Magic Dirt: The Best of Sean Williams (36 page)

~ * ~

His wife’s voice brought him abruptly out of sleep that night:

“He’ll need the bones before he’s done.”

He opened his eyes groggily in the darkness. “What, Arna?”

She didn’t answer. The night was silent and still. Angry at himself for letting himself being woken up like that, he rolled onto his side and tried to get back to sleep.

Thoughts of the latest murder surfaced, unbidden and unwanted. The news had come through that afternoon, after his encounter with Jellyhead, and the worst thing about it was that no-one had been truly surprised. Even Moir had looked resigned. The Slayer was like an unstoppable, invisible disease, killing cell by cell while the rest of the body looked on in horror. Dozens of detectives were working the case, but as yet no-one had been arrested; no suspects had been named. It was a waiting game at worst, and a praying game at best. Hollister envied no-one involved. It was bad enough on the outside looking in.

During the last year, he had lost contact with some of his old friends in forensics, but he heard enough. The killer targeted young, vulnerable women, usually addicts and prostitutes in the Poison Street area. One had been a day-tripper in the wrong place at the wrong time. All had piercings, which the killer took as souvenirs after he’d finished with them. The media knew about the rings and studs, but they didn’t know all of it. The killer was also in the habit of taking his victims’ tattoos.

“We thinking he’s curing the skin,” said one of Hollister’s contacts. “Preserving it. God knows why. Maybe he turns them into lampshades ...”

Hollister lay awake in the darkness, imagining the killer’s living room, mottled with shadowy roses, Celtic crosses and cobwebs, and shuddered.

~ * ~

He’d half-expected it—any sex-related crime prompted connections to the Amberley Slayings, no matter how tenuous—but the call into Superintendent Leonie Penglis’ upper-floor office the next day filled him with foreboding.

“Jane told me about your idea,” she said, not bothering to get up.

“It’s not our case,” said Moir. She was sitting with her back to the window, to the view of cheap hotels, garish shop-fronts and closed restaurants stretching into the distance. Her face was in shadow, and Hollister couldn’t tell if she was annoyed or not. “We have better things to do than go shooting at shadows.”

“Do you think it’s just shadows, Senior Constable Hollister?”

“It could be,” he said, as diplomatically as he could.

“Well, I think the idea has some merit. Look into it, would you?”

So they went back out onto the streets, hunting for the crazies. At first they strolled at random, seeking just one of their new “suspects”. They asked around, paying particular attention to bottle shops and bus shelters. No-one could remember seeing Jellyhead or any of the others that day. No-one knew anything about them, either. Who they were, where they came from, and what they did was all a mystery. They were background figures, drifting into focus on odd occasions but never viewed close up. They were, Hollister thought, very much like ghosts.

“This is getting us nowhere,” Moir said over a sandwich lunch, resting on a park bench.

Hollister agreed, although he didn’t say so. It was bad enough to have suggested the pointless plan in the first place. He felt awkward disturbing people who had obviously gone to extreme lengths to avoid society. What right did he have to drag them back into it? And maybe that, he thought, was why the crazies were hard to find that day. They could sense his and Moir’s intentions on some psychic grapevine and kept their heads down accordingly. Who was he to bother them?

Or maybe it was just the expression in Jellyhead’s eyes; he didn’t want to probe any deeper into that sadness.

“You’re quiet today,” Moir said.

“I didn’t sleep well.” His lunch tasted like ashes in his mouth.

“Bad dreams?”

“Kind of.” He wrapped up the rest of the food and tossed it into a bin. “I’m sorry about this, Jane.”

“You have nothing to apologize for, Wey. You know that.”

“I mean today.”

“Well ...” She shrugged helplessly. “At least it’s keeping us outside. We can work on our tans, from the neck up.”

They tried a number of charity groups that afternoon, and managed to track down a couple of tired old men with cheap alcohol on their breaths. They didn’t know anything about the break-ins, but showed a morbid interest in the murders. One expressed a firm opinion that the victims deserved what they got for walking around the streets at night on their own, dressed like prostitutes.

“Some of them
were
prostitutes,” Moir said.

“There you are. Asking for it, they were.”

“No-one asks to be murdered.”

“Not out loud, no ... “ The toothless alcoholic cackled at them as they left.

They were running out of options, and their feet were getting sore. Their last port of call was a homeless shelter in Reyes Hill run by a tired-looking social worker named Ellard Trenorden, a man so scruffy he looked on the verge of becoming one of his own charges. Hollister had spoken to him a couple of times before, pursuing more everyday matters, but had never warmed to him.

“We get a few of the older ones through here every now and again,” Trenorden said. “Not as often as you’d expect, though, unless one of them gets sick or beaten up.”

“Do you know where they live?” Moir asked.

“Me? No. But Cloe might. She’s made contact with a couple of them.”

“Is Cloe in today?”

“I’ll see if she’s free.”

Cloe Flavell was in her late twenties and pale to the point of vanishing. Her office was just as bland, the only feature being a bright red coat draped over a chair.

“I know who you mean,” she said in response to their queries. “Some of them come here to see me; they know I’ll listen. They’re deeply traumatized individuals, often with serious and untreated psychiatric problems.”

“Psychosis?” Moir asked.

“In the clinical sense, yes. But none of them is the Amberley Slayer.”

“Can you be certain of that?”

“Well, for one thing, few of them bathe, and murder is bloody work. They’d be wearing the evidence for weeks.”

Hollister was surprised by the frankness of her words. Moir simply acknowledged the point with a nod. “How would you rate their reliability as witnesses?”

“Poor.” Flavell didn’t seemed surprised by the question. “They have their own support mechanisms and are quite independent of the world you or I take for granted. It wouldn’t matter that you were from the police. I know one old guy who would lie on principle.”

“The one called Jellyhead?” asked Hollister.

She winced slightly. “Why are you asking me these questions? Has he done anything wrong?”

“Do you think he might have?”

“No, but...” Her pupils danced in sharp diagonal streaks: up-left, down-right, then centered on him. “He isn’t a liar, although he can be a bit off-putting. Some people say they find him creepy.”

Moir leaned forward. “Why?”

“I’m not really supposed to talk about things like this.” She glanced at the door that time, as though worried that her supervisor might burst in at any moment.

“This is purely off the record,” Moir assured her. She gave Flavell the now-familiar line about the porn shop break-in. “Our superintendent wants us to look for a reliable witness no-one around here would notice, or care about if they did notice. We don’t really think your clients are serial killers, just that they might have seen one in action—but if you’re saying that one of your clients
is
capable of—”

“No, it’s not that. Not that at all.” Flavell shook her head almost too hard. Hollister was afraid her blonde bob might slide off in one piece. “I’m sure none of them have done anything like that.”

“Do you know where they live?”

Another shake. “Hardly any of them have homes. Some go from shelter to shelter, or sleep wherever they can find cover. One has a spot in a dead line near here—”

“A what?” interrupted Hollister.

“Train line. A tunnel. The city is riddled with old spaces no-one cares about any more.”

“It sounds just perfect, then.”

“Maybe it is, but that’s not
their
fault.” A slight flush came to her cheeks—the first real sign of life her face had shown.

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it that way.” He was genuinely contrite. “I feel as sorry as for these old guys as you do.”

“I doubt that.”

“It must be awful living with no money, no home—alone ...”

Her gaze danced away. “Well, some of them choose to, of course, in their own way. It’s a means of escaping, of letting go. In many ways, they’re more free than we will ever be. There are people— not me—who like to think of them as our last surviving mystics: dreamers who don’t fit into modern society, reviled channellers permanently in contact with realms we can no longer experience.”

The expression on her face belied her words: part of her did want to believe that the old men in her care were worth something to the world around them, even if the world didn’t recognize them for what they were. Before he could say anything, though, Moir stifled a yawn and leaned back into the conversation.

“It’s after five, Ms Flavell, and we don’t want to keep you. Do you think you could ask your clients on our behalf if they’ve seen anything odd in the last few days?”

She still looked reluctant. “I suppose I could, if you think it might help catch the Slayer.”

“You never know. Here’s our card.”

They let themselves out of her office. Hollister was already looking forward to putting his feet up at the station when, on their way past the shelter’s reception, a young man waved them over.

“I heard what you were talking about,” he said, whispering as a group of teenagers burst through the door and headed past them to a back room. “I have the office next to Cloe. We started at the same time. She really cares about the old ones, but...”

“But what?” Moir was starting to look more interested than irritated.

“Cloe is an idealist. She thinks she can help anyone, even when they can’t be helped; you can only try to stop them from hurting themselves, and other people. She doesn’t see what we see.”

“What
do
you see?”

He paused and looked around. “They’re not stupid, these men. They use her to get vouchers for accommodation, food, prescription drugs. She gives them the benefit of the doubt, and they walk all over her.”

Hollister nodded, although he thought Cloe Flavell seemed competent enough, not so easily swayed. “Anyone in particular?”

“There’s one. He comes here a lot, more than we like to encourage, and asks specifically for her. We’re so busy here so she can’t always see him, but he waits around anyway. He’s always lurking about, watching her. It’s spooky.”

“You’ve never said anything about this to her?”

“She thinks I’m imagining things.”

Maybe he was, Hollister thought. “Do you think he’s stalking her?” Moir asked.

“Well, no, but ... “His expression darkened as though internally he changed gears, from office gossip to real concern. “There
was
this one time. I was talking to Cloe about another client and he was standing behind her. He was staring at her—just her, not me, even though our eyes were almost meeting. It was like I didn’t exist. Anyway, when Cloe and I were finished, someone else came up to talk to her and I went to my office. I looked back before I went in and saw this old guy walk up the hallway toward me, as if he’d given up waiting and was going to leave. As he went past Cloe, he reached out and took something from her shoulder.”

“Took what, exactly?”

“A hair. She didn’t notice. Jellyhead—she doesn’t like him being called that, but that’s who it was—put the hand with the hair into his pocket and kept walking. If he saw me looking, he didn’t say anything as he went past, and I was too surprised to say anything just then. I mean, who steal hairs?”

Moir glanced at Hollister. “I don’t know, um, mister ... ?”

“Harris. Dale Harris.”

“I don’t know, Dale,” she repeated, “but thanks for telling us about it.”

He looked relieved. “I thought you ought to know—if only so you realize that Cloe is sometimes a little
too
forgiving.”

“We understand.” Moir gave him a card. “Let us know if anything else happens, won’t you?”

“I will.” He nodded eagerly. “I will.”

“Maybe he’s just got a crush on her,” Hollister said when they were back out in the fresh air.

“Who? Harris or Jellyhead?”

“Both of them.” Moir smiled. “I meant Jellyhead.”

“But he couldn’t be the Amberley Slayer.”

“Almost certainly not, but he’ll look good on paper. At least we can tell Penglis we’ve found
something.
And we’ll spread the word to keep an eye out for him. If we can get a handle on him, maybe he’ll talk to us. He might be worth investing in for the future. You never know when he’ll come in handy.”

The thought of recruiting a senile old man in a bicycle helmet as a spy on the Poison Street underworld struck Hollister as ludicrous, but that, he supposed, was the point. The street-walkers were detritus, quite literally: pieces of society rubbed away by repeated stress. Few people noticed them, let alone cared about them— and for that reason he found himself understanding Cloe Flavell’s blindness. Someone had to look after them, whatever they did. If not her, then who? That it might not be anyone at all was more than a little saddening. There was nothing worse than being alone.