The 50/50 Killer Read online

  There was comfort in them, but he knew there were also dangers here. It was as though he was standing on the edge of some more terrible memory, and his mind had to keep distracting him from it. As he sank back into the dream, the bedroom solidified around him again, and it felt precarious: the walls, the curtains - all a paper-thin defence. It might occlude the threat from view, but it wouldn’t keep it out for ever. Sooner or later, the real memories would find him, and all this would fall apart.

  ‘Let me see.’

  Suddenly, it was daytime, with bright light coming through the pale curtains, and Jodie was sitting on the edge of the bed. There was a pile of canvases at the far end. She was leaning over, reaching out for them.

  He sat up quickly. ‘Whoa. Hang on.’

  He wanted to sort them first, make sure she only saw the ones he thought were best. He’d told her they were all rubbish, but in reality there were a couple that he thought might be all right - although he would wait to see her reaction before he admitted it.

  It was no use protesting, anyway. Jodie was forceful. Already, she understood him too well.

  ‘Ah-ah.’ She slapped his hand away. ‘I know your game, lad. Just let me see.’

  He settled back reluctantly, and watched as she worked through his paintings. She spent more time on each piece than was necessary simply to be polite, even the really bad ones, and she asked questions and listened to his answers.

  ‘I am quite proud of this one,’ he said, when she reached the best.

  ‘You should be. You should be proud of all of them. You’re really talented.’

  ‘No.’

  She slapped his leg this time. ‘Yes, you are.’

  He gave up. Jodie was major computers, minor business studies, and by her own admission she didn’t have a creative bone in her body. The paintings were pleasant enough, but he knew that if she’d been a fine-art student she would be far more critical - even snobby. Talent wasn’t strictly the issue: any monkey could learn to paint. But what was the harm? He could take the compliments and enjoy them for what they were. He liked it that she said things like that. He wanted to impress her, and—

  —the sun was blocked out. A shadow had passed over the room.

  The devil, Scott thought, although he didn’t know what that meant. He heard a throaty rattling to his left and turned slowly to face it.

  Something else was in the room, sitting beside him on the bed. Its face was so close he could smell the heat rising off it, but he couldn’t see it. There was just the impression of red and black skin, of an elongated snout like a goat’s.

  The face tilted quickly from side to side like a metronome, blurring the features even further.

  You like my artwork and you support me.

  Scott turned back to warn Jodie - but stopped abruptly, confused. The old student bedroom had disappeared. He was sitting in their front room, the one they lived in now, on the left-hand side of the settee.

  Impossibly, he was staring at himself.

  The second him was standing in the centre of the room, his face half hidden by the camera he was holding.

  ‘Say “Cheese”.’

  ‘Cheese!’

  He looked to his right in time to see Jodie illuminated by a flash at the other end of the settee. She was curled up like a cat, her legs tucked beneath her, giving the camera a huge grin.

  Another flash.

  The him with the camera frowned at the screen on the back.

  ‘This one’s better. See what you think.’

  Suddenly, Jodie and the other him were gone, and Scott heard the rattle again. It was coming from the kitchen, behind him and to the left. He stood up quickly and backed into the middle of the room.

  Round the doorframe, he could see the tumble-dryer, the washing-machine. He stepped to the right and could see more: the fridge, the edge of a cupboard ...

  A set of fingers curled slowly round the doorframe. Then another set, further up. The devil. A second later, a black and red face leaned slowly out into view, and then the thing rushed out at him.

  ‘Let me see!’

  They were in the bedroom. He was standing behind Jodie, reaching round her and holding his hands over her eyes. She kept pulling half-heartedly at his wrists. Outside, he could see the weather was cold; the air hard and still. He started to shiver, and turned his attention back to Jodie.

  ‘I love you.’

  He took his hands away.

  ‘Happy Birthday.’

  The painting was on the bed, positioned on the pillows so that it rested against the headboard.

  Starting with the photograph he’d taken of Jodie on the settee, he’d applied the same iterative process he’d been using recently in his work: painting, scanning, reducing the picture quality, painting again. The final painting on the bed, from about halfway through the process, was both Jodie and not Jodie. It was square blocks of colour - browns and pinks and beiges - painted onto a canvas that was about seventy blocks high by forty wide. If you blurred your eyes, you could see her. Sort of. He had worked very hard, and he was proud of it.

  She put her hands to her mouth for a second, then turned and hugged him.

  ‘I love it,’ she said. ‘It’s perfect.’

  He held her tightly, looking over her shoulder at the painting. She was telling him how wonderful it was, how much she loved him, thanking him for all the effort he’d put in ... She could say what she wanted, but he knew. He’d seen the disappointment in her eyes, and then the way it was swiftly hidden.

  I fucked up. I should have given her the first painting I did. He still could, but it wouldn’t be the same. You could always do different things for someone; they told you, and you changed it. The trick was getting it right first time.

  I just wanted to give you something different, he thought. Any idiot can paint. I wanted to do something that nobody else would do for you. Something that was me. I wanted—

  Over her shoulder, Scott saw the devil. It was crawling awkwardly out from underneath the bed, steam rising off its face.

  ‘Jodie—’

  But she was holding him too tight, like a backpack tied round his front. She wouldn’t let him go. He couldn’t move.

  The devil rose to full height, its joints clicking and cracking and popping, then walked across to them. Panic fluttered inside him. Somewhere, a baby was crying. He frowned.

  ‘Shhhh.’

  Bang!

  His head was gone from the shoulders up, replaced by white, hissing static, a cloud of nausea.

  Inexplicably, he was on his face on the carpet, back in the front room. The painting was leaned against the far wall, behind the dining table, where it had been for the ten months since her birthday.

  ‘We must put that up,’ one of them would say, and yet for some reason neither of them ever had. He fixed his attention on it now, blurring his eyes so that she came into focus. Jodie.

  I love your brown hair.

  As he stared at it, blocks of colour began fading away. He blinked, willing them to return, but instead even more began to disappear.

  The smoothness of your skin.

  Her hair vanished.

  Small squares of white were appearing everywhere, the pink and beige shades of her skin melting out of existence.

  I love the feel of your neck on my lips.

  It was nearly all gone. Three more squares. Two.

  Scott didn’t see the last blocks fade: there was simply a moment when he realised he was staring at a blank white canvas, abandoned against a wall.

  A moment when he realised he’d lost her.

  4 DECEMBER

  5 HOURS, 20 MINUTES UNTIL DAWN

  2.00 A.M.

  Mark

  Each floor of the hospital seemed to inhabit its own shade of the spectrum. The reception area and waiting room downstairs had been pale blue. Here, one floor up, everything was either washed-out green or turquoise. Whoever had designed the building had used a colour-scheme with all the vibrancy sucked out of
the palette. It was all very ‘hospital’, I thought. If you woke up here confused, the pastel shades alone would convince you that you were sick.

  Because of the nature of our enquiry, Scott Banks had been given his own room in the east wing. It was small, with enough space around a single bed to fit a trolley of equipment on one side and a chair for me on the other. It was also very dark. The blinds were drawn and the lights had been dimmed. It felt appropriate that the bandaged figure on the bed had a covering of shadow to rest under.

  He was sleeping, his slow and steady breathing interrupted by an intermittent hitch in his throat: a wheeze and a click. The only other sound in the room was from the equipment: the quietly comforting beep of his pulse, registered by a quivering green line on a machine by the bed. He was on a drip: IV fluids were keeping his temperature steady and administering morphine to take the teeth out of the pain he’d feel when awake.

  The entire right side of his head was padded with gauze to form a football of bandages; his left cheek was patterned with butterfly plasters. White blankets on the bed were pulled up to his chin.

  Another wheeze and click, his chest rising and lowering almost imperceptibly.

  I found I was synchronising my own breathing with his, allowing it to calm me down. It had been tense downstairs after Pete left, and I’d been glad when Li returned. He’d brought me up here about ten minutes ago, a journey that took in a cramped, noisy elevator and then what felt like endless corridors filled with movement and activity. Wherever I’d walked, I was exactly where somebody else needed to be. More practised, Li had moved through the throng with ease, while I floundered behind, catching the instructions he called back to me.

  ‘... sleeping at the moment. And that’s all I ask; that you let him sleep when he needs to. He has to rest ...’

  And so on.

  I’d nodded, although he couldn’t have seen me, and wondered what the fuck he thought I was going to do. Jab his patient with a pen, presumably.

  When we arrived at the room, the security guard had already been in place. He was tall and solid, dressed in a pale brown uniform. Li introduced me, but I showed him my badge anyway and made sure he understood the deal. Hospital personnel and myself aside, nobody was to be allowed in to see Scott Banks.

  Now I was sitting quietly with his file on my lap, attempting to formulate an interview strategy. But the quiet and the dark were soothing, and it was difficult to think. I felt the tension and the bustle of the day lifting from me, the length and exhaustion settling in, and I had to keep mentally slapping myself back on course.

  Confidence comes from knowledge.

  What did I know here? The closest parallel I could think of was Daniel Roseneil. He had also been tortured, but physical pain was only a part of it. Roseneil was a man who had been forced to abandon someone he loved. Even though that decision was tempered by the context, the responsibility for it had been too overwhelming for him to bear, and so he had let go of the memory - thrown it where it couldn’t be found. It was likely that Scott would be the same.

  He wants to help but he’s afraid to remember.

  I pictured it as a door in his head. His mind would have shut the trauma away on the other side. But he could still see the door itself and he’d be getting certain impressions of what lay behind it. His girlfriend was behind it, and she was in danger, so part of him wanted to open the door and help her. But another part of him knew what else was shut away there and wouldn’t let him go near. My job was to help him reconcile the two. I had to keep the scared part comforted and distracted while I led the other across to the door and helped him open it.

  To do so, I would have to disregard the argument we’d had downstairs. Thinking with my head, I was sure Pete was right. Scott’s girlfriend was probably dead and the killer gone. Inside this room, though, there were going to be two simple truths that I would stick to no matter what: Jodie was alive; and we were going to find her. Those were the ground rules.

  Then there was the method.

  When it comes down to it, all interviews are actually very similar. I remembered interrogating an old man we were fairly sure had abducted a child from a playground, and when I sat down with him I knew straight away that he was our guy. He was eaten up with self-disgust, and a part of him clearly wanted to confess and get what he’d done out in the open; but at that time he couldn’t bring himself to admit it. So all we got was lies and evasions. He wasn’t there, he was somewhere else; he never saw her. He would never hurt a little girl.

  But the truth existed in the straight chronology of his memory, and so I took him along it, step by step. Where were you at twelve? Then where did you go? Visualise it - walk through the day in your head. The old man did, and every so often he’d bump up against one of his lies and have to blur the detail. At that point, he suddenly couldn’t remember quite as well, and so we’d back off for a bit and talk about something else. Then we’d press a little more. He wasn’t going anywhere and he knew it, which allowed the truth to come out in degrees. Yes, he was there at the playground, but he didn’t do anything, didn’t see the little girl. Ten minutes later we’d got to, well, maybe he did see her. Then, yes, she went for a walk with him but she was fine - he left her by the trees and someone else must have hurt her afterwards. And so on. Step by step, he gave it up. He knew we had him, but it was too difficult for him to run straight there and say, ‘I did it.’ At the end of the interview, he actually looked grateful.

  This was a different situation, but the same principle applied. Scott’s experiences formed a wound. I would have to press carefully around the edges to see which parts were tender, slowly getting him used to the pressure. We would work gently, approaching the truth with patience.

  Or as much patience as the time limit allowed.

  I looked up from the rise and fall of his chest to his face. The part of it I could see, anyway. It was two o’clock in the morning; about seven hours until dawn. Regardless of my promise to Doctor Li, if Scott Banks didn’t wake up soon I might end up having to jab him with a pen after all.

  In the meantime, I adjusted the file slightly, leaned back in the chair and closed my eyes.

  ‘Hello?’

  I jerked awake. Scott’s file hit the floor and the papers spread out in a fan. Shit. I leaned down to gather them back together, looking up at the bed at the same time. Scott was watching me. My brain told me that in order to salvage my self-respect I would have to pretend I hadn’t been asleep, but I decided that was hopeless.

  How fucking professional do you look right now?

  ‘I’m sorry.’ I spoke quietly, as though he was still asleep. ‘It’s been a long day.’

  ‘That’s okay.’

  He kept his voice down, too. Perhaps it was the room: the hospital forcing us into a conversation full of whispers.

  ‘You looked like you were having a nightmare,’ he said.

  ‘I was. I’m sorry.’

  The dream was already fading, but I knew it had been about Lise. I couldn’t remember what. Had it been the same as that morning? The only impression I had left was the sound of the sea, rushing and breaking. The same feeling of despair; it was like starvation, but inside the heart.

  ‘I keep having nightmares, too,’ Scott said. ‘I can’t remember them properly. Everything’s confused.’

  ‘I think that’s to be expected. Do you know where you are?’

  He nodded carefully. ‘But you’re not a doctor. Are you here to protect me?’

  ‘Like in the movies?’ I could have smiled - some guard I’d be right now - but it wouldn’t hurt for Scott to know he was safe. ‘I suppose I am, sort of. My name’s Mark Nelson. I’m a detective. Basically, I’m here to keep you company, chat for a bit. See if we can shed some light on what’s happened to you this evening.’

  He considered this for a moment, and then began an attempt at pulling himself up into a sitting position. The trolley by the bedside moved with him, the bag on the drip beginning to rock gently.
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  I felt a flush of panic. ‘Careful you don’t knock that.’

  ‘I’m fine.’

  There was a hard edge to his voice, like he was suffering and finding it hard to take, but determined to keep going. The covers fell away slightly, revealing a slim, athletic body. There were bruises like black and purple stains on his skin. I kept my wince inside: bruises don’t appear that quickly unless you’ve been hit very hard. I saw more bandages as well, covering what must have been numerous cuts. The tube leading from his arm to the trolley was tied tightly to him with swathes of white cloth.

  ‘Your doctor would kill us both if he saw you doing that,’ I said. ‘He seems a pretty tough guy.’

  ‘He didn’t want me to speak to you.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘But I have to.’

  I nodded, noting the language: ‘have to’, not ‘want to’.

  ‘I need to tape record our conversations.’ I gestured at the equipment I’d brought. ‘Is that okay?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘If at any point you want to stop’ - I spread my hands - ‘that’s fine. We take a break, pick it up again later on. Basically, I’ll be back and forth for the duration. We’ll see how we get on.’

  ‘I don’t know how much help I’m going to be.’ He frowned. ‘My head keeps going ... in circles.’

  ‘Well, we’ll just take things easy to start with,’ I said. ‘I want you to stay as calm and relaxed as possible. You may not remember properly at the moment, but I know you’re very worried about your girlfriend.’

  Immediately: ‘Jodie.’

  ‘I know you’re worried about her. And that might make you feel panicky. As much as possible, I want you to try not to worry. The guy in charge is the best there is at this sort of thing. So we’ll do the worrying for you.’

  ‘But she’s still there. In the woods.’