BlondeVenus was still playing hard to get.
He’d sent her three messages on Morefishinthesea.com in the last two days, but not a sausage. So he moved on to WildEmma36, blonde (if there was one thing Tommy had a weakness for it was intelligent blondes.) WildEmma36, was—hey, what a surprise—36. She had an average body type, brown eyes. Her interests: horse riding, tennis, gambling (and he was beginning to think they really should have renamed this website WTF.com). His hands hovered over the laptop.
I’m a caring, thoughtful girl who looks younger than her age. Can’t argue with that, Tommy nodded as he read along. She was slim and fit. Nice hint of cleavage revealed by the tight red Tee she was wearing in the profile pic. I am looking for someone honest, funny and kind. No married men, or players And if you expect me to just drop everything at the last minute for a wild date, you can jog on. I have a two year old boy to care for.
Tommy jogged on.
Another quick check on BlondeVenus. Her online indicator was glowing green. She was always online! But nothing in his inbox. He tapped the laptop pensively. The bedroom door opened behind him and he slammed the laptop closed. He turned slowly, as if he had nothing to hide. She was standing impassively in the doorway, a disappointed look on her face.
Trish was in her early thirties, a slender brunette with worry lines beginning to gather around her dark eyes. She’d started dying her hair to hide the odd thread of grey, and Tommy had been diplomatic enough not to comment on it. Her lips were thin, as was her nose, but she had a stubborn chin. This was set defensively now as she watched him, disapproval tugging at her lips and eyes.
“Looking at porn again?” Her voice was a croak. He guessed she’d been asleep again. He hoped she hadn’t been crying.
He sighed dramatically, but didn’t bother answering. Why did it always have to be like this? The constant head butting, the disagreements, the resentment, and worse still, the apathy. And that’s what he felt right now: nothing. He had passed the point of despair, of pain, of loss. She was gone already, though neither of them had the guts to admit it yet.
“What do you want, Trish?”
“Not you, that’s for sure.”
“I know.” His voice sounded sad, even if he didn’t feel anything.
“I’m going out.” She began to turn.
“Where?”
“Do you care?”
He shrugged. “It’s nine o’clock, Trish. Just wondering where on Earth you could be going to at this time of night. Is that unreasonable?”
“It is when you don’t really give a damn. Why pretend? I’m going to Laura’s. I’m going somewhere where there won’t be policemen knocking on the door.”
He shook his head incredulously. “You think that’s my fault? You think I had something to do with killing my own friend? I hold my hands up to many things you’ve accused me of before. Yep, even the porn. But you are way out of line there.”
“So why do they keep coming back?” Her eyes were narrow.
“Are you serious? Because I was the one who fucking found him, that’s why!” He turned his back on her. “Goodbye, Trish.”
He heard the front door close a few minutes later. He blew out a long sigh, considered opening the laptop again but managed to resist the impulse.
His phone let out a trickle. A text. He thumbed the button. Mark: Have the rozzers been to see you?
He texted back his answer, adding: they asked exactly the same questions. AGAIN. Trish is pissed off with it, even though she was out when they came. Scared, I guess. Hopefully not of me. You should make a complaint about that bastard Slade. He actually assaulted you. He can’t get away with behaviour like that.
A minute later the reply: Hardly class wiping dog shit on me as brutality. I’ve had worse. His turn will come, I’m sure. We just need to find a bigger dog. You going to the audition?
Tommy had forgotten all about the casting. No surprise there really, what with his mate being impaled, gutted and bear-trapped. Not sure.
The response came immediately. You should. It is going to be huge. This director REALLY knows what he’s doing.
Why do you care, Mark? Tommy thought. We’re not mates. He thought of Whay Aye, the laughs and jobs they’d worked on together. Working with Andy reminded him of his brief time on a building site after leaving Uni, the same all-lads-together camaraderie. Andy had been the type to stick by a mate.
He turned back to the laptop, typed in SinemaExtreme.com.
The screen went dark. One word floated to the surface. ENTRANCE. Cute. He clicked on it. The screen remained dark. Tommy’s patience began to run out. He was about to close the laptop when the screen crackled with video snow, like the leader tape in an old VHS. A close up on a pair of female eyes. Blue. Scared. And maybe a little familiar. Had he worked with her maybe? It was hard to tell. A whimper on the soundtrack. Muffled sobbing. So this is the next big thing, according to Mark? Just the same old low budget torture porn…I’ll pass, Marky Mark. Hey, thanks awfully though…
Then there was a series of long shots of a blonde girl wearing just pants and knickers in a dark bedroom, her back towards the camera, again naggingly familiar. Tommy waited for her to turn, or for a close up of her face but was teasingly denied. A close up of her breasts though, small and cute, and her taut stomach. Then back to just her eyes and held on them. Scared. Blue. A female scream morphed into a synthesizer drone on the soundtrack, then sounds of ecstasy and female orgasm, again distorted electronically, becoming amplified shrieks of shivering agony that disturbed and excited in equal measure. Tommy’s interest sharpened, intrigued despite his cynicism. The screen began to darken, the eyes slowly fading from blue to black. And then an email address flickered up in a lurid red font.
But did he really want to be involved in a horror flick, with Andy butchered horribly just the day before? Did he want to be reminded of the slow lazy buzz of flies hanging around Andy’s ripped head, waiting for Tommy and Mark to leave them to their pleasures? But this would be a fiction, he told himself. It might even be cathartic. Bullshit! There was no way reliving murder and mayhem on film would get rid of the memory of Andy hanging from that tree, his tongue half out of his mouth… If he wanted to do this film it was for his own selfish reasons. It could be a break, like Mark said. But Mark is an egotistical ass, and cares about nothing but his own career. Was that how Tommy wanted to end up? Well, if Trish had anything to say on the matter, he was already halfway there…
On a whim, he left the bedroom, went downstairs to the lounge. Trish had left the light on and the curtains wide open, so everyone passing in the street outside could see their possessions. Not that they had many, apart from the giant mother-ship of a plasma Tommy had insisted on plonking in the small room.
He stood in front of the bookcase stacked tightly with DVDs as if pondering what to spend the next couple of hours of his life watching. Then he came to a decision, left the lounge and entered the spare room next door. This room was the same size as the lounge, but looked smaller thanks to the bicycles leaning against one wall and the pile of coats, jumpers and hand bags that Trish had dumped on top of the now invisible wooden rocking chair in the centre. He navigated his way round the trailing coats, stepped on a CD fallen from a tilting rack that Trish must have knocked, cursed when he realized he’d cracked the case and it was “Goat’s Head Soup” by the Stones. Bollocks. He picked it up ruefully, retrieved a couple more that were waiting to be stepped on next time (the Best of the Damned and Johnny Winter) and slotted them carefully in the rack, rearranging it so it wouldn’t topple. Then he opened the cupboard in the corner.
Here were all his dusty old VHS cassette tapes, bought years before. He’d stopped collecting them now, much to Trish’s relief. He’d been known to spend up to fifty quid on some of the rarer ones. He slid his fingers along the fat plastic spines. Exotic if brutal titles ranging from Nightmares in a Damaged Brain to Shriek of the Mutilated. But the one he wanted eluded him for a moment, and he was beginning to think it had gone altogether when he found it right at the back, hidden behind Snuff.
He pulled it out, examining the garish cover.
Slade would have had a field day if he’d found this.
Slade! What a joke. What an absolute cartoon character of a copper. Was that the best they could get for a murder case? Tommy would have laughed if it hadn’t been for the memory of the blood squeezed from Andy’s crushed face, the right eyeball egging out of its socket from the brutal pressure of the trap jaws.
He took the cassette with him into the lounge, squatting in front of the Sony DVD/VHS combo player on its shelf under the plasma TV. He popped the tape out of its clam case and loaded it into the player.
Then he took a seat, wondering who it was Slade reminded him of as Don’t Go in the Woods Alone began to play after a brief flurry of video snow.
If Tommy had returned to the spare room and rifled through his CD selection, he might just have realized exactly who it was that Slade reminded him of: the cover of Concrete, a 1981 release from the pop punk band 999 would have shown him. He would have seen Detective Inspector Howard Slade’s major source of inspiration, at least visually. The singer was stocky with a square face and short-cropped, dark-brown hair, wearing a knee length trench mac—very similar to the one Slade was wearing now as he stood before the whiteboard in the incident room. If Tommy had said to him, “holy fuck, you look like Nick Cash from 999” Slade might have clapped him on the back, and forgiven him much, impressed that this Supporting Fartist had even heard about the band—hell, he might even have resisted crunching his instep or punching him in the guts. Tommy might well have blown it though by adding, “After he’d been crunched in the face by a breeze block.” But Tommy wouldn’t have added that last bit. That would have been stupid. Tommy wasn’t stupid.
Slade’s nose was flatter than Nick Cash’s for sure, and his lips looked like they’d been splayed by a few too many fists—which wasn’t far from the truth, Slade was a born scrapper—but he bore the same devil-may-care crook or copper ambivalence that marked out the old punk. They both had another thing in common, and this was where Mark had been far off the…mark: Slade had never seen Life on Mars, but he and Cash loved The Sweeney.
“You got any word on that Bear Trap yet?”
DS Whitley leaned back in his chair. “Still on it, guv. Checking all the local farms in the area, it’s taking a while…”
Slade grunted, staring at the SOC photo of Andy Hill projected on the whiteboard. “Can’t be many of those things around these days… I wanna know if any have gone missing, or if any of the farmers looks dodgy when you mention a Bear Trap. Any agricultural museums around? Check them too. It’s too old and rusty to be a new purchase, but check online for antique animal traps. And get on to forensics: I want everything they can tell me about the animal skins found on the spear.”
Trev nodded and reached for his desk phone. Slade turned to an attractive black girl in smart pinstripes sitting just behind Whitley. “Black coffee, two sugars please, love.” He looked at the whiteboard again, deep in thought.
“I think you mean Detective Constable Nandu, sir.”
“Hmm?” Slade faced her, puzzled.
“That’s my name and rank.” Her eyes were large and challenging, unwavering.
Slade nodded his head slowly, measuring her up. Good taut body, pretty face, small tits though. “How long have you been in this squad, Detective Constable Nandu?”
She didn’t flinch. “Three days, sir.”
He pursed his lips, moved over and sat on the edge of her desk. She remained where she was, staring him right back in the eye. Whitley, still on the phone to forensics, grimaced. Several of the other DCs, hardened murder vets, grinned at each other. Some of the rawer recruits watched and listened carefully.
“This your first murder case, DC Nandu?” He folded his arms.
“Yes sir. But I don’t see how that can possibly affect the manner in which you address me in the workplace.”
Slade nodded in mock self-chastisement. He rubbed his chin.
“I’ll tell you what, you rack up a few more murders on your CV and prove your mettle and I’ll address you however the fuck you want. Until then, me and the grown ups will continue to work hard tracking down the fucker who did this and you will do whatever the fuck I ask you to. If you don’t like it, I hear St. Paul’s needs a new policewoman for social liaison.” He winked at her. “Coffee, black, two sugars. Please.”
Whitley put down his phone and shook his head disapprovingly. Slade got off Nandu’s desk and held his hands out in a wtf gesture.
Whitley waited until DC Nandu had slowly, resentfully got to her feet and left the incident room before speaking in a low tone so that the rest of the squad couldn’t hear.
“You’ve got to be careful, guv. This isn’t the seventies. The complaints are racking up. You know that.”
“And so are the bodies. Or they will be if they didn’t have this squad to stick their fuckin’ finger in the breach.” Whitley winced at the minced metaphors.
“You think there’s more to come?”
Slade didn’t answer straightaway. He glanced at the whiteboard again, at the blow up of the video box that had been recovered next to the body. “Forensics finished examining this, Trev?”
“No prints. On the box or tape. The tape contains exactly what it says on the box. No hidden extras, no obvious messages. It’s clean. Old, battered and filthy, but clean. Same with the spear. They’re still working on the skins.”
Slade turned to address the whole room.
“In reference to DS Whitley’s comment, yes, I do think there’s more to come. Call it a hunch, an instinct, and maybe I’m going out on a limb here, but this stinks of a cornflake.” Looking up to see DC Nandu had returned to the incident room, resentfully carrying a vending machine coffee, he added, “That’s serial killer to you, love.” There were a few chuckles from the more experienced detectives but Slade’s tone was serious now and his expression had lost its playfulness.
“This was a particularly nasty homicide. Forensics believe the victim was already dead from injuries sustained by the bear trap before the assailant used the spear. That seems to be for—and this is relevant, considering there was a sodding TV crew filming a few hundred yards away—dramatic effect only, for whatever twisted reason. I want every member of that cast and crew re-interviewed, from the director right down to the asshole who changes the shit-roll in the portaloos. You got that? I don’t care how many of them whinge. Someone must know some reason why this Geordie lad bought the farm. It’s not a stretch to guess it’s got something to do with this shitty video. Has anyone heard of it before?” He leaned forward on the back of a chair and scrutinised his attentive squad.
A hand rose hesitantly in the air. Slade’s eyes widened just a tad. He straightened up and hitched his trousers up an inch. “Detective Constable Nandu…?” He sounded gruff and a little awkward.
When she spoke, the female DC’s voice was in contrast confident and professional. “It’s a 1981 slasher flick made in America, sir, directed by James Bryan, pretty much his sole credit, but will check further on that. Very low budget, no big names attached, no links with the UK that are obvious, or to the Arthur TV crew. US title: Don’t Go in the Woods. The Alone suffix was added by the British distributors. Found itself on the video nasty list and was subsequently banned. There have been no releases on DVD or any other format in this country, although it is available in other countries, including the US, Japan, Germany, Holland…”
Slade tilted his head back, impressed. “Video nasty, eh? Haven’t heard them mentioned in a while. Fuck’s sake. Any obvious link between this film and the Geordie?” He was addressing her alone now. She answered instantly.
“Nothing obvious, sir. I can interview his family if you like? His flat has already been checked but no links to horror films there, banned or otherwise.”
“Have you seen it, DC Nandu? Don’t Go in the Woods Alone, I mean?”
“No sir. If forensics have finished with it I can watch it tonight.”
“With popcorn and a date?” a few DCs started to titter again, but Slade held up his hand. “You’ve done good work there, DC Nandu. Watch it and let me know if there’s anything that ties it in with this lad from Newcastle. Check his full record while you’re at it. I want to know everything about him, where he shops, where he drinks, who he fucks… And yes, get on to the family. With your sensitive nature you’re probably the best woman for the job. Good.” He scanned the rest of the squad. “While DC Nandu’s busy with the victim, I want the rest of you all over the others like I said. Start with the extras, work upwards. I want to hear about every TV episode or film Bertrand and his crew have ever worked on. I want to know if Pyres is gay or straight. I want to know who’s financing Arthur. If anyone on that crew has ever had even a fuckin’ parking ticket, I want to hear about it. If an extra got involved in a bar scrap, let me have it. Grudges, animosity, particularly in reference to Andy Hills—I want it in writing. Statements had better be squeaky tight and loophole free or I’ll visit each one of your homes with my CD collection. And if you ask DS Whitley, that’s something you really don’t wanna invite. We all clear?”
There were assorted nods and grunts. Slade dismissed them and crossed to Whitley. “What do you know about video nasties, Trev?”
Whitley shrugged. “Not a lot. Like most of us, I’ve probably watched the odd one in my time. When I worked in vice, there were loads being confiscated. I might have watched a few of them.”
“Well, you can watch this one after Nandu’s finished with it. Just to get a male perspective on it. Or is that too un-PC for you.”
“I’ve given up worrying about your politically correct qualities, guv. But I think what you really mean to say is you want a more experienced detective to give it the once over.” He raised his eyebrow.
Slade chuckled. “Just couldn’t bring myself to say it, could I? Must be a dinosaur after all. Old fuckin’ habits die hard. But watch it anyway.” He approached the whiteboard again.
“I’ve got a nasty feeling about this one, Trev…” He grimaced at the DS. “No fuckin’ pun intended.”