The Reaper

‘It’s only fifty quid. Everybody else is in. You don’t have to do anything illegal.’

‘What do you call this?’

No, they’d manage. He wasn’t going to put himself at the whim of crooked businessmen and seedy night club owners. He’d joined the Force to catch criminals, not become one. The Brooks would get by without brown envelopes.

Besides, he was a graduate. He knew his Economics. He’d seen the way things were shaping. After the stock market crash, property in London was cheap–but not forever. If they could afford to hang onto the flat when they moved into their Battersea house, they’d clean up in a few years. Fulham was up and coming. There was money to be made. Not that he cared about money. Not as much as Amy. Brook worried more about choice, that’s what money bought: freedom to choose. That was something they might need soon, especially as it was becoming clear to both of them that his current choices weren’t making him happy.

He shook the worries from his mind and turned to more practical matters. He drained his cup and placed it ontothe passenger seat with the others, before pulling on his carefree face and patting the leather-clad steering wheel with affection.

Then he rotated the ignition key nonchalantly as though expecting no resistance. ‘Come on.’ The engine coughed a haughty response, complaining in injured tones at being disturbed at this ungodly hour. ‘Come on,’ he pleaded a little more insistently.

‘Start please,’ he ordered with a hint of teeth beginning to grind. The Stag decided it had made its point and spluttered into life on the fourth turn and Brook swung off the kerb and north onto Fulham Palace Road, towards Hammersmith. Traffic was light though London was never deserted, even at three in the morning, something which never ceased to amaze Brook. His hometown, Barnsley, became a ghost town after what local publicans, without irony, called Happy Hour.

Twenty minutes later Brook pulled onto Minet Avenue. For a second the headlights illuminated a fox, nonchalantly nuzzling through shredded bin bags. It turned to face Brook, calm, at home. This was its patch, its time.

Brook killed the engine behind the flashing lights of a squad car and nodded to the constable on crowd control, though there wasn’t much interest at that time of the morning.

‘What have we got Fulbright?’

‘A nasty one, sir.’

‘Brooky Up here.’ DI Charlie Rowlands was leaning on the top of the stairwell that climbed to the first floor flat from the alley at the side of the grimy launderette. He pulled urgently on the inevitable Capstan Full Strength.

Rowlands was a tall, well-built man with the permanent flush of excessive drinking on his face. His eyebrows knotted in the middle above intelligent black eyes and a large, pockmarked nose. He had an air of the thinker, though, to Brook, he always seemed not to be wrestling with present problems but distant mysteries.

Unlike Brook he was in regulation dress for an officer of his age: dark grey suit, grey raincoat, flecked with moisture, and a tie that would last have had sartorial approval on VE Day His brown suede brogues confirmed the impression of a man who cared nothing for his appearance save that it wouldn’t be noticed.

At this moment, he was in imminent danger of falling through the flimsy iron rail on which his weight rested.

‘Guv.’ Brook stepped carefully up the damp metal stairs and perched at the top, fearing the whole structure might suddenly tear itself away from its fastenings under their combined presence. Rowlands’ features seemed drawn and apprehensive and Brook felt his superior’s unease was not selfish. ‘What have we got?’

Rowlands flicked his cigarette onto the wall across the alley and swept his nicotine-stained fingers across the thin wisp of grey hair he habitually trained across his bald head. It amused and comforted Brook that someone with so little idea of fashion could channel his vanity into such a hopeless venture. More hopeless than ever, now the rain had left the umbilical to Rowlands’ youth matted against his crown.

With a heavy sigh, he turned to train his penetrating dark eyes onto Brook’s. The smell of stale whisky defeated the stench of urine rising from the alley and infused theair between them. Rowlands’ drinking had been virtually constant since the death of his daughter the year before. Shed been at university in Edinburgh and, despite being the daughter of a senior policeman, or maybe because of it, she’d succumbed to the attractions of heroin.

Brook was worried about him. He didn’t need to be out on a night like this. Not with his heart. But Brook understood the self-perpetuating disease of police work. The more you saw in the job, the more you wanted to be away from it, but the more time you spent recreating yourself the more you dwelt on the terrible things you’d seen. The only answer was to keep working. Work was the only consolation, the only solution.

But there was a cost. Sooner or later something would have to give. Health, marriage, sanity. Take your pick. With Brook it would be two out of three. All he could hope was that it would be later rather than sooner.

‘Sammy Elphick.’

‘Sammy Elphick? Oh dear, what’s he been up to? Got himself in with the wrong crowd, has he?’

‘It looks like it. Whatever Sammy’s got into, it must have been pretty bad because they’ve all been done. And it’s no robbery. There’s a room full of stolen goods that’s not been touched.’

Brook screwed his face, sifting through scraps of memory. ‘Did he have kids?’

Rowlands nodded. ‘A boy. I’ve never seen anything like this, Brooky In all my years…’

‘How bad is it?’ Brook replied, damping down the fear and excitement that swelled in him at the start of a case. This didn’t sound like a routine refuse disposal.

‘I don’t know any more,’ Rowlands replied with a curt little laugh. ‘I need you to tell me.’ Brook caught the little look of envy thrown at him. Charlie Rowlands was on the final bend of the course and his emotional resources were spent. But he still saw scraps of humanity, of feeling, clinging to his DS and he needed it now to inform his own dead soul.

He ushered Brook through the door into a short hallway, in which it was difficult for both men to stand in comfort. It smelt of damp and stale beer and vomit. The walls were lined with peeling wallpaper. There was a halo of worn grime around the outdated circular light switch.

A gilt-framed picture of Jesus hung on the back wall. It hadn’t seen a cloth in decades. The incongruity didn’t escape either man and they exchanged a bleak smile. Sammy Elphick in the House of God? Only if there was lead on the roof.

Ancient, ill-fitting linoleum clung to the floor, the pattern long since obscured by substances which tugged at the soles of Brook’s Hush Puppies, announcing his every step with a squeak. The dim light was provided by a wall fitting, wittily shaped as a candle with a small bare bulb as its flame.

Brook took all this in, as might a man about to be executed, seeing everything, drinking in the banal details around him to assert his connection to life–the spider dropping from its web, the nipple of damp forming on the ceiling, the pounding of his heart.

Brook didn’t enjoy this part of the job. Or rather he didn’t enjoy the thrill it gave him. The adrenaline of dread.What was behind that door? He’d been told it was bad but that made it worse.

Would it be a study in scarlet? Would Colonel Mustard be prostrate on the floor of his library, smoking jacket wrapped around his tidy corpse, spotless lead pipe lying beside him? Unlikely.

At school Brook had dreamt of being a superstar detective grappling with unfathomable clues, crossing swords with fiendish criminals, saving the day. As a child he hadn’t considered wading through pools of blood and vomit.

Rowlands pushed open the door and Brook began assessing the scene. The worst was over. The not-knowing. In fact, he was surprised by Rowlands’ misgivings. There seemed to be order and purpose about the room with only the smell of faeces to gnaw at Brook’s equilibrium, offset by a hint of perfume. Talcum powder, Brook guessed. There was another smell, intermingling. Hospitals.

As he took everything in he was aware of the distant mumbling of lowered voices, could see the flash of the police photographer adding another chapter to his Book of the Dead.

The boy hung from the ceiling by the light cord, his head to one side, purple tongue peeping through parted teeth. Brook’s first thought was of Ariel in the Tempest, hovering above Prospero, awaiting instruction. He stared, expecting a horror that didn’t arrive. It was okay. He could function. He paced around the body trying to gather facts and impressions, not moving his eyes from the boy.

Yes. The boy was Prospero’s angel, floating, invisible, watching over his earthly charge. He had on thin nylon pyjamas and couldn’t have been more than ten or eleven. He was very slight but even so the ceiling rose was hangingoff at the unexpected burden it had been asked to support and looked like it might give way at any second.

Brook looked past the boy briefly, at the fireplace alcove and the daubing of ‘SALVATION’ in blood red finger-writing. Trickles had formed at the base of some of the letters and Brook nodded appreciatively at this dramatic touch. Perhaps he was going to tangle with Professor Moriarty after all.

‘Our boy fancies himself as a bit of a Stephen King,’ chuckled Rowlands.

Brook smiled in agreement and moved closer to the boy. His eyes were closed and sunken and his tousled hair fell in a heap across his face, a couple of strands touching the light bulb still in situ. They were singed.

‘Was that light on when we got here?’

Rowlands looked nonplussed for a second then turned to enquire of the photographer who shrugged. ‘Not when I got ’ere, it weren’t,’ he answered.

‘Maybe the bulb has blown. Check that, will you, when you’ve finished?’ Brook said to the man combing for fibres on the carpet. ‘It should have been on,’ he said to Rowlands.

‘How do you know?’

‘Just an impression. A good show needs lighting.’

Brook moved around the corpse as though it were a maypole, being careful to avoid stepping in any blood. The only sign of violence on the boy was the congealed blood around the stump of his missing middle and forefinger. From the small lump above a slight blackening stain in his breast pocket, Brook deduced that the sliced off fingers had been placed neatly in there. Neat was the word. There’d been no major struggle here. This was highly organised.

Brook examined further, wondering why he wasn’t appalled. Perhaps it was the neatness. Yes, that was it. He could focus. He could take it all in. Why was that? Was he just a good copper or had he become so hardened?

Rowlands was right. It was a bad one. Killing children was the last great taboo. Even regular criminals abhorred child killers. They weren’t safe anywhere, least of all in prison where child killers were vital to the self-esteem of other inmates. Run-of-the-mill lags could feel good about themselves once they no longer clung to the bottom rung of the ladder. They were better than child killers and had a duty to inflict righteous retribution on any in their midst who’d abused, raped or murdered children. Society demanded it.

But despite society’s abhorrence, Brook was unmoved, could look at this child without tears or nausea. Was it because he wasn’t yet a father? Was it the absence of blood and gore? He didn’t know. Rowlands, who had known fatherhood, also seemed calm but then he’d been ‘seeming’ calm for thirty years.