Needing (21 page)

As they walked away from the sergeant and down the slope, Oliver said, “Maybe they thought, because this is supposedly the last drugged-up killer out there, you’d want to be the one who brought him in.”

Langham slipped on a particularly wet sheet of mud and nearly went down on his arse. “Yeah,” he said over his shoulder. “But fucking hell, what if I don’t want to be the one?”

“It’s your job to be the one,” Oliver said, nearly slipping on the same patch of mud even though he’d braced himself not to. “Like it appears to be my job lately to listen to the dead and see scary fucking devils at the end of the bed. Not what I’d have chosen, but there you go.”

They came to a stop on a path strewn with tiny pebbles, loose dirt and a smattering of refuse. A supermarket receipt fluttered by, the long trail of paper undulating like an eel. Someone either had a big fucking family to feed or had bought food for a party. The paper seemed to go on forever before it finally fucked off and disappeared inside the tunnel.

Oliver stared into it, stomach rolling as the reason they were actually here tiptoed through his mind. Beneath there, in the darkness and shadows, was a man fast asleep—asleep after butchering an innocent woman.

How do you sleep after something like that? How do you live with yourself?

Langham walked ahead, approaching the tunnel on near-silent feet. He stopped to whisper to a pair of officers situated to the side and out of sight of anyone inside, nodded then turned to face Oliver.

“Stay there.” His eyes said it all—‘I don’t want you to get hurt, because we’ve got this thing…’

Oliver nodded, thinking,
Yep, we’ve got this thing, and it might all come to an end when you walk into that tunnel. He might turn violent. He might…might take you away from me.

The darkness scoffed Langham and the other two officers whole, and Oliver could only hope it didn’t chew them up and spit them right back out again. Despite the insanity of this case, this was the happiest Oliver had been in forever. To have what he wanted handed to him on a plate, only to have it ripped away now… Shit, fate wasn’t that cruel, was it? He fought the urge to leg it after Langham, to be there to protect him if things turned violent, but stopped. His presence in that tunnel might put Langham off his game, cause more harm than good. Oliver would just have to wait it out.

He didn’t have to wait long. Langham’s echoic voice emanated from the pitch a few seconds after a flashlight blared to life, the beam illuminating what looked like a heap of clothing on the ground.

“Asleep? A-fucking-
sleep?
Who the hell checked this guy? It’s obvious he’s fucking dead!”

Without waiting for permission, Oliver sped into the tunnel, coming abreast of the three standing men and the one on the ground. He stared at the corpse, its face frozen in an expression of innocence, as though the blood covering his skin was just makeup, that it didn’t belong to Sasha Morrison. Had the man, a vagrant by the look of him, been given the drugs on the street then told where he needed to go when the urge to kill took over him? Too many questions, ones he was thankful he didn’t need to know the answers to in order to get on with his job. Not now they had everyone involved either apprehended, in their sights or dead—but then what about those who had taken the drug, the ones they didn’t know about? Langham could deal with it—Oliver would just be there to listen if his man felt the need to share.

He wanted to reach up, close the inches between them and hold Langham’s hand, to give comfort to a detective who showed obvious signs of thinking his teammates were incompetent at times. Could Oliver do this…this job on a more permanent basis? He was momentarily startled by the thought but acknowledged that he wanted to be near Langham as much as possible, not just when the dead called. Was there some kind of title he could be given, other than informant, civilian help, that meant he could get regular pay, work side by side with the detective?

He hoped so. Despite the bone-weary tiredness it would bring when cases meant working for twenty-four hours or more in one go, despite people realising they were in a relationship that went beyond detective and his informant, despite every fucking damn thing, he hoped so.

Chapter Seventeen

Something Oliver had learnt early on in life was, despite wanting something so bad and praying for it, you sometimes never got it. Langham’s request to have him as a permanent police partner of sorts was rejected. It had to be really, didn’t it? Oliver had no formal police training, didn’t get hunches or have any desire to actually
be
a copper—it wasn’t in his blood, wasn’t the thing that shoved him out of bed in the morning, ready to wade through another case, another day full of sick people with no regard for others, catching them and making sure they had a stint behind bars.

Perhaps the fact that the dead hadn’t contacted him lately was a godsend. After the Sugar Strand case had finally ended, Gideon Davis apprehended after months of being watched, months of painstaking investigations to find evidence that had actually led the authorities to solid evidence that he was the mastermind behind it, Oliver was shattered for days. Knackered beyond description.

No spirits had contacted him since, and he wondered if he’d secured the cocoon a little too tight, making it so even the good ones couldn’t come knocking. With his sleep no longer interrupted by death’s call, he spent his days well rested and alert. He left his old job, wanting something new to do, and started a part-time position as an editor’s assistant for the local rag—tea-making boy, more like—his boss agreeing that if Oliver was needed by the police in future, he could go on a moment’s notice and also on the proviso that he gave reporters inside information on any high-profile cases he worked on. He’d checked with Langham on that, fucked if he wanted to get him into trouble for leaking anything he shouldn’t. Langham had said he would give Oliver as much information as he could without compromising the investigations. Oliver’s boss had been content with that.

So, all round, everything had worked out pretty well, although Oliver had a hard time keeping the images of the Sugar Strand case out of his head. Even though he’d told himself he didn’t need answers, he apparently did. His subconscious asked for them when he slept, making him wake in a sweat, streams of queries flapping through his mind like that damn supermarket receipt he’d seen. There were too many victims, that was it. Too many bodies had stacked up, all owing to an arsehole named Gideon Davis, who wasn’t spilling the beans on anything he’d done or why.

Before all this shit, Oliver had only had to deal with one dead body at a time—that of the spirit who contacted him—and that was hard enough. If a dead person did manage to get a hold of him again in the future, he hoped it would be like it had always been. Just one.

He sat in the police station’s public waiting area, legs open, hands between his knees, gaze fixed firmly on the needs-a-damn-good-wash linoleum. Langham would be finishing work soon—five minutes max he’d said about half an hour ago—and they had a table booked at Grisotto’s, some new Italian place in the city. He glanced up, watched those behind the glass pane of the front desk milling about, some on phones, some with their heads bent over paperwork, bored with the sight.

Lowering his head again, he watched an ant scurrying from beneath one of his boots towards the wall his chair was backed against, smiling wryly because even the insect had a mission. All he seemed good for nowadays was making tea with four sugars, filing old news stories and listening to his boss waffle on about needing new and exciting leads, nudge-nudge, wink-wink, get the dead to speak to you, boy. Oliver sighed every time, explained he couldn’t just summon the dead people whenever he bloody felt like it and grimaced at the look of disbelief on his boss’s face.

He admitted he felt lost without the dead. Yes, when they’d contacted him in the past it had sometimes been a bind, too much for him to handle, but their silence, their utter, deafening silence was worse. It made him feel useless, like he had no purpose. Langham assured Oliver he was needed—‘
By me, man, isn’t that enough?’
—and Oliver had gone on to explain that, although it should have been, it wasn’t. Didn’t Langham understand, what with his own job, his own desire to rid the streets of the filth that walked upon them, that a man sometimes needed a calling in order to feel truly whole? Oliver would love to say Langham was all he needed in life, but he’d be lying if he did.

And at the same time, it hurt, and he felt guilty that he wanted more.

The swoosh of the door leading to the innards of the police station had Oliver lifting his head, hope swimming through him that he’d see Langham breezing through the doorway. He didn’t. Another officer swept by, oblivious to Oliver sitting there like a lost soul, waiting for his buoy to float by so he could hang onto it and feel
necessary.

A policeman behind the desk tapped on the glass partition. “Langham’s caught up in some last minute things. Said he’ll meet you at home in about an hour.”

So maybe they wouldn’t be going to the restaurant, then. And home? Which one? Oliver’s or Langham’s? He didn’t know but stood, sliding his hand into his pocket to finger the key to Langham’s. He’d go there, hope he’d picked the right place. This past month he’d been to Langham’s more than his own gaff and, as he pushed open the station’s main door and walked out onto the street, he wondered whether they had some unspoken agreement that Oliver should live there. He wished he could bring the subject up—paying rent on his flat when he didn’t spend much time there seemed stupid—but as Langham hadn’t said anything about it, Oliver thought it best to keep his mouth shut.

After all, he didn’t fancy putting Langham in the awkward position of having to tell Oliver he wasn’t ready for that shit, that they’d only officially been a couple for a short while. Even though it had been months and the longest time Oliver had been with anyone.

He didn’t fancy rejection.

On the walk ‘home’, he thought about the drugged kids, how they’d been reunited with their parents once they’d been given the all-clear by doctors and the police. They could hardly be charged for something they hadn’t been aware they’d done. None of them remembered their acts or who had given them the drugs—none except Glenn Close, now living with a kind set of foster parents who gave her the life the girl should have had right from the start. If anything good had come out of that whole sorry mess, it had been that. She was young enough that the horrors could become a distant memory if enough good times eclipsed the bad.

He wandered along, feet knowing where to go. Good job, really, because his mind wasn’t on the route he was taking, was it? As he rounded the corner into Langham’s street, a cat zipped out of a bush, streaking across his path with a glance over its shoulder that brought a shiver-inducing thought to mind. Those creepy eyes, they’d never been explained. The kids had them, Alex Reynolds had them and he’d bet his next wage packet that the tramp under the bypass had them when he’d been alive. There was more to those eyes, Oliver knew it.

And they weren’t anything to do with drugs.

Yeah, he knew how stupid that sounded, how fucking ridiculous that he entertained the idea that demons inhabited those people while they were under the influence, how no one wanted to acknowledge that the eyes were even a problem, a mystery that needed solving. And if he hadn’t seen a demon with those eyes himself, he wouldn’t have believed it either.

He sighed, walking into Langham’s place. The scent of a good old British breakfast, stale now that hours had passed since it was cooked, welcomed him in. As oily as it smelt, he relished it—relished any scent to do with Langham, if he were honest—and closed the front door on a world gone crazy, the people out there, it seemed, all having something to do.

All except him.

Another sigh came out, and he shirked his shoulders and told himself not to be so bloody grim. He had a good man in his life, had a job,
two
roofs over his head. What was his problem? He walked down the short, no-room-to-swing-a-cat hallway then into the living room, where he slumped down onto the sofa, a beige velour thing that squeaked with every movement. He rested his head back and closed his eyes, wondering if a court date had been settled yet for Gideon Davis. For the first time, he wanted to follow up on the bad guy, visit the public gallery and see how things went after people had been caught. Maybe he only wanted to do that because it would mean seeing Langham take the stand, giving him time to study the man without feeling self-conscious. The only time he got to do that comfortably was when the detective slept, and, nine times out of ten, Oliver was so tired from a good fucking he ended up falling asleep mid-gaze.

He sat like that for a long time, opening his eyes when a key scraped in the lock, his belly clenching at the sound. He sat more upright, feeling a stupid wanker for staring at the doorway, probably with a longing expression on his face, fit for a schoolboy with a deep and searing crush. He had that crush all right, had it bad, and when Langham walked into the room, keys dangling from one finger, his hair dishevelled from having his hand go through it one time too many, Oliver had to stifle a whimper.

Oliver stood, sucking in the detective’s weary countenance, the dark circles beneath his eyes. He didn’t know what the man was working on at the moment, but it seemed to be taking its toll.

“You need rest,” Oliver said, wiping out the space between them and running his palm down Langham’s face. “Shall we forget going to the restaurant?”

“Fuck, no.” Langham raised his hand, covered Oliver’s with it. “It’s the weekend. Time for us.”