Magic Dirt: The Best of Sean Williams (37 page)

But the possibility that Jellyhead might be a predator, if only emotionally, wasn’t itself ridiculous. Just because he was old and infirm didn’t automatically make him benign.

~ * ~

Arna woke him again that night.

He had come home from work physically drained. Armed with leftovers and the remote control, he had collapsed onto a couch and watched TV until exhaustion took him. The last thing he recalled seeing was a documentary about legendary 1950s pianist, Renaud Le Huy, and the premier performance of von Doussa’s “Devil’s Hand” Scherzo that had almost cost him his career. A scherzo was normally a light, jocular piece of music—but not this one. The final moments demanded an increasingly frenetic style, hammering at the keys with no pedal; its climax culminated in the performer kicking back the stool and violently striking the lower half of the keyboard with a single clenched fist. The theatrics were specifically called for in the score, and Le Huy obeyed them to the letter. As the echoes of his final blow faded, he stalked silently off-stage “like a little storm cloud”, according to one reviewer.

The crowd waited for Le Huy to return for a bow, but he did not, and he failed to return after interval. Instead, the organizers of the concert appeared on stage to announce that the pianist had broken three fingers in his right hand and was unable to continue the performance. Le Huy’s reputation as a hot-headed genius was thereby firmly established, even though it meant missing several months of lucrative touring as a result.

Hollister missed that sort of passion. It ached in him like a hole. As he dragged himself to bed, he wondered if that was how Jellyhead felt every day of his life. Was that what the old man thought of when he looked at Cloe Flavell—at the young, bright things who walked along Poison Street, carefully pretending not to see him? Maybe that was who he had been talking to when Hollister had approached him: some lost wife, a long-gone love.

Hollister didn’t know how he stood it—or how Cloe Flavell endured that dreadful yearning in his eyes, day after day.

“It’s a girl-thing,” Arna told him that night, speaking out of sleep with such impossible clarity it made him start awake. “It’s too dark in here.”

The echo of the old man’s words sent a chill down his spine even as he turned on the light to banish them.

~ * ~

He and Moir were back to normal desk duties the next day, so at least he had coffee at hand to wipe away the effects of another broken sleep. Mid-morning, his contact in forensics brought him up to date on the hunt for the Amberley Slayer. The latest victim was a girl in her late teens. Her body exhibited the usual wounds, no more or less severe than usual. As an aside, Hollister endured the story, for the fourth time, about the eighth victim, a woman as tattooed as a road map. She had been skinned alive before being suffocated in a plastic bag and dumped in a sewer.

Identified by the place a tattoo had once been and a birthmark under her left armpit, the latest victim turned out to be a homeless girl last seen by her mother two years earlier. On the surface of it, there was nothing to suggest that she was any different to the others, but Hollister’s contact ended with a rumor that the Amberley Slayer might have made a mistake, this time. The detectives working on the case were excited, he said, as though they were getting close. He didn’t know who or what to, but something was building to a head.

When Hollister hung up the phone, he felt a maudlin mood creeping over him. Everything was out of kilter. The dead girl had been just beginning her life; Jellyhead’s was in its final stages. Yet she was dead and he wasn’t. Would a killer of useless old men gain the same media coverage as the Amberley Slayer? He doubted it. And not all killers of young women were punished ...

At least it would be over soon, if Hollister’s contact was right.

“Expect an announcement soon,” he had said, as though foretelling a royal birth.

~ * ~

A patrol brought Jellyhead in that afternoon. Hollister and Moir were summoned by the desk sergeant as soon as his identity became known. Their all-patrols notice had only gone out that morning; neither had expected it to produce such instant results.

Hollister took the short distance almost at a run. Sure enough, there he was, with helmet slightly askew and one arm held by a brawny constable who looked glad to see his two superiors.

“We caught him coming out of the toilets on Crowe,” he explained. In his other hand he held Jellyhead’s dirty cloth satchel. “You might want to look in here.”

“She cries,” the old man said. The words still didn’t make sense, but the police around him certainly had his attention. He looked nervous, fidgety. He clearly wanted the satchel back, but didn’t resist when they put him in an interview room without it.

They examined the satchel in the room next door. It stank of sweat and feces, the same mix Hollister remembered from their first encounter, but worse. It was inconceivable that anything could smell so bad.

Moir used a pen to open the flap of the satchel. Hollister procured a pair of plastic gloves and probed deeper. The satchel contained some rags or old clothes, a couple of items of cheap jewelry, and a number of sealed plastic bags large enough to hold a sandwich or an apple.

“Jesus,” said Moir. “Is that what I think it is?”

One bag was filled with used tampons and sanitary napkins, dark brown in color. Another contained what looked like feces. A third was half-full of a clear yellowish fluid. The rest contained hairs, nail clippings and gray dust.

“You say you caught him coming out of the Crowe Street toilets,” Hollister asked the pale-faced constable who had brought Jellyhead in. “The female side, I presume?”

A nod. “We’ve seen him around there before, but never really thought anything of it. We watched him this time, as you said we should, thinking he might be looking for a rendezvous or something, as unlikely as that seems. He just waited until he thought we weren’t looking then went in. Into the female toilets.”

“And you went in after him?”

“Yes. We caught him levering open one of the sanitary bins.”

“The toilets were empty at the time?”

The constable looked nervous, as though worried Hollister might accuse him of doing something wrong. “We didn’t check before we went in, but yes, they were.”

Hollister nodded. “That’s what he was waiting for, then. He’s scavenging, not perving or stalking.”

“Not today, anyway.” Past the mask of Moir’s face, Hollister could see her jaw working. “Let’s see what
he’s
got to say, shall we?”

Old Jellyhead looked up when they entered the room. His eyes tracked normally as they took seats opposite him, across the narrow desk. Hollister saw nothing but fear in them, although his smell was as vile as the bag’s.

“She’ll be angry,” the old man said.

“Who will be?” Hollister asked.

“She will
be.”
There was an odd emphasis to Jellyhead’s reply that suggested he was answering a very different question.

“What were you doing in the toilets?” Moir asked.

The old man looked at her, and Hollister was released from his stare. He hadn’t realized until then how intense it was.

“She needs me.”

“Don’t stuff me around. Answer the question, please. I haven’t got time to sit here all day.”

“She can’t do it on her own. I have to do it for her.”

Hollister wondered if the use of the first person pronoun counted as progress. “Do what?”

“She’s trying to come through. I don’t know where from. She’s there, and she wants to be here. She doesn’t say why. She just says
what.
She found the way. She needs me. She can’t do it on her own. She’s impatient. She cries. She does what she has to do.”

Hollister recognized a repeat of what the old man had already told him, the first time they had met. He scribbled a note saying that he was going to call Cloe Flavell and stood up.

Moir shot him a look as he left the room, as though she thought he was using the social worker as an excuse to get some fresh air but was more annoyed by not thinking of it first.

~ * ~

Flavell came instantly, dressed in the bright red coat Hollister had noticed in her office the day before. It made her look more alive, as though her skin had absorbed some of its color. Hollister met her at the desk and took her through.

“He’s not making a lot of sense, I’m afraid.”

“He wouldn’t,” she said, her tone scolding. Her eyes were as restless as ever, nervous. “He’s a sick old man. You’ve probably scared him half to death.”

When he explained where the old man had been picked up, her lips tightened and she lost some of her coat’s reflected vitality.

“Did you steal those clothes?” Moir was asking when Hollister let her into the interview room. Some of the bag’s contents had been brought into the room and lay spread across the table. One was a woman’s blouse.

“She will be cold.” Jellyhead looked up at Flavell as though begging her to explain for him. If she understood, though, she didn’t show it.

“What are you doing here, Mister Emes?” Flavell asked, crossing the room to stand next to him. “They tell me you were caught in a woman’s toilet. Is that true?”

He looked from one face to another. “She ...” His throat worked and he hunched down in his seat like a frightened child. “People leave stuff everywhere. I can take it, can’t I?”

“That’s stealing,” she said firmly. “You know that.”

“Not rubbish. Not refuse. They throw it away.”

“Are you saying someone threw out these clothes?” Moir asked. “That it’s rubbish you found?”

“Yes. All of it. She needs it. No-one else does. Why can’t she have it?” The old man looked close to tears. Hollister felt a pang of pity as Jellyhead tried to make them understand the skewed reality in his head. “The cost of living is high. She needs me to find it for her, to put it together. She doesn’t want to be hard, but she will if she has to. She doesn’t like the darkness. She cries.”

“Who is crying, Mister Emes? Can you hear her crying now?”

Jellyhead wouldn’t meet Cloe Flavell’s eyes. “She says she wants you, but I tell her she shouldn’t. The cost is too high. I make sure she only does what she
has
to do.”

“So you’re not a thief?” Moir’s moue of distaste seemed permanent.

“No.” But the old man’s had face closed over again. Gone was the look of vulnerable fright; and Hollister could tell that he was lying.

“What about the rest?” Moir pressed. “The hair, the fingernails? Does she want them too?”

“She found a way.”

“The shit? The pads?”

“She is impatient.” Jellyhead leaned back into the chair and folded his dirty greatcoat over his lap.

“Fuck.” Moir stood and motioned for the others to join her outside. She inhaled and exhaled deeply before talking. “I’m sorry,” she said to Cloe Flavell. “This is weirding me out a little.”

Flavell nodded. “You’re not alone.”

“How much do you really know about this guy?”

“Not much.”

“His full name would be something to begin with.”

“It’s Arnold Emes. He has a social security card somewhere; I saw it once, when he showed me where he lives. He used to be in the army, I think, and he gets a medical pension.”

“Where
does
he live?”

She looked from Moir to Hollister. “I don’t want to get him into trouble.”

“I know you don’t, but he’s doing well enough on his own.” Moir took another deep breath and put on what Hollister recognized as her sympathetic face. “Will you give us his address?”

“He doesn’t have a proper address. He lives in the old line I mentioned yesterday. You’ll never find it unless you know where it is.”

“Will you take us there, then?”

Hollister added his voice to the request. “Please, Ms Flavell. If he has nothing to hide, he has nothing to fear from us.”

She was just inexperienced enough to believe it. “Okay. I’ll take you there. But only if you let me talk to him again.”

“When you get back,” said Moir, taking her arm. “I’ll arrange someone to drive you there while we keep interviewing him ourselves. The sooner we can work out what’s going on here, the sooner he can go home.”

Or not,
Hollister added silently as he steeled himself to face the old man’s stare again, and Moir guided Cloe Flavell away.

~ * ~

“I don’t know what to make of this,” said Superintendent Penglis later that day, in her office. They had just reviewed the tapes of Jellyhead’s interview. In it, the old man seemed as deranged as ever—literally, Hollister thought. But he was holding up pretty well, considering; all he’d asked for was a cup of tea, which he had been allowed. “What about you two?”

“I haven’t the foggiest,” said Moir, rubbing at her temples. “But he’s not telling us everything.”

“Faking, do you think?”

“I don’t doubt it. Do you, Wey?”

He hesitated for a split-second, then thought: To
hell with it.
“I don’t think he’s faking. If he’s not right in the head, then that’s what he is. He can’t help that. But there is something going on, yes. He is lying.”