a maze of back streets he’d not been down before. Even he, hardened to Manchester’s meanest districts and housing estates, felt more than a little trepidation in walking the run down area. This, he knew, was where all the bad stuff happened – drugs, prostitutes, you name it there was a lot of it going on here. The police came in pairs, if they ever came at all. And then he’d heard it was only to fish for narks.

  She crossed a large forecourt that led up to a block of oppressive-looking flats, a throwback to the ‘Sixties when they threw them up like Lego with scant attention to quality or longevity. He followed her to where she took the stairs, avoiding the lifts, he noticed. The stairwell stank of piss, the walls so full of graffiti they could sell it to the Tate Modern as abstract. But he dared not follow her further, not on that first night, and he crept back off as quietly and as furtively as he could. He didn’t want to hang around the place too long. He was likely to get mugged, or knifed, or raped, or all three at once.

  But it didn’t stop there. He couldn’t let it. He blamed her for the invisible hold she had on him. He went back during the day to snoop around, maybe to get a glimpse of her. Then he went through her trash and recycling bin. He didn’t really think anything of it. He just needed to know more about her. What she ate, what she read, what she wore. Who she was.

  There didn’t appear to be any boyfriends. He never saw anyone else with her. Except for one time; he caught sight of another young woman of a similar age enter her flat. Briefly he considered the unthinkable, that she was a lesbian. That would answer a lot, he thought bleakly, and was consumed by a heavy, cutting sense of betrayal. But he could not, would not, accept that to be the case. He never saw the woman again, which confirmed his feelings and lifted a heavy burden from him.

  He would occasionally go back there to wait outside, hang around, watching the flat, walking around the place in a way that allowed him to keep vigil without arousing too much suspicion. Anyhow, there were so many other dodgy people hanging around that one more wouldn’t arouse much suspicion, he thought. Then one day he struck gold; she came out of the flat one Saturday afternoon, holding a carrier bag heavy with something. He followed her. She stopped at a grocer’s shop, went into a chemists, did the usual stuff. Then she ducked into a pawnshop. OK, so they didn’t call them that these days, they went under fancy names, but it’s where you went to hock your stuff all the same. A rash of them had sprung up all over the city as the depression deepened.

  Strange thing was she paid a visit to three of them, one after the other. There were only so many watches, gold rings and necklaces she possessed, surely? And he never once saw her wearing any jewellery, come to think of it, not even earrings.

  The following weekend she came out, same time in the afternoon, but on this occasion she carried a small suitcase. At first his heart almost skipped a beat. Was she leaving? Going somewhere for good?

  He followed her and watched from a safe distance as she waited at a bus stop. When a double-decker turned up and he saw her pay her fare and skip up the stairs, he made a dash for the bus and managed to clamber on board before the doors swished shut.

  ‘Where to?’ asked the driver.

  ‘Where do you go to?’ said Billy. ‘Where’s the end of the line?’

  The driver told him and Billy stumped up the fare.

  Breathlessly he took a seat at the rear of the bus and watched for Beth coming down the stairs.

  Eventually she emerged and he ducked down so she wouldn’t glance back down the bus and see him. He needn’t have worried. She left the bus and Billy almost left it too late to leave his seat. The driver was closing the doors and the bus lurched forward when Billy said, ‘Wait a minute, let me off!’

  ‘Make your bloody mind up!’ the driver grumbled. So much for customer service, thought Billy.

  He followed her through the crowds of shoppers, till she ducked into the ladies’ toilets. She was gone about ten minutes. He nearly didn’
t recognise her; she came up the steps dressed to the nines, hair brushed up nice, face made-up, a natty two-piece suit and black high heels that she must have had in her suitcase. She went into a store simply called Kennedy’s, the highest-class cash or exchange shop of them all; the stuff they dealt with sometimes ran to the hundreds of thousands. Even those with money sometimes needed to hock their Rolex, he guessed. A higher-class cash or exchange shop for a better class of economic hardship, he thought.

  He hung around. She was in for twenty minutes or so. She emerged, went back to the toilets and changed back into her old gear. She caught a bus straight back home. Billy was fascinated, but he had no answer to her strange behaviour. That didn’t stop him speculating.

  Yes, he thought, ramming a dented tin onto the supermarket shelf, I know more about you than you know. He wasn’t fooled by that quiet, innocent exterior. She was involved in shady goings-on at the flat. Why else would she pick to live there, lost amongst the dross? She was a fence, most likely, shifting valuables for some hoodlum or other. Some of those shops wouldn’t ask too many questions either.

  It didn’t dampen his enthusiasm, it added spice. And he was considering ways he might use that information against her, to get what he wanted from her. Money, for one, to support the Big Plan. And he grew excited by other possibilities. Who gave a fuck that the only way he might bed her was through blackmail? In his soiled book the end determined the means.

  He heard the muffled sound of some commotion or other from outside the supermarket. He didn’t pay it much notice. There were many nights when drunken yobs played havoc in the yard. Slimer had regularly called in the police to deal with them when he first started at the supermarket, but he’d called them out so often they pretended not to hear anymore. In the end Slimer accepted it was what you could expect from such a crap posting in such a crap place and ignored the annoying but generally harmless incursion into his territory. Slimer, everyone knew, would much rather sit in his poky little office reading porn or trying to catch up on sleep. One word from a weirdo or two usually put paid to any mischief anyhow.

  Billy returned to his shelf filling. He was biding his time, waiting for an opportune moment to confront Beth not-so-innocent Heaney. He let the thought roll over in his mind, the way he’d roll a toffee in his mouth, playing over the sweetness it offered.

  The strident, crashing sound of shattering glass rudely interrupted his daydreaming. He couldn’t see the front entrance from his aisle so he left his work and made his way to the front of the store where the tills were ranked. He was joined by the majority of the night staff, each drawn by idle curiosity.

  Billy’s eyes widened in disbelief when he saw the seething black mass of a crowd of people gathered beyond the supermarket’s large windows. One of the panes sported a great gaping hole where a brick had been thrown through it. Loud, angry voices raged like a stormy sea. He saw Slimer up front, his finger on a large green button. The metal shutters were shivering their slow way down; he hadn’t bothered to shut them and was giving someone else an ear bashing for his own mistake.

  It was too late. More bricks followed the first and a good length of the windows simply dissolved and showered the floor like ice crystals. Slimer jumped away from the button as a torrent of people – mostly youths but some of them were distinctly older – rolled through the rent into the store like an oil slick onto a beach. They wore hoodies to hide their heads, or scarves wrapped around their lower faces, and many of them brandished makeshift weapons like staves of two-by-one timber, or long pieces of iron and chains; some of them still had a brick in each hand.

  The crowd charged belligerently, the sound that of an amplified wounded bear, the look in people’s eyes like that of a hungry snake staring at a blind mouse. Slimer, his staff for the first time right behind him, ran down towards the rear of the supermarket screaming: ‘It’s a bastard riot!’

  For a moment Billy was rooted, as if his feet had been planted in concrete blocks. He glanced to his right; Beth was also standing motionless, pale-faced, a tin of something or other still clutched in her hands. She looked at him worriedly as the crowd surged towards them.

  Stuff this, thought Billy, the instinct for self-preservation never more than a scratch below the surface. He abandoned her to find her own way out it. It was a case of every shelf-filler for himself.

  People were hurling shopping trolleys through the opening in the window and they wasted no time in helping themselves to anything they could get their hands on, scooping stock off the shelves and sweeping it into the trolleys like queer kinds of consumer goods waterfalls. Some made directly for the small electrical section, another group for the spirits and wines; a couple of thoughtful fathers, perhaps, began to stock up on tinned baby milk and packets of disposable nappies; another small group, maybe harbouring thoughts of preventing the need for baby milk altogether, loaded up with condoms.

  A large contingent simply had violence and destruction in mind and set about trashing all they could with homemade weapons. The sounds of shattering glass and tins hitting the floor added to the horrific din echoing around the supermarket aisles.

  Over the tannoy, Englebert Humperdink was singing, ‘Please release me…’

  Billy found the way out blocked. He came up against Slimer and the rest of the staff, backing away from the rear doors that led to the warehouse yard; more people were spilling in this way and forcing them back into the store.

  ‘We’re all going to die!’ Slimer screamed, and Billy, looking at the rampaging crowd swarming like killer bees and settling all over the supermarket, shared similar gloomy thoughts.

  He saw Beth briefly, barged out of the way and falling to the tiled floor, disappearing beneath a thicket of legs. If he felt the urge to rush to her aid it was quickly drowned by a cold wave of choking fear. Slimer ducked through the door that led to the upstairs office and everyone played follow-my-leader again. He allowed so many people inside the office before trying to shut out the remainder, saying there wouldn’t be enough oxygen for everyone. ‘Fuck you,’ said two of the weirdos in perfect harmony, and soon the small office was crammed to capacity. They could now look through a small window onto the madness swirling like a menacing whirlpool below them.

  Slimer telephoned the police, who it seemed at first didn’t want to believe him. ‘We’re all going to be murdered here!’ he yelled almost incoherently. As if to give weight to his predictions he saw smoke begin to billow from one of the aisles. ‘Jesus, the bastards are using our own firelighters!’ he cried disbelievingly; how anyone could light anything with those crappy things he’d never know, but they’d certainly got a good blaze going now. He waved everyone out. ‘Back down the stairs! Back down the stairs! Get back, damn you! We’ll all be boiled alive!’

  Billy would have liked to have corrected him – there was a distinct absence of water around – but he wasn’t going to hang around long enough to debate the matter. He pushed his way out and headed down the stairs. Others took his lead and abandoned their hysterical manager to his fate.

  As the flames took hold the crowd shrank before them like cellophane in a fire, gradually retreating back to the front of the store and out through the broken windows, or back into the warehouse yard. There came the sound of a police siren and even the hardiest of hardcore rioters, who’d lingered to load up with a few more bottles of vodka, made a dash for the exits, some cursing the blasted trolley wheels for refusing to go straight.

  The smoke started to choke Billy and his eyes began to stream. He coughed as he ran, keeping his head low. He came across Beth, sat on the floor, dazed, her leg bloodied. She looked up at him, her eyes cold. Well to hell with you, he thought, and stumbled towards the window. But something made him stop. As the last of the rioters tried desperately to lift their heavy trolleys out of the window Billy turned and went back to look for her. But when he reached the place where he’d last seen her she was no longer there.

  Now the smoke was getting really thick and blac
k as the blaze consumed plastic and rubber. He coughed so much he choked, and his chest was gripped by painful spasms he couldn’t do a thing to control. Ah fuck, he thought angrily. He staggered towards where the windows were supposed to be, pausing on the way to snatch a mobile phone from the shelf. ‘They’re cheap crap anyway,’ he said.

  The fresh air outside was welcome. He stood bent over, his hands on his knees, retching and bringing up bitter bile. Blue flashing lights of police cars and fire engines lit up the front of the store like it was a nightclub.

  He realised a tiny crowd of his colleagues had also gathered, drawn protectively to each other, and Beth was there, standing with them.

  ‘Is everyone accounted for?’ asked a fireman of one of the weirdos, who shook his head in shock. ‘Who’s your manager?’ he persisted. ‘Who is in charge here?’ Someone pointed at Slimer who sat on the concrete floor staring at the supermarket flames racing through the building. ‘Who is your fire officer?’ Slimer shook his head. ‘How many staff did you have in there? We need to do a quick count, see if anyone’s missing.’ But Slimer appeared not to understand a single word.

  To Billy’s surprise there was a small TV crew and a photographer already on the scene, pointing a camera at Beth and the small group of employees. He noticed she quickly turned away. At that moment there was a series of small explosions as aerosols burst open in the heat and Billy’s attention was diverted.

  ‘They’ve been running wild through the city,’ explained a police officer when Billy questioned what was happening. ‘The riots just flared up without warning. Started with a guy being shot by police in Tottenham. Then rioting broke out all over London, spread to other cities. It’s happening everywhere,’ he said, his voice slightly panicky, which didn’t do much to reassure Billy. I mean, he thought, you’d expect the police to be in control, but obviously nobody was in control of anything anymore. It was as if the world had gone mad, all order broken down, normal rules ripped up and stamped upon.