A young lad met them outside. Loosely knotted tie, shiny shoes. Bright, eager.
Linzi turned to Maddox. “Are you thinking of moving?”
“It’s bigger and it’s cheap.”
Linzi smiled stiffly. They followed the agent up the stairs. He unlocked the interior door and launched into his routine. Maddox nodded without listening as his eyes greedily took everything in, trying to make sense of the flat, to match what he saw to the published photographs. It didn’t fit.
“The bathroom’s gone,” he said, interrupting the agent.
“There’s a shower room,” the boy said. “And a washbasin across the hall. An unusual arrangement.”
Nilsen had dissected two bodies in the bathroom.
“This is a lovely room,” the agent said, moving to the front of the flat.
Maddox entered the room at the back and checked the view from the window.
“At least this is unchanged,” he said to Linzi, who had appeared alongside.
“What do you mean?”
He looked at her and realized what he’d said.
“This flat’s all different. I’ve seen pictures of it.”
The story came out later, back at Maddox’s place.
“You took me round Dennis Nilsen’s flat?”
He turned away.
“You didn’t think to mention it first? You thought we might live there together? In the former home of a serial killer? What the fuck is wrong with you?”
“It’s cheap,” he said, to the closing door.
He watched from the window as she ran off towards West Green Road. He stayed at the window for a time and then pulled down the ladder and went up into the loft. He pulled up the ladder and closed the trap door. He opened the big brown suitcase. It was like getting a fix. He studied the dimensions of the suitcase. It was not much smaller than Tony Mancini’s trunk.
Christine was at work. Maddox read a note she’d left in the kitchen: “We need milk and bread.”
He went into the living room and took down the Hellraiser DVD from the shelf. Sitting in the car with Jack outside the house on Dollis Hill Lane, Maddox had noticed something not quite right about the windows on the second floor. They were new windows and set in two pairs with a gap between them, but that wasn’t it. There was something else and he didn’t know what. He fast-forwarded until the exterior shot of Julia leaving the house to go to the bar where she picks up the first victim. The second-floor window comprised six lights in a row. For some reason, when rebuilding the house, they’d left out two of the lights and gone with just four, in two pairs. But that wasn’t what was bothering him.
He skipped forward. He kept watching.
Frank and Julia in the second-floor room, top of the house. She’s just killed the guy from the bar and Frank has drained his body. Julia re-enters the room after cleaning herself up and as she walks towards the window we see it comprises four lights in a row. Four windows. Four windows in a row. Not six. Four.
Maddox wielded the remote.
Looking up at the house as Julia leaves it to go to the bar. Second floor, six windows. Inside the same room on the second floor, looking towards the windows. Four, not six.
So what? The transformation scenes, which take place in that second-floor room at the front of the house, weren’t shot on Dollis Hill Lane. Big deal. That kind of stuff would have to be done in the studio. The arrival of the Cenobites, the transformation of Frank, his being torn apart. It wasn’t the kind of stuff you could shoot on location. But how could they make such a glaring continuity error as the number of lights in a window? Six from outside, four from within. It couldn’t be a mistake. It was supposed to mean something. But what?
“Daddy?”
Maddox jumped.
“What is it, Jack?”
“What are you watching?”
Maddox looked at the screen as he thought about his response.
“This film, the one shot in that house.”
“The house with the windows?”
“Yes.”
“Why is it important?”
“I don’t know. No, I do know.” His shoulders slumped. “I don’t know. Maybe it’s not.”
He drove to the supermarket. Jack was quiet in the back. They got a trolley. Maddox stopped in front of the newspapers. He looked at the Independent. Although he’d first met Christine on the Independent arts desk, it wasn’t until they bumped into each other some years later, when they were both freelancing on TV listings magazines at IPC, that they started going out. Although they were equals at IPC, Christine had routinely rewritten his headlines at the Independent and while he pretended it didn’t still rankle, it did. Not the best basis for a relationship, perhaps. Then a permanent position came up on TV Times, and they both went for it, but Christine’s experience counted. They decided it wouldn’t affect things, but agreed that maybe Maddox should free himself of his commitments at IPC. He said he had a book he wanted to write. Together they negotiated an increasingly obstacle-strewn path towards making a life together. If they stopped and thought about it, it didn’t seem like a very good idea, but neither of them had a better one.
Maddox looked around to check that Jack was still in tow, then moved on.
He stood silently in cold meats, swaying very gently.
“Gone,” he said quietly. “All gone. Disappeared.”
“What, Daddy? What’s gone?”
“Wait there, Jack. I’ll be back. Don’t move.”
He walked to the end of the aisle and turned the corner. He walked to the end of the next aisle and then the next, looking at the items on the shelves, familiar brands, labels he’d seen a thousand times. All meaningless. He recognised nothing. What was he looking for? Bread and milk? Where were they? He couldn’t remember. He went back to where he’d left the trolley. It was there, but Jack wasn’t.
He looked up and down the aisle. The brand names that had meant nothing to him a moment ago now leapt out at him, shouting, screaming for attention. It was as if the two sides of the aisle had suddenly shifted inward. Jack was nowhere to be seen.
“Jack!”
Maddox ran to the end of the aisle and looked both ways. He looked up the next aisle, then up the next and the one after. He kept calling Jack’s name. Shoppers stopped and stared, but Maddox moved faster and shouted louder. He looked at the line of tills and wondered if Jack had gone that way. He could already be out of the store, wandering around the car park, about to be run over or abducted. He told himself to calm down, that he would find him, but at the same time another voice suggested that sometimes the worst thing imaginable did happen. It had before, after all. Would this be the next case heard about on the news? A half-page in the paper. London man loses child in supermarket. Brian Maddox, 42, took his eyes off his son for one moment and he was gone. But he hadn’t taken his eyes off him for just one moment. He’d gone to the next aisle, or the one after. He’d gone away. He could have been gone five minutes. Ten, fifteen.
“Jack!”
“Sir?”
A young lad, a shelf stacker, was standing in front of him. Maddox told him his son had disappeared. The shelf stacker asked for a description. Maddox gave him one and the lad said he would start from the far end of the store and advised Maddox to start from the other. They would meet in the middle and most likely one of them would have found Jack. Maddox did as he was told and neither of them found Jack. Maddox was short of breath, dry in the mouth, his chest rising and falling, unbearable pressure being exerted on his temples. He could no longer call out Jack’s name without his voice breaking. More staff were on hand now. They took Maddox’s arms and led him to an office where he was sat down and given a drink of water.
“Maybe the boy’s with his mother?” someone suggested.
Maddox shook his head.
“Do you have a number for her?”
Maddox produced Christine’s number. He was dimly aware of a phone call being made. The office was full of people. Managers, security
, cashiers. They swopped remarks, observations. Some expressions hardened. “What did she say?” a voice asked. “There is no son,” another one answered. “No kids at all, apparently.” A security guard replayed videotape on a monitor. Grainy, vivid. Maddox entering the store on his own with a trolley. Standing in front of the newspapers, on his own. Leaving the trolley in cold meats. No unattached children.
They gave Maddox another glass of water while waiting for the police to arrive. The store didn’t want to press charges. “What would be the point?” Maddox was free to go. “Has this happened before?” Shake of the head. “If it were to happen again, the store would have to consider taking action . . . Very upsetting for other shoppers . . . You will see someone?”
Maddox sat in the car park, behind the wheel of the car. He hadn’t got what he’d come for. The milk and the bread. Maybe it didn’t matter any more. He sat in the car for a long time and only turned the key in the ignition when he realized the sky over central London was beginning to get dark.
He didn’t go to the house. He didn’t imagine Christine would be there, but it was kind of irrelevant either way. Instead, he drove to South Tottenham. He drove through the top of the congestion charge zone. It didn’t matter any more. It was rush hour. It took an hour and a half to get to N15. The street door was open. He walked up, entered the flat. Thump-thump-thump from downstairs. He took out his phone and sent a text message, then stood by the window for a while watching the street. He left the phone on the window ledge and pulled down the ladder and climbed into the loft, retrieving the ladder and closing the trap door behind him. Stooping, he walked over to the suitcase, which smelled strongly of formalin. He knelt in front of it for several minutes, resting his hands on the lid, then touching the clasps.
He released the clasps and opened the case.
It was empty.
He frowned, then sat and stared at the empty case for some time, listening to the creaks of the beams and the muffled basslines from the downstairs flat. He wondered if Karen would come, how long she might be. He wasn’t sure what he would do when she arrived.
Slowly, he rose, then lowered the upper half of his body into the case, folding his legs in afterwards. Inside the case, the smell of formalin was very strong. He stared at the pine beams, the cobwebs, the shadows clinging to the insulating material. He could still faintly hear his neighbour’s loud music, which Karen had been unable to hear, and then, rising above it, the clear and unmistakeable chime of his phone, down in the flat, announcing the arrival of a text message. He started to uncurl his body and the lid of the case fell forward.
He had twisted his body far enough that the hump of his shoulder caught the closing lid.
He climbed out and lay down next to the suitcase.
A minute later his phone chimed a reminder.
He thought about Linzi. Linzi had been good for him, until things went bad. He wondered where she was. He looked at the empty suitcase again and plucked a long fine strand of fair hair from the lining. He thought about Karen and her need, unacknowledged, to be looked after. He remembered how vulnerable Linzi had seemed when he saw her for the first time.
Karen would be along soon. Probably. She hadn’t let him down yet.
He still had options.
THE LAST KAYFABE
Ray Banks
Don’t matter what city you’re in, what town. Three hundred days a year on the road, you could be in Shitsville, Ohio or New York fuckin’ city. All it looks to you is another hotel room charging ten dollars for a stubby bottle of beer. Outside, you got the same old shit too: drizzle throwing a mist over the streets and their barred-up liquor stores. And you know if there’s a place with Martin Luther King’s name on it, that’s where you’re gonna score.
“That time you fucked up New Jack,” says Monty. “That for real?”
They don’t always recognize me. This one can’t believe a white boy pinned a former bounty hunter with four justifiables. I stare at him, wish he’d move his ass and hand over the fuckin’ dimes.
“No,” I say. “Wasn’t for real.”
“Any of that shit for real?”
Shake my head. Apart from the blood. The blood was real. The pain. Shit, you wanna talk pain, we can talk pain. I got a constant steel-band ache across the back of my neck thanks to a guitar broke over my head by an Elvis-looking motherfucker called himself The Honky Tonk Man. Then Hardcore, list it out: second-degree burns on my hands and arms; been spiked so many times with barb wire I lost count; broke all my ribs, individual and all at once; broke my sternum; eight concussions and I got a total of over six hundred stitches holding me together like a beefed-up rag doll with bad dreams.
Might’ve been sports entertainment. Might’ve been rehearsed. Bret Hart saying he never hurt anyone – fuck Bret Hart. But just ’cause you planned that three-hundred-pound grizzly dropping on your ass from fifty feet in the air, didn’t mean your damn bones didn’t shake and break.
“What about that time – shit, musta been ten years ago – you was on RAW—”
“Your name’s Monty, right?”
“Yeah.”
“Just making sure, ’cause your man up the way there, he told me I should come down here and get the shit from Monty. Now I gave him the money, but you ain’t given me shit but an interview. So how about we turn off the fuckin’ Biography Channel and do some business?”
Run the numbers: work twenty-seven days out the month, twice daily on the weekends. Nine airplane connections a week. Adds up to a couple dimes a day. In the way-back, I didn’t know a jobber who didn’t pop, snort, guzzle or spike. Pills for the pain, drink or tie off to sleep, snort to wake and grapple. Better living through chemistry, and mine came boulder-shaped.
Beat those old memories like dust from a rug. No good for me in the here and now.
“You give the money to Leon?” says Monty.
I point at a stringy guy who looks like he’s trying to shit his pants slowly. “That Leon? ’Cause that’s the motherfucker got my money.”
Monty nods. “That’s Leon.”
“Then we’re all acquainted.”
“How much you give him?”
I squint at him. He’s stalling. “What’s the problem, Monty?”
“Ain’t no problem at all, man.”
Except he’s looking over my fuckin’ shoulder.
I turn, get the picture in Hi-Def.
Leon’s quit shifting his weight, coming down on me full-bore. Got this crazy-ass chimp face on him, grin to grimace, like he’s playing heel in his own private smackdown. Hands outstretched, but I knock the lunge out of him. Grab his head, bring it to mine solid – stamp the sidewalk as I do, force of habit. Another collision, Leon totters back. Reach for his skull, grab what I can of his hair. Adjust the tape on my fingers, sneak the razor out.
In the trade, they call it a blade-job. You need to sell a pillowstrike, you cut yourself. One time I caught a gash so bad, I made a 0.7 on the Muta Scale.
Leon tries to jerk, makes me dig an artery. I let him go as he squeals and bleeds like a chiselled pig.
He ain’t the only one bleeding. I spin at a spike in my leg, see something drop to the ground as I turn and grab Monty. Motherfucker’s heavy, but I reckoned he’d carry it slow. No more bullshit: sometimes you got to close the fist and fuck somebody up. I tear into Monty, drop him to the concrete. The sidewalk opens his head at the scalp. I put my foot in his ribs, then pull back when the pain in my stuck leg is too much.
Hearing screams melt into hoarse breath now. Monty rolls onto his back. A blood bubble appears in his open mouth, pops when his lungs are empty. Look over at Leon, he can’t see through the blood in his eyes. Curled up like a fuckin’ baby on the ground. Sounds like he’s crying.
I look at the ground: Monty’s weapon, the one he stuck me with. It’s a boxcutter.
Another word we use in the trade: kayfabe. Means fake. Some jobber threw for real, tried to hurt you, that was breaking kayfabe. You didn’t do it unles
s you wanted your fuckin’ papers.
These two: kayfabe fuckin’ dealers, no stones to back ’em up. Broke roles ’cause they reckoned me another crackhead cracker.
Thinking now, picturing these two hanging out with their pipe-hitting pals: “That whiteboy wrestler, Babyface – you remember that motherfucker? He came round my shit wanting rocks, man. Me an’ Leon, we fucked that boy up.”
“This fun to you?” I say. “You having fun, boys? ’Cause you want some more, I’ll stretch both you motherfuckers blue.”
Leon whines.
“That’s what I thought.”
Look at me now, you think I’m FUBAR. Lean and old, holding my fuckin’ leg like it’s gonna drop off. It’s why they don’t recognize me. Been a long time since I was the ultimate face in the Federation. But then, I was Babyface. The crowd popped at me, man. I put so many heels to the mat, I was a fuckin’ hero. Spin out a running DDT as a finish, hear twenty thousand people calling my name.
The ladies shouting: “Nobody puts Babyface in the corner!”
Got the men: “That Babyface ain’t for crying!”
Hear it now, the applause like a fuckin’ rainstorm.
And then wait for the lightning to strike. The Attitude years, hearing the cheers turn to jeers, the crowd turned vicious. They need a hero like they need a bag on their collective hip. I go up against Stone Cold, I do my gimmick – rip my T and throw it to the crowd – but they ain’t having it. They throw my T back. Faces are victims, there to be stomped. Some turn heel, some leave the business to sell used cars. I take flop on flop, pin on pin. Do whatever the bosses tell me ’cause I’m a good worker and I believe that people’ll want their heroes back some day.
The Mammoth Book of Best British Mysteries Page 40
