Eye Snatcher (8 page)

But hey. Relationships required compromises.

Brian unlocked the door to his house and stepped inside. He scrubbed his feet on the welcome mat, which always seemed to do a shitty job of cleaning his shoes. Another wasted expense.

He could smell something from the kitchen. Hotpot.

His stomach turned.

The kitchen door opened and Hannah stepped out. She smiled at him, with her dark brown hair dangling down to her shoulders and her iPad in her hands. She was wearing a peach cardigan with a white T-shirt underneath, which really flattered her breasts. Which were amazing as it was. She had tight blue jeans on as she stepped up to Brian, barely acknowledging him, kissed him on his cheek.

“Hotpot’s on the table for you.”

Brian took off his shoes. “You eaten?”

Hannah stepped up the stairs. “Yeah. Got hungry. And I have some article to finish off.”

“Interesting article?” Brian asked, craning his neck as Hannah continued to disappear up the stairs.

“I’ll catch you later, hun. Enjoy your tea.”

And then she was gone.

Brian stood there, alone, in the darkened hallway of his house. It’d been like this with Hannah for a few months now. He’d tried to ignore it at first. Tried not to see it. But really, they were just little things that added up and when considered as a whole, were pretty lofty. The times she spent away from him during dinner doing work (she was a freelance journalist, so finding “work” was easy). The friends she went out to meet on week nights that she hadn’t previously seen in years. The little side-glances he’d catch from her when they were lying in bed.

He was lucky. He knew that. She was gorgeous. Amazing.

But maybe that was the problem. Maybe she was too gorgeous. Too amazing.

He stepped through to the kitchen, towards the looming smell of hotpot. Maybe she was falling out of love with him. He was hardly the catch he was in his twenties. Sure, he got told he had some weird macho charm about him—some mysteriousness that women craved—but he wasn’t such a looker.

Maybe she was tired of him. Maybe that’s why she was making him get therapy again, see a counsellor. Maybe she saw what she was doing to him—the paranoia she was causing within him, and trying to get the therapist to break the news of his deteriorated relationship gently.

Or maybe he really was just being paranoid. Maybe he really did need help.

He pushed open his kitchen door. One of the bulbs had gone, so there was a dimness to the room. Pots were stacked up in and beside the sink, Hannah’s leftover coffee half-filling the cups. That bugged Brian. It was his pet hate. How hard was it for her to fill them with a bit of water?

But he didn’t say anything. He didn’t pull her up for it out of fear.

He didn’t want to lose her.

He went over to the gas stove and lifted the metal lid of a pan resting on top. The steaming mush of potatoes, corned beef and stewed vegetables stared back at him, the smell filling his nostrils and making him want to hurl.

She made an excellent hotpot. But she made it too much. Too often. Not that he was any kind of gender stereotypist—Hannah actually enjoyed cooking. Said it gave her a buzz, like some people got from doing sports, or writing songs.

But she was making hotpot a lot these days. Hotpot was her “lazy-ass” dish, she’d once said.

Brian cringed as he scooped a bit of the frothy mess out of the pan and took it to the little circular wooden table in a bowl.

He stuck a fork into it. Slurped up the mushy potato and stared into the nothingness of the rain hitting the kitchen window, making it rattle on its deteriorating hinges. As he moved a disintegrating slice of sloppy salted carrot around his mouth, he saw Sam Betts.

Saw his opened belly, intestines dangling out.

Saw his vacant eye sockets, flies crawling around them.

Saw his little smile on that school photo of his.

He pushed aside the hotpot after forcing a carrot down his throat and rested his head in his hands. He wished he was like a normal cop. One of those cold as shit bastards who could switch off when they got home. One of those morally screwed wankers who got a buzz from murder cases, played them like they were a game of fucking Cluedo rather than actual real lives.

But he couldn’t. He never had been able to switch off. He accepted that now. Knew it was just a part of him—a part of his genetic makeup, or whatever. The obsessiveness, not the police part. His dad was a train track construction worker and his mum was a stay at home mum until she decided she didn’t want to stay at home anymore.

But he always remembered the way his dad used to obsess about things. The littlest of things—conspiracy theories, stuff in the newspaper, things like that. Once, he pinned up the entire day’s news on the falling shares of a big British bank. Was convinced he was some kind of modern day Nostradamus, and that everyone should withdraw all their money from them and get it into another bank right away.

Naturally, the bank his dad moved his money into went into liquidation two weeks later.

That was one of the few funny memories Brian had of his dad.

He scraped his chair back. Poured the barely eaten hotpot back into the pan and put the lid back on top. He’d grab some later if he was hungry. Or maybe he’d just get in a Dominos. Dominos went down easier. And Hannah wouldn’t mind. She never minded.

He walked out of the kitchen and into the dark coldness of the hall. Stepped upstairs to see where Hannah was, what she was up to.

He pushed open the bedroom door and he saw that she was crying.

She was sat on the end of the bed. Sat with her hands covering her face. Sniffing, knees close together, like she was a scared kid who’d lost her parents.

“Han?” Brian said. He took a few trepidatious steps into the bedroom.

Hannah moved her hands from her face. Her eyes were completely red and her cheeks were soaked. She looked at Brian with apologetic eyes. With apology—no,
guilt
—which Brian had seen way too many times on the job already.

Brian waited for the news. Waited for the news of an affair to hit him. Waited for it to stab him in his big fat gut and leave him mentally disembowelled, his innards pouring out onto the floor.

“I’m pregnant, Brian,” she said. “I’m pregnant.”

Jeff Milton wiped the piss puddle away from the edge of the toilet seat and prayed he’d get another job sooner rather than later.

He threw the dirty green sponge into his big black bin bag and stepped away from the men’s toilets. He’d been working as a toilet cleaner in Booths for seven years now. Seven fucking years mopping up piss and scraping up shit for a living. No wonder he couldn’t find a woman. He was hardly a catch.

He wheeled his cleaning apparatus away from the cubicle and did a quick check of the hand driers. Automatic one on the right wasn’t working, again. Someone had drawn on a cock in red marker pen too. Shit—when Jeff was younger, he’d be the kind of guy to do jokey shit like that. Now he had to clean it up, he took back everything he did. What a little shite he was.

The smell of stale urine and cleaning foam lingered in his nostrils, invaded his taste buds, the same way a fry-up might fill the nostrils of a normal person on a Saturday morning. Nope—every day of Jeff’s life, nothing but bogs to clean. And they were always in an awful state. No matter how many signs you put up telling people to lift the seats, to not flush paper towels down the loo, to hold their fucking flapping cocks while they pissed, they just never did.

Always the same.

He caught a glance of himself in the mirror as he wheeled his cleaning apparatus away. Jesus, he looked tired. When the frig had he got so bloody old? Big blue bags under his eyes. Greying, balding hair. He might only be forty-nine, but he looked about twice that. Suppose that’s what all this cleaning work did to a man. All the chemicals he handled, inhaled, let coat his body, they couldn’t be good for him.

He turned away from the mirror as fast as he could and opened the creaking wooden door out of the men’s toilets.

As he walked towards the ladies’ loos, he peeked around the corner at Booths shopping centre. Completely silent, not a sound in there. He kind of liked that about working early mornings. Liked the creepiness of it. It was like a zombie TV show he dipped in and out of—the one with Riley and that fat bloke called Ted. Reminded him of being stuck in there with all these supplies. He’d handle zombies just fine. Straight to the butchers’ section, grab a few sharp knives, lure them out by tossing meat at them and thwack—voila. One dead zombie.

He had way too much time on his hands. Came from being a single, middle-aged man with no friends and a family that didn’t really give a rat’s ass.

He took in a deep breath of the clean air outside the loos before heading into the ladies. Weirdly, the ladies’ loos were always a lot worse than the men’s. He figured they were where men sometimes crept in to have a little play around with their women. Used johnnies, shits on the floor—all kinds of weird crap in the ladies’ loo. It was like a place where boundaries dropped, and being ladylike suddenly died.

He pushed his cleaning apparatus up to the wooden door of the ladies’ loos and braced himself for a shit-tip.

What he got was much, much worse.

The smell hit him first. Ghastly, worst stench he’d ever smelled. Like rotting milk had been left in a warm room for a few months, the lid finally opened.

He pulled his apparatus back. Covered his nostrils and his mouth with his hand. Took a few more gasps of the fresher air.

He readied himself. Jesus Christ, what the fuck had gone on in these loos? Some kind of filthy shitty party? He’d seen a porno like that once upon a time. Scarred him mentally, but that’s what lonely curiosity did to a single man of his age.

He pushed aside his cleaning apparatus. Stepped up to the door and prepared himself to enter.

When he pushed his way through the door, his sleeve did nothing to disguise the smell. But against all his intuition, against all the words in his mind telling him to do otherwise, he powered on through.

The first thing he noticed beyond the smell was the blood.

It was all over the mirrors. Smeared all over. Trickling around the white tiles of the floor.

Leaking from underneath the closed cubicle door.

Jeff shook. Shook and felt dizzy, sick. He should get out of here. Call the police. Summat had happened here. Something terrible.

Instead, he walked towards the cubicle door.

Curiosity got the better of him, once again.

He lifted a quivering hand to the grey door of the cubicle. It was ajar, but the lock was switched over to “Occupied.”

He pushed the door open.

When he saw what was sitting naked on the toilet seat staring back at him, he didn’t understand at first. Thought it must be some sort of wind-up. Some sort of sick wind-up.

And then the realisation clicked that it wasn’t a wind up and he tumbled away, collapsed onto the floor, almost cracked his head in the process.

The blood from the tiles covered his clothes. Got all over his hands, so that as he scrambled for his phone he couldn’t help but get blood everywhere.

He dialled the police. Dialled the police, the person on the toilet still looking at him, staring at him.

“This is the emergency services. Which service do you require?”

Jeff tried to speak but his throat seared with acid. His nostrils reeked of rot. His body, arms, everything just tingled all over.

“Hello? Anyone there?”

He felt the burning fill up in his throat and then he puked all over the bathroom floor.

All the while, the eyeless head of the little girl on the toilet looked on.

Brian headed into work on Saturday morning without any breakfast.

When he got there, Brad was already at the offices. He frowned at him. Squinted.

“You’re looking cheery today.”

“At work on a Saturday morning. What do you expect?’

Brad nodded and walked towards his office area.

Truth was, Brian wasn’t sure just how sarcastic Brad was being. Last night, he’d found out Hannah was pregnant. After weeks and weeks of expecting some news on their deteriorating relationship, of readying himself for her to leave for a better new model, she announced she was pregnant.

But that wasn’t even the bad news. The bad news was that she wanted to keep the kid.

Shit. He almost wished she
had
just been dating some toyboy after all.

Brian nodded at a few officers as he stepped through the main offices towards the briefing room, which was now his temporary office. The smell of coffee and warmed up porridge was strong. Both made Brian want to hurl. Light peeked in through the windows lining the office today. Much less grim than yesterday. A beautiful autumn morning.

Yeah. Right.

“Got some news for you,” Brad said, as Brian headed into his office.

Jesus. Not more news. “Anything on the coat?”

Brad shook his head. “Should find out about that later today. But we have another body.”

Brian almost puked up right there on the spot.

“Another body? What do you mean another body?”

“Little girl,” a voice from Brian’s right said. Samantha Carter walked out with an apple in her hands, arms folded as she crunched down on it. “Similar age to Sam. Janie Doe at the moment. Same wounds. Same murder method.”

“Jesus,” Brian said. He sat down at his desk to steady himself. Not what he wanted to hear right now.

“Down at Booths in Fulwood. Cleaning guy called us about half an hour ago.”

Brian shook his head. The news still didn’t seem real to him. None of the news did.

“So you’re probably gonna want to take a look down there. Figured I’d let you sneak in before forensics crawl the place.”

“Thanks,” Brian said.

“You okay?” Samantha asked. She frowned. Crunched down on her apple some more.

Christ—was he that obviously stressed out? You’d think there’d been two kids killed or something the way they were claiming he was acting. “Just tired,” he said. “Takes it out of you, stuff like this.”