Nothing but Meat: A dark, heart-stopping British crime thriller Page 11

  The boy had heard Peterson telling others earlier that day how he was going to get his mother to give him a lift to the party and what time he planned to get there, and so, later that evening the boy positioned himself a short distance from Peterson’s house and waited for them to leave. He used Peterson’s keys to let himself into their house through the back door.

  The house was empty. Daddy wasn’t around anymore, the boy didn’t know the circumstances of the father’s departure and he didn’t care, any anguish and turmoil Peterson felt in his heart was delightful to the boy.

  Never a fool and always prudent, he produced a pair of rubber gloves from his pocket, they were just general purpose washing up gloves he’d taken earlier from the cupboard beneath the sink at home but they were more than sufficient for covering his finger prints.

  He looked around the lounge and found a bottle of gin in one of the cupboards; he opened it and took a swig, pouring it into his mouth, being careful not to let the rim of the bottle touch his lips. It burned into his stomach and went straight to his head and a glorious sensation of power washed over him while he went through their belongings and helped himself to whatever cash he found.

  Peterson’s mother wasn’t unattractive by any means and his erection pressed tightly against his jeans as he looked through her underwear drawer. He found a sex toy in her bedside cabinet and smelt the casing before putting it back, he wanted to taste it but was conscious of leaving evidence behind and besides her private belongings were merely a distraction, he didn’t have long before she would return and there was one particular item he was looking for and he found it as soon as he entered Peterson’s bedroom. He picked it from the floor and swung it in a huge arc, the cricket bat felt reassuringly hefty and easily capable of the task he had in mind.

  The smacking sound was much louder than he had expected and although it happened in an instant, when he thought about it in bed later that night he was sure he could distinguish all the different nuances in the complexities of the layered sound.

  It had taken a less than an hour for Peterson’s mother to drop him at the party and the boy was waiting for her when she came home.

  When she entered the lounge, he caught her attention by making a small kissing sound from behind the door. She had just enough time to see him before the bat hit her full in the face. He held the cricket bat in the air like a baseball player and put all the strength he had into the swing that connected perfectly with her head. She had no time to defend herself and barely had enough time to register his presence before the blow knocked her to the ground unconscious.

  The boy stood over her and looked at what he had done. Peterson’s mother lay on her side and the boy rolled her onto her back with his foot. Her face was crushed, her cheekbone and jaw clearly shattered and her eye bulged terribly from the pulverized socket. He sat on her chest and opened her mouth, he touched the sharp little fragments of where her teeth had been and felt the slackness of her broken jaw. As he moved it around he noticed a dark line amongst the blood, it was a separation of skin where a flap had ripped open on her cheek. He slid his gloved fingers smoothly into the wound and tried to feel the bone underneath, he forced them deeper under the skin and tried to tear it away but the flesh was tough and his fingers too blood soaked to get purchase enough to separate it from the muscle beneath.

  A shell of cheekbone teased him from under the flap of skin and he was desperate to see more so he left her on the floor while he went to the kitchen to select a knife from the block. He knew what he was looking for; a small utility knife would work perfectly, he found one quickly enough and turned it in the light, the slim blade shimmered under the fluorescents as if it were alive. Lost in the wonderment of what was about to happen, his imagination was running wild at the thought of seeing her without skin when suddenly the doorbell rang. He jumped as the shrill distorted ding-dong speared him like a sonic shard of glass. He spun on his heels and sped back into the lounge only to find she wasn’t where he left her. She had rolled onto her front and managed to crawl across the room, her goal was obvious but she hadn’t made it. She lay still with one arm outstretched only a few feet from the salvation of the telephone, the other was tucked under her chest and her forehead rested on the carpet. The doorbell rang again and he ducked down even though the curtains were drawn. Silence was the key; he knew he had to keep her quiet but no sooner had the thought flashed through his mind she began to make a gurgling sound; a strange blood drowned whine that rose in crescendo and began to turn into a steady moaning noise. He had to shut her up. He grabbed the cricket bat from the floor and kicked her in the ribs knocking the air from her lungs. He flipped her onto her back as the doorbell chimed again, this time followed by a healthy knock. She opened her mouth, clearly wanting to scream but never getting the chance; he pressed the flat of her son’s cricket bat against her throat and knelt on it. She offered little resistance, no more than a token scratching at his gloved wrists. Her mouth moved in a soft chewing motion and for a second her good eye opened wide with the pain and the horror of realisation as he rocked from side to side and crushed the blooded bat into her soft throat with his knees. The sound it made reminded him of the sensation of biting into celery. He stayed there for a while looking at the bloodied mess he had created. He was silent, she was silent and the person at the door had left.

  He spent some time cutting sections of her face away with the small knife and then washed it in the kitchen sink along with his gloves and put it back in the block.

  As he slipped out of the house and onto the dark street his heart was still pounding in his chest from the adrenalin and the thrill of what he had just done. He considered whether he had actually intended to kill her. Had he really meant to commit murder when he broke into the house? He wasn’t sure; he hadn’t planned that far ahead; before the doorbell rang and the threat of being discovered became very real he had only wanted to hurt her very badly, the fact that she may not have survived hadn’t crossed his mind nor did he expect to feel the need to lift the skin from her face. He was fearful of being caught and was convinced he had covered his tracks, but he could never be certain the police wouldn’t come knocking. One thing he was sure of was that he was now a murderer.

  Part 2:

  Heart Shine

  11

  For the past few weeks Simone had felt that her life had been steeped in death. Day after day she seemed to be dealing with blood and gore and grieving families.

  Her face had healed well and now only yellow and purple bruises remained. Her reflection looked sad but she was on the mend and determined to make the changes that would finally bring some sunshine into her life.

  Simone got to the station before West and busied herself with paperwork while waiting for him to arrive. The post came and with it a parcel for West – a cardboard box with a basic label. She took it from the mailman; it was deceptively heavy; a dense solid weight, as if it contained a couple of bottles of water. Something about it felt wrong. For a start the printed label bore only West’s surname and the station address. Not Detective West or Mr West or DCI West it simply read: West. She put it on his desk and stared at it for a while. There was no return address either, just the Royal Mail postage stamp. Something was wrong about it, the room was silent and she put her arms on the desk and leant towards it, listening. She pressed her ear to the cardboard; it looked new but smelt old and dank and mouldy. There was also a feint floral fragrance as if the box had been standing in a puddle of toilet cleaner.

  Bombs don’t tick they hum she thought to herself as she held her breath and listened. Could she hear something coming from within? She wasn’t sure and blamed it on her imagination. Simone considered ringing the bomb squad but in her mind pictured the evacuation and everyone standing outside complaining about Simone’s decision to get them out of the building only to find that West had ordered a new teapot. She pushed the thoughts away and listened ever so carefully.

  Bang!

  She jumped out of
her skin as West flung the door wide open and came rushing into the room.

  ‘Fucking Christ Nathan!’

  ‘Morning to you too.’

  She had her hand on her chest and she knew she looked a state. ‘What’s up?’ he said.

  ‘Have you ordered anything to be delivered to the station?’

  He looked at the parcel instantly serious. ‘No.’

  ‘It arrived a few minutes ago.’

  ‘Step away.’

  Without question she did as he said, was he thinking the same as her?

  ‘It shouldn’t have got this far without being opened,’ he said. He walked to the desk and looked at the label. ‘Who delivered it?’

  ‘The usual kid.’

  ‘First things first – call downstairs, we need to guarantee this was delivered by Royal Mail and logged in before getting in here.’

  Simone did as he asked. ‘It was delivered today. Everything is in order. They fucked up downstairs and let it go through without being opened. They were confused because you don’t work at this station and somehow it slipped through the net. The kid only knew where to deliver it because he knows me and knows we are working together.’

  ‘Okay. Let’s see Jackson.’

  West and Jackson made the call to clear the station. Simone was one of the evacuees. She stood in the sweltering heat of the car park waiting with the others at the fire assembly points. When the bomb disposal team arrived West and Jackson joined her at the assembly point. They moved away from the majority and sat together on a low stone wall at the edge of the car park.

  She asked West, ‘What’s the procedure?’

  ‘They’ll use a hand drill to make three or four holes in the lid and look inside with a camera. They’ll check to see if anything is attached to the lid, things like wires or connecting plates. They’ll look at the contents too as best they can.’ He looked around for eavesdroppers and although no one was near them he continued in a lower voice. ‘They’ll be looking for powders; poisons or diseases like anthrax. If they don’t find anything they’ll probably open it up. They’ll look for pressure pads and –.’ He mouthed the word silently, ‘-explosives.’

  Thinking it was a fire drill people sat around smoking and chatting casually amongst themselves while they waited for the all clear. But for Simone the time passed slowly. She was anxious and couldn’t shake the feeling that an explosion would rip a hole in the top floor of the building at any moment. The heat was a distraction; she could feel the sweat glaze her back, chest and stomach and she used her hand to shade her eyes and wished she hadn’t left her sunglasses inside.

  West and Jackson were in conversation and she turned her face into the sun, its heat kissed her throbbing nose and bruises and it felt good. She sniffed unconsciously and her mouth suddenly filled with a huge glob of bloody matter from the back of her nose. It took her by surprise and her first instinct was to spit it into a tissue but she didn’t have one and she couldn’t spit it onto the floor in front of people so she swallowed quickly. It slid down her throat like a bloody oyster and her mouth tasted metallic afterwards but she found she could breathe deeply through her nose, a pressure had eased from between her eyes and it was the most clear and deep breath she had taken since the incident at the Pulaski’s; it felt glorious and confirmed the feeling that her nose was well on the way to being healed.

  Jackson’s mobile rang. He had a brief conversation and hung up. He said to Simone, ‘It’s all clear, tell the marshal to let everyone back inside and come straight up.’ He and West stood and walked towards the building together.

  Both West and Jackson were on their phones when she walked into the office and the moulding yet floral stench had filled the room like an invisible fog that had become so overpowering it was almost unbearable. The box was in the same place on the desk but now the cardboard flaps were open and a sheet of paper and hunk of polystyrene lay beside it. What looked like small dusty gravel lay in scattered heaps across the table. She moved to step closer but West caught her attention and motioned for her to wait with a gloved hand.

  West finished his conversation and hung up before Jackson who turned away from them while he spoke into the phone.

  They were concerned; she could see it in their eyes.

  ‘What’s happened?’ she said.

  He motioned to the box. ‘Look inside.’

  She approached the table slowly, more apprehensive now. The smell was stronger and obviously coming from the box. She looked at the piece of paper, the polystyrene and the dusty gravel, that she now recognised as cat litter beside it and considered the dense, heavy weight she felt when she first picked it up. Thoughts of what else it could contain flashed across her mind.

  She peered in.

  At first what she saw wasn’t shocking. She had imagined looking in and seeing a human head staring back at her with vacant eyes and peeling flesh but what she saw didn’t seem unusual to her, the box contained packets of raw bacon, rashers of smoked meat that were vacuum packed and shiny and looked as though they had just been lifted from the cold food aisle at a supermarket or the cabinet at her local butchers. The most disturbing thing was that the meat had turned in the warmth and smelt awful even though it had been tightly packed in clear plastic packages. They were dusted with cat litter and she saw that a handful of yellow car air fresheners had been ripped open and lay on top of the meat packets, all obviously there as a weak attempt to disguise the inevitable sourness that would come from sending unrefrigerated meat through the postal system in the middle of summertime. The combined smell of artificial flora and rancid meat was like the tip of a feather in the back of her throat and she felt her abdomen tighten as her stomach toyed playfully with idea of relieving itself of its contents. She turned away and swallowed slowly, her mind racing with the image and smell of rotten meat and as she wished her nose was still blocked her thoughts went back to the taste and sensation of swallowing the congealed matter from the back of her nose that now sat heavily in her stomach like a huge blob of bloody snot.

  She put her fist to her mouth and made watery eye contact with West.

  ‘Okay?’ he asked.

  ‘It’s the smell.’

  ‘Stinks doesn’t it?’

  She nodded. ‘I’m surprised how well polystyrene, a bit of cat litter and a few air fresheners did at covering the stench before it was opened,’ she said.

  ‘Did you read the note?’ he said.

  ‘No,’ she said and reluctantly moved a few steps towards the desk and the evil stench that hung strongly around it.

  ‘Hold this.’ He passed her a plastic evidence bag and carefully lifted a corner of the note with his pen and picked it from the desk by his gloved fingernails. She held the bag open for him as he slid the note inside. She zipped it shut and read the note out loud through the plastic cover. ‘I have all I need. Pig.’ She peered back into the box. ‘The meat in the box, is it human?’

  West lifted a packet from the box and showed it to her, turning it in the light so she could get a clear look without touching. ‘It looks like bacon; it smells fucking terrible but it still smells like bacon,’ he said. ‘Pounds of it - all sealed in packages.’ She looked at the long drooping packet, the raw meat; red, wet and fleshy on one side, and on the other fluid swam glossily over the white fat that coated one edge.

  He lifted them out. ‘Twelve packets of meat,’ he said, ‘and this too.’ He reached back into the box and removed a small cassette case. He showed her the spine; it was marked Damning Evidence, with a label from an old Dymo labelling machine.

  ‘What about the cassette; is there one inside.’

  He shook his head. ‘It’s empty,’ he said. ‘I can tell from the weight.’ He opened it anyway and showed her the empty case.

  ‘At least it can be swabbed for prints and the meat can go straight to the lab.’ He put it back in the box. ‘We need to confirm whether it’s human or not, I’m convinced it’s just bacon but we need to know if it’s something mo
re sinister.’

  Jackson came over looking more stressed than ever. ‘Do you think it’s our man?’

  ‘Who the hell knows?’ said West. ‘He cut the word sow into Redman’s back, but that could be coincidence.’

  ‘Referring to police as pigs isn’t exactly unique,’ said Simone.

  ‘It was addressed to you West. Any enemies?’

  He shrugged. ‘Too many to count probably.’

  ‘The cassette case; any ideas?’

  ‘It’s the cassette from a Dictaphone, sending a recording on the cassette itself I could understand, but an empty case?’ he sighed. ‘The label looks old, and that label style is definitely old, modern ones no longer have the raised print.’

  ‘Dictaphones with cassettes are outdated too,’ said Simone. ‘Modern ones are digital.’

  ‘Damning evidence?’ said Jackson referring to the label.

  ‘It seems he’s trying to send us a message; but it’s beyond me.’ said West. ‘We could do some digging and try to date the label style but I very much doubt it’ll be worth the time and effort.’

  ‘I agree, we need to discuss our resources,’ Jackson said. ‘I hate to say it but I’m running out of personnel, we need to prioritise the leads.’

  ‘Understood,’ said West. ‘We can spend an hour or two running over what we know and working out where to go next.’

  ‘We have to close this fucker down – he keeps cranking the pressure up and I don’t like it.’

  12

  West stood by a white board; marker pen in hand, he spoke as he wrote. ‘Who attacked Gary Stevens? Where did the tooth come from? Who sent us a box of meat?’ He stamped a full stop at the end of the final question. ‘Who the hell is this guy?’ he said loudly and turned back to the room.

  There was little response from the onlookers; no one knew what to say. It was time for West to let the station commander step in and take over, he made eye contact with Jackson who was standing nearby and Jackson took his cue. He suddenly slammed his fist on the desk and yelled at the crowd, ‘How can we be so damn clueless? Come on people we need to follow leads and we need to move fast, we have limited manpower but we have enough to get this guy. I know we do.’