Six Dead Men (10 page)

*****

Later, in the sanctuary of her bedroom, shunning sleep to avoid the nightmares which plagued her constantly, Madie wrote in her journal. She employed this writing ritual religiously. She had bought the notebook in a pound shop because she liked the pre-Raphaelite picture on the front.

La Belle Dame Sans Merci
, by Sir Frank Dicksee, circa 1902
the inscription on the inside of the cover told her. Every 20 or so pages the notebook had a new picture. Something in these images appealed to Madie. They spoke of a world beyond the ugliness she felt was beginning to overwhelm her. Besides the picture on the front cover another of Madie’s favourites was The Lady of Shalott. When she first saw this print the woman seemed so at peace with her tapestry, but the closer Madie looked the more she sensed the isolation and loneliness of the depicted figure. Often Madie would stare at the picture and feel she was that woman trapped in the tower.

From the pound shop she had also bought a set of scented gel pens which smelled nothing like the scent they claimed to be, but Madie liked the lurid colours of them. She always used a different colour for a new entry. Tonight it was Andrew’s turn. She chose the acid green pen from the pot on her tiny bedside table and wrote steadily till her eyelids began to flutter and she could scarcely see the page.

Andrew was nice. Only met him the once. He told me I could get into modelling. Didn’t really believe him. Even I know I’m way too short. But he was interested in what I had to say. Listened to me. I think I even talked about college. Brendan gave me one almighty lecture about him on the way to that party. Had to remind him I was older than he was and didn’t need looking after. Besides, everybody else was there. I was in no danger whatsoever.

But Luis had to spoil everything. Kept insisting Andrew had spiked my drink. Ridiculous, just because he caught us kissing...

So stupid. Something so simple and that’s how I did it. Andrew wanted to kiss me and I let him. And now he’s...
Reminded of the reason for her exile Madi couldn’t continue. She curled herself into a foetal position around the journal, her hand still clutching the supposedly lime scented pen in a death-like grip. Unhappy thoughts raged through her mind till mental exhaustion finally pushed her into sleep.

Every night she wrote a little more about what she remembered of each of her victims. And each night she tried to ascertain why this was happening to her. And each night she failed to find an answer. And in the coldest hours before the dawn, without fail, she woke in a trembling sweat from yet another nightmare. Robert Deed regularly featured in these dreams of terror.
What if I’ve killed him? O God! I don’t want him to be dead. But if he was alive he’d come and find me.

He was the one person Madie thought of constantly but never wrote about in her journal. If she wrote about him then it would mean that like the others he was dead. She didn’t want him to be dead. She really needed him to be alive. So many times she imagined him tracking her down, knocking on her door and wrapping her in his arms, telling her everything would be just fine. But then the day dream would dissolve and Madie would remind herself of the look she had seen on his face that day at Manchester Piccadilly and how impossible it was for him to want to help her make everything right again.
Stupid, stupid woman. How could any man love you knowing what you are?
Because if by some miracle she hadn’t managed to kill him, Madie had no doubt Robert Deed knew exactly what she was. And this was why she would never see him standing outside her door, ever.

“Come on, come on, I know you’ll be in the crowd somewhere.” Ire checked the surveillance video again. He watched the pedestrians in the scene and scanned their faces for the one he was certain would be there. “Aha, there you are my beauty.”

He was looking at footage the Drug Squad had been gathering for months now. It seemed that just as soon as they were about to effect a major raid their main suspect would go missing and then turn up dead. They had passed the tapes onto him because he had a reputation for being able to identify every scumbag that had ever walked the streets of Manchester and Salford. In the course of this Ire noticed a petite young girl who always appeared a day before the suspect disappeared.
You certainly get around
. He decided there and then he was going to have to check out the young woman.

Now he picked up the phone and dialled a number from memory. “Are your guys still doing that surveillance in Salford?”

“Yeah we are, but we’re getting pretty frustrated. We need to make some major busts soon.”

Ire zoomed in on the figure of the woman on his screen. “Look, I’m checking out that spate of scumbag deaths you asked me to look at and I think I have a lead.”

“That would be good. We just found another body in the canal.”

Several images of the woman now filled Ire’s screen. “Who was it?”

“We’re still waiting for confirmation but we think it’s Billy Saunders.”

Ire chose one of the images which showed the woman’s features clearly. “Isn’t he Dingo’s enforcer?”

“That’s the one. And if the squished up mess we dragged out of the canal is Saunders then it must have been some serious fucker who got him.”

“Yeah right.” Done with his crop and zoom job, Ire pressed the attach button on his email. “Okay, I’m e-mailing you a still of a young woman. See if she turns up on any of your more recent footage and let me know.”

“Thanks, we’ll put a tag on her and see what we can find out.”

“Keep me updated with what you find Brian.” Ire replaced the receiver before Brian could reply and turned his attention back to the picture of the woman. There was something mesmerizing about her.
By God! You're a bit of alright my girl. Would be a shame if you’re involved in these deaths. But let’s find you and then, who knows, maybe you and I can link up. I bet you’re willing to do all sorts of things to a man.

He licked his forefinger and touched it to the frozen image of the young woman’s face. As he did so he made a sizzling sound between his teeth.

Madie made her way to her favourite spot in the greasy spoon. It was owned by a middle aged couple from Cyprus called Jack and Joanna. The shop itself was scarcely larger than an average living-room, but they had managed to squeeze the maximum number of booths into the tiny space. The booths were made to Cypriote specifications and if anyone taller than five foot two tried to sit in them they became permanently ensconced. Hand-made signs indicated set menus and specials of the day made by Joanna’s own fair hand. The warmth of the couple’s reception compensated triple-fold for the lack of space in the café. Joanna brought a cup of tea over as soon as Madie sat down.

“Your usual love?”

“Yes, thanks Joanna.” She smiled up at the portly figure and reached for one of the tabloid papers the shop had delivered every day. She never read the paper, only ever turned to the crossword page. She scrabbled in her coat pocket for the pen she kept there and was distracted by Jack coming out of the café’s kitchen to greet her. The couple’s care and concern was one of the few things that made her lonely days that much more bearable. Under the wing of their foreign accents and the familiar odours of toast, sausage, egg and bacon Madie was learning to relax a little into her chosen life of exile.

And today she felt more relaxed than usual because the day before, unable to bear her concerns about Inspector Deed’s well being any longer, Madie finally got together the courage to call the number on the card he had given her two months ago. The message on his forwarding service left her with such a sense of relief that she had been discovered by Cara in floods of tears.
He’s alive. He’s alive. He’s alive!
No amount of questions or solace by Cara had quelled the deluge. After this bout of respite Madie felt like it might be possible to start living just a little.
I didn’t kill him. I didn’t kill him.
When she set out to the café she let these words ring through her mind — a mantra of solace in an otherwise crappy existence.

In the café, the day’s greetings and small talk having warmed the edges of her heart further; Madie unfurled the paper, reached for her coffee and was confronted by a vaguely familiar handsome face.
Darrell Burgess was an ebullient but dedicated apprentice at a local estate agents.
read the caption. A well-known estate agent’s logo flashed in a corner of Madie’s memory as she read the caption beneath the picture. Her fingers trailed disbelievingly over the enlarged photograph. It should have reflected solemnity but the tabloid headline succeeded only in making it garish. Madie felt all the blood drain from her face. The laughing face of the young man in the photograph looked back at her with accusation and resentment. A sharp pain pierced at her chest and all the lights in the café went out.

Madie recovered her senses to a flurry of activity. Joanna was fanning her with the very newspaper that had caused her distress. Jack kept asking if he should call an ambulance. Various builders who were in the café for breakfast were clustered round voicing suggestions for a course of action as well as concern.

Madie was overwhelmed by fears reborn in an instant and a huge desire to leave the café as swiftly as possible. Was the death of the young estate agent the beginning of another list of dead men instigated by her actions? Why was she even questioning the possibility? Was there nothing she could do to stop more deaths? She had been so careful, so very careful. She knew what curs’d plague she carried. But it had not been enough. Now every man in the café who had come into contact with her would die.
Oh God. Oh God!

Faces and bodies loomed over Madie. By force of will alone she leapt up from her faint and shouted hysterically, “Don’t touch me! Nobody touch me!” Hands that had been coming to her assistance were instantly repelled. Joanna tried to intervene, but Madie’s frantic eyes made her retreat. Madie grabbed her bag from the table and hurled herself from the haven of the little café onto the busy street.

Should she run again? Where could she go this time? She found herself wishing she had stayed in London and braved the consequences of Detective Inspector Deed’s investigation. Men in hazmet suits would probably have arrived on her doorstep and taken her away like they had taken that cute little alien away in ET. Right now she should be undergoing extensive tests to ascertain her rogue killing gene. In this insane day dream she saw the armies of the world bidding to use her as an assassination tool. Her hysteria bubbled over into manic laughter and from the corner of her eye she saw how pedestrians stared or frowned and gave her a wide berth.

She had waited in bleak hope every day since her arrival in Manchester, waited for that momentous knock on the door. And today for the briefest of moments she had begun to believe it might even happen. This morning, for the first time since leaving Brendan’s she had let herself remember and savour what it had felt like to have Robert Deed’s arms around her. She had let a kernel of herself believe in fairy tales again. But now she knew that faint hope was no hope at all.

“Mum!”

Terence Ire pulled his key from the latch. He pushed against the door and felt the slight pressure from the post on the mat. He bent down and began gathering the envelopes together. “Bloody junk mail. Mum I thought I told you not to fill in any more of those internet surveys. They only want your address so they can try to sell you stuff.”

One knee resting on the mat, Ire glanced up and saw his mother lying at the bottom of the stairs. Her neck was at an awkward angle. One of her slippers had slid across the tiled floor and lay forlorn and alone near the phone alcove. The slipper less foot pointed up at the stairs and the sight of the taut calf muscle reminded him of his first sexual encounter with a pole dancer. Ire looked at the shapely leg revealed where his mother’s skirt had ridden up high. His breath quickened and he felt a tremor in his penis. He closed his eyes and let the feeling of pleasure flood through him momentarily.

Eventually he stood and rang for the ambulance. He knew there was no point, but they could sort out time of death.

After the call Ire sorted through the mail and then stacked it neatly on the console table. He walked past his mother’s body and through to the kitchen where he began to make himself a cup of Lavazza. He ground the beans then placed a careful measure in the percolator. The stylish lines of the Alessi machine jarred against the grubby tiles of his mother’s kitchen surfaces. Ire placed the left over grounds in the compost crock on the windowsill overlooking the garden. At least the garden was immaculate. He had hired a suitable gardener when the work got too much for his mother. The result was much more to his liking. As he looked at the clean lines of the autumn garden with pleasure he wiped down the kitchen surfaces with an antibacterial wipe, ensuring no grounds had accidentally made their way into any nooks or crannies. Finally, he stood over the cooker and drew in the smoky scent of the coffee as it rose with the building heat and steam.
Thank god she remembered to keep the coffee airtight and in the fridge.
When it was ready he poured a large cup and went out into the garden to enjoy his drink and the end of the day.

*****

Shit, what a mess. Why did I bother with hiring that cleaner? Seems all she ever did was drink cups of tea and watch day time soaps with mum. I can do without this. I've got that bloody woman to find and now I've this mess to deal with. After I've sorted the paperwork I'll get in a cleaning crew. I’ll have to get the place spruced up a bit if I'm going to sell it. They'll probably hike their prices with Christmas not far off. Probably won't even want to do the job with it being so close.