See That My Grave Is Kept Clean

by Douglas Lindsay

  Quick text to Taylor. It’ll take him long enough to get here, and it’ll all be over by the time he arrives. It’s all going to be over five minutes from now.

  Torch turned on, hold the phone forward to light the way, find the door, hesitate at the top of the stairs, then start heading down.

  Clayton is completely in control. There’s no sneaking up on him, there’s no surprise, there’s no getting the upper hand. Not yet, at any rate. He holds every damn card in the pack, and this thing goes the way he wants it to go. So, there’s no point in walking slowly around corners, there’s no point in hesitation, there’s no point in trying to work out angles and look for signs. Whatever’s going to happen, will happen at a time of Clayton’s choosing.

  I’m not here to solve anything, am I? I’m just here to get on with it, get this bloody awful business wrapped up and over with, so that others can get on with their lives and their jobs, and hope the women are all right.

  Sgt Harrison and Dr Brady. That’s why I’m here, tonight, right now. For them. Nothing else would likely have got me out the house.

  Into the basement, phone held up around me. The table tennis table, the skis, the old set of golf clubs, the workbench. And, against the far wall with the old cabinet pushed to the side, an opening.

  I don’t even stop to think about why we didn’t find this previously. Taylor can worry about that later, if it even matters.

  Into the darkness of the passageway. Maybe it would help if I thought of this whole stupid business as an episode of Scooby Doo. In the end, however, I don’t think I’ll be pulling Clayton’s mask off and revealing old Mr Watts, the janitor, beneath. I would’ve gotten away with it, if it hadn’t been for you pesky cunt.

  The tunnel is clean, walls of stone. It feels safe. Plenty of head room. I wonder who built it? Who is out there who knows Clayton has a tunnel leading from beneath his house?

  Did he get a couple of builders in and then get rid of them afterwards? Likely, too messy. Too much chance for something to go wrong, for people to turn up at the last place they’d been known to be working. Unless he picked them off the street.

  This is what Clayton does. He makes you think he’s capable of anything. All he might be is some opportunistic fucker, yet in my head he’s the Machiavellian master. He’s every Moriarty that’s ever been portrayed, rolled into one.

  I’m not sure how long I walk, because I’m not sure I’m thinking properly anymore, about anything. At some point, thirty seconds later, or ten minutes later, or some time later, a flight of stairs appears out of the darkness.

  Stop for a moment, take whatever the opposite of a deep breath is – that thing where you hang you head and just think, oh for fuck’s sake, here we go, this is it – then up the stairs, turn the handle of the door at the top, and walk into the hallway of another house.

  48

  AN ORDINARY HALLWAY in an ordinary home. Not too dissimilar to the one I just left. I can tell it’s ordinary, because there’s a light on, a large lamp on a table halfway along the hall. The light on here, but no lights in the previous house. Further evidence he’s just having a laugh.

  This house smells old and comfortable. I lost track of the direction in which I’d walked, so can’t think which of the surrounding houses I’m in.

  A painting of Edinburgh on one wall, one of Dundee and the Tay on the other. An old portrait hangs near the front door.

  I close the door behind me, but don’t move. There’s music playing in a room upstairs. Choral, religious possibly. The kind of thing you’d hear at evensong.

  Jesus. Well isn’t that mundane from the innovative murdering genius? The final act is to be carried out to a slow, dramatic soundtrack, like every hack movie you ever saw. Surprised it’s not Nessun fucking Dorma.

  Stand still. Is this house going to be as clean as the other, or is it possible this is where we’ll find the proof of all Clayton’s misdeeds? If that was to be the case, why don’t I just run? Get out, establish where I am, get the police round, mob-handed?

  Clayton the Machiavellian smiles smugly at my thoughts. That’s exactly what he’s wanting me to do.

  The phone pings again. Quick look at the message. It’s video, this time, and I don’t hesitate. Might as well take a look. And there I am, having sex. But it’s not with Dr Brady. This one is with her. Jane Kettering. The Plague of Crows. Me lying back, and her on top of me, those small breasts moving frantically in time with her body, and then me reaching up to grab one, taking the other in my mouth.

  I watch it for a few seconds, then click off. If I remember correctly it wasn’t too far away from the moment she zapped me with a taser. Been a while since I relived that particular pain.

  I turn and look up the stairs. That’s where the music is coming from, that’s where I’m being drawn. Inexorably onwards and upwards. The sense of overwhelming defeat is getting stronger, so that it now feels inevitable. There’s nothing I can do, nowhere else for me to go, no way out.

  This guy knows my past just as much as he knows my future. The messages he’s sending are so broad in scope, so humiliating, it seems he knows everything about me. He’s there, whenever I do anything at all, to prick whatever balloon I happen to be flying at any given moment.

  He owns me. He owns everything I do, and everything I say.

  ‘Fuck it.’

  Up the stairs, quickly now, two at a time. A bend in the stairs, then up onto the first floor landing. There are five doors off, one of them ajar, and it’s from there the music is coming. Two strides, door open, and then into the room.

  There is a small lamp in the corner, and the television is turned on, although the screen is currently blank. The DVD player screen, before play has been pressed.

  Three people look at me. Clayton to the side, sitting in an old-fashioned, upright comfy chair. The kind of comfy chair that isn’t very comfortable. Back straight, staring at me, as though his eyes have been looking at the door for some time now, waiting for my entrance.

  Then there’s a two-seat sofa, with wooden armrests, directly in front of the television. Sitting together on the sofa are Dr Brady and Sgt Harrison, side by side, bound and gagged. Blonde beside blonde.

  They’re looking at me, Brady with fear, Harrison with nothing. Dead eyes. Will be annoyed for allowing herself to be taken. Will apologise when all this is over, if we’re both still around when all this is over. Just as I’ll apologise for having dragged her into this fucking awful mess.

  The music plays on. Beautiful and low, foreshadowing Death. Out of place here. Would be perfect in my old church at the top of the town. The church that belongs in my thoughts to me and Mary Buttler, the church to which neither of us will ever go again.

  ‘Come in, Mr Bond,’ says Clayton. ‘Sit down.’ Then he giggles.

  I really look at him for the first time. He’s holding a gun in his right hand, the gun resting in his lap.

  ‘Look, Sergeant,’ he says, ‘let us not dally. You took quite enough time getting over here. We were all getting rather impatient, weren’t we, ladies? The time for procrastination is over, if ever there was such a time. We’re here to watch a video presentation. This is your life, Detective Sergeant. It’s been so much fun investigating your past, it really has. Sit down, take a load off, and let’s begin, shall we?’

  He’s smiling. I hold his gaze, but can barely stand to look at him. Glance at Harrison, who still gives me nothing.

  ‘Well,’ says Clayton, ‘if you’re just going to stand there.’

  My life. A film of my life. I’ve already seen one of the photographs, I’ve heard the stories he told Dr Brady, I know how much digging he’s done, down into the dark, awful pits of my past.

  And then the screen flashes into life, and there she is again. The same photo, the same face, the same woman looking back at me. The Bosniak. The one who died. The one who got a bullet in the head while I watched. The woman I was ordered, at gun point, to rape. On whom I lay. Who was desperate for me to fuck her
, so she’d be allowed to live. Who lay there helpless. Who got a bullet in the head for my weakness, while I, terrified and impotent, couldn’t get an erection, my pathetic, helpless, useless cock, small and limp and as terrified as the rest of me.

  The film freezes on the picture of the woman.

  ‘Come now, Sergeant, please sit down,’ says the voice of the snake from the corner. ‘Make yourself comfortable. It’s only twenty minutes. Plenty more interesting tidbits!’

  I can barely take my eyes off her, and I almost stumble past the sofa, and slump down into the chair supplied for me.

  ‘Excellent!’ he beams, and then, with a single clap of celebration, he restarts the film.

  And there I am, up on the screen, sitting much like I am now, watching TV, but with my dick in my hands. He had a camera in my television. He was filming me, in my own sitting room, from the TV. And so now I sit here, watching myself masturbate, and immediately I run through all the other things he’s going to have filmed, the other people, and I wonder how long he’s had it there, and if there’s going to be sight of Philo, sitting at the small table, and I know there will definitely be footage of Harrison and me.

  And then before I’ve even begun to fathom the depths to which he’ll have trawled into my life, the scene changes to a camera running through a forest, and it could be a forest anywhere, but I know which forest it is, I know what happened in that forest, all those years ago.

  Images flick past, one bleeding horrendously into another. Given that he started with the very worst, the forthcoming horror is not that this film will come to a head – it’s not linear, images and scenes and photographs zipping back and forth – but more its overall, cumulative effect.

  Me naked, drunk, talking to myself; me talking to Philo’s grave; Philo kissing me goodbye; faces from the past, from Bosnia, from old cases; ex-wives; me and Harrison, naked and coming together; photographs of women I’ve slept with, women I’ve hurt; my children; the recording of me suggesting to Taylor that I kill Clayton; a recording of a phone call between me and Andy, my disinterested son, Andy hanging up the phone.

  Clayton has been watching me for over a year, ever since the Plague of Crows business ended. Cameras everywhere. Phones bugged. And he’s coupled the surveillance with raking through the past, digging up so much. And I sit here, forced to watch, wanting to look away, wanting to grab him and take the bullet or put the bullet in him, to finish this all off, but I’m fascinated and horrified, and I can’t take my eyes from it.

  Me having sex, me drunk, me feeling guilty, me fucking up a case, me fucking up a relationship, me fucking up my life, on and on, one scene or clip or photograph quickly jumping on to the next, the divine, choral music rising in crescendo, tears streaming down my face – on the screen and here, sitting in front of it – every life I’ve ruined, and none more so than this one right here, in this position, having allowed himself to come to this, this utter, fucking, wretched waste of a single fucking strand of sperm...

  Finally I’m up off my feet, kicking the television, a boot right to the middle, but I’m closer to losing my balance than knocking it over, so I take a better kick, soul of the boot, and the set tips backwards, and then I lift it, pick up the set, pulling the plug out as I do it, and toss it away to the side.

  ‘Fuck! Fuck! Fuuuuuuuck!’

  The set smashes against the wall, with the final chord of the oratorio, or whatever the fuck that was we’ve just been listening to, then it settles with a crash, and suddenly the room is silent.

  Dead silent.

  Hands on my hips, head down. Eyes open, but I can barely see the floor through the tears. Jesus. Wipe my eyes, sniff, hand dragged across my nose, straighten up, finally. Turn round.

  Clayton is up out of the seat. His face is dead. The face of a man delivering the final, crushing blow. The face of a man getting a job done. Perhaps the face of a man doing a job that, in the end, was so easy there’s barely any satisfaction to be had.

  He taps the barrel of the gun against his fingertips.

  ‘How does it feel?’ he says.

  I give him nothing, except slumped shoulders. The women are no more than a couple of yards away, but they might as well not be there. At least, I think they might as well not be there. But he’s in control. Everything is happening for a reason. Everyone is here for a reason.

  ‘How does it feel?’ he repeats. ‘To be on...’ He laughs, humourlessly. ‘I shan’t, I shan’t. Too easy, too easy...’

  And now, like a fucking wasted piece of washed-up useless sphincter skin, in the shittiest generic movie you ever watched, I fall to my knees. Head down, shoulders down, hands uselessly at my side.

  ‘I’m leaving,’ he says. ‘This is an awful country. Going to the dogs. I mean, there are a lot of awful countries out there in the world, but it’s time for me to move on. I rather fancy being the outsider. Living on the fringes, detached from society. Somewhere I don’t understand the language. Bosnia looks nice... No, I’m teasing. It’s fucking awful. No wonder you found it so easy to fuck up people’s lives there.’

  I’m staring at his feet, though I can feel his head, tipped to the side, staring at me like some kindly old uncle, standing over the lame dog before he puts a bullet in its head.

  ‘Just a couple of small details to sort out before we’re done. The presence of the two ladies won’t have passed you by, I take it? You obviously got my clue.’

  I don’t lift my head, don’t stare at him. I should be doing everything I can to save them, but I feel so empty, so bereft. I just want it all to end. Clayton can win. He can have what he wants, he can kill who he likes, just so long as I’m one of them.

  ‘Obviously, it won’t take much. One on top of the other, blonde on blonde, faces pressed together, then bound so there’s little breath to take. A last few gasps, and then... well, another fine addition to the intriguing case of the Bob Dylan Murders. After that, time for just one more. You get it, don’t you? I mean, you know what we’re talking about? You understand your own death...?’

  Time slows. Every sentence, every word, is another reach of his hand down inside me, ripping out my heart and my lungs and my stomach and my everything else.

  ‘Self Portrait,’ I say, the words forced out, and the fucker almost squeals with pleasure.

  ‘Bravo, Sergeant, bravo. Self Portrait. Excellent. Still, let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Look at me. Look at me, Sergeant. Come on.’

  Slowly I lift my head. He’s three yards away. Why don’t I just go for him? He’s got the gun, and the chances are he’d get the shot off and I’d be downed before I got to him. But I don’t care anyway, do I? Right?

  You don’t care, you wasted piece of fuck, so why not just have a go?

  ‘Before you die, I’m going to do you a favour. That’s the kind of man I am. Decent. No, really, I’m perfectly decent, I really am. So, what is this favour, you’re asking? Well, I’m going to give you the chance at redemption. How does that sound? Surely, everyone wants redemption?’

  I’ve got nothing to say. I’m just the puppet, limp and useless before the master, waiting to do as I’m told. Is there anything I wouldn’t do now, just to get this over with?

  ‘Oh, I found them, Sergeant, don’t you worry. I heard you tell poor, dear Philo your story, and I went to Bosnia and I found them. I found the ones you left behind, the ones who hadn’t died. They hadn’t forgotten. Of course they hadn’t. And they certainly remembered the photographer, the Scottish photographer, who couldn’t get an erection. One of them said it might have been funny if it hadn’t been so tragic.’

  He pauses, enjoying the moment. He’s been planning it long enough, and now is his time. He has the floor, the arch villain has his stage on which to monologue.

  ‘Haven’t you always wished you could have that night back, Sergeant? A do-over? I mean, really, haven’t you relived it a thousand times? Ten thousand. When you relive it, when you think about her lying there, does it give you an erection?’
<
br />   I see the gun move in his hands. He’s baiting me, possibly wary of me snapping, and getting ready to deal with a charge.

  ‘Well, now’s your chance.’

  A smile, and I really don’t know what he’s talking about. And then slowly, his head and the gun turn towards the two bound women.

  ‘Now we already know you’re happy to sleep with the good doctor. But Sgt Harrison... I don’t know, I felt you left so much on the table when you sat together on the couch. So much potential lost. So, Sergeant, this is your chance for salvation. It has been my intention all evening to kill them both. To trap them together, blonde, indeed, on blonde. But I will spare them, or rather, you can spare them, if you do what you failed to do to that poor woman – who would otherwise still be alive today – in the Bosnian forest.’

  I hold his gaze, from my position of abject poverty, and then look round at Harrison. We stare at each other across the short distance of the room.

  ‘Fuck her, Sergeant,’ he says from my right, his voice suddenly cold, zigzagging back and forth as it does, as he plays me. ‘Fuck her, or she dies.’

  49

  GUN IN ONE HAND, HE takes out his phone with the other, looking at me expectantly.

  ‘Well, Sergeant, we have film of so much else! When this footage is used in the documentary of your life, you want the final moment of triumph to have been captured, don’t you? The scene of deliverance. Every good film has one.’

  Brady has her eyes closed. She’s crying. I wonder where her daughter is. At least we have that, at least Clayton hasn’t dragged us all so low, that there would be a twelve year-old girl sitting here, subjected to the X-rated garbage of my life.

  Harrison is steady. Good on her. Not taking any of this arsehole’s crap. She’s worth a hundred of me.

  ‘Take her gag off,’ I say. Looking at her, not him. The words could be an order, but I’m so bereft of spirit, so damned empty, they sound like a sad and hollow last request.