The King of Terrors

home second. You got that? Billy, listen up, this is important! You got that?’

‘Yeah, I got it,’ he snivelled, wiping his nose on his sleeve.

‘I’m your friend, Billy. Didn’t I just save your arse back there? So you gotta trust me. You got that? Trust me.’

Billy swallowed, nodded dumbly. The car sped down the deserted streets into the night.

15

Silent Scream

These sorts of places were hell during the day, but at night they were something else. A stinking maze full of rats, he thought, eking out a dull, hand to mouth existence with little to relieve the tedium or the squalor. Most of the occupants unemployed, most doing drugs or something worse. A foetid pit where they threw society’s leftovers. At least, that’s what he thought, and once he thought something there was very little chance of shifting it. Helped him do his job. You needed to get things straight in your head, not mess them about. That way you knew where you were.

And where he was at this moment was outside flat number 349. And the door was unlocked.

He checked again down the walkway and then peered over the edge of the concrete wall and down onto the empty courtyard below. There were voices, in the distance, the hum of car tyres, the sound of a TV playing too loud a few doors down. But, from all appearances, flat number 349 had not attracted any attention. For the moment.

He’d been back at midday to check, and though a number of people came and went, going about whatever business people around these parts needed to take care of, no one even suspected what had happened in flat number 349 the previous night. No police, no drama, nothing. A narrow window of opportunity offered itself before the law and media were crawling all over the place. He knew he might not have long. Billy had told him that Beth Heaney had been murdered, but he couldn’t rely on the word of that snivelling little runt of a weasel. He had to check this out for himself.

He pushed the door open. The metallic smell of blood confirmed something had happened, and it was strong, enough to tell him plenty of it had been spilled in the process. He was careful to close the door quietly behind him before flicking on the torch, shining it at his feet. As he suspected, an inordinately large patch of blood had soaked through the carpet almost to the place where he stood. He must not tread in any of this, he thought, sliding the beam over to the centre of the room.

He’d seen many a body in his time — cut up, shot up, beat up — and had contributed to the list himself over the years, and he knew what state this one would probably be in, but all the same the sight of the inhuman lump of flesh, covered over with a fine grey-white powder, took his breath away for a second.

He made out a torso, beside it its dismembered limbs arranged like so many logs beside a fire, and atop these was what looked to be the severed head. The whole sat in a black lake of blood.

He bent to his haunches, aiming the torch at the head, the mouth, open and bloodied, gaping wide in a final silent scream, was visible through the mound of lime that had been poured over it.

Difficult to tell who she was, he thought. But not a nice way to go, whoever. Fucking barbarians. He’d hoped to get to her before they did, to prevent this.

He played the beam of the torch over the bare feet of the corpse. He squinted thoughtfully for a moment. He rose, and saw a strange symbol on the wall opposite. He played the torch beam over it. A circle in black paint, a cross in the centre, a star in the middle of it all. His eyes narrowed. The circle turned out to be a snake or something, eating its own tail. Fucking barbarians, he thought again.

He edged around the room, avoiding any of the blood, careful not to touch anything, not to brush against the blood-spattered furniture and walls. His gloved hand pushed open one of the two bedroom doors revealing an unmade bed, a cheap, chipboard cabinet at its side, a chest of drawers — an ancient-looking thing, dark varnished wood and probably 1930s. He went over to the drawers first, going through them one by one. Cheap women’s clothing — T-shirts, underwear, a jersey. Precious little. Hardly enough to support a life. This place was temporary, he thought, a stopping-off place. To where, he wondered?

The cabinet yielded nothing except a plastic alarm clock which had stopped at ten thirty-four. He lifted the mattress. Nothing underneath. He ran a speculative hand down the mattress edge and at the foot of it discovered a slit, six inches long, not easily detectable unless you knew what you were looking for. His fingers probed inside and he took out an envelope. He shone the light on the contents: a number of documents, including a plastic driver’s licence bearing the name Daniel Burgess, and a birth certificate for the same guy. He didn’t recognise the face on the photo. He stuffed it all back inside the envelope and back into the mattress, shining the torch around the room. By the window was a pair of women’s shoes. He picked one of them up. But on the way out he was drawn to two stylish photographic prints on the wall, incongruous because they didn’t seem to fit with the other taste in decor, or distinct lack of it, and because they were the only two things adorning the walls anywhere in the flat. Black and white photos. Coastal landscapes.

In the corner of each, written in pencil on the white paper margin were limited edition numbers. And the name of the photographer: Gareth Davies.

He took one of them down from the wall. On the back was a London gallery label: Foster Specialist Galleries, Chelsea. They would have been expensive to buy. He made a mental note of the name and address and hung it back up.

A noise on the walkway outside caused him to stiffen, flick off the torch. He stood motionless in the dark, waiting for the voices to thin and disappear. Only then did he make his move. He paused by the hardly recognisable heap of human remains and placed the shoe he’d found in the other room near the dead woman’s foot.

As he suspected, the foot was too big for the shoe. One thing he was almost certain of now; the woman lying here on the floor wasn’t Beth Heaney.

16

Learning to Swim

She was cold. Shivering. Though the room was chilled, her tremors were because of the reason why she was here. What she had to do.

She found her mind shooting back to when he was little, her Billy, though in truth she hated it when everyone called him Billy. His name was William, she said, getting progressively more annoyed each time. How could they corrupt it so? It was William. In the end she gave up the fight. But to her he was always William, nothing else. Her little William.

How she’d longed — ached — for a baby. How she’d clutched him to her sweated breasts, a tiny, bloodied lump of a baby boy. But he was hers. She promised she would love him come what may. She was a mother, and he was her little boy. A bond that lasts forever.

‘This way, Mrs Krodde,’ said the man.

He had a comb-over. Youngish but with a comb-over. She thought such things were dead and gone these days. Men preferred to shave their heads entirely. It was the fashion.

There was a horrible smell in the room. A sharp, chemical smell that prickled the nostrils and made her feel nauseous.

He was lovely till he was twelve years old, she thought. His mother could do no wrong. He worshipped her. He loved that. My William, she’d tell him, and he’d respond by kissing her on the cheek. Then all that fizzled away when he became a teenager and it never came back. One moment a sweet puppy; the next a snarling hound you couldn’t put your hand near. She could just about put up with the cold shoulder from her husband — there’d been no fire in that particular oven for years — but not from her William. It cut her up.