04-Mothers of the Disappeared (23 page)

He believed it, too. There was no acting with Burns when it came to his own motivations. He genuinely believed that he was working for some greater good, that all the things he did were out of necessity, that he was some flawed hero in his own bloody story.

He wanted people like me to realize that about him. Why he kept insisting that we were somehow the same. He was looking for vindication. God knows why he chose me, but he did. That was what made me the ideal person to become Griggs’s stooge. More than Susan, maybe even more than Ernie.

But like I said, the old man wasn’t stupid.

He’d expect me to fight what was happening, at least for a while.

And he’d expect me to sacrifice something for the greater good, as he saw it. One of my principles, perhaps. He’d dress it up like his way was the only truly moral choice.

I started to close up, shutting down the computer, checking that nothing was left on that didn’t need to be.

Figured a beer might help me make sense of things.

When I went out into reception, I heard someone knocking at the door.

‘We’re closed,’ I shouted. ‘For the evening.’

They insisted. Rattling at the door, then battering it with their fists. Like they couldn’t figure out why we weren’t open at their beck and call.

I sighed, went to the door and opened it. ‘If you call back tomorrow, you can make an appoint—’

I stepped back.

Taylor rammed the door open with his shoulder, pushing against my weight. He had the element of surprise, knocked me off balance.

I stumbled a few steps, knocked against Dot’s desk, managed to right myself.

That was when I saw him come at me with the hammer.

I
twisted back, felt the hammer rush past where my face had been a second earlier. Which was good, meant that he was off balance. I let my momentum carry me, taking the weight on my hands, balancing on the desk, and raising one leg swiftly. Caught Taylor a good one in the balls.

He didn’t drop the hammer, but he stepped back, posture crumpling, instinct making him try to protect himself. I took the opportunity to increase the distance between us, moving behind the desk, trying to regain some semblance of control.

This wasn’t the first time someone had tried to kill me in my own office. Five years back, I’d watched my then secretary shot in the stomach by two psychos who had threatened my life moments earlier.

Maybe it was the building.

Or just these offices.

Taylor straightened up, his features crooked. This was the man as he really was: a monster. A machine of violence and hate and ugliness.

He was wearing the same clothes I’d seen him in three days earlier. He hadn’t shaved. Hadn’t slept either.

He was ready to kill me. I still wondered why he hadn’t before.

‘Think you can do it?’

He hesitated, still holding the hammer, body a bear-trap of tension. ‘Do what?’

‘Kill me.’

‘I’ve killed. You know I have.’

‘Right,’ I said. ‘Little boys. Kids too innocent to defend themselves. Big fucking killer that you are.’ Sure, taunt the man with the hammer.

He was breathing hard. Barely able to keep control over his own body. Kept licking at his lips, then swallowing.

‘You got lucky,’ I said. ‘Before. Element of surprise. So put down the hammer, and we’ll see how this plays out in a fair fight.’

He shook his head. ‘Mr Fucking Hero, eh? What do you know?’

‘I know that you’ve lived with all this for way too long. You tried to tell me the other day how it was a sickness, a compulsion.’

‘No, I …’

‘I think you tried to tell me something else, too. Your mother. When I mentioned her …’

‘Don’t. Just don’t.’

‘Did she hurt you?’

‘You don’t fucking understand.’

‘And your father?’

He swallowed hard. His breathing got heavy, catching in his chest. The long hair had started to matt against his face, caught in the sweat that poured out of him.

‘Did they know what kind of monster you were? Your first kill came after your mother’s death.’

‘Shut up!’

‘You can get help, Taylor.’

‘Too late for that. Too many …’

‘How many?’

He dropped his head for a moment. I could still see his eyes. They were moving from side to side in a strange kind of way. His lips were moving, too. And I realized:
He was counting.

I remembered the dream. All those faces staring back at me from the walls. The presence outside the room that I could sense coming closer with each tick of my watch.

I had felt terrified, then. Adrenaline pumping.

Fear was close to answer.

Do we ever escape who we are?

Taylor had never been able to escape his own sickening compulsions. No matter how hard he tried to become a respectable man, what he had done was always there. Even if he told himself that he would never act on those urges again, the possibility was still within him that one day he would. He could change his behaviour, but who he was inside would never really change.

In that sense, we were the same.

We both tried to deny who we were, but could never escape the truth.

He was a monster. I was driven by rage.

At the monsters of this world. The ones who hurt others for no reason other than they can.

He was still counting his victims when I rushed him. He tried to swing with the hammer, but it was too late. I grabbed his wrist, swung him in a strange parody of a waltz and slammed that arm down against Dot’s desk. He caught the edge of the wooden top with the back of his wrist. His fingers spasmed, let go of the hammer.

I followed up fast, slamming my forehead against the soft bridge of his nose. He cried out and went limp. I pulled back, let him slump to the floor. The hammer was still within his reach. I kicked it away and stood over him. My breath came heavy, my chest tight with exertion.

‘Not so tough when they fight back, are you?’

He didn’t say anything.

‘You ever been in a real fight?’

He looked up at me. His nose was broken. Blood soaked his upper lip and down his chin. He spat and said, ‘Cunt.’

‘Get up,’ I said.

He climbed to his feet. He was unsteady.

‘Sit down.’

He did so, taking Dot’s chair. Glared at me. Didn’t bother trying to wipe the blood away from his nose. Right now he probably didn’t feel it so bad. He’d be running on the post-adrenaline spike. The pain would settle in later when he had time to process what had happened. Right now he was humiliated more than anything.

It was about to get much worse.

‘This what they did to you? What you wanted to do to those kids? Make them hurt like you did?’

‘You’ll never understand.’

I picked up the phone.

‘Calling the police?’ His voice sounded stuffed up. Like he had a bad cold. Between words he snorted, clearing his airways as the blood gathered.

I ignored him, finished dialling, listened to the tones on the other end of the line. Finally, a man answered. I didn’t recognize him. All I said was, ‘Tell him it’s McNee. Tell him I have a gift.’

When I hung up, I looked over at Taylor.

He didn’t look so cocky any more.

He looked like a man who’d just realized his nightmare was real.

The big man didn’t come himself. I hadn’t expected him to make a personal appearance, of course. He didn’t take risks. That was how he’d evaded arrest for so long.

The two men who came to the office were burly, dressed like bouncers, looking like they’d rather be in shellsuits and trainers. But Burns was a businessman through and through, preferring his associates try to dress properly. Intimidation through professionalism.

‘Who’re these guys?’ Taylor asked. His plummy tones had vanished. His voice had taken on a rougher accent, betraying his roots.

I didn’t say anything.

Neither did the two thugs. They hauled him to his feet.

‘I thought you were going to call the cops!’ Taylor said. ‘I thought you were calling the fucking cops!’

My mobile buzzed from the desk.

A text message.

Number withheld.

An address.

Nothing more.

I watched as the thugs frogmarched Taylor out the front door. He was protesting the whole way, wriggling like a fish caught on a hook. His protests were shaky, terrified. He had expected the comforting arms of the cops. Instead, he was being taken somewhere by two men who looked like they could crush his head with one hand.

He was frightened.

Good.

I waited until he was out of earshot, down the stairs. Then I went to the bathroom and vomited into the bowl.

When I was done, I sat down on the floor and slowed my breathing. My muscles ached.

There was no turning back, now.

T
he Murder House.

That’s what we used to call it.

On the outskirts of the city, a crumbling Victorian presence, with overgrown gardens and decaying facade. I’ve never seen it for sale, never been sure who owned it. It was one of those buildings that didn’t really change, that people knew existed but never paid attention to.

Perhaps because of its history.

Some buildings become their history. They become entwined with a particular narrative and the more years pass, the more that narrative takes hold of the building, becomes part of its very structure.

That was the Murder House.

I dare you to knock on the door.

I dare you to look in the window.

I dare you to go inside.

We were kids. The idea of a house haunted by a gruesome murder was irresistible. But none of us knew the real truth. All we had were half-heard and half-remembered whispers.

I wouldn’t discover the truth until years later when I joined the force.

The Murder House had belonged to a man named Charles Leigh. He was a family man, 2.4 kids, a good mid-level management job, the whole dream. He’d never been in trouble with the police, never shown any signs of instability. He was what you’d call a model citizen. But the trouble with normal, as a man like Jason Taylor proved, is that it’s too often a mask for real troubles.

Leigh was the kind of man who lived beyond his means, and in the 1980s, when the recession hit, found himself facing a world of troubles he’d never anticipated. But he could never admit to any problems, and continued to live the same lifestyle with mounting bills that he kept hidden from his wife and kids.

What happened next is a little unclear. Leigh started killing people for money. He didn’t take contracts or work for any local gangsters. What he did was break into old people’s houses, kill them, and take whatever valuables he could find. He killed three pensioners before the police finally caught up to him.

Leigh was a keen amateur shooter, regularly took part in shoots on estates outside the city. He kept three shotguns in the home, all legally obtained and licensed. He was careful and fastidious about safety. He kept them locked away, where the kids couldn’t get at them. Ammunition was stored in a separate room. He respected the weapons, understood what they were capable of.

And then the police came to his door.

Leigh knew why they were there. He knew that they’d worked out his scheme. And he panicked. He took his wife and younger daughter hostage. Locked them in the house with him. Threatened them with one of his shotguns. Didn’t make demands. Just kept the police at bay, maybe hoping against hope that there was a way out.

But there wasn’t.

Charles Leigh was an inept killer. He wasn’t cut out to be a murderer.

He had only done what he did out of desperation, the pressures of maintaining his expected lifestyle in the midst of a recession finally proving too much for him.

The standoff took place over eight hours. The police thought they’d finally talked Leigh down from his desperation. They were ready to enter the house when Leigh killed his wife. His daughter.

And finally, as the police rushed into the bedroom where he had been holed up, Leigh killed himself. They thought that he had tried to employ the shotgun in his mouth, but the length of the barrel would have given him difficulty, so they walked in on him as he slit his own throat. That was the worst thing, according to the officers who witnessed it. Slitting your own throat takes an amount of desperation and will. It’s tricky and messy. Most folk can’t do it. But Leigh had snapped in the final moments of the siege. Maybe he knew it would be worse for him to be taken in alive. He died two minutes later. Drowned in his own blood.

The Murder House.

No one lived there after that. Even over two decades later, it remained empty, a strange and abandoned shell at the end of a long street of similar houses.

This was the address that had arrived at my mobile.

I saw the van across the street. White, nondescript, same plates as the one that had pulled up outside my offices thirty minutes earlier.

I looked at the Murder House. Remembered my childhood fears. I’d never been brave enough to go inside. The idea of the poor tormented souls of a dead family haunting the place had been enough to give me nightmares.

Now, I had no choice but to enter.

I walked up the broken and chipped garden path. Beyond crazy paving, now, it was overgrown with weeds and overhanging branches from the neglected bushes that had once gently marked its boundaries.

I paused at the front door.

The old fear gathering inside. That sick-to-the-stomach feeling that comes with irrational panic.

Pushing down the sensation, I opened the door. Walked inside.

‘Glad you finally made it.’

They were in the large dining room at the rear of the ground floor. The space was empty, except for one chair in the very centre. Taylor was tied to the chair with plastic ties. Naked. Bloodier than when I last saw him. And very still. Not slumped. Not dead. Just still.

Expectant.

Floodlights illuminated him. A generator hummed.

Burns and his thugs stood just outside the circles of light. Watching this pathetic, naked man as he sat there bathed in harsh light, waiting for something to happen.