The Glister (3 page)

Over the next few hours, Morrison went about his business with a feeling more of irritation than concern. He stopped off at Mark Wilkinson's house before he did anything else because, as he'd told the others, finding the boy there was the most likely scenario. When he got to the house, however, at just after eleven o'clock, the Wilkinsons were watching television and they seemed more upset at being interrupted at the crucial point in the film than anything else. They certainly didn't seem concerned for their son. After showing Morrison into the front room, they hadn't even switched off the television, though the mother did turn the sound down a little. Still, all the way through the interview, they kept sneaking glances at the screen, to see what was happening. This annoyed Morrison, who also found it difficult to sit in a room where a TV was turned on and not be distracted. Though he hardly ever watched it at home, it struck him as a fairly innocent distraction and it was company for Alice when he was out and about. That night, however, there was something dully obscene about those images flickering on the screen and the sound of the actors talking, dialogue spoken just quietly enough that, even though he didn't care a whit about what they were saying, Morrison found himself straining to follow. Perhaps because of this, or maybe because the parents seemed so unconcerned, the interview did not last long. It seemed the boy hadn't come home yet, but the Wilkinsons made no show of being worried. “Mark often stays out late,” the husband said, darting a quick glance at the screen. Clint Eastwood was pointing a gun at somebody.

“He's stayed out all night a couple of times,” the wife added. She seemed oddly blasé about it, as if she didn't much care what the boy did, or what might happen to him. Morrison thought, talking to them, that it was no surprise Mark was out there in the dark, wandering around in the poison wood, playing stupid games to scare his pals. In fact, the longer the conversation went on, the more he disapproved of these people. At the same time, however, he knew he didn't have any right to judge them. He didn't know what their lives were like. You only had to take one look at them to know that marriage to either one couldn't be much fun. “He just goes off, without a by-your-leave.” She glanced at the TV. “I think it's his way of teaching us a lesson.”

“I see,” Morrison said. He sounded like a policeman from a TV program himself at times. “So, can you think of any reason why he might have wanted to teach you a lesson tonight?”

The woman gave him a sharp glance. She had sensed his disapproval and she was none too pleased. She turned to her husband, whose face was as blank as a TO
LET
sign; then, with nothing doing there, she swung back to Morrison and gave him a bitter smile. “Probably,” she said. “Nothing would surprise me with him.”

Morrison was working hard not to show his exasperation. “Well,” he said, “do you know of
anywhere
he might have gone?”

The woman didn't look at him, but kept her eyes defiantly on the screen. “He might have gone to my sister's,” she said.

“Your sister's?”

“Yes,” she said. “Sall's.”

“And where is that?”

“Oh, she's not there
now”
the woman said, with an oddly triumphant expression. “Sall's dead. Somebody else lives there now.” The woman seemed as indifferent to her sister's death as she did to her son's apparent disappearance.

“He just goes over there, sometimes,” the man put in. “He loved Sall,” he added, a little wistfully, Morrison thought.

“She spoiled him,” the woman said. “She didn't have kids of her own.”

Mr. Wilkinson had started to get interested now. “Well,” he said, “she couldn't, could she?”

His wife shot him a warning look and he slipped back into semi-torpor. “Anyway,” she said, “he goes over there and hangs about. God knows why.” She gave Morrison another of her tight smiles. “I mean, he
knows
she's dead.”

It was around then that Morrison decided he didn't see any point in continuing any further, so, after noting down the aunt's address and a few more-or-less token questions, he stood up. The Wilkinsons stayed where they were, on the sofa. “Well, I wouldn't worry,” Morrison said. “It's probably just a bit of Halloween high spirits.”

The woman looked at him. “Probably,” she said.

Morrison stood a long moment, then the man finally got up. “I'll get the door for you,” he said.

“Don't worry,” Morrison said. “I'll see myself out.” The man looked surprised at this, then relieved. He sat down again and turned to the television. By the time he got to the front door, the TV was back at normal volume.

As he closed the Wilkinsons' gate, Morrison had debated whether to let the matter go for the night and follow up the next morning—and without a doubt, he would have been better off if he had. If someone else had found the boy, there was a good chance that things would have turned out differently, not just in this one case, but in all the cases that followed. On another night, perhaps, he would have gone back to the police house, to check in with Alice and have a cup of tea, but that night, something nagged at him, something he couldn't put his finger on. So he'd fetched the car and gone over to the poison wood to take a look. Even then, he'd been in two minds and he'd considered just going home and waiting till morning, thinking himself a fool for bothering. If the parents didn't think the boy was in any real trouble, he asked himself, why should he? About half an hour into the search, however, he found what looked like a little den among the trees, a natural shelter of scrubby bushes and rubble, the kind of place where some lonely child might go to hide out. Not a place for a gang, but a secret, enclosed space where a boy with more imagination than friends might sit out late, playing at wilderness. Or that was what it looked like at first; it was only on closer inspection that Morrison saw that it was really the first in a series of such closed spaces, the first tiny room in a series of rooms, one leading to another, until, in the fourth, he found a strange little bower where someone had made an elaborate display, all glinting, colored fragments of glass and china, the bushes decked with swatches of stripy fabric, the floor splashed here and there with what looked like tinsel and glitter. It was all new, a special place that someone had just built—a
bower,
like those elaborate structures that some exotic birds make, when they want to attract a mate. At the same time, it also had the feel of a chapel, a special place set aside for prayer, or contemplation, or possibly sacrifice—and it was as if that thought, that wisp of an impression, drew Morrison's torch beam away, dancing over the cold, glittering floor of the den across a wall of twigs and tattered scraps of nylon and old curtain fabric to the body. A boy's body, Mark Wilkinson's body, suspended from the bough of the largest tree; suspended, perfectly bright and neat and—this was what disturbed Morrison most, this was what his mind kept going back to afterward—absurdly gift wrapped, at the throat and around the chest and ankles, in tinsel and bright lengths of fabric, like a decoration or a small gift hung on a Christmas tree. Morrison knew it was Mark Wilkinson right away, though there was no reason to be so sure: the face was covered with blood and grime and there were faint creases in the dirt on his cheeks, where he might have been crying—though Morrison wasn't sure of this, because the boy's face looked oddly calm, even though his eyes were open and he was suspended in the tree like a figure from some makeshift crucifixion. Morrison didn't know why, but he was convinced that whatever had happened here had only just finished, maybe only a few minutes since. Still, he didn't have to check the boy's pulse to know he was dead. Yet it wasn't the fact of death that horrified Morrison so much as his own reaction to the crime scene. It was nothing like the climactic moment in a film, where someone discovers a body and screams: he didn't reel away in disgust, he didn't cry out or run to fetch help. Worse still, he didn't remember who he was and start doing his job. Instead, he came to a halt at every level of his being. He came to a total standstill in his mind and in his nerves and in his blood, suddenly drained of energy and will, captivated by the horror and, at the same time—and this was what transfixed him—by the sense that there was some kind of meaning in all this. Had he got there soon enough to intervene, or a few hours later—the next morning, say—it might have been different. There would have been something to do, set actions to perform; or everything would have been frozen and drained of color, a crime scene, a collection of evidence that someone, though probably not John Morrison, could have read like a book.

At first sight, it appeared that the boy had been brutally treated, deliberately and systematically wounded, in a process that easily could have been mistaken for torture. Yet later, when the image of this place had sunk into every fiber of his bones and nerves, Morrison would not have called it that. Mark Wilkinson's hands had been bound—bound, yes, yet loosely, almost symbolically—with a length of very white, almost silky rope, and most of his clothes had been removed, leaving him so thin and stark and creaturely that he looked more like some new kind of animal than a boy in his early teens. His skin was very white, in the unmarked areas between the mud stains and grazes, but what struck Morrison most forcibly was the look in his eyes, a look that suggested, not fear, or not just fear, but recognition. That was what shocked him most: the boy had a look in his eyes that suggested that he had seen, at the moment of death, something he knew, something he recognized—and it took Morrison a moment to realize what he was now witnessing, a moment to work it all out, not thinking, just feeling, just ticking like a machine for remembering and connecting, and then he understood that what he was seeing wasn't the result of a torture scene, but of something that, to him, seemed much worse.

What he remembered then was a passage in a book he had read, a passage that described how, when the Aztecs performed a human sacrifice, they would cut the heart from the still-living body, and he recalled how he had shuddered at the notion that a whole people, an entire culture, could believe that this was the only way to protect their crops, or to ensure victory in battle. It had revolted him, that these things had actually happened, that this was how people had once spoken to their gods. To believe in human sacrifice, not as some secret, ugly, perverted thing, but as a glorious act; to accord the highest honor to the priest who scooped out that living heart and raised it to the sun, not once but time after time, in ceremonies that might claim tens, perhaps hundreds of victims, had seemed to him obscene beyond imagining. Yet it had also seemed mercifully remote, the ugly, absurd practice of a primitive, warlike race. Now, however, as he stared into Mark Wilkinson's pale, muddied face, he understood that his death had meant something to his killer, something religious, even mystical. He didn't know
how
he knew this, he simply did. It wasn't the scene of the crime that told Morrison what the killer felt; it was nothing rational and it was certainly nothing he could have put into words had someone come, at that moment, to question him, or prod him into doing his job. No: it was something about the arrangement of the body that struck him, an arrangement in which he sensed the reverence of a last moment. No matter how incredible or disgusting the idea would have seemed to him at any other time, Morrison sensed, for one fleeting and terrifying moment, that there had been reverence here, a terrible, impossible tenderness—in both the killer and his victim—for whatever it is that disappears at the moment of death, an almost religious regard for what the body gives up, something sublime and precise and exactly equal in substance to the presence of a living creature: the measured weight of a small bird or a rodent, a field mouse, say, or perhaps some kind of finch.

Morrison had to fight the temptation, then, to cut the boy down, to undo the ceremony of what had been done to him, to cover him up and not let him be seen like this by anyone else. He wanted to deny this sacrifice, he wanted to invalidate it—but then the realization came that what he really wanted was to bring the boy back to life, to reverse the process through which he had suffered and died, and that was something nobody could do. And it was then that John Morrison understood, with a sudden and brutal clarity, that he wasn't a real policeman after all, because he did not have what it took to deal with this. He could already feel some brittle structure crumbling in his mind and, as he stood staring at this sacrificed child, everything he had hoped for when Brian Smith unexpectedly wangled him the job of town policeman collapsed like a bad wedding cake. When he'd joined the police force, he had never expected to find a body. Or not like this, at least. People died in the Innertown all the time, as they die elsewhere. They died of strokes, old age, lung disease. Occasionally, they killed themselves, or were made strange by some random accident. Morrison had already had his fair share of those, and he'd been obliged to deal with the aftermath, or make notes, or stand at the edge of some family's bewilderment and grief and pretend he had a reason to be there. Mostly, though, his neighbors died privately, with no need for an official presence, and Morrison was as removed from those deaths as he was from their other secrets. Some of them died from causes that were, and would forever remain, unknown, because no authority on earth wanted to determine what those causes were. The Innertown wasn't a healthy place to live; the trouble was that, for most people, there was nowhere else to go. This was why so many also died of things that no doctor could have diagnosed—disappointment, anger, fear, loneliness. Not being touched. Not being loved. Silence. In the old days, even hardnosed GPs would talk about dying from a broken heart: now cause of death had to be something more official. Still, nobody had been murdered in the Innertown, not in Morrison's lifetime, and he was glad of that, at least. He might have wanted to be a policeman all his life, but he had never wanted to be one of
those
policeman, like the ones he saw on television, finding bodies, stalking the killer, refusing tea from a friendly, but now slightly anxious woman, because he was about to tell her that her child had been tortured to death. That was all very well for the cinema, or crime magazines, but Morrison had never thought of it as real police work. What Morrison had wanted was to be a small-town bobby, walking the beat, a face familiar to everyone, a person people could trust. He wanted to work with the familiar and the tender; he wanted to be able to know what he was dealing with, learning all the time as he went along till he had a body of knowledge and understanding that he could pass on to whoever replaced him. He wanted, in other words, to be part of the community, a man as well known and reliable as the town-hall clock. He wanted to tap the barometer as he left home in the morning and know the chances of rain that day; he wanted to buy a paper on a Monday and read about the town gala, or some minor local sporting victory. Not this. Not some child, hung out on a tree like a sacred offering.