The Cutting Crew (4 page)

Lucy and Rosh arrived and we chatted; they both liked me and I liked them. We had a few drinks, sounded each other out, felt around each other a bit. I knew what they were suggesting without them saying it, and at that point I was fine with it.

So that was it. That was our crew.

As expected, Timothy Hartley was released. He clearly knew some people, and the legitimate witness withdrew his statement.

The next evening we paid Hartley a visit at his garage.

Like I said, Lucy was only small, but she had what my grandmother would call the life force in her, and when she wanted to she could let it go. Hartley was a sizeable guy, but he never knew what hit him. She tore him apart in about ten seconds, and then did some stuff to him that I wouldn't wish on anyone. Pretty quickly, he told us where the girl was.

Sean went off to check while we held Hartley there at gunpoint.

After a few minutes he started to get his balls back. He told us that we'd never get away with this, that he'd see us all in prison, fucked and dead for what we'd done. None of it made any difference to Rosh or Lucy, but it was my first time out and I was beginning to get frightened. Eventually, Sean phoned to say he'd found the girl and that she was still alive. Ten seconds later, Lucy shot Hartley in the head, and then there wasn't enough time for me to be frightened about anything.

We planted enough false evidence in the garage to point any investigating officers to a rival gang, and nobody was ever any the wiser. The girl? We left her near the hospital and made an anonymous call.

That was the first time, and it fucked me up as much as you'd imagine. I thought my life was over - that I'd damned myself and I'd go to a hell I didn't believe in but was still afraid of. Or I'd be caught. All the thoughts you'd imagine. But I wasn't caught - we were too careful for that - and the more I thought about it, the less I felt, and then finally I started to feel okay. Hartley was a crock of shit, and we'd saved someone's life. I tried to rationalise it, playing devil's advocate with my conscience. What exactly, I asked myself, was wrong with what I'd done? I really wasn't sure. You couldn't argue with the results. In every way possible, we'd made the situation better.

I didn't go with the crew the next time they went out, but I did the time after that, and it went on from there.

All in all, I was involved in killing seven men in cold blood. With each one the feelings lessened; I'd make myself feel angry and then I'd make myself feel nothing at all. As we went on, it got to seem like the only way of getting any real justice in our city at all. By the time we killed Carl Halloran - the last person we ever visited as a team - I was almost fine about it. That was a couple of weeks before we found Alison, though, and I had no idea how everything was about to fall apart.

One thing about being a cop: it's surprising how abstracted it makes you feel. You start off with a desire to help people and serve their interests, but that soon fades into the background. What you do marks you out as different - there's a real sense of community among police officers, and at its most intense it creates an 'us against them' mentality. You realise quickly that a lot of the people you're protecting don't care about you. In fact, a good proportion of them fucking hate you. Sometimes we earn that, sometimes we don't.

As a result, you begin to see people differently. It happened to me, and after a while I began looking sideways at the city itself.

Sean felt the same, and that's partly what brought us together and cemented our friendship.

There were nights when he'd drive me out of the city and up into the hills nearby. We'd park and both look out over the buildings and the lights and the people below us, and it would seem to me that in some awful way the city was alive: that there was a dark heart flexing and thumping underneath the skin of concrete and soil. Everybody thinks that way sometimes, I guess, but Sean thought it most of the time, and his belief was infectious. He'd tell me his theories, and the feeling would bloom inside me. The more we talked and worked, the more I could sense the city's heartbeat.

It made me feel powerless and awful and weak.

I was supposed to be in control of this city - this enormous creature that was bad from top to bottom - and it wanted none of it. Maybe it would let us get away with the little stuff, but the evil was too ingrained: any concerted attempt to dig it out would bring the buildings crashing down. That's what Sean said: it was like the human body if you removed all the water - all you'd be left with is a pile of sand.

That was how he saw the city, and after a while that's how I began to see it too. Partly it was because of the way things worked: everything was so orchestrated and coordinated that it was often difficult not to see a design under it all. But sometimes you only had to walk down the streets to start imagining them as veins and arteries, and on those occasions I often wondered if I could kneel down, press my hand to the pavement and feel the slow thud of the city's pulse.

Stupid, maybe, but that was how I started to see things.

Alison Sheldon's murder offered a kind of proof of it.

We didn't know her name then, of course. We didn't know who she was, only what she was.

Some kids found her, deep inside an old, abandoned building in Bull. Bull is a strange, eerie district in the top eastern corner of the city, expanding out far beyond the walls. To the far north-east, towards the hills, you have the power stations and towers, with smoke gusting out day and night. At the tops, you can see it unfolding ever so slowly, churning up and merging into the still grey of the sky. Closer to the city, the district is quiet, but there are always echoes and clangs in the distance. It's the industrial heart of the city, and probably one of the oldest parts, historically. Inside the city walls, the houses are all old mill-workers' back-to-backs.

They're where the navvies lived; where wool was spun; where the air was filled with smoke and soot and cholera. These buildings are mostly abandoned, dirty and dangerous, and because the district borders Wasp to the south, a lot of things go missing in them, including people.

Like I said, some kids found her. Bodies generally rest unattended in Bull for quite some time before they're stumbled on.

These kids were exploring and got unlucky. It was pretty dark inside, and she was just a shape to them: a shape and a smell. They spilled out of the building and called us - probably the first time in their lives, and probably the last. Sean and I took the call.

It was an old house. With a lot of the back-to-backs round there, it wasn't always clear where one place stopped and another one started. The walls were often thin; some of them would be missing entirely. Boards were nailed across properties, dividing homes into smaller sections, many of which had been knocked through into their neighbours. The front doors were only ever a guide to the internal spread of properties. Where there were back doors, you couldn't get to them because the alleys were all filled with squat bin-bags and splintered timber.

The kids, and a few adults, waited outside while we went in with torches, wary of our footing.

I could sense death the second we entered the house. There was a presence to the place. It was very quiet, but it felt like someone was in there with us and keeping still so as to not make any noise. Like even though the girl we would find upstairs was dead, she was still aware and watching us: flickering in the corner behind a soundproof screen that prevented her from screaming to us. Perhaps it was just the house itself: its mouldy walls broken down, paper peeling, everything reeking of damp and decay. The floor was covered with dust, old bricks, wood. Our flashlights carved across it, and wherever they weren't shining immediately seemed blacker as a result. We both had our guns drawn. Even though there was nothing alive in here to shoot, it felt like you might need to defend your soul against something.

We found her upstairs, exactly where the kids told us. Sean holstered his gun and got out a handkerchief to cover his face, while I toughed it out, shining the torch around the room to check what else was here. The walls were covered in shreds of paper, with strips of it hanging off, and the plaster beneath was mottled with damp and rot. A lot of old, stained graffiti. There didn't seem to be any furniture. The only real thing to note was a window opposite us, which was slatted, coated over with grey paper and thick with flies.

She was in the centre of the room, staining broken floorboards we could hardly see. Forensics would later determine that her body had been left balanced in a kneeling position. Her hands and feet had been bound behind her, and the cord around her neck had been tied tightly back to join the one at her ankles. When we arrived, however, decomposition had toppled her. She had lost most semblance of form, swollen from the slim girl she had once been into something awful and tight and black: something you'd have nightmares about. Her head looked like an odd pile of pebbles; you couldn't even tell where her eyes had been. A thin line of fungus trailed away across the floor, reaching for the window.

'Do you think she's dead?' Sean asked.

I gave him a look. Then we quickly checked around and went outside to call it in. Confirmed dead body; forensics required.

They'd go in first and do whatever they needed to do before the scene became even more contaminated, and then we'd get a chance to examine the area and get a feel for what might have happened there. We took details from the children who'd found her, and I tipped one of the other kids some money to get us both a coffee, and then we waited out in the open air for people with scientific qualifications to arrive and start measuring shit.

'This is going to be a bad one,' Sean said.

I nodded. But really - back then - I had no idea.

We worked that investigation hard: all of us. Each person that touched the file on the dead girl in Bull felt it burn their fingertips a little and not want to leave them.

This wasn't a business hit; it had none of that cool efficiency. As a cop, you have a certain understanding of professional hits: you might not like them, but you know why it's been done and a lot of the time it ends up making your life a bit easier. It's about greed, and everybody feels greedy once in a while. You can relate. But this kind of crime stemmed from something darker and more unpleasant.

And the worst part is that you can still relate. It's all the same building, but some crimes happen in the nice, clean offices upstairs, whereas others take place in the basement, beneath the rust and cobwebs, in rooms that you're scared to go into. You recognise the roots of everything you investigate, but you learn quickly that some are more uncomfortably damp than others.

The other reason we worked so tirelessly was Sean. As the case progressed - or didn't - he grew ever more distant and haunted. I saw less and less of him, and I started to realise that he wasn't sleeping much. There were days when he didn't turn up at all - he'd just be out on his own, running his own lines and walking grids that might not even have existed outside his own head. Everybody could see that he was unravelling. Bits of him were fading and becoming as indistinct as the girl - we didn't know her name, where she was from, who killed her and why. For some reason, it seemed like traces of Sean's mind were blowing away on these breezes of dead air, and, even if we didn't discuss the subject openly, I think we all figured that solving the case might save him.

Maybe it would have done, but we'll never know. However hard we looked and however many people we asked, we learned nothing. She had no name or identity, no family, no past, no future.

And in the end, Sean literally went to pieces.

When I thought about the dead girl, I thought of it like this.

People die in swamps or quicksand and they get sucked under for a long time - maybe even for ever. But sometimes the ground shifts and the body is brought to the surface. It's not evil and there's no thought behind it; it's just what happens. The girl's corpse felt like that. It was as though our city had shifted awkwardly in a nightmare and one of its dead had rolled up into the light.

Nameless and forgotten, she might have never been anyone at all.

This was just what our city did. What went on underneath.

Eventually, as stupid as it might seem, you start thinking.

Perhaps nobody killed her at all. Perhaps she was just dead there in the same way that the paint was peeling and the walls were crumbling. It sounds ridiculous, but on the nights when you can almost hear the city breathing it doesn't always feel it. Sean and I talked about it once, drunk as fuckers, and, although it was left unspoken, we both knew that it scared us how similarly we were starting to see the world. So I understood a little how and why it was haunting him so much, but I didn't appreciate it properly back then. Now I realise the feeling took him over and he simply couldn't cope anymore. People die in our city every day, and you learn to deal with it, but Alison's death was always different. We didn't know it then, of course, but it was tied into our city and its history, vibrating on a wavelength that Sean had begun to hear increasingly clearly. I could only vaguely sense the echoes, but even that was enough to frighten me.