The Killing Hour (12 page)

‘I don’t think I do.’

‘He brought his girlfriend out here when she no longer wanted to be his girlfriend. Any guesses as to why he’d do that?’

‘Look, I’m not a killer. You have to believe me.’

‘He tied her up and put her in the boot of his car. That’s a long drive in that condition. A real long drive. That alone could have killed her. There used to be a bath right there,’ he says, pointing to the far corner behind me. ‘No plumbing, just an old tub that suited the décor of this place. He kept her in the boot while he carried buckets to the river that runs about a minute west of here. It had to be close enough so he wouldn’t have to walk far. He filled the bathtub with freezing cold water and he held her down in it. You want to know why?’

‘This is a mistake,’ I say, but he’s off somewhere, living in the past.

‘He didn’t like the fact she was moving on without him. So he drowned her. And then he revived her. And drowned her again. He had her up here for six days, drowning and reviving her until she couldn’t be revived any more. We found him when he came back into the city. He led us here. He’d put her back in the bath. He said he was cleaning her. We took the bath away as evidence and left this cabin standing. You want to know why?’

‘Please, listen to me, you have to let me explain what happened. I didn’t kill them, I tried to save them. I tried to …’

‘It wasn’t cost-effective. That’s what they said. Didn’t want to pay anybody to drive up here with a sledgehammer and knock this shithole down. I haven’t been here since then. And I haven’t seen anything as sick until now. So when you say you understand, that’s bullshit. You don’t understand anything other than how it feels to cause pain.’

He’s wrong about me. Yeah, sure, the world has gone to shit. Everybody hates somebody, nobody likes anybody, people fight for no reason or for every reason. We hear it all the time. The media drums it into us every single day. Only right now I’m in the process of becoming one of those statistics. Sure, Landry feels justified in killing me but I don’t feel justified in dying.

‘Listen, if you’ll just …‘

His eyes narrow and his jaw clenches. ‘You’ll get your chance to explain things, Feldman, you’ll get your chance when I’m good and ready, but for now I just need you to be quiet, okay? I need to think.’

‘About what?’

He grits his teeth, and for a moment looks down at his feet. When he looks up again I can see confusion in his eyes. It lasts only a second because he sees me and the anger returns.

‘Q and A, Feldman. You get that? I ask, you answer. So let’s start with a fairly simple one. You think you can handle that?’

I say yes and he seems happy.

‘Who has the gun?’ he asks.

‘You do.’ It’s a big gun. No missing it.

‘Who here is the officer of the law?’

‘You are,’ I say, though at the moment that’s a rather fine distinction to make.

‘Who’s wearing the handcuffs?’

‘I am.’

‘Who’s on trial?’

‘I am.’

‘So who’s asking the questions?’

‘You are.’

‘So you would be?’

I shrug. ‘Answering,’ I say.

‘Are things clear enough?’

‘They’re way too clear.’

‘Good, so you’ll shut up unless I’ve asked you something.’

He lifts the shotgun, crosses his legs, then replaces it. The barrel points at the wall. His hands are shaking slightly. We both notice this at the same time. I want to tell him he’s not only drawn the wrong conclusions, but also painted an entirely wrong picture. I want to tell him he’s a lunatic.

I raise my left hand to my jaw – my right follows because of the handcuffs. I move slowly because I don’t want Landry misinterpreting any movement as a violent attempt to attack him. My jaw is throbbing. I’m lucky he didn’t dislocate it. After a few minutes of silence he continues.

‘I’ve brought a Bible along, Feldman. It’s in my bag. I’d offer it to you to swear upon but I think it would be pointless.’ His eyes narrow and he sweeps his hand through his grey hair. ‘I know what it’s like to no longer believe in God and I can’t imagine you ever did.’

I’m thinking the same thing. My life seems to have gone back to that game show, only now up for grabs is the opportunity to kill me, and it seems everybody is banging on their buzzer to have a turn. I wonder who the game-show host is then realise it’s my new friend Evil.

He crouches forward in his chair. ‘What do you believe in, Feldman?’

‘A fair trial.’

He gives what sounds like a nervous laugh, then starts picking at a stain on his right knee but only smudges it wider. He keeps itching at it then looks up at me, expressionless.

‘You’re nothing more than a stain, Feldman.’

He reaches into the duffel bag and pulls out a wooden stake. I recognise the craftsmanship. He must have picked it up on his journey through my house. He waves it back and forth, his eyes following it as if out of all the wooden stakes he’s seen this one has to be the nicest. Eventually his gaze moves back to me, and the confusion I saw earlier has gone. ‘Which one did you murder first?’

I listen to the rain. It’s still heavy. I wonder if I’ll be dead before sunrise. I sigh and turn my attention back to the question, not bothering to count off my final minutes in this horrible world.

20

The rain is pouring heavily on the tin roof. The inside of the cabin is damp, his skin feels clammy, his feet cold and he feels sick at being in a place where such depravity took place. He feels sick, too, sitting opposite this piece of human trash. Coming here is without doubt the worst decision he’s ever made, and he can’t see a way out of it. If he shows up at the station with Feldman he’ll have to explain this little outing, and it’s going to look as though he withheld evidence just in case he felt like killing the suspect. He’ll blame as much as he can on the cancer. He’ll say the pills have affected him more than he realised. They’ll send him home and they’ll wonder how many other people he brought out here. He’ll pass from this world to the next under a cloud of suspicion.

Jesus, what a mess. The plan had been to bring Feldman out here and scare the hell out of him but obviously he hadn’t thought it through. But really, had that been the plan? If it was, it was a poor one. There has to be more to it, doesn’t there?

He pictures the two dead women. He pictures the contents of the cardboard box. He pictures the other cases he’s never been able to let go even long after they were solved. He remembers the young woman floating facedown in the bathtub in this very cabin, her grey, wrinkled skin, her milky eyes. He thinks of other young women face down in alleyways and hallways and ditches. Maybe it isn’t such a mess after all. Feldman’s as guilty as they come – he’s doing the world a favour by taking him out of it.

‘I asked which one of them you murdered first, Feldman. Are you going to answer?’

‘I wasn’t sure if I was allowed.’

He hates Feldman. Hates his sarcasm. In the end it’ll be the smugness that’ll make his transition from judge to executioner easier to bear. So will the confession. As soon as Feldman admits what he did then he can happily …

Happily?

That’s the wrong word. The last thing he wants to do is take a life. This is the last place he wants to be. In six months when his sins are weighed up in whatever magical-afterlife-landscape he goes to, a large piece of him will still be back here.

The other problem is that Feldman is delusional. His account of what happened is a testament to that – assuming he believes even a fraction of what he wrote in his letter. If he truly is insane then punishing him for having a sickness is in itself sick. No, he has to believe Feldman is of sound mind. Has to believe he knew every step of the way what was going on and was enjoying it. When the confession comes he won’t feel so bad about ending Feldman’s life. Yet he needs that confession because with it comes the feeling of justice. With it, dying from the cancer will be easier to do. Without it, he’s just one more bad man doing bad deeds.

21

‘I didn’t kill either of them,’ I reply, not that it matters to him.

I try to think about things logically. Like a mathematician. Or one of those thinking-outside-of-the-box riddles: two people are in a room, one has a gun, the other is handcuffed. No wonder I never liked riddles.

‘Why did you stake them through the heart?’

‘I didn’t.’

‘I saw the bodies. Damn it you even had a stake on your bedroom floor.’

‘I can explain that.’

‘Hopefully you can explain it better than your letter. That was obviously the ramblings of a madman.’

‘It’s all true.’

‘Uh huh. If you were hoping that string of lies would throw us off the real truth then you’re crazier than I first thought.’

‘It’s all true.’

‘It’s all bullshit.’

‘It’s not. Look, Kathy was asleep when he first attacked her,’ I say, and in the front of my mind the lounge we sat in while she told me this starts to form, slowly at first, and soon I can smell the blood on my clothes and taste the last mouthful of beer. Kathy brought me into a world where evil happened and I had loaded my hands full of its treasures. I can see Landry sitting opposite me, but standing just over his left shoulder is Kathy.

‘I never heard anyone come in,’ she says.

‘I know you didn’t. It wasn’t your fault.’

‘Jesus, Feldman, you’ve lost me,’ Landry says.

‘I didn’t know what time it was, Charlie, maybe ten-thirty, and I woke up as his hand pressed down against my mouth. I wanted to scream, but couldn’t. He held the tip of a knife next to my eye.’

‘I killed him with that knife,’ I say.

‘Him? What the hell are you talking about? Which one did you kill first, Feldman?’

‘I didn’t kill them,’ I say. ‘I really didn’t kill them.’

Kathy is ignoring Landry because in her world he never existed and that’s the fundamental problem with homicide cops – it’s already too late when you need them. Kathy stares at me with remorse and pity. She has a drink in her hand. It’s the one she had before I showered to wash away the blood. She seems uninterested in the cabin. The cold doesn’t seem to affect her. The back of my neck is alive with goosebumps.

‘I could smell his skin. So vile. Like he hadn’t bathed in days. Strange, huh? I was choking on his odour. I was sure he had plans for me but right at that moment the smell was all I could think about.’

‘He broke into Kathy’s bedroom and abducted her,’ I say.

‘You killed her first?’

‘He moved his knife to my throat. It trapped the smell and the taste in there. I was desperate for air and was starting to black out. Then he was promising me if I made a sound he would kill me. His eyes were so dark. So intense. I knew then that this man was pure evil. Have you ever seen pure evil, Charlie?’

‘I once saw an episode of
Melrose Place
.’ Kathy’s ghost smiles, and Landry looks at me as if I’ve completely lost it. Maybe I have.

‘He told me his name was Cyris and I should remember it because I’d be calling it out over and over in the night. He told me to nod if I could remember that, so I nodded. I was so afraid and I thought he was going to kill me right there, but instead he backed away and tossed me some clothes. I couldn’t do anything at first except cough and spit. He ordered me to dress and I was happy to.’

‘Answer the goddamn question,’ Landry says. ‘Who’d you kill first?’

‘Cyris. He was the first one to die.’

‘Tell me about the women. Tell me why you killed them.’

‘Yes, Charlie, tell us why,’ Kathy says, surprising me because it means she knows about Landry.

I close my eyes to try and hide from her and what I see is Cyris in the trees, Cyris with the metal stake and the knife, Cyris asking me if I wanted to join him. When I open my eyes I’m expecting to see Kathy has gone but she hasn’t. She pours herself another invisible drink, then leans against a bar that is nearly two days ago and at least a hundred kilometres away. All the moments from the morning I awoke into the Real World emerge: the guilt, the headache, the nausea, the talking with ghosts.

‘They weren’t meant to die,’ I say. ‘Don’t you see? I saved them. I saved them.’

‘From Cyris. So the letter says. What happened, Feldman? Tell me about them. Tell me how you met them. Tell me what they did to make you kill them. Tell me.’

Kathy looks down at her ghostly feet. They are bare and I wonder if she can see the floor through them like I can. ‘I didn’t know he was going to take me away to hear me scream. I would have fought more had I known what my fate was going to be.’

‘He took them from their houses to torture them,’ I tell Landry. ‘He tied them to trees.’

‘In the paddock you wrote about.’

‘Things like this only happen to other people,’ Kathy tells me, and she starts to fade.

‘He forced her into a van, and when he took her to the paddock that was when she found out Luciana had been kidnapped too. She said that scared her the most.’

Kathy is nodding slowly, agreeing, fading quickly now.

‘She said she knew at that point she was going to die.’

I try to imagine the terror she must have felt as he dragged her through the trees, the horror when she saw her friend. My fear of walking through those trees in the darkness later had been nothing in comparison. What would it be like to know you were being taken to your death? How would you feel knowing the rest of your short life would be lived out in immense pain and cruelty? I shudder at the thought of putting myself into her position. This is electric chair material. Of being taken down a corridor there is no coming back from. I look at Landry’s bag and think of the Bible inside. Could anybody in these situations really find comfort from one?

‘He told her she was a mistress of evil. She said it was like being attacked by two different people. One moment he was calm, the next he was in a frenzy – only she was sure the frenzy was an act. She was positive he was calm the whole time.’

‘An act? Even if I believed another man killed them why would I believe he was acting in a frenzy just for the sake of acting? He had no audience.’