I find myself shuddering with excitement and, to my surprise, sporting a sudden and huge erection.
I sit down at the kitchen table, something I never usually do since you don’t know which of the lowlifes has sat there before you, in order to disguise the disarrangement of my pants. Could I do it? Should I do it? Why not, after all? I could do it in such a way that would not identify my involvement. And it would make everything suddenly much more interesting, much more exciting. I’ve enjoyed the last year very much indeed, but the last ones haven’t been nearly so entertaining. It still feels like the right thing to do and I get a thrill of excitement each time I walk away from them, leaving them behind, but the stimulation I get now is not nearly the same as it was the first few times. I need to—how do the tabloids put it?—up my game.
So what, if the press then know it is being done deliberately? They will have no idea how, or why. They will quite likely not believe that such a thing is possible. The individuals concerned all died of natural causes, after all. There is no question of foul play.
The thought of calling someone up—or, no, perhaps it would be better done by e-mail, or by post—and the result of it! The story they would print for the next edition! It would be immense. It might even attract national attention.
The erection is growing, not diminishing. I’m past the point of decision. It’s no longer about the “if”; it’s now all about the “when” and the “how.” It has given me a completely new way of approaching the matter. A new inspiration.
I pick up the newspaper, no longer concerned about the crumbs or the smear of butter, and fold it in half. Holding it casually against the front of my body, I leave the kitchen and hurry past the desks outside to the lobby, ducking into the disabled toilet tucked away around the corner by the elevators. I lock the door and undo my pants, laying the newspaper out open on the grubby floor, a double-page spread with pictures of them as I’ve never seen them, pictures of smiling faces from a different age, happy faces before I met them, before I released them from their pain, before I showed them the way to escape from it all. And looking at them again turns me on even more, rubbing myself hard enough for it to hurt, thrusting into my fist until I find relief, all over the newspaper, over their faces.
Annabel
The Park and Ride was quiet on a Tuesday lunchtime. I’d only ever seen it at seven in the morning, the buses busy but the parking lot still empty. Now I had to drive all the way to the far side before I found a space. Annoying to have to walk all the way to the bus stop and then all the way to the very back of the parking lot before I could start to drive home. And then, no doubt, to have to park three or four streets away from home.
I’d taken the morning off because I’d woken up with a fierce headache, one that made me nauseous. I’d almost expected it to last the day, but by eleven o’clock it had subsided to a dull thudding, and I was bored at home anyway.
On the bus, my cell phone rang. It rang so infrequently that it always gave me a jolt when I heard it. I felt for the phone, vibrating and playing a tinny rendition of Mozart at the bottom of my bag, tangled up in the rubbish I carried around with me everywhere I went and never needed. Someone sitting behind me tutted with annoyance at the noise, which got louder and louder as I held my bag open.
At last, when I was convinced the caller was going to give up and it was going to go to voice mail, I felt the trembling phone and grabbed it.
“Hello?”
There was a pause and I thought again that they must have hung up.
“Hello, is this Annabel?”
“Yes,” I said, wondering if it was a sales call and how I could get out of it. “I’m on a bus; I can’t hear you very well.”
“This is Sam Everett,” said the voice. “I’m a journalist with the Briarstone Chronicle.”
“Oh, yes. I got your e-mail. How did you get my cell number?”
“Ah—a lady in your office let me have it. Sorry, she said she thought you wouldn’t mind.”
Of course. Kate would assume I wouldn’t mind; I never minded anything, did I? I felt annoyed, but that wouldn’t make a blind bit of difference now.
“No, I guess it doesn’t matter.”
For some reason, I’d assumed Sam Everett was a woman. I had no idea why; I just suspected that a journalist interested in a human interest story like this one would be female, empathetic, kind. Maybe Sam Everett the man had a completely different take on it; maybe it was the bodies he was interested in, the decomposition, the potential for violence.
“Is it a good moment to talk?”
“Not really. I’m on the bus, on my way to work.”
“Ah. Maybe I could meet up with you later? What time do you finish?”
“Well, I’m late going in already,” I said.
“It won’t take long. Look, I’m in the town center. I could meet you off the bus and buy you a very quick coffee. What do you think?”
“Well . . .”
They didn’t even know I was coming in, to be honest. I’d not phoned to let them know, reasoning that neither Kate nor Bill would answer their phones, and, if they did, they probably wouldn’t much care.
“I’d really appreciate it,” Sam said. “I think we could really help each other out with this, you know? Nobody’s taking it seriously enough, and too many people are dying.”
“Yes,” I said. Where was this conversation heading? It was making me feel uncomfortable.
“So you’ll meet me? What bus are you on?”
I told him, which he took to mean I had assented.
“If you get off at the stop before the shopping center, I’ll wait for you there, OK? See you in a few minutes, then.”
He hung up. I put the phone back into my bag and looked out of the window at the houses lining the road. Big houses, large front lawns. The bus paused in traffic, outside a house that was obviously empty: no curtains in the windows, the lawn overgrown, weeds growing up through the cracks in the paving stones. Was there someone inside, after all? Someone waiting to be found?
A few minutes later the bus turned the corner onto the High Street. Four hundred yards farther on, the shopping center entrance would be the first of my two possible stops, there or the war memorial; from the shopping center I would walk through the arcade, usually empty and cold first thing in the morning, but at this time of day it would be heaving with shoppers. And the bus was full of them now, too, about to get off. That was why he’d asked me to meet him at the earlier stop; I would be the only one. He wouldn’t have to guess who I was, and he wouldn’t have to risk me going off without him.
I stood and went to the front of the bus, holding on to the pole and swaying as it bumped its way through the potholes. I could see through the front windshield a figure standing waiting at the bus stop, and as I got closer I realized this must be Sam Everett.
He was younger than I’d expected, certainly younger than me, maybe no more than twenty-five. He had dark hair that was long enough to curl over his collar, and wore neat glasses, black jeans, and a black thigh-length coat over what looked like a band tour T-shirt. I thought I’d seen him somewhere before, but the memory wouldn’t come. When I stepped down from the bus I saw it was a Pulp T-shirt that he was wearing and I thawed a little toward him then, because I’d loved Pulp when I’d been at university; they were my all-time favorite band. I gave him a smile.
“Annabel?” he asked, holding out his hand for me to shake. “I’m Sam.”
“Nice to meet you,” I said.
“Shall we go in here?”
We headed inside a café called the Lunch Box. Once a greasy spoon that had catered to the taxi drivers and bus conductors on their breaks, it had been completely renovated and now served panini and salad alongside the traditional full English breakfasts and bacon sandwiches.
I found a table near the back and, while Sam ordered for us at the counter, I watched him standing there and thought for a moment that he looked a little lost. I didn’t know what I had exp
ected a journalist to look like, but he probably wasn’t it. I’d been wondering why he looked familiar, and then I realized he was the journalist who had knocked on my door on the day I’d found Shelley Burton. The one who’d come with a photographer.
“Thanks,” I said. “How much was it?” I had my purse out ready, but he waved me away.
“Don’t worry about it,” he said.
He probably expensed it all, anyway, so I put my purse back in my bag without further argument. It was warm in here after the chill of being outside, and I felt my cheeks glowing. This was probably a bad idea I thought. I shouldn’t really be here with this man.
“So,” he said, as the man behind the counter brought two coffees and set them down in front of us on the table, “you’re working on the decomposed bodies, right?”
“I wouldn’t say I’m working on them, exactly. I’ve been trying to establish how many of them there are and looking for patterns. Look, I really think you need to be talking to Media Services, don’t you, rather than me?”
“I tried Media Services; I know that’s how it’s supposed to be done. They had no knowledge of it at all. Either that, or they just didn’t want to talk about it.”
“Really?”
“You may not realize this, but your organization’s media relations policy is pretty restrictive. They only tell you things they want you to hear. Which isn’t very much.”
“Oh,” I said.
“I went to school with Ryan Frost. Andrew Frost is his dad. I see Ryan all the time; we still go out some weekends. Last Saturday I was over his house and Ryan’s dad—sorry, I find it really hard to think of him as Andrew—was there, so I asked him about the bodies. I’ve been looking at it for a while, in fact. I did a Freedom of Information request to get the numbers, talked to the Coroner’s Office as well.”
I looked at him. He was flushed, leaning across the table toward me. Excited about it all.
“How many did you find?” I asked him. “I haven’t seen today’s paper.”
“Nineteen,” he said.
“I found twenty-four, including the one last week.”
“This is bad,” he said. “Don’t you think this is really bad? All those people. There has to be something linking them.”
“That’s what I keep looking for, but I haven’t found it yet.”
“I mean, they’re all so different—different ages, different social backgrounds, family, no family. I can’t find anything about them that’s similar.”
“I thought it might be something medical. I wondered if they were all at the same doctor’s practice, or they’d all been seen at the hospital, or they’d—I don’t know—engaged with Social Services, or something.”
“Have you heard of the hikikomori?”
“No, what’s that?” I said.
“It’s a phenomenon in Japan. A whole section of society—usually teenagers, specifically male teenagers—withdrawing. They shut themselves up in their rooms and don’t come out for years.”
“Why?”
“Lots of theories, but nobody really knows. They reckon it might be a backlash against the high-pressure educational system in Japan. These kids are generally high functioning, wealthy backgrounds, stable home life—no apparent reason why they should want to rebel. It’s like they just give up on life. But there are so many of them now that they’ve actually given it a name. Estimates vary as to how many of them there are, but it’s probably somewhere around three million. Out of a population of 127 million.”
“But they don’t stay in their rooms till they die?”
“Usually their families keep feeding them, or they go out in the middle of the night to a konbini—a sort of convenience store. But it’s the choice they make that intrigues me.” He took a drink from his coffee, which was growing cold on the table in front of him. I’d finished mine, drank it in a couple of gulps.
“The choice to withdraw?”
“Yes. The choice to withdraw—for whatever reason. Maybe apathy, or as an act of rebellion. Maybe our cases are similar.”
“Rebellion against what, though?”
“I don’t know. It might just be a side effect of the recession: economic meltdown, depression, despair. Or else it’s something in our society they don’t want to engage with. Which is why you might be right to look at public services, the medical system, Social Services, that type of thing.”
“I can’t get access to all that,” I said. “I’ve tried.”
“Isn’t there anything on the case files?”
“There aren’t any case files. That’s the problem. These aren’t murders. They aren’t even, for the most part, suspicious deaths. They are just people who have died. Once they’ve been collected by the funeral directors they’re no longer a police matter. The families, if we can find them, are informed, and that’s the end of our involvement in it. Nothing is recorded; there’s no point. For the people who do have families, I have next to no information at all. It’s only the ones who are unclaimed that still remain of interest.”
He was leaning forward in his seat, frowning. Listening.
“You know it was me who found Shelley Burton?”
“Really? I didn’t know that.”
“I live next door to her. I could smell something. I thought the house was empty, but she was in there the whole time.”
“That must have been a very traumatic thing to see,” he said.
“It was horrible. She was—”
I’d said so much, and at that moment I realized that the excitement of having someone show an interest had made me garrulous. This wasn’t just anybody, either; this man was a journalist. He could even be recording our conversation! I hadn’t thought of that. I’d been an idiot. This was going to cost me my job. I couldn’t believe I’d been so stupid.
“What?” he asked. “What’s the matter?”
“What do you mean?”
“You look—I don’t know. Worried.”
He was certainly perceptive. Probably that came with the job: the ability to spot discomfort in your companion, the ability to ask pertinent and impertinent questions, the capacity to memorize long sections of conversation and then subtly adapt them to make it seem that the person had actually said what you’d wanted them to say, without them ever actually saying it.
“I should go,” I said, heaving myself up out of the chair.
“Annabel, wait a minute.”
“No, really, thank you for the coffee, but I need to go . . .”
“Can I see you again?”
I stopped pulling my coat around my shoulders and stared at him. It sounded so odd, that phrase. “What for?”
He stood up, blocking my route to the door of the café. “I know you care about this,” he said. “I don’t want to compromise your job in any way, and I don’t want you to feel uncomfortable. Whatever’s going on isn’t just going to stop. We need to try to get them to do something about it, and the only way we’re going to do that is to find out what’s going on. Will you help me?”
I bit my lip. He was standing close to me and I didn’t like it. My back was against the wall in more ways than one.
“I don’t know what I can do,” I said. “I’ve tried everything.”
“I’ll do all the hard stuff. I just need your data. The same data you’ve been looking at and dealing with every day. I can put pressure on the senior officers by printing more about the people involved, and I can get that information elsewhere. I just need to get a better picture about who they are.”
“That’s all covered by the Data Protection Act,” I said lamely.
“Not if they’re dead,” he said. “The DPA doesn’t apply after death.”
“I know that. It still applies while there’s an active investigation, though. And in any case it still applies to their families,” I said, trying to recover. He knew the legislation better than I did. It would do me no good to try to look clever in front of him.
“I didn’t think there was an active inv
estigation.”
He must have noticed my discomfort then, because he stood aside to let me through. “I’ll walk you down the hill, OK?”
I mumbled something and he followed me out into the bright, crisp air on the main road. The pavement was crowded with shoppers and although he walked beside me we kept getting separated.
“Look,” he said at last, as we turned the corner into the wide pedestrian mall leading down the hill to the river. “I’d just really like to stay in touch. You’re the only person I’ve spoken to who is taking this seriously. I’ve been trying to get my editor involved, too. She agreed to start up our campaign to get everyone to check up on their neighbors, but I’m still thinking it’s a bit more sinister than a lack of public spiritedness.”
“Sinister?”
“You know. That they are being murdered.”
I stopped dead and turned to look at him. “I don’t think they’re being murdered,” I said.
“Really? You don’t think that?”
“There’s nothing to suggest they were murdered. No break-ins—” Not apart from the house next door, I thought, remembering the crash of the pane of glass inside the kitchen. “No trauma, no violent attacks. They just died.”
“Maybe it was a slow-acting poison,” he said. “Or they were gassed by their boilers, or something.”
“It’s a bit far-fetched,” I said. “And there’s no evidence. What makes you think they’re being murdered?”
His cheeks were flushed and he dropped his voice so I had to move closer to hear him. “Well, all right, then, maybe not murdered. But someone else is involved with this. They haven’t all just spontaneously decided to die, have they?”
“Why not? That’s almost what your Japanese teenagers did.”
We continued walking. At the bottom of the hill I would cross the road at the pedestrian crossing, and then I would be at the police station. I didn’t really want to be seen talking to a journalist, and was trying to work out a way of parting company with him before getting to the main road.