by Andrew Lowe
He reached out with his left arm, but Sawyer stepped to the side and gripped the forearm, holding it firm. Taylor attempted a right punch but Sawyer checked it with an elbow strike to the crook of his arm. As they stood for a moment, frozen in the grapple, Sawyer kicked Taylor’s forward foot to the side, unbalancing him, and moved in close, holding his arm firm at the elbow joint and stepping behind him, denying the angle for any counterattack. Taylor roared in pain as Sawyer twisted and applied pressure on the back side of the joint.
The girl cried out, and sprang to her feet. Price dropped the joypad and scurried over the back of the sofa, using it as a barrier. He flipped back his hood and gaped at the scene, laughing. ‘Holy shit. It’s Johnny Fucking Cage.’
Sawyer eased the pressure on Taylor’s elbow joint, but held him firm. ‘I’m not quite ready to leave yet, Ricky. I was hoping for some insight into your relationship with Darren. I think it was a bit more than a “mate of a mate”.’
Price scowled and held up his hands, palms up. ‘What the fuck, Taylor? Where’s your black-belt shit?’
Taylor groaned and tried to jerk himself forward, but Sawyer twisted at the joint and applied more pressure, causing him to howl.
Price took a wary step around the sofa. ‘You know what, Mr Robbins? Looks like you’ve got the idea that Missing Boy was some kind of angel.’ He shook his head. ‘I did sell him some gear, yeah. None of that shit you showed me, though. He was into something stronger.’
14
Sawyer woke way too early. He lay in bed for a while, gazing up at the ceiling, tuning in to the dawn chorus. He made coffee and forced himself to work out with overladen hand weights, grunting through each lift and curl. He showered, dressed and flopped onto the sofa. The wrap of speed he’d lifted from Ash at the Players club sat on the coffee table; he pocketed it, and fired up his favourite PS4 game, Bullet Symphony, a comically hostile 2D shoot-’em-up.
Sawyer jinked his way through a torrential onslaught of glowing, pellet-like missiles, and paused the game, freezing the mayhem into a flickering, static image. He caught a flavour of something, a distant nag of memory. He closed his eyes and let his mind drift, but it would only latch onto the usual terrors: the wrinkles in his father’s neck as he dug the shotgun barrel under his chin; his mother’s pulverised face; his brother, looking over his shoulder, looking back but seeing nothing.
He dialled Shepherd’s number, set the phone to speaker and continued with the game at a low volume. The call connected, to silence.
‘Ed?’
‘Jake. We’re going informal now, then?’
‘Sorry, it’s a bit early.’
A clunk as Shepherd closed his office door, reminding Sawyer of the open-plan MIT floor with its side offices and central conference room. Shepherd sighed but said nothing.
‘You’ve spoken to Farrell,’ prompted Sawyer.
‘Briefly. We’re due for a formal debrief later with the IOPC goon.’
‘It’s taken him a while to get round to you.’
A tinkling teaspoon from Shepherd’s end. ‘Probably his idea of sweating me.’
‘He’s letting you know he’s giving you time to prepare your story. It’s a domination thing. Showing that he’s all set to pick holes in it.’
‘He told me not to discuss it with you.’
‘So that’s going well.’
Shepherd laughed. ‘Did you catch up with Mr Price?’
Sawyer paused the game again, suddenly irritated by the chaos, and turned off the console. ‘Yeah. Quite a charmer. Any leads on the Hardwick murder?’
‘No. But I couldn’t tell you, anyway.’
‘You just did.’ Sawyer switched the phone off speaker and picked it up. He found his car keys and headed for the door. ‘It’s… pinging something.’
Shepherd slurped at a drink. ‘Pinging?’
‘The body. The method.’
‘And how, dare I ask, do you know about the method?’
‘I couldn’t possibly reveal my sources.’
‘Logan.’
Sawyer opened the front door and cradled the phone in his shoulder as he locked up. ‘Butcher’s shops. Hardwick owned a chain of them.’
‘You think he overcharged someone for their sausages?’
Sawyer climbed into the Mini. ‘Do you have toxicology yet?’
‘Yet?’
‘I take it Drummond didn’t fast-track it. Hardwick was thirty-four, male. Not young enough or female enough.’
‘Partially buried.’
Sawyer turned the ignition. ‘Yeah, that’s interesting. It’s an outlier. But I’d be keen to know if his killer drugged him before peeling off his skin.’
The noise of the car engine sounded an alert on a tracking device by the side of a man in a dilapidated farm outbuilding, in a grazing field close to Sawyer’s house. He took a few lungfuls of morning air and sat up in his sleeping blanket. He opened a bottle of pills marked with a green logo—three concentric C symbols—and tossed two into his mouth, then washed them down with water.
He scraped his loose blond hair back, tied it into a ponytail, and reached for his boots.
15
‘PaulX, I presume?’
Sawyer offered a hand to the timid-looking man stirring the straw around his milkshake. He took far too long to accept the hand, and, after shaking, lathered his hands together as if he were washing them.
‘Sorry. I don’t mean to be rude. I don’t normally…’
Sawyer ordered tea, and browsed the cake selection. ‘Do you want anything else, Paul?’
‘Uh, no. Thanks.’
Insomnia was a popular indie coffee shop on a busy crossroads in the Hope Valley. It was packed to capacity with morning locals and tourists, and they had to raise their voices over the chatter. Sawyer bought an apple pastry: browned and frosted with sugar. ‘Why the X?’
‘Oh.’ He coughed out a laugh. ‘It’s not my surname. I’m Paul Barton. Just… an online alias, I suppose.’
‘Is it a fairly secretive thing, the urbex world?’
‘God, yeah. There’s all kinds of politics.’
Sawyer brought his tea and cake over to the table.
Barton smiled. ‘Is that breakfast?’
Sawyer dug in with a mini-fork. ‘Well. It’s sort of fruit. With a bit of carbs for dessert.’
Barton sucked on his straw. He was scrawny and sallow, mid-to-late twenties, shaven-headed, in a saggy blue T-shirt with a bright yellow legend rendered like a graffiti tag: BILLIE EILISH.
Sawyer munched on his cake, watching Barton as his eyes flitted around: anywhere but at Sawyer. ‘Thanks for meeting. My name’s Jake Sawyer.’
Barton nodded. ‘As in Tom.’
‘The Mark Twain character or the Rush song?’
‘What’s Rush?’
‘An old band. Three Canadians.’ He nodded at Barton’s T-shirt. ‘You wouldn’t like them. I’m investigating the disappearance of a local lad, Darren Coleman. Have you heard of him?’
Barton shook his head and put down his straw.
‘He went out to a party in Matlock seven years ago. Never came home. I think he might have been into urbex, and I wanted to find out a bit more about how it all works. Can I just play you something?’
Sawyer took out his phone and navigated to the bookmarked section of the audio snippet taken from Episode Three of the Mendez podcast. Barton replaced the headphones with his own and Sawyer pressed play.
He listened for a few seconds, then removed his headphones and lathered his hands together again, swiping his palms over each other.
Sawyer stirred his tea. ‘What do you think?’
Barton caught Sawyer’s eye for a moment then looked down at his writhing hands. ‘Sounds like an urbexer. I don’t recognise the voice, though.’
‘He talks about “hot places”, “hero shots”.’
‘Yeah. A hero shot is a pic of an explorer looking smug or happy about something he’s discovered. Like a trophy. A brag. You g
et people shots, action shots. Dirty shots are where the light is low but they’ve bumped up the gain, so it’s rough and grainy. A hot place is somewhere that’s either a new explore or it hasn’t been rinsed yet. Y’know, over-exposed, fully investigated. No surprises.’
Sawyer nodded. ‘Virgin territory.’
‘Sort of. People do it for different reasons. Some love the ruin porn aspect; some like the danger of sneaking into forbidden places. Then you get all the Goon Tubers who do it for likes and attention.’
Sawyer sloshed his tea around and took a sip. ‘How about you?’
Barton made fleeting eye contact before looking out of the window. ‘I’m all about the ruin porn. I love the darker places like asylums and mortuaries. Hospitals. I grew up near an abandoned hospital, near Sheffield. I wandered around it a lot when I was a kid and it got under my skin. Sometimes I don’t even take pictures. I just wander around and breathe it in. The hospitals and mortuaries are wonderful. You get artefacts still lying around, and there’s something quite beautiful about an old porcelain mortuary slab.’ He looked back at Sawyer, holding his gaze this time. ‘I know what you’re thinking. Weirdo. But you’d be surprised. It’s a social community. We have parties, meet-ups.’
Sawyer smiled. ‘I wasn’t thinking that. Are there still plenty of hot places or have most of them been… rinsed?’ He sliced off a crusty corner of cake and forked it into his mouth.
‘Oh, there are loads of places only a few people know about. There’s a public forum on Left Behind where you’re expected to reveal the locations. That’s usually reserved for the obvious places. But there are other levels. A section called “non-public”, which is for the inner circle, and there are regional groups within that, and then a small group of super elites who keep the really good stuff to themselves.’
‘Are there tensions? Fallings out?’
‘All the time, yeah.’
‘And what about the people who own the buildings? Landowners, security?’
Barton shook his head. ‘Depends. They’re normally okay with standard urbexers, but you also get metal buries.’ He winced. ‘Sorry to say the word, but… pikeys, basically. You know what I mean. They get in and steal copper. Some of them make a living out of it. And, obviously, the listed buildings tend to be secure. There are plenty of old cotton mills in Huddersfield and Halifax, but they’re listed and you can’t get near them.’
‘What use are abandoned buildings to the landowners?’
Barton laughed. ‘Well, exactly. Not much. Some of them, though… They mysteriously catch fire. Then the owner can flatten the land and rebuild on it. The bloke who owned the Derby Hippodrome drove a JCB in there and said the roof collapsed. You get tension between the locals who want to restore, and the owners who want to raze everything and build more lucrative businesses on top.’
‘Do you ever clash with security, police?’
‘We do our best to avoid that. Some owners hire people to watch over the building, give them keyholder status. They can get aggressive. North Wales hospital in Denbigh had a notorious security guy who looked after the site. He was bipolar. Sometimes he’d be nice and other times he’d set his dog on you.’
‘And you set up the website yourself, yes? Where are you based?’
Barton smiled. ‘I couldn’t possibly reveal the location.’ He held the moment a bit too long. ‘I’ve got a flat just outside Monyash. I work for a local IT company.’ Barton finished his drink. He dropped his gaze and placed his hands in his lap, folding them over and into each other.
Sawyer kept his eyes on the hands. ‘Have you heard of anyone called Sutton who may be involved in the urbex world?’
Barton shook his head; the hand movement continued.
‘How about locations near to Matlock that could be interesting, or might have been hot places a few years ago?’
‘There’ll be one or two. Can’t think of any off-hand. I’ll check and let you know.’
Sawyer drained his cup and clunked the mug back down on the table. ‘Thanks again for taking the time to meet, Paul. Last question, I promise. Well. More of a word.’
Barton raised his head, looked around, anywhere but Sawyer.
Sawyer leaned back in his chair. ‘Devil.’
The hands froze in place. Barton gave a slow nod. ‘What about it?’
‘Does the word ping anything for you? Association with a place? Person? A nickname?’
With effort, Barton turned to face Sawyer. He held eye contact for a moment, then looked back down at his hands, got them moving again. ‘No. I can’t think of anything, sorry.’
Sawyer drove to Buxton Police Station and took his usual spot in the car park, surprised that Farrell hadn’t rented it out during his suspension. He sat there for a while, scrolling through the public forum of the Left Behind website on his phone. Photo galleries of recent explores, access advice, a long thread about clothing and safety during exploring. He tried a few searches: Sutton, Darren, Coleman, Price, Matlock, Mendez, Devil.
Nothing.
He navigated to his account page, which informed him that his posts would be moderated for a while as an anti-spam measure, and that he had access to ‘most’ of the forum features.
Sawyer looked up. Karl Rhodes, the station’s digital media adviser, approached a white BMW parked in the far corner. Sawyer wound down his window.
Rhodes caught the movement and walked over, stooping to peer into the Mini. ‘Well, look who it fucking well is! If we’re doing a shady deal, Sawyer, you’ve certainly chosen a discreet spot for the meeting.’
Sawyer angled his head towards the passenger side and Rhodes climbed in and closed the door. He was short and square-headed, with a neat moustache. As he settled into his seat, Sawyer caught a whiff of whisky on his breath.
Rhodes turned to Sawyer and grinned. ‘What can I do for you?’
‘I need some digital media advice. So I thought I’d ask our digital media adviser.’
‘Our? Let’s see your warrant card, then.’
Sawyer sighed. ‘Okay. A digital media adviser.’ He opened the glovebox, took out a crumpled packet of lemon bonbons and offered it to Rhodes, who smiled, took one, popped it in his mouth. Sawyer replaced the packet.
‘You not dining with me?’
‘Already eaten. How are things?’
Rhodes rolled the sweet around his mouth. ‘Hectic. Nasty new case. I’m sure you know more than I do, though.’ He chewed, regarding Sawyer with a smirk. ‘Keeping your hand in, I assume?’
‘Working on something extra-curricular. Could you have a look at a website for me?’
‘By “have a look” you mean—’
‘I mean illegally hack the back end and don’t tell anyone.’
Rhodes laughed. ‘I could be wearing a wire, you know.’
‘It’s a victimless crime. In fact, it’s a crime that might help to prevent someone becoming a victim of a more serious crime.’
Rhodes looked out of the windscreen and took a few seconds to enjoy his sweet. ‘Here we sit, two police officers, in the car park of a police station, plotting criminal activity.’
Sawyer gave a slow nod. ‘How ironic.’
‘What’s the site?’
‘It’s called Left Behind. Urban exploration. People who get off on abandoned buildings, factories, that kind of thing. I’m trying to find someone, and I think they might have contributed to one of the site’s hidden areas. There’s a public forum but other levels are only accessible to members with specific status.’
Rhodes looked at him. ‘That’s it? Fucking hell, Sawyer. You could do this yourself with a bit of googling.’
‘Maybe. But you could do it without the googling. Saves time. I’m looking for references to three things. The word “Devil”, and two names. “Sutton” and “Darren Coleman”.’
Rhodes took out a pad and made a note. ‘Isn’t Coleman that kid who went missing a few years ago?’
‘Seven, yeah. Do you remember the case?’
>
‘A bit.’ He grimaced and held Sawyer’s gaze. ‘Seven years. Going back a bit. I’m sorry for him and his folks but you’re not going to find him now. Is there really any point in raking over dead ground?’
Sawyer opened the glovebox and took out a sweet, slipped it into his mouth. He looked out at the station building. ‘A great philosopher once wrote, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”’
Rhodes angled his head. ‘Deep. Who said that, then?’
‘Faulkner. He meant that we tend to dismiss the past because we say that we’re always changing and need to look to the future and the present. But the present is constantly moving into the past. So, in a way, it’s inescapable.’
Rhodes shoved the pad back into his pocket and opened the door. ‘See, this is why you don’t get invited to parties.’
16
AUGUST 2010
Sawyer had to duck slightly to enter the main door of The Nut Tree, a compact café on the corner of a patch of detached houses just outside the village of Hartington. Maggie Spark sat in one of two facing brown leather sofas, browsing the newspaper sections on a coffee table. She tucked her hair behind one ear and looked up, pointing to the cups on the table.
Sawyer headed over, sidestepping through a lively lunch crowd gathered around the counter. Maggie greeted him with a hug and he sank into the sofa.
‘Got you a coffee.’ She smiled, watching him take in the place. ‘And a thing.’
He smiled and plucked a corner section off the slice of cake on a plate beside a tall mug of coffee. He posted it into his mouth and raised his eyebrows in approval. ‘A coconut thing.’
Maggie nodded, sipped her coffee. ‘Nice new place.’
Sawyer brushed a crumb from the corner of his mouth. ‘Good to see someone addressing the shortage of coffee and cream tea options round these parts.’
‘Been to see your mum?’
He managed a strained grin. ‘Yeah. She’s doing well. Certainly no worse.’
‘I tried to get you some flowers for the grave but the shop was shut. They had a flood or something.’
