Authors: Ed O'Connor
Acid Lullaby (20 page)
‘It should do.’ Doreen was already trying to think of a way out. ‘How would that help?’
‘I could cross-check with Mary’s records. See what she thought had been spent and what the reality was. If I had your duty rotas I’d know who had done her shopping on certain days.’
‘She keeps all the till records then?’ Doreen asked in surprise.
‘Oh yes,’ said Underwood, ‘she keeps records.’
Half an hour later, in Dexter’s office, Underwood opened Mary Colson’s envelope and read the details of her latest dream. He noticed the date at the top of the first page and was reminded for a second of his own mother. The tenth anniversary of her death was approaching.
‘Dear Mr Underwood, I am very sorry about what happened to your friend. But now we are friends and I hope that this might help you. Yours, Mary Colson.’
Underwood felt a twinge of guilt. He hadn’t regarded Mary Colson as a friend. Maybe he had forgotten how to recognize them.
‘First there is a man tied to a table. His hands are bound underneath him and his head is in a box. This was your friend: I know that now. He has spoken to us already. His spirit is restless. I told you his message about the keys. He has also appeared in other parts of my dream. There’s a woman too, crying in the dark. She’s terrified, screaming.’
Underwood found Mary’s words more disturbing when written out in front of him. He didn’t like to think of the dead sending messages: standing in massed, whispering huddles around him. Underwood had long since given up on hopes of salvation. The death of his parents and the implosion of his private life had eradicated any last vestiges of his Catholic belief system. He found the idea of an afterlife, of sharing eternity with all the spirits he had disappointed, utterly depressing. He had reconciled himself to death by imagining it as nothingness: a return to the same state of blissful unawareness we enjoy prior to birth. Underwood regarded awareness as a curse: becoming aware of things was, for him, a prelude to becoming disillusioned with them. That was why he opposed capital punishment: better to let the bastards rot in boredom.
He stopped drifting as he felt the tide lapping at his feet and tried to focus on Mary’s letter:
‘Then there is a pile of bodies: people hidden in different darknesses. They are together but separate. They are inside but outside. It’s like a room with no building around it. There are children playing nearby. Maybe there’s a school. I can hear them laughing and shouting. They are running in and out of the trees. Sometimes I can hear loud cracks like stones being smashed or gunshots.’
Underwood paused for a second. He had two problems: the first was that he had no evidence that there were bodies waiting to be found. Jensen and Rowena Harvey were missing but even though he sensed Jensen was dead it was standard procedure to assume abductees were alive until proof was found to the contrary. However, he reasoned, if his theory about the coins was correct, that the killer was counting down, then he could easily have dumped them somewhere together. Maybe the countdown was already complete.
His second problem was that Mary’s dream was still vague. It gave him no real sense of where to look.
‘Inside
but
outside.
It’s
like
a
room
with
no
building
around
it.’
Underwood was frustrated. The statement could mean anything. Maybe Mary had imagined a cellar: a building that had been demolished above the surface but whose basement remained. It seemed the most plausible explanation.
‘But
where
?’ He looked again at the page in front of him.
‘There are children playing around the trees nearby. Maybe there’s a school. I can hear them laughing and shouting. Sometimes I can hear loud cracks like stones being smashed or gunshots.’
Underwood discounted the idea of children playing: it was too vague. It could have referred to a school, or a playground, a field, anything. He focused on the last sentence of the section.
‘Sometimes
I
can
hear
loud
cracks
like
stones
being
smashed
or
gunshots.’
That was potentially more useful. Perhaps, Mary had seen a quarry in her dream. Underwood felt a spark of excitement. A quarry might have underground chambers that resembled a
‘room
without
a
building.’
He reached into Dexter’s drawer and withdrew her road atlas of Cambridgeshire. His finger quickly located three quarries: Melbridge Clay Pits, Little Elstead Gravel Quarry and Paxton Gault Stoneworks. He hesitated. He knew at least two of the three were still working quarries and the more he thought about the logistics of moving four or five bodies the less viable leaving them in a quarry seemed.
It would take the killer time to move and conceal so many bodies. He would not want an exposed area. He would want the privacy afforded by woodland or deserted buildings. Still, he would give the names of the quarries to Harrison to check up on.
‘Like
stones
being
smashed
or
gunshots.’
He paused. What if the latter half of Mary’s statement was correct? That the area was located near to the sound of gunshots. Underwood racked his brains. Where would you hear gunshots? On farmland possibly but that would only be intermittently; on organized shoots for game birds maybe.
Organized
shoots.
He looked back at Dexter’s map. There were two major rifle ranges that he knew of in the county. He wrote down the locations of both. The remainder of Mary’s letter was disturbing and unstructured. It seemed merely a collection of strange images that lacked clarity and meaning.
‘I know, Mr Underwood, that the dog-man is going to kill me. You see, it happens in my dream. I fall to the floor and the dog-man rises above me. I feel a terrible pain in my head.’
Underwood skipped through the next two paragraphs, which developed the image in greater detail. However, the conclusion of Mary’s account drew his full attention.
‘The dream ends with me in a box. That’s how everything ends, I suppose. Your friend is in the box with me. I try to get out but I can’t. Then the lid closes. The thing is, Mr Underwood, that it’s you who closes the lid on the two of us. I have had the dream for months without knowing who finally buries me. Now I know that it will be you. I knew it was you when I first met you. I find that reassuring. As I said, you have a kind face.’
Underwood folded the letter up and placed it in his inside jacket pocket.
Dexter returned to the office shortly before lunchtime. She had driven home and tidied herself up; washing her face and trying unsuccessfully to scrub the redness out of her eyes. Underwood got up from her desk as she arrived and politely moved out of her way. Dexter dropped her radio and mobile phone on to her desk.
‘Everything okay?’ he asked.
‘Marvellous.’
‘Sorry I was using your office,’ he said. ‘It’s just, well, I don’t have one anymore.’
‘Not a problem.’ Dexter’s eyes were glazed and unfocused. It was unlike her. Underwood was concerned. He decided to concentrate on business.
‘If you’ve got a moment, Dex, I’d like to run through what we’ve got so far.’
‘That won’t take long.’
Underwood smiled. Dexter was in there somewhere: under the fog of unhappiness her redoubtable spirit still glowed. ‘I’m not so sure. We’re building a clearer picture of the “how”, it’s the “why” we’re not so hot on.’
Dexter pulled open a drawer and took a bottle of mineral water from her desk. Her head was throbbing with dehydration. She unscrewed the cap and took a large and grateful glug. ‘Two deaths, two abductions,’ she said. ‘We know that the two murder victims were injected with some mixture of organic poisons. The most likely sources for those poisons were the mushrooms our friend Dr Miller showed us.’
‘Amanita Muscaria and Amanita Virosa,’ Underwood added.
‘Whatever. Does that matter?’
‘I think it might.’
Dexter shrugged. ‘So they are injected with this crap. It kills Ian Stark and would probably have killed Jack if the killer hadn’t cut his head off.’
‘I don’t think the injections were designed to kill the
victims,’ Underwood observed.
‘What, then?’
‘I’m not sure. That’s the key to all this. The “why” that we are missing. The murderer wants to send them on some sort of trip before killing them.’
‘Why did he cut Jack’s head off? That’s another “why” we haven’t figured out yet.’
‘Maybe he wants to take the symbols of their knowledge, of their intelligence away with him.’ Underwood was struggling now, his ideas were still fragmented. ‘You know, like a trophy. It’s the coins that bother me.’
‘How so?’
‘If I’m right and they do represent some form of countdown. We still don’t know what he’s counting down to.’
‘You’re saying that he’s collecting heads in anticipation of something?’
Underwood still hadn’t figured it through properly. ‘Maybe. By the way, I’ve asked HQ at Huntingdon to send you a list of all the police referral cases that Jack has been working on.’
‘Why to me?’
‘Two reasons: you’re in charge and I’m one of the cases.’
‘Okay. You think this fruit might be one of Jack’s patients?’
‘It would make sense.’
‘There’s another element here which I haven’t discussed with you.’
Dexter raised a quizzical eyebrow. ‘Go on.’
Underwood took a deep breath and told Dexter about Mary Colson and her dream of the dog-man. To his surprise, Dexter didn’t laugh him out of the room.
‘You say she has been specific? Specific about things she couldn’t have known?’ Dexter asked.
‘Enough to freak the shit out of me. She knew about Jack’s hands being tied under the table, she knew he was my friend, she said something about “remembering my keys”: Jack said much the same thing the last time I saw him.’
‘And she says there’s more bodies?’
‘About half a dozen.’
‘Bloody hell.’ Dexter thought of Rowena Harvey and Jensen.
‘She’s described a possible location. It’s vague but I’ve given some suggestions to Harrison.’
‘Do you believe in this stuff, John? All this psychic business?’
‘Never encountered it before. The Met have used psychics in some cases, haven’t they?’
‘Yeah, as a last resort,’ Dexter said darkly.
‘Well we don’t have a huge amount else to work with, do we?’ said Underwood patiently. ‘Look, Dex, if we do use Mary Colson, you need to be okay with it. Ultimately, if we catch this nutcase, no one will worry too much how we did it. On the other hand, if we don’t catch him …’
‘Everyone will say “why did you waste time talking to some cranky old bird?” And my arse will have a target stamped on it.’
‘Something like that.’
Dexter thought for a second. ‘Our priority is finding Rowena Harvey and Jensen. We have to assume that they are alive until we find evidence to the contrary. If this person is working to a timetable – counting down to something – we need to work quickly. We haven’t got a lot of information to work with. I say let’s use what she says.’
Underwood nodded. ‘You want to hear the rest of it?’
‘I’m all ears,’ she said with the ghost of a smile.
Encouraged, Underwood related the dream of the dog-man.
It was a beautiful sunset: orange and white swirls reaching across the dizzying East Anglian sky. Max Fallon found himself sitting on the riverbank at Ely watching a university women’s boat crew paddling back after a training session on the fens. He had little idea of why he was there. He lay back
on the damp grass and listened to the vague quacking of ducks and the gentle slapping of oars on the water. The moon was starting to emerge above him.
He knew that the moment of his final incarnation was close. He couldn’t see its twisting, momentous, approaching beauty through the glowing fuzz of clouds and sky but he sensed its inevitability. The idea was enervating. Rowena Harvey would be the willing vehicle for his chariot ride to immortality. He had already investigated her body in great detail, tracing her skin for blemishes, washing her in the morning. It was testing his reserves of self-control to the extreme. However, the moment had to be right and the moment was now a mathematical certainty.
Max found the thought arousing. He sat up and watched the women’s boat crew. They had pulled up opposite him on the other side of the river and were leaning forward, releasing their feet from the strapping that fixed them to the boat. Max liked their light-blue Lycra body suits and the way their hair had become damp with sweat. He started with surprise as he felt a hand inside his jogging bottoms. It took him a minute of ecstatic confusion to clarify that the hand was his own.
The crew hauled the fibreglass rowing eight from the water and carried it inside the boathouse. The large wooden door clanked shut behind them. Max cursed his frustration. He became irritated with the cold grass and the exposure. He decided to walk back to his Land Cruiser. He had parked close to the river, next to a tea shop. An old Labrador retriever lay on the pavement in front of the entrance. He noticed its eyes tracing his movements.
Max froze when he arrived back at the car. He sensed a powerful but familiar smell emanating from inside. He looked through the glass and saw four grain sacks: two on the back seat, one in the passenger seat and one rammed up at the rear window.
‘Whaddafuck?’
He looked at the Labrador. It had the face of an old man: some inbred old fool.
‘What did you say, you wanker?’ Max called out to it.
The Labrador’s ears twitched at the cry. It stood and sauntered over.
‘I don’t have time for a conversation, pal,’ Max insisted, ‘someone’s filled up my car with shit.’
The smell was strong and nauseating. Max looked around him.
‘Did you do this? Is this your idea of a joke?’ he asked the dog which had sat down directly in front of him. ‘I’m laughing. Ho – Ho – Ho.’