The Cutting Crew (10 page)

But when I got home, there was another package waiting for me.

Chapter
Six

It was a different type of envelope, and it had my name written in neat letters across the front in handwriting I didn't recognise. I opened it downstairs and found a video inside, with no label and no letter of explanation. Perhaps what was on it would be explanation enough. I took it upstairs, slotted it into my old deck and pressed play.

There were a few seconds of blank screen, and then the clip started running. My first impression was that the picture was fuzzy and unprofessional, but the quality was good enough for me to see what was happening. My second thought was that I didn't like it.

It was a static shot of a room, although as the seconds crept by the camera wobbled a little, as though it was on a cheap tripod resting on uneven floorboards and people were moving about nearby. But there was nobody in shot. The room itself was bare, derelict and full of sick-looking air. Most of the paper had been stripped from the mouldy walls, and the plaster beneath was pitted and stained and scratched and scarred - covered in more graffiti than the room knew what to do with. The walls were shouting a thousand scrawled arguments to each other, whispering and muttering a thousand more.

The quality of the picture dipped. A saturation of colour occurred, disrupted by flickering lines of blurry black and white.

Then it returned to normal.

Maybe it was the quality, or perhaps it was that I'd only ever seen the place spotlit before now, but it took me a few moments to recognise where it was. When I did, I hit pause and sat back on the bed, feeling the air hum a little. It was the room where Sean and I had found Alison's body.

The pause was unsteady. A wave of incoherence rolled steadily up the screen.

Fuck. Even though it was just an empty room - lit by a bulb hanging down from above - it was a haunted place for me. Anyone looking at it would have known that it was a killing room: a place full of dead moths and flies and lice; a place where everything was rotting.

I looked at the envelope again but I didn't touch it. There were prints to be considered, although whoever had sent this had no doubt been very careful. There were no visible marks apart from the name. No address. Like the letter from Sean, it had been hand delivered. I looked up again. The video was fluttering, making a noise like a dog shaking water from itself.

I pressed play. The screen fuzzed up for a second as the video pulled itself together, and then it cleared. The empty room. I knew that I was going to see something awful. Alison's murder, perhaps.

Or something else altogether.

There was no sound - the tape had been made without a microphone. Also, I thought, the light. My mind was picking the scene apart, turning it around. There was a bulb hanging from the ceiling. But when we'd found Alison, there had been an empty socket.

Three figures moved into view, startling me. There were two big men, both dressed in black, on either side of another man, who was naked and who seemed barely able to stand by himself. Quickly, they shoved him towards the opposite corner and moved back out of view.

Not Alison, then.

The naked man stumbled a little but kept his footing. He was shivering; hugging himself. He was well-muscled, but the light from above made him look pale as milk: weak and vulnerable. After a moment, he turned around to face the camera, almost directly in the centre of the frame. It was Sean. Staring at me and looking as terrified as I'd ever seen a person look.

I made some kind of noise, sat forward on the bed. Reached out towards the screen to take something that wasn't there, and then withdrew my hand. It was shaking as I brought it to my mouth.

Before Sean had time to react, the two other men moved back into view. They were wearing balaclavas and carrying what looked like baseball bats. The man on the left side of the screen took a good, two-handed grip and swung as hard as he could. Sean saw it coming of course - he held his arms up in front of his face, and they took the full force. I saw him scream, even though I couldn't hear it. The other man came in quickly, swinging the bat into Sean's side. His defensive huddle collapsed, and then the first man hit again, catching him on the top of the shoulder and taking him down to the floor.

My whole body was shaking. I had the controller in my hand, my thumb hovering over pause, and I wanted so badly to press it.

But that would only stop the video.

The men took it in turns: bang, bang, bang. I felt each one. They had to keep stepping back and taking better grips on the bats. Sean maintained a feeble defence for as long as he could, with his body stubbornly refusing to stop fighting for life, but then a blow to the head put him flat on his back, semi-conscious. With his arms down by his side, fingers broken, there was nothing to stop them. They took massive, overhead swings that made the camera shake, and me along with it.

The video went on for another minute. By the end of it, his head was ruined, his eyes were gone, his jaw was half off. But even then, he was still moving slightly: his fingers tapping on the floorboards.

Watching him, I couldn't imagine what was going on in his mind.

Perhaps nothing; perhaps just electrical impulses still running halfheartedly through ruined circuitry. One of the men aimed more carefully and really hit him hard: a killing shot. Sean's body went slack and lifeless. The clawing stopped.

The two men stood in shot for a second, breathing heavily, and then exchanged a few words. After a moment, one of them moved out of view. The camera shook a little more aggressively and then the scene cut to white noise. I knew that something inside me was going to snap, but I also knew I had to keep it together for a little longer. There might be more. So I visual-searched the remaining hour of videotape, but it was all blank. That was the end.

Then, I lost it entirely.

Frustration. The feeling of needing to run as fast as you can but being forced to walk very slowly; when there's simply too much space and not enough time between you and where you urgently need to be. I had frustration now in spades.

The tram was so slow that I had to resist the urge to stick the barrel of my gun in the driver's ear and tell him to fucking step on it. But running was out of the question, even if the mindless exercise of it would have helped, so I was stuck on public transport: bottled up in an oppressive, bright cannister that was trundling painfully slowly through the city.

Early evening had thickened into night. The sky was blue-black, and the windows of the tram gave back pale reflections of the interior: people nodding asleep; people hanging on to overhead bars. And me - staring blankly out at dark buildings I could hardly see, feeling frustration and hiding it behind a face full of hate.

There was no difficulty generating it now. It must have been coming off me in waves.

We skirted the main square at one point, and everyone craned their necks a little to check out the boxing ring. It was only a few days away, I supposed. The square would be crammed with people, all watching fighters representing the city's districts hammering the crap out of each other all day. The ring had actually been there for over a week now, but they were still working on the scaffolding for the speaker system and the big screen. The ring itself was spotlit at night and everybody on the tram seemed fascinated by it. I looked away. Gritted my teeth. Thought: come on.

I got out on the edge of Bull, into air that was cold and vivid: a slap in the face. The doors shushed closed behind me and the tram chugged away into the night. After a moment, I was left with the distant clanking of machinery. It was the sound of enormous steam hammers pounding the ground, but the faraway noise of it was strangely muffled by the blocky spread of abandoned factories, foundries and mills. The district bulges off the edge of the city like a tumour. The businesses build up the ground, burn it down again and move ever outwards.

Now I could run.

I had the gun out of my pocket, and the safety off, and when I started running it was like a switch had been thrown inside me. It was lucky that there was nobody around. Sections of the video clip kept looping and repeating in my head, with fragments of scenes flashing up. Now that I was running, frustration had turned to panic.

It took five minutes to get to the house, and I didn't see a single person the whole time. By the time I arrived, the night sky had blackened, spread and opened; rain had started to fall. Not a heavy shower, but persistent, and it smelled slightly of chemicals: bleach and ethanol. The street looked like dark rubber. At the house itself, the wood of the boards and timber was soaked. I flicked on the torch I'd brought with me and clambered carefully through the ruins of the front door.

The walls on the ground floor were shiny with rain, rolling down from the levels above, and in the few places where the paper remained it was raised up in boils of damp. I padded along the corridor, and the floorboards felt soft beneath my feet. The building was in an advanced state of decay - far more deteriorated than my first visit. And again, I had the impression that somebody was here with me, except this time it was more likely. The person who sent me the clip would have expected me to come. So I made my way up the weak stairs slowly, ready and eager to unload a full clip into anything stupid enough to move.

I stopped on the landing. The door at the far end of the corridor was closed, but outlined with soft yellow light. Somebody had left the bulb switched on for me. Either that, or someone was in there right now.

Someone other than Sean anyway.

Three other doors on the corridor. One was boarded up tight, but the other two were slightly ajar and the insides of the rooms were dark. Real problems. I hesitated for about a second, and then decided to head straight on: deep down, it didn't really feel like there was anybody waiting for me in here. It was just the house, with its heavy memories. You walk into a place like that, you can't help but feel them.

A deep breath, and then I moved.

Straight for the end room, kicking the door open - but not so hard that it bounced off the wall and shut again - my gun up in front, trigger already half pulled. But the room was empty. No body on the floor. I swept it and then moved in, turning on my heels to cover the area behind the door. Still nothing. Nobody waiting here. Nothing.

I closed the door behind me, shutting myself off from the other rooms in the house.

No body. But there was a lot of dried blood on the floorboards, and spatters all over the walls, too. Remnants of mould, as well.

After all, this was an abandoned house; Alison's body had been taken away for burial but nobody had come in to clean up afterwards. And now Sean. This room was death upon death, like some kind of trap people wandered into. Unlike Alison, however, the people who had beaten Sean to death had taken his body away with them. He might never be found or receive a proper burial.

Insult to injury.

The reality of what I'd seen hit me again, and I felt like sliding down the wall and collapsing. Suddenly, it felt as though there was nobody within a hundred miles of me: nothing but a spread of empty houses and rusting factories; pistons moving through pointless, automated arcs and machines turning this way and that in the distance. I imagined that the noise of it was echoing away, diminishing from the hard, anvil sound of metal upon metal until it became as quiet as falling snow by the time it reached the city or the night sky or the hills in the distance. I could have walked outside the house and screamed, and no one would have heard.

But instead of sitting down, I forced myself to take in the room: to see all the details and try to make sense of it all. There wasn't much, and I knew my mind was a little too strained for anything like a careful analysis: that would come later. But at least one thing caught my eye. I walked over to the far corner of the room, stepping over the section where Sean had been killed, and crouched down carefully to examine the wall, tilting my head a little to match the slight incline of the writing there. There was some newer graffiti, written in what looked like blood.

Eli is rising.

I didn't know what it meant, but there was something familiar about it.

I stood up, just as I felt the vibration in my pocket. A text message, now of all times. I took out the phone, expecting to see my wife's name there, but instead it was Lucy. I frowned and pressed the read message option.

hope ur ok. pis stp hurting, im sorry about rich, hope u undrstnd. didn't mean to hurt u. :(p>

She certainly picked her moments. I didn't know how long it had been since she'd last been in touch, or how many plaintive messages I'd sent to her in the meantime, and this was when she'd finally replied. If she hadn't, then things might have panned out differently.

I typed a reply: no am not ok. need u n rosh. its sean.