What happened next was, and remains, confidential. It was the middle of the night and I was woken by the sound of weeping. Before my not-yet-dead brother had gone to sleep, while my dead little sister and I were doing our teeth in the bathroom downstairs, over the sink by the boiler next to the toilet where I’d first found her, feet tiptoeing across the floor in the cold where, years before, she lay in a puddle of broken water and blood, we’d (at her suggestion) drunk several bladder-full glasses of water.
We needed an interval. Just one.
The door to our bedroom was closed when I heard the weeping. It was a snotty kind of weeping. A wet fart kind of sobbing. An all-hope-is-lost kind of pleading for the chance to live again.
Gentleman Jim.
Who, we soon discovered, was once again holding a stranger’s head.
And we really did see this through a window.
Holding a head at the back of a neck, knuckles white, gasping.
‘Looks like quite a struggle,’ she’d said. My sister. Twisting her ponytail between her fingers and biting her lip. ‘That man, that stranger, really must want to stay alive.’ It was the middle of the night and my brother was snoring a teenage snore, with one foot out of the duvet cover, and there was a thick green light on the floor, inviting me out to the hallway.
My sister wasn’t with me. She’d left a note that said, ‘Meet me at Jim’s house,’ which I knew was part of the plan and had already checked the tyre pressure on my mother’s old Traffic Master, less traceable than my mountain bike, which I’d strategically placed by the back door before my parents turned out the lights.
‘Bring protection.’
Jim lived in a small town six miles down the road from our village. He lived in a small flat above a row of shops with a black metal stairwell round the back that led up to the front door and the cold vinyl floor that he swept every day and, at the back, behind the utility room where we weren’t allowed to go, the desk drawer with the lock.
‘I’d heard Jim say it was over,’ said my sister, who I’d met next to Jim’s parked motorcycle by the first step, ‘at the pub earlier. Jim kept saying to the stranger, “It’s okay. It’s okay. It’s going to be okay.” He said, “This is how it has to be.”’ And then she looked at me. ‘Did you bring it?’ I checked in my pockets but there was only my wallet which she took from my hand and emptied. ‘Is this it?’ she asked, holding a rotten fiver and a condom I’d taken from my brother’s bedside drawer. ‘I couldn’t find the key to my father’s gun cabinet,’ I said.
She shook her head. ‘Doesn’t matter,’ she said. ‘Just follow my lead.’ And she began gnawing on the motorbike’s brake cables.
A light went on in the flat above the shops. We were crouching on the twelfth step, behind the bins where the kitchen window opened out. Jim was walking around his open plan kitchen with an apron on, wiping his hands and comprehending dishes in the sink which was spattered with red flecks and half-eaten sausages. ‘He’s been at it again,’ said my sister, dead, as she twirled her hair.
The black gloves lay deflated on the arm of the sofa.
‘He must’ve done the job here, then cut up the body in the utility closet that no one else is allowed to go in.’
Jim removed the apron. He’d gone from the kitchen into the study, which was at the back of the open-plan living room, to get a black duffel bag. When he came back he took a key from his pocket and stood in front of the door to the utility closet, which he then opened before he, half-standing inside, began filling the bag.
‘Can you see what he’s putting in there?’ she asked.
I was hiding under the camouflage hat my father had got me for shooting. But Jim wasn’t a pigeon. Jim was a fox. And foxes have good hearing.
I said, ‘Shh.’
Jim had filled the bag. And Jim had changed his shirt. And Jim was turning off the lights to leave the flat but stopped to lick something red from a dirty plate by the sink.
Jim opened a drawer and took out some clingfilm.
Jim picked up one of the uneaten sausage pieces and wrapped it up.
He put the wrapped up sausage in his bag then took the black gloves off the arm of the sofa.
He turned off the light by the window, without closing it, and opened the door.
‘What’s more,’ said my sister, sifting through Al Stewart records and dipping fingers in pools of red liquid round the sink while I looked through glass jars and bottles and key trays, ‘is you’ve eaten dinner here before. Pretty gross.’
‘There’s a lot less blood than I thought there’d be,’ I said from inside the bathroom.
‘Do you know how much a man bleeds when you cut off his dick?’ said my sister.
I said no.
She said, ‘It’s a giant vein, remember.’
By the sink.
‘An artery.’
Checking dishes. ‘Did you see him lick the blood off these?’ she said holding plates. ‘It’s like the Titanic. Seal off the bulkheads but the blood keeps on spilling.’
‘I thought he was already dead,’ I said, from the corner by the door to the utility room. ‘I thought you said he strangled him by the bins behind that pub?’
‘Well,’ she said. ‘I did see them round the back of that kitchen.’
‘Did you see Jim do it?’
‘No. Jim would never be so public. He would’ve cut the man’s throat with the kukri knife. He would’ve–’
‘I know.’
‘–pulled, yes pul-l-l-ed, slowly pulled the twelve inch blade across the stranger’s jugular. Adam’s apple. Voice box. His vocal cords would’ve snapped like guitar strings and reverberated with the gurgling of air and blood.’
‘Kind of like when you have a snotty nose,’ I said, at Jim’s desk. ‘So let’s check.’ I expected the drawer to be locked, so when I went to open it I used too much force and the whole thing fell out. ‘Wait,’ said my sister, whose hair had grown longer, ‘let me.’ And she pushed me aside abruptly.
‘What do you see?’ I asked. It was dark. We couldn’t turn on the lights in case Jim came back after dumping the body parts.
‘DVDs,’ she said.
‘What kind?’
She giggled but said, ‘Never mind. The knife’s gone.’
‘He must’ve taken it with him.’
‘Yes,’ she said, closing the drawer. ‘For protection.’
I checked my back pocket to make sure my wallet was there.
There was nothing in the utility closet. Just a washing machine, a tumble drier and a boiler set on heat. No sign of a struggle. No sign of bone marrow and no congealed blood.
Not even a pubic hair.
‘Very thorough,’ said my sister, dead, as we followed Jim to the address we’d found written down on the pub receipt he’d left by the landline. ‘Do you think it’s a b&b?’
‘No chance. This is a small town. People won’t tolerate covert operations at the best of times. These people are small-minded. Too curious. Nosey. And quick to reject anyone dissimilar to them.’
‘Well, aren’t we?’
‘We’re truth seekers,’ she said in the darkness. ‘We’ve got to find evidence. We’ve got to find proof so our brother believes us.’
‘He’s not you brother,’ I said. ‘He’s mine.’
‘So’s the blame,’ she said, sighing. It didn’t matter, anyway. My brother no longer seemed necessary to convince. No longer lived in the forts we’d built, the bird hides, the telescopic sights. ‘He’s got bigger, more blood-filled things on his mind,’ my sister said as we left Jim’s flat.
The address led us a few streets over to a business hotel: red brick, faceless, the perfect place to meet a murder accomplice, or a crime syndicate boss. The kind of person with bodyguards and money-laundering schemes Gentleman Jim would probably work for.
‘Around here?’ I said. ‘I doubt it.’
‘You saw the man’s penis, right?’
‘I thought it was leftover sausage?’
‘You saw the blood flecks on the dishes and the stained red apron? You saw Uncle Jim wiping his hands after the fact, finished with the act. Did you SEE those Beatles records?’
‘I feel bad for slashing his motorbike tyres.’
‘Well don’t. That way he can’t follow your bike tracks when you go back home.’
The receipt paper had ROOM 17 written on it in pencil.
Room 17 was on the first floor. My sister and I looked over from the same old churchyard with the yew tree in it. The same telescopic cemetery bushes with the same downhill view to that stranger’s house, the first instance of catching Jim (almost) in the act, before our father’s feet hit the stairs and echoed work in the morning.
‘Look,’ my sister said to me with an elbow. She elbowed me out of the corner of the hollow yew tree we were hiding in, only facing a different way. ‘Stop fucking around and see.’
‘What’s this?’
‘It’s the telescopic sight from Jim’s .243,’ she said. ‘There’s no sense in wasting ammunition, so we can use it as a regular telescope. And besides, he’s family.’
‘I’m cold,’ I said.
‘Try being dead,’ she said. ‘Here,’ passing me the rifle scope. ‘Take this.’
‘Don’t you need it?’
‘I’ve seen it all already.’
We were watching through the window of Room 17. Nice curtains. Purple bedspread. Gentleman Jim sitting on a cheap armchair next to a service tray. Milk pots and UHT creamers. A stained kettle and the remote control for an old TV. We couldn’t see his feet or the black bag he’d filled with body parts.
Jim was waiting.
He’d got there early, to get a good chair and feel ready.
‘What’s he eating?’ said my sister.
A sausage, half eaten. And some olives with feta cheese on a green plate. Jim was still wearing his black gloves and his eyes were fixed readily on the door. ‘Seems amateur,’ I said out loud, ‘to be waiting for a mob boss by an open window. The curtains aren’t even drawn. What if we had a rifle and a desire to kill? What if we were friends with the murdered strangers?’
‘The one with the dog? Or the one whose dick he’s eating?’
‘Does it matter?’
Uncle Jim was sipping from a glass of water. He seemed pretty relaxed. He barely even moved when another man entered the room, and then another, younger, man after him.
‘He’s in handcuffs,’ said my sister, with the younger man in her sights.
‘Now they’re hugging,’ I said, though she’d already seen the second, older man, approach Jim, who’d risen from his chair, leaving his water (suspiciously amber in colour) by the green plate. ‘Quite intimate, these gangsters,’ said my sister. ‘Blood ties, I suppose. But not the kind that pass down through procreation. I bet that when they let a new member into their, um, coven–’
‘Their gang.’
‘–they, yes, gang, when they let a new man in they have to cut their hands with a knife. Their right hands. Then they touch their wounds together.’
‘I think a coven’s just for women.’
‘Well, they do bleed differently, I guess.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Doesn’t matter.’
In a puddle, under a sink next to a boiler by a toilet in a downstairs bathroom. Or on white cotton sheets in the middle of the night, expecting twins.
‘He must be a prisoner,’ said my sister, who felt older than me because she seemed to know everything. ‘Darling,’ she said, which was strange, ‘I know everything that’s going to happen in your life. You just have to trust me.’
I didn’t.
But still I wanted to see.
I wanted to see what was going to happen.
I wanted to see the older man and Jim, my uncle, strip him.
The third man, who looked almost a boy.
‘Can’t be more than twenty-four,’ she told me, and yet now he seems younger than I was then. ‘Must be a snitch. Jim delivers the goods,’ pointing at the older man who was looking into Jim’s black duffel bag and smiling, good, sadistic, dead, dealt with that stranger now here’s another, ‘so the boss can get a look.’
‘They all seem quite close,’ I said. ‘They all seem to know what’s going to happen. What HAS to happen.’
‘See that?’
‘See what?’
‘The younger man, the boy,’ said my sister. ‘They’ve removed his handcuffs and he’s taking something out of the bag.’
‘Is it another sausage? They’re all very hungry, aren’t they.’
‘It’s not a sausage,’ she said, raising her eyes which had dilated into completely milk-white pupils that consumed her face. ‘It’s the kukri knife.’
The boy was holding it in front of him. His knuckles were white. It looked big in his hands.
‘Remember that trick at school?’ I said.
‘I never went.’
‘When you make a pencil bend by holding it at one end, loosely, between your index finger and thumb, then sort of shake it up and down. It looks like it’s bending, but it’s just an optical illusion.’
The boy was holding the blade, shaking it up and down.
‘Uh huh,’ said my sister, growing younger again. ‘What’s he doing now?’
‘He’s holding it in front of him like a twelve inch long–’
‘He’s smiling. And LAUGHING.’
‘He must know that he’s done wrong,’ I said. ‘To so happily go to his death.’
By now the younger man was on the bed. He’d been ordered to remove his clothes by the older man who was now waving the knife around casually, still wearing his suit and purple tie, looking veiny. Uncle Jim was rolling up a note and sniffing coke off the green plate. Of course, I didn’t know this then. I just saw him unravel some rope then tie the younger man up. He tied his wrists and he tied his ankles. The rope was black. He’d pulled it from one of the pockets on the side of his bag. The younger man was on his back, looking nervous, rope round his body parts and rope round the back of the bed and down to the legs because it didn’t have posts.
‘They’re going to cut his balls off,’ said my sister, twirling her hair even more. ‘They’re going to cut his balls off and shove them down his throat.’
‘But why would they do it in a ho–’
‘Don’t ask questions with obvious answers,’ she said. But I didn’t know what, exactly, she meant.
The older man was slowly dragging the blunt side of the kukri knife over the young man’s groin. Gentleman Jim was fiddling with something in his pocket. I was sure it was a gun. Pillow for silencer. Just finish him off and be done with it, I thought. One shot (9mm) to the head and get out of it. I couldn’t understand it. Everything was taking ages. The younger man looked too happy. As though they were actually helping him. As though the older man and Jim were preparing to remove a cancerous tumour from him. Removing great weight of pressure from him. Looked ready to burst from excitement. Twisted his wrists and ankles, bare, bald chested as I felt it. The rope. The rush of blood to the, nope, didn’t know what that was (in a whisper, to my sister, who I’d jabbed with the front of the scope).
Or an elbow.
Or a, ‘Stop stroking that.’
Pause.
‘This isn’t a fucking joke,’ she’d said, poking me in the shoulder.
Get your hand out of my head.
Get you out of–
They were stroking the younger man’s forehead.
–my head.
They were sweating.
Get you–
Stroking.
–out.
I didn’t actually see them cut him open.
‘Excuse me?’
‘I was distracted. A fox howled, somewhere in the cemetery.’
‘Do foxes howl?’
‘Maybe. Somewhere at the bottom of the cemetery, near the house we’d spied Gentleman Jim in previously, dragging his long, hard knife across the throat of the stranger.’
‘Which one? There’ve been so many. I don’t remember.’
‘At the bottom, by the war graves, surrounded by the trees. Near the gate which opens out onto the street with the psychiatric hospital.’
‘A fox?’
‘Yowling. Howling. Zipping across.’
Uncle Jim heard it, too. He paused what he was doing and looked out through the window towards our hollow yew tree. Snipers cover their rifles with cloth. Modern telescopic sights have slit-eye covers that fit across the front lens to prevent glare from the sun. In this case it was a child’s hand. My hand whipped across and I ducked my head and said, ‘He’s seen us,’ to my sister, but all of a sudden she was gone. The younger man, tied up, was licking coke residue off the plate as the older man, still in his suit, held it in front of his face. It can’t be over yet, I thought.
Then Jim undid his top button and drew the curtains.