PAIN HAS A PERMANENT ADDRESS - READ BETWEEN THE LIES

PAIN HAS A PERMANENT ADDRESS - EPISODE NINE

Chapter Twenty-Two

“A window of opportunity,” Kira had called it.

  Cowan Carter had gone away with her daughter to a dog show in London.  Only a few staff would be at the kennels.  Getting in and out of the kennels like I had discussed with Kira after her house fire, would be a great deal easier for me.

  Doses up to the eyeballs with the painkillers, I used the path that weaved its way past the Reverend’s cottage to reach the beach, where the foreshore was narrow with a paved slope.  With poor visibility, walking into a few of the small boats that lay on the slope would help me reach my destination.  The path curved round and finished against a shoulder of rock, and in this rock gaped the mouth of a cave with another beach invisible at the other end.  I found what I needed inside the cave, a rubber dinghy stored against one wall, hidden from view.

  I dragged the dinghy out through the other end of the cave and down to the beach.  Because of my knee, it took longer than what would have been normal.  Hauling a rubber dinghy over six-foot wide seaweed-covered rocks to the sea twenty yards away is back-breaking in daylight, and a killer in darkness. Several bone-jarring bruises later I got the dinghy out to sea and started rowing towards the North Sea facing entrance of the kennels. 

  After a while I wondered whether this was a good idea.  It took an hour and a half and my arms ached by the time I had tied the boat to a small wooden jetty protected from the craggy shore.  I spent a few moments getting my breath back and massaging some feeling back into my arms before setting off across the beach.

  My feet crunched on the stones and shells.  The tall red-and-white striped finger of the unmanned lighthouse across the water on the Headland my only guide.  Its beam sliced through the shadows of the night like a blade of fire.  Flint pebbles crunched under a gathering of gulls, who flapped and screamed with righteous indignation when disturbed at such an ungodly hour.

  I soon discovered the reason for their indignation when the beam of the lighthouse passed me by. Rough circles of scraped-together grass and seaweed, each holding one or two oval eggs blotched with scribbles of tarry black for camouflage.  “Go-go-go!” screamed the gulls flapping overhead as they urged me on my way.

  A faint mist of rain drifted across the still of the night, swirling beneath the lights of the kennels like a swarm of insects.  It dotted against my skin, cool and fine as I ran across the shingle beach to the perimeter fence.  The space between the kennels and the boundary fence, five hundred yards at the nearest approach, open and clear.  No trees, no bushes, just tiny sea campion, sea pea, and horned poppy.  Nothing higher grew in this bleak desolation.

  I found the back gate padlocked.  I looked up and down the beach, checked the bay window at the back of Cowan’s house.  Blinds drawn, no sign of light through the glass panels in the back door.  Checking again that there were no eyes on me, I slipped along the pathway running parallel to the perimeter fence and climbed up and over the gate and dropped on the other side.  I paused, listening.  All quiet. Any sudden sounds would make the dogs go berserk.

  At the back of the house was a small garden, basic perfunctory: a two-foot brick wall hemmed in a patio full of perfectly even slabs and an immaculate square of lawn, that wouldn’t look out of place on a golf course.  The beds were full of colourful plants, as were the pots and trellising.  On one side of the garden you could clearly hear the North Sea and the on the other side were the kennels. I kept crouched and tried to stay out of sight.

  I reached the back door, took out my picks and went to work on the lock.  It was an old-fashioned tumbler, the pins full of rust, but – after a couple of failed attempts – I managed to get it open and headed in.

  Once I pushed the door shut again, the passing traffic in front of the house became a dull buzz, like a dying insect, and the soft sounds of the house started to emerge:  the hum of a refrigerator; the gurgle of a water pipe; an occasional, faint creak from somewhere as someone turned over in their bed and the house contracted in the dark.  I left the kitchen and made my way to the sitting room.  I moved through the darkness of the interior, keeping my torch turned off.  Enough light came from outside, as well as digital displays and a luminous wall clock.

  I went to the bookshelves and dropped to my haunches and my attention was drawn to the DVDs.  A Letter to Juliet.  Les Misérables. Phantom of the Opera. The Hounds of the Baskerville. The Da Vinci Code.

  On the spine of The Da Vinci Code, an X had been added in red marker.

  Removing it from the shelf.  I opened it up and briefly shone my torch on it.  I checked the other films, but they just contained the discs they were supposed to.  It was the only one that was different.

  I felt a flicker of unease.

  Clipping the official disc back into The Da Vinci Code box, I returned it to the shelf, pocketed the blank disc and stood up.

  The sheer animal power, the feral ferocity of the pair of huge hands that closed round my neck from behind terrified and surprised me.  Something I’d never known of, never dreamed of.  After the first moment of blind panic and shocked paralysis, I had one thought:  and I hadn’t expected it to come to me in my life quite yet. I'd run up against someone smarter, stronger, and more ruthless than me who attempted to strangle the life out of me.

  I lashed back with all the power of my right foot, but the man behind me knew every rule in the book.  His own right foot, travelling with even more speed and power than mine, smashed into the back of my swinging leg.  My leg didn’t just feel as if it had been broken, it felt as if it had been cut in half.  I felt his toe behind my left foot and stamped on it with every vicious ounce of power left in me but when my foot came down his toe wasn’t there any more.  The agonizing jar from the solid floor shot clear to the top of my head.  I reached up with my hands to break his fingers, but he knew that too for his hands were clenched into iron-hard balls with the second knuckle grinding into the carotid artery.  I wasn’t the first man he’d strangled and unless I did something pretty quickly I wasn’t going to be the last either.  My ears were starting to throb.  Behind my eyes were shooting lines and flashes of colour were deepening and brightening by the moment.

  I suddenly bent forward in a convulsive jerk.  Half of his weigh came on to my back, that throttling grip of his not easing a fraction.  At the same time he moved his feet as far backwards as possible – the instinctive reaction to my move, he would have thought that I was making a grab for one of his legs.  When I had him momentarily off-balance, I swung round in a small arc and then thrust backwards with all my strength, accelerating all the way into the wall.

  If I’d taken that impact I’d have broken my back or slipped enough discs to keep an orthopaedic surgeon in steady employment for months.  But there were no shouts of agony from my attacker.  No gasps, even.  Not a whisper of sound.  Maybe he was a deaf mute – I’d heard of several deaf mutes possessed of this phenomenal strength, part of nature’s compensatory process, I suppose.

  But he’d been forced to break his grip, enabling me to thrust myself away and spin round to face him.

  I could see him now as he straightened up from the wall.  Not clearly – it was too dark for that – but I could see the white blur of his face and hands and the general outline of his body.

  I had been expecting some towering giant, but this man was barely five foot nine, but he looked compact and fit.

  He came at me again, I feinted one way and then another and caught him with a vicious clubbing of my elbow.  I caught him on the perfect cheekbone – nose – cheekbone line and the cracking and splintering of his nose was clearly audible.

  He wasn’t silent this time and to shut him up I head-butted him, like I was trying to dive a fence post into the dry soil of my back garden with my head.  The man hit the floor silently, and I stepped over him and as I did, I became aware of someone moving about stealthily upstairs.  It was time to leave.

  I'm still raining, I pulled the door shut and made my way back towards the gate.  Staying out of the sight-line of the house, I crossed to the perimeter fence with acute stealth and just as I was within touching distance, there came the quick stealthy rush of padding feet behind me and I suddenly felt like I had been hit by a train.

Chapter Twenty-Three

Before I could react, something else closed over my upper-left arm, just above the elbow, with all the power and brutal savagery of a sprung bear trap.  In agonizing pain, I staggered and lurched and almost fell. I felt my arm being crushed.  I swung round in a vicious half-circle hooking with all the strength of my right arm from where I thought the stomach of my attacker ought to have been and all I did was to make a hole in the night.  I almost dislocated my right shoulder but I’d more to think about than that as I lurched sideways again, fighting for my life.  It wasn’t a person who had hold of me, but a dog about the size and power of a wolf.

  Bruno.

 Trying to tear him off my right hand only sunk his huge teeth deeper into my arm. I tried crashing my right fist again and again against that powerful body, but he was so far to my left and back that I could barely reach him.  Though I kicked, I couldn't get at him, I couldn’t shake him off, there was no solid object I could crush him against, and I knew that if I fell on top of him he would loosen his grip and tear my throat out.

  He must have weighed between eighty and ninety pounds.  He had fangs like steel hooks. I felt myself get weak as the waves of pain and nausea washed over me. Then, in a moment of clarity, my brain worked again.  I’d no trouble in getting the knife clear of my belt, and it was a few pain-filled seconds before the stiletto point entered just below the breastbone and angled inwards and upwards for the heart, meeting almost no resistance.  The bear-trap grip on my arm loosened in a fraction of a second and the dog died before it reached the ground.

  A torchlight probed the night.  A pointing speck of light without hesitation.  I headed for the gate and quickly climbed over it.  Voices called after me.  I staggered as fast as I could to the small wooden jetty where I had cached the boat. 

  Removing my sweatshirt, my arm had already begun to stiffen, but I managed and then washed my arm in the icy-cold waters of the North Sea. I quickly bandaged my arm with the sweatshirt before climbing into the boat and unshipping the two stubby oars.  I eventually arrived back at the cove.

  The church towered above me near the edge of the cliff, bleakly evocative in the summer darkness.

  I returned the dinghy to its rightful place and followed the coastal path instead of disturbing Reverend Frances Ward at this ungodly hour.  The path wound to the left of the church and took me past the caravan site, the beach huts and the boat maker’s yard, now empty of boats.

  I passed some original houses of Oxmarket, a motley line of dwellings just across the road from the boathouse and boatyards and mooring jetties.  They were from a time when people didn’t see much point in a sea view against an icy wind and occasional floods.  The cottages that lined the Oxmarket marshes were odd, ill-sorted, and squeezed in at strange angles as if each had fitted into a space slightly too small for it.

   Following the natural curvature of the path I felt like teetering on the edge of the world.  The summery early morning light slanted on to the flat, colourless landscape; the slight wind moaned, the seabirds shrieked, and there was a melancholy boom from a huge heading towards nearby Felixstowe.  I shivered inwardly, my mind full of plots and sub-plots, piecing together the puzzle of how who, what, when and why.  My arm and knee ached interminably, helping to keep my focus.

   I had now re-joined the lane that eventually became the main street of Oxmarket.  The river beside the lane rushed by, journeying in the opposite direction towards the sea, its flow swifter than my pace; white spume washing against the leafy banks and breaking over embedded boulders; debris of leaves, small branches and stones were carried in the flux and water spray cast a thin mist over the river’s bubbling rough surface.  Trees that edged the lane and the opposite riverbank glistened like silver raindrops. 

    I passed where my car had been repaired deep in thought.  I am a realist and knew how the truth could be manipulated, ameliorated, and negotiated away at every stage of an investigation.  Usually, with a little luck, the facts fall into place and right person gets arrested.  Truly innocent people rarely go to prison.  That’s the theory.  It’s normally the practice.  Then a case like this one comes along where the waters are a little murkier.

Chapter Twenty-Four

“I’m not going back to the bloody hospital and that’s final,” I said.  With a couple of ham sandwiches and half a tumbler of whisky inside me, I was feeling my old miserable self again.  “Sorry, Doctor, but there it is.”

  “I’m sorry too.”  Dr Marsden was bending over me in the living room of Kira’s house.  He was my dead wife’s replacement as the local GP, and he was a neat methodical and precise man with a neat methodical precise voice.  “I can’t make you go, more’s the pity.”  He turned to Kira who was standing in the doorway.  “Try and talk some sense into your friend, Doctor Reed.”

  Doctor Marsden picked up his tool bag and took off.  Once he was out of sight, I stood up and pulled on a clean shirt, which Kira had collected from my house.  It hurt, but not as much as I expected it would.

  “What the hell do you think you were doing?”

  I frowned.  “It’s my job.”

  “No, I don’t mean that.  I mean . . .” She stopped and flicked her hair away from her face.  “I understand it’s your job to sometimes assist the local constabulary.”

  She looked at me, her eyes focused, but said nothing.  I smiled at her, and she smiled back – but not in the way she normally did.

  “What’s the matter, Kira?”

  She looked away.

  “Kira?”

  Finally, she looked at me.

  “I think about what you do, about how far you’re prepared to go to solve a case.”

  “It’s my job.  This is what I do.”

  “What worries me is that you don’t have the mechanism to tell you when enough is enough.  You don’t know when to stop.”

  She had her head down.  I reached across and squeezed her hands.  Then she looked up at me.  A tear breaking free, a watery streak of mascara following in its wake.  I stared back trying to articulate something in my head.

  “I don’t want any more harm to come to you.”

  “Kira.”  My voice softened.  I no longer felt defensive.  “Two people are dead and we both have almost suffered the same fate.  Whoever is behind these needs to be stopped.”

  “By the police.”

  “Sometimes I need to do things because they’re right – even if they’re not legally right.”

  “Like breaking and entering?”

  “Like breaking and entering,” I agreed.

  “And what did you find?”

  I showed her the DVD I had removed from Cowan’s house.

  “I’ll get my laptop.”  She said, mellowing.

  While I waited, I checked the DVD again.  There was no writing on it.  No label.  No marking of any kind.  It could just as easily have been new and completely empty.  Except, as I turned it over and over in my hands, I got that same sense of unease I’d had when I’d been in the house, finding it for the first time.  Did the unease come from instinct, from a history of dealing with liars, knowing how they thought and tried to cover their tracks?  Or had I now become so weary – and such a paranoiac – that I suspected every one of everything?

  Kira returned with her pink ASUS laptop, powered it on and slipped the DVD into the drive.  A couple of seconds later, we watched as the DVD function came to life and footage of Buster Bill popped onto the screen.  It was an uneven, shaky video of him filming himself – and Cowan and Isabella – on a large boat cruising on a beautiful mountain-lined lake.  I recognized it. I had been there myself with Zoë about seven years ago.  Lake Garda.

  It was just footage from their travels.

  Kira fast-forwarded it, as I felt doubts kicking in.

  Ten minutes passed.  Twenty.

  After thirty, they switched locations – to Verona – and, as I watched him filming, Cowan and Isabella laughing at a joke he had just told.  This was innocent.  There was nothing here.  Tired, sore; my instincts had worn off.

   But then, also as soon as my focus flailed, the footage switched again.  And as it did, we both realized something: this wasn’t footage from his travels.

  This was something very different.

  Isabella’s naked body lay stretched out on white sheets like washed silk.  Buster Bill’s hands slid over her lips, her neck, and her breasts.  Her white eyes looked up to the ceiling, her eyelids flickering as he charged at her, entering her body between pale and trembling thighs.  The same hands that had read my face, were now clutching Buster Bill’s buttocks that were glistening with sweat her nails into them and guiding him towards her with desperate animal desire.

  Kira and I exchanged shocked glances and then leant forward and fast-forwarded footage until it cut from the anonymous bedroom and the two writhing naked bodies to an anonymous field. 

  We watched the camera pan across the field that was swathed in vibrant yellow.  When did the wheat, barley and corn of my youth become usurped by rapeseed?

  As the camera panned across the field, Cowan came into view, flanked by two German Shepherds on leads.  This explained Bruno’s ambidexterity.  They were different dogs that could perform the same tasks under instruction.

  What happened was so sudden, so – unexpected, that Kira and I just sat there shocked and horrified.

 The dogs stopped, as if they had sensed something.  The camera panned left and right and then stopped on the russet brown coat of a male Muntjac deer, grazing.

  The focus returned to Cowan, who with a sleight of hand released the two German Shepherds.

  On the blow of a silent whistle that rested on Cowan’s lips, the dogs set off in pursuit of their prey.  The camera followed them.  With long bounds, the dogs were leaping through the rapeseed, following hard upon the steps of the panic-stricken Muntjac.

  It twisted and turned trying to shake off its pursuers, but the dogs hunted him down like a couple of wolves.  Never had I seen such fleet of foot from all three animals.  But the two dogs were so well-trained in the art of hunting they eventually sprung upon their victim, and hurled the Muntjac to the ground, grabbing it by the throat.

  A thin mist of blood sprayed upwards as Cowan walked slowly towards the scene.

  Then there was a cracking sound, like someone standing on a dried twig or branch.

  The camera panned right round.  Searching the forest for him.  There was movement, but you couldn’t make out what it was.

  He panned back to the field and noticed the noise had distracted Cowan.  She was looking straight at the camera.

  Her cheeks puffed out again as she blew the dog whistle and the two German Shepherds returned to her side.  Their eyes stared with a smouldering glare, their muzzles covered with blood.

  The dogs moved forward, prowling.  In a blur of movement, Buster Bill ran.  The camera was still running, pointing to the ground.  All we could see was a blur of undergrowth and Buster Bill panting.

  He kept running, jerky movements flashing in front of us.  Then the camera clattered to the ground and the next thing we saw was Buster Bill running away along the winding track.

 The two dogs bounded past in unison.  Their thin, crisp, continuous patter disappearing into the heart of the forest.

  We waited, staring at the screen.  Uncertain of what we were about to see or hear.  And then we heard scream after scream and the sound of flesh tearing and the vociferous sound of the dogs growling.

  The camera was picked up from the ground and Cowan’s face was clear to see before the screen went blank.

  There was nothing else.

  Kira turned the laptop off, and I sat and closed my eyes trying to settle my nerves and force the tension out.  It felt like I had a migraine coming, a drumbeat thumped relentlessly at the side of my head.

  Did Cowan keep this as a trophy?  She’d filmed her daughter having s*x with her common-law partner and then filmed him being attacked by her dogs.

  Taking a series of long breaths, I forced myself to calm down.  I now understood the blurred images on the photographs I’d found at Sabrina Muller’s house.  They were of Buster Bill being chased through the forest by the two dogs.

  I looked at my watch. It was just after four o’clock in the morning.  I was exhausted, bruised, drained and emotional.

 Chapter Twenty-Five

I don’t know how long I’d slept but the sound of the shower woke me.  As I slowly stirred, I lay on my back and looked up at the ceiling, steam crawling out to through the partially open bathroom door.  The bed was empty and the bedroom surprisingly cool.  I pulled the duvet and rolled over and noticed on the side table a mug of black coffee, steam and its enticing smell rising from inside.

  The shower stopped.

  I sat up, sipped the coffee, and watched through the gap in the bathroom door. I saw the shower door opening.  Kira’s arm reaching for a towel revealing one side of her body, water droplets running down the skin, tracing her waist and hips.

  Outside, the rain continued to spit against the window. I placed the half-finished mug of coffee back on the side table, threw the duvet cover back and walked over to the window.  The first pinpricks of day pierced through a smear of clouds.  I pulled on a pair of boxer shorts and watched one of Kira’s neighbours fill his car with junk.  When he was done, his wife came down the drive to him, kissed him, and watched him pull out and disappear along the road.

  “Morning.”

  I turned.  Kira stood looking at me, a towel around her, her wet hair pulled to one side.

  “Morning,” I said smiling and gestured to the coffee on the side table.  “Thanks.”

  “You’re welcome.”  She moved around to my side of the bed, then perched herself on the edge.  I sat down next to her.  “How are you feeling?”  

 I looked at her.  She blinked as a little water broke free from her hairline and ran down her cheek.

  “Tired. You?”

  “I feel good, sorry, it’s so early.  I’ve got a lot of work to do.”

  “That’s okay.” 

  From previous experience on other cases and working with Kira, her working day started early.  Normally, around 7.00 a.m. to prepare the bodies that required post-mortems.

  An average of six or seven bodies a week were processed through the Oxmarket’s mortuary.  The good thing about the early start, from Kira’s perspective and mine, was on most days she would be home by 4.00 p.m.  After the brutal intrusion of a post-mortem, her next duty, with the help of her small team of assistants, was to make the body look presentable for viewing and formal identification if required.  That meant replacing all the internal organs, stitching the body up, washing it, doing the hair, and applying make-up.  Then receiving and treating the loved ones with sympathy and respect in the non-denominational chapel.

  The moment a person died, their body became the property of the Coroner, by law.  If someone, already ill, had died of natural causes and their doctor signed off the death certificate, the body would go to the funeral director.

   Since we had started dating, I found it hard to see Kira when she was at work, with the constantly grim duties she carried out every day, in contrast to her home life.  And I admired her all the more for it.  She often told me that her greatest achievement came from helping the bereaved loved ones through one of the most difficult tasks they ever had to face in their lives.

  I knew all too well that in an ever-changing world, where my cases became more complex and dangerous, there was a strong possibility that one day I could end up one of those post-mortem tables myself.

  It was something that I knew Kira knew only too well, also.  The elephant in the room that we rarely talked about.  Regardless of the size of its shadow, I respected her enormously for her work, and her attitude.

  “I don’t like leaving you like this,” she said.

  “As you say, you have got a lot of work on, and so have I.”  I took another sip of coffee.  “And in any case, this is a mean cup of coffee to depart on.”

  She leant into me and kissed me.  When she moved away again, her eyes fixed on mine.  She looked like she was expecting me to flinch.

  “I don’t regret us being together,” I said.

  More water ran down her face.  She placed a hand on my leg, studying me, looking for signs of uncertainty.

  “Are you certain?”

  “Zoë was a part of my life for ten years,” I said, placing my hand on hers.  “She was the first woman I loved, the only thing that ever really mattered to me while we were together.  If you’re asking me if there’ll be moments, to begin with when I’m a little unsure myself, or feel like things are maybe moving too fast, then yes there will be moments like that.  But if you’re asking me if I regret is being in a relationship, then no, I don’t.  You’ve waited for me, and supported me, and comforted me.  You’ve been there for me.  I don’t regret it happening.”

  Her eyes shimmered a little.