Chief Inspector Wheeler waited for her team to trickle into the briefing room. The sun had made a half-hearted attempt to rise on this last day of the year. The gloom seemed in keeping with her sombre mood.
The horrors of the Oddfellows Arms were still being uncovered - bodies (or what was left of them) in barrels. Young men who had gone missing, presumed legged it to London, were gradually being identified. Some of them were dissolved to such an extent their names might never be known and in some cases, some casks contained more than one man.
How could it happen? In my town? How could we not know?
She smiled curtly to Harry Henry as he bumbled in, early for once. He poured himself a mug of coffee, steaming up his glasses in the process.
“She’ll be here in a bit, Chief.”
Wheeler nodded.
D I Stevens was next to arrive, looking grey and ashen.
“Should you have come in, Ben?” she asked. The 1970s moustache twitched.
“Isn’t there a briefing, then?”
“Yes; I want to go over a few things but if you’re not up to it...”
“I’m fine. Better out than in.” He flopped into an armchair. “Although I usually prefer the other way around.” He chuckled. Alone.
Pattimore was next, wrapped in scarf and hoodie.
“Good morning, Jason!” Wheeler greeted her youngest detective warmly. “It’s good to see you.”
Pattimore grunted and headed for the coffee.
“Cheers, Jase,” said Stevens. “Three sugars.”
Pattimore showed him his middle finger but made the coffee anyway. He became aware Wheeler was looking at him with an expectant expression.
“Um, did you want one, Chief?”
“No, thank you. D I Brough not with you?”
“Um.” Pattimore flushed red. He sat and unwrapped himself. “Still at the hospital, far as I know. You know. With Miller.”
“Ah. Of course.”
But at that second, Brough came in. He nodded to Wheeler and took a seat.
“David,” said Wheeler. “How’s Melanie?”
Brough puffed out his cheeks. His eyes were shadowed from lack of sleep. “They’re keeping her in. She’s in the best place.”
“Quite,” said Wheeler. “Let’s make a start, shall we?”
She clicked a remote control and the white board over her shoulder displayed a photograph of Dickon in custody, standing against a height chart. His eyes were wide and staring into the camera lens. Most of Serious couldn’t look directly at him.
“Kenneth Dickens,” Wheeler began, “Known in more recent years as Dickon Deakin, bar manager at the Oddfellows Arms. Dickens went missing as a teenager, following a vicious attack on one Keith Daley. Interviews with Daley overnight revealed that he - Daley - used to bully him - Dickens - at school and all of this appears to stem from those days. Dickens was bent - on revenge, I mean. He disappeared, re-invented himself, spent years abroad getting up to all sorts.
“He worked as a volunteer in Africa building homes for the starving, where he learned to lay bricks - a skill he put to use in the pub cellar, walling up his victims over the years. He travelled to Haiti after the earthquake where he was repaid for his charitable efforts by a local man who turned him on to some rather occult practices.”
“Voodoo,” said Pattimore.
“Mumbo jumbo,” said Stevens.
“Not quite,” said Harry Henry, getting to his feet. He pointed at the screen of his mobile. “She’s in Reception. I’ll go down and fetch her.”
“Thank you, Harry.”
While Harry Henry was gone, Wheeler continued to sketch out the story Dickon had told Daley before attempting to brick him up in the cellar.
“Yes, Jason?”
Pattimore lowered his hand. “Why? Why brick him up?”
“To make him think about what he’d done?” offered Stevens.
“Not exactly,” said Wheeler. “Well, not just that. Ah, here’s our visitor.”
Harry Henry ushered in the large black woman who had appeared in the cellar. The men of Serious could see in these better lighting conditions that she had a pleasant face below her bright turban. Her skirt was colourful as a carnival tent but her prodigious chest was just about contained by a tight-fitting Tweed jacket.
“Work at the top, party at the bottom,” was Stevens’s muttered observation.
“Allow me to introduce Doctor Vanessa Mvula, renowned anthropologist and emeritus professor of Caribbean Studies.”
“Gentlemen.” Dr Mvula showed them a broad smile. “My son-in-law contacted me when it came to light that a spate of thefts of certain, shall we say, items had occurred in and around the area -”
“Excuse me,” Brough interrupted. “Thefts? This case is about kidnapping, torture and murder.”
“Ah,” Wheeler held up a finger. “Patience, David. Forgive us, Doctor Mvula; we’re all a bit fraught this morning.”
“It was a rough night.” Doctor Mvula’s smile flashed again. “May I?” She took the remote from Wheeler. “Harry?”
Harry Henry came forward and inserted a USB drive into the computer.
“Ho!” Stevens laughed. “This is your mother-in-law, is it, Harry?”
Harry Henry grinned sheepishly and returned to his seat.
“The puffer fish.” Dr Mvula clicked and an image appeared that was a welcome relief from Dickon’s maniacal stare. “Produces tetrotodoxin, a key ingredient.” She clicked again. “The marine toad, Bufo marinus, produces a range of toxic substances...” A third click. “The hyla tree frog...”
“Um, excuse me again,” Brough interrupted. “Perhaps I’m overtired but I’m not following.”
“Of course,” said Wheeler. “Harry came to me when the thefts occurred.”
“What thefts exactly?”
“Remember,” said Harry, “When the sushi bar was knocked over.”
“No!” said the men of Serious as one.
Dr Mvula clicked. A picture of a storefront appeared. Dedley’s only Japanese food outlet, Oi, Sushi!
“That’s where he got the puffer fish,” said Harry Henry. “The frogs and toads he got from the zoo.” A thought occurred to him. “Hey! Maybe that’s why he chose that pub in particular. Right by the zoo!” He looked to his mother-in-law for approval.
Dr Mvula was noncommittal.
“I don’t get it,” grumbled Stevens. “What’s he want all that lot for? Erotic pets?”
“Exotic!” laughed Pattimore.
“Patience, Ben,” said Wheeler. “Doctor?”
“Certain cultures,” Dr Mvula showed them a map of the Caribbean, “hold certain beliefs. They believe a human being can be controlled, enslaved in a mindless living death.”
“Zombies!” said Brough.
Stevens made a scornful noise.
“You are correct to scoff,” said the doctor. “Not the bloodthirsty, brain-eating monsters of popular film. Dismiss that image from your thoughts. I’m talking about a drug-induced state, a kind of catatonia in which the victim is not only susceptible to suggestion but also powerless to disobey it.”
“Bit like hypnosis?” said Pattimore.
“A little bit,” the doctor’s teeth glinted in the beam of the projector. “But from the zombified state there is no waking up. There is only the release of death. If you’re lucky.”
She let her words sink in. She could see the minds of the detectives working - some were pulling more twisted faces than others.
“He was making zombies...” Stevens gave voice to what they were all thinking.
“Now look at this,” Chief Inspector Wheeler pushed a button and the screen filled with grainy footage from a security surveillance system. At the bottom of the screen a counter ticked away the passing seconds. The top left hand corner revealed the recording originated from Dedley’s premier outlet for domestic animals, Heavy Petting. The Serious team watched agog as a shadowy figure stole across the frame and with a small net on a long pole extracted a specimen from a fish tank.
“Looks a bit tall,” observed Brough.
“He does a bit,” Harry Henry agreed.
“Too tall?” said Brough.
“It’s not who you think,” said Harry Henry. The CCTV footage was swapped for a mug shot of someone else recently taken into custody.
“Edward!” Brough and Pattimore gasped as one voice, recognising the bar man in an instant.
“Don’t tell me he’s mixed up in this as well,” Pattimore was incredulous. “I always thought he was a bit dozy but never a crook and never a - a - zombie.” He felt ridiculous just saying the word.
“Ah!” Harry Henry smiled the smile of one with special knowledge. “Perhaps he’s not as dozy as you think.”
“And perhaps,” Wheeler was keen to keep things moving, “he’s not the willing participant the video suggests.”
“Uh?” Stevens was puzzled. “But we’ve just seen him do it,” he gestured at the screen.
“I think he was coerced,” said Harry. “Well, perhaps not coerced exactly but...” He trailed off. Doctor Mvula stepped in.
“What my son-in-law is trying to explain is that the bar man was a tool.”
“I’ll say!” said Stevens.
“A pawn,” Mvula ignored him, “An unwitting accomplice in the bar manager’s schemes. We’re ordering blood tests but I’d wager the results will show that Edward here is pumped full of a permutation of Dickens’s zombie cocktail.”
“So, he’s a zombie and all?” Stevens nodded at the mug shot.
“Not exactly. That is, he’s still very much unaltered in a physical sense. Dickens used his drugs to subdue Edward’s will and bend it to his own.”
“So...” Brough was putting it together, “he got Edward to carry out the thefts. Then if Edward got caught, Dickon could deny all knowledge and carry on with his plans.”
“And...” Pattimore chimed in, “if Edward got caught and questioned nobody wouldn’t be able to get no sense out of him.”
Brough winced at the multiple negatives but had to agree with the theory. “He’d be written off as a junkie, stealing exotic animals to fuel his habit.”
“Or to satisfy the munchies!” said Stevens, not to be left out. As usual, his outburst fell on deaf ears.
“What will happen to him?” Brough addressed the question to Dr Mvula as much as C I Wheeler.
“If it’s shown he wasn’t doing it on purpose,” Wheeler shrugged, “we’ll let him go.”
“And monitor him closely - medically and psychologically, I mean.” Dr Mvula’s smile suggested she was looking forward to it. She clicked the clicker again.
“Lawrence Pickett, Timothy Trent,” Dr Mvula showed pictures of the dead men who had first come to their attention. “Countless others, too. Another necessary ingredient of zombie powder is human remains. Dickens’s first victims were his bully’s sidekicks.” She flashed up school photographs of spotty youths.
“Reported missing years ago,” said Wheeler. “Dickens was playing the long game. He made a lot of money working building sites abroad and spent little of it. That is, until he went to Los Angeles and blew the lot on cosmetic surgery. He was then able to come home to Dedley unrecognised. Besides, no one seemed to remember the lost little boy he used to be. He took over the pub, rebranded it and made a success of it. But of course, that wasn’t enough. His initial goal remained the same.”
Dr Mvula took up the narrative.
“Kenneth Dickens experimented on the young gay men of Dedley for years. Most, it appears, simply died, and so he disposed of their bodies in barrels of acid. Others, like Pickett and Trent, showed promise. But they retained enough presence of mind to escape from the cellar. The drugs robbed them of their identity and memory and eventually poisoned their systems. I think Lawrence Pickett went to the park because he used to frequent there to meet men. Similarly, Timothy Trent showed up at his parents’ house out of habit. Something deep inside them remembered their old habits. Like when you’re drunk and you somehow manage to get home on autopilot.
“You might be asking why. Why did this man go to all this trouble? Why not just murder those who had made his life such a misery?”
“Go on, then,” said Stevens, tired of her dramatic pauses. “Why?”
“It wasn’t enough to confront the bully,” Dr Mvula went on as if no one had spoken, “And tell him the harm and the agony he had inflicted on the lonely little boy Dickens used to be. It wasn’t enough to inflict pain on the bully in return. Even killing him would not be satisfactory in terms of payback.”
Brough’s eyes widened. He thought of Ronnie Flavell on the resuscitation table.
“He wanted his bully to live forever!” he gasped. “He was going to brick him up so all he could do was sit there and think about what he’d done.”
“That’s what I said,” muttered Stevens, petulantly.
“But - but - wouldn’t he die anyway?” Pattimore countered. “Wouldn’t he, like, starve, or something?”
“Possibly,” said Dr Mvula. “There is the belief that the zombie is trapped forever between life and death.”
“Ooh...” Harry Henry shuddered.
“We’ll never know if Dickens’s last experiment would have succeeded,” she went on, “All his ingredients had been seized and, when they are no longer required as evidence, must be destroyed.”
“Do you believe it, doctor?” said Pattimore. “That somebody could live forever?”
Dr Mvula smiled indulgently at the young detective.
“I am a scientist,” she shrugged. “What Dickens did to his victims was chemical-based. Not voodoo or hoodoo or even bad juju.” She laughed. And then stopped. “I believe that Dickens believed it and that’s what kept him going. He was, you might say, a slave to his own zombie powder and his desire for revenge.”
The picture of mad, staring Dickon was back but this time the detectives were able to meet that wild-eyed gaze.
“He must have really been hurt,” said Brough.
“Fucked up,” said Stevens.
“On that note,” Dr Mvula laughed, “I shall leave you to your investigation. I shall of course give my expert testimony at the trial.”
“Thank you, doctor.” Wheeler shook her hand. Dr Mvula breezed from the room. Wheeler clicked off the projector and looked at each face in turn.
“Dear me,” she said.
“Fuck me, you mean,” said Stevens. “Come on, Chief; let rip. A case like this is worth a good swear. Come on. It’s only us. We won’t say nothing.”
Wheeler opened her mouth. And closed it again.
“Right, gentlemen. Our man is in the hands of the psychiatric assessors who will report on his sanity and fitness for trial. In the meantime, we have a lot of material to put together and make sense of and loose ends to tie up. The fact that the intended final victim, the target of all this, survives is invaluable to our inquiry.
“But, it can wait until after the bank holiday. Happy New Year, gentlemen.”
Pattimore’s mind was still boggling. “And he did all of - this - just to get his own back on the school bully?” He couldn’t take it in. “What a life of bitterness he must have had! Spurred on by resentment and revenge. If he’d just found it within himself to forgive...” He directed this last statement towards Brough who, just as pointedly, looked away.
“Well, I’ll be fucked,” said Stevens.
“I doubt that,” said Wheeler, “but if you’re expressing your amazement and stupefaction at the scale of Dickens’s atrocities, then I would be inclined to agree.”
“Then say so!” Stevens urged.
“Say what?”
She made to leave but Stevens called her back.
“Hold up, Chief.” He stroked his moustache. “I sid you in the audience last night.”
“You might have done,” said Wheeler but still he barred her way.
“Enjoy it, did you?”
“Um, yes, you put on quite a show. Well done, Ben - Is that what you want me to say?”
“Not the show. Going undercover, I mean. Lezzing up.”
Wheeler’s expression darkened. “Putting a pink wig on and wearing double denim does not constitute ‘lezzing up’!”
Stevens sensed he’d touched the vicinity of a nerve and pursued this line of enquiry. “You really looked the part, Chief. Bet you turned a few heads.”
“Well, I doubt that,” Wheeler squirmed.
“Didn’t fancy it then? A quick finger in the bogs? A bit of fanny bumping?”
The other detectives held their breath. Wheeler’s face was like thunder.
“I know what you’m trying to do,” she said quietly but firmly. “Trying to provoke me into using inappropriate language. It’s not going to happen, Benny boy. And if I was you, I’d be more concerned with what’s all over the internet this morning.”
She clicked the remote. Video footage of Tasha the Flasha played on the screen, recorded on some punter’s phone.
Stevens paled. He threw himself at the screen, trying to prevent the others from seeing. The image of his made-up face was projected onto the real thing.
His colleagues whooped and cheered. Wheeler caught Brough’s eye.
“My office,” she said.
He followed her out.
***
Wheeler showed him in then slammed the office door.
“I’m upset, David,” she said. “The old you wouldn’t take notice of Stevens. You’d have eaten him for breakfast.”
“Upset with you,” she clarified. “What you said last night before you got in your ambulance. I thought it was the stress of the moment. I want you to tell me it was the stress of the moment. Tell me you’ve changed your mind.”
“I haven’t,” said Brough. “I’m leaving.”
“Sit down, David.” It wasn’t a request.
Brough stayed on his feet. “I meant what I said.” He stared at the wall above the diminutive chief inspector’s head. “I’m going.”
“Look,” Wheeler spread her hands on her desk, “I understand; if you want to take some leave - compassionate grounds, sick leave, whatever - that’s fine. We can handle the paperwork for all this - madness - without you. And then you can come back, all refreshed and relaxed and -” she shook her head. “I’m not getting through to you, am I? I’m wasting my breath.”
“You are, rather,” said Brough.
Wheeler jabbed the air with an angry finger. “Oh, you can be a right cold fish at times,” she was struggling to keep her temper. “When you first came to Dedley, I never thought you’d be able to work in the team but you proved me wrong. You’re a vital component of what makes Serious Serious, David.”
“No one’s indispensable,” said Brough.
“But why, David? Why pack it in? I don’t get it.”
“Reasons,” said Brough. “I will take you up on your offer of leave. Effective immediately. I’ll use what I’ve got left in lieu of notice.”
“But what about young Whojimmyflop - Pattimore? You’ll break his heart.”
Brough answered with a look of cold disdain.
“Ah.” Wheeler was not head of a crack team of detectives by chance. “There’s the rub. Honestly, you of all people, letting personal affairs get in the way of the job.”
“It’s not like that,” Brough sneered. “You don’t understand.”
“Then explain it to me. In words of one syllable or less.”
“Or fewer,” Brough corrected automatically. “You’ll have my letter of resignation by lunchtime. New year, new start, and all of that.”
He made for the door.
“And what about Miller?”
Wheeler’s words halted him like a game of Simon Says.
Brough looked her in the eye.
“I’ll say goodbye to her in person.”
He turned the handle. Wheeler closed her eyes as he left the office. Then she rushed out into the corridor and called after him - just as the rest of the team were coming out of the briefing room, still giggling at Stevens’s expense.
“Oh, go on then,” Wheeler roared at Brough’s back as he walked away. “Fucking fuck the fuck off, you fucking, cock-knocking, selfish, piss-guzzling fucking bastard, wanker-faced, thundercunt!”
She rounded on the team. “And what the fucking cock am you lot fucking gawping at? You can fuck off and all.”
She withdrew into her office and slammed the door hard enough to break the glass.
“She’s back,” said Stevens. He held out his hands. Pattimore and Harry Henry handed over ten-pound notes.