The Knowing: A thrilling horror fantasy Page 8

  Dale made a beeline for the fourth plinth without knowing what was on it. Steve had to run to catch up. “What’s the rush, Dale?” he yelled breathlessly. “It’s only pop-up art by some jerk with an inflated ego.”

  They read from the inscription on the side of the plinth that the installation illustrated humankind’s fragile dependency on technology. Some critics viewed it as an ironic gift from the Chinese for all the millions of phones exported from their factories. Most saw it as a shrine of remembrance for those who died as a consequence of ‘the screaming’. The art work, entitled ‘Gone Phishing’, comprised a transparent tank, measuring about twelve feet by six, full of hundreds of deadly but redundant mobile phones suspended in clear jelly. Dotted between the phones were the names of factory workers who’d died doing their jobs.

  Dale stared up at the unusual aquarium and felt a compulsion to scale the plinth and commune with the technology. His nuts had started aching again, despite the protection he’d added inside his boxer briefs. They’d found a sports store near their hotel selling a space blanket that Steve had fashioned into a metallic diaper. It wasn’t comfortable and it definitely wasn’t sexy, but it took the edge off the gnawing.

  The image of the triplets from the Marshall household’s kitchen flashed suddenly into Dale’s mind, except they weren’t sitting at a table waiting to be fed. Their mouths were open in a silenced scream, as if witnessing something and unable to respond. An icy chill slithered slowly up Dale’s spine and stopped at the base of his skull to hammer the message home.

  “Dude, you’re looking rather weird,” Steve said.

  Dale whipped his head around. A young family had just appeared from nowhere and the mother was pushing a trio of infants strapped into a triple berth stroller.

  “Shit!” Dale said under his breath.

  The triplets looked at him as one and started yelling their heads off. The tortured sound reverberated around the square and the pigeons scattered to the sanctuary of nearby rooftops. Dale sensed tendrils of disapprobation sneaking out at him in the early morning mist. A fat crow landed on top of the plinth and added its raucous squawk to the general commotion. It was like a scene in a John Carpenter movie. All it needed was the noodling electronic soundtrack.

  “Let’s get away from here,” Dale said, wincing painfully.

  “What the fuck?” Steve mouthed. He plainly wasn’t getting the B-movie vibe.

  They moved away from the exhibit. Dale felt sure the parents were staring at him. He glanced back. The man was looking around suspiciously, as if seeking a reason for the infants’ disquiet. Dale imagined him turning into a vengeful fisherman with murderous hooks for hands. The kiddies were like wailing banshees. He had to find somewhere to sit and get his bearings. For fuck’s sake, what’s happening to me?

  “Eh, what’s up, Doc?” Steve said playfully, making rabbit ears with his hands.

  Jeez, I knew he was going to use those words!

  Dale grasped Steve’s hands and looked him squarely in the eye. “Why the fuck did you say that?”

  Steve shrugged. “I don’t know. It just sorta came to me.”

  “Steve, I could tell you were going to say, ‘Eh, what’s up, Doc?’”

  “And make the rabbit ears, too?” Steve showed his incisors. They were far too orthodontically perfect to resemble rabbit’s teeth.

  “Yeah.” The chill at the base of Dale’s skull was digging ever deeper with sharp ice-picks. The sort that got used for lobotomies, in fact.

  Steve raised his shoulders again. “So what? It’s just a phrase.”

  “One more thing: I knew that family were going to appear.”

  “Okay ...” Steve had lost his wide-eyed, tourist-onvacation look.

  “And I know what you’re going to do next.”

  “Look, sweets, if this is you practising your magic trick for the Christmas party, it’s not amusing.” Steve wrestled his hands out of Dale’s grasp and crossed them over his chest.

  “You just did it,” Dale said.

  “You’re fucking scaring me, dude.”

  “I’m fucking scaring myself,” Dale said, shaking his head. “Let’s go find a coffee. I need to do some thinking.”

  They found a coffee shop just off Trafalgar Square in St Martin’s Lane. Dale left Steve sitting at a table on the sidewalk while he went in to order their beverages. Away from the family from hell, he already felt some semblance of equilibrium returning.

  “I’ll take two medium skinny lattes, decaf and hold the sugar,” he called to the barista over the hustle and bustle.

  “Sure, sir. Can I get you anything to eat? I can recommend these healthy doughnuts.” The barista pointed at a stand of garishly coloured pastries on the counter. “We bake them from a special recipe we got from a deli in the States. They’re quite special.”

  Dale caught the price. It was displayed in dollars and euros, as well as pounds. “Phew!” he whistled through his teeth.

  “Anything wrong, sir?” The barista looked disgruntled.

  “No, no,” Dale replied swiftly. “It’s just that we know the deli owner. In fact, he’s my boyfriend’s ex.” He decided not to mention they were half the cost back home – or that he’d need to take out a second mortgage to keep KCPD supplied with oxynuts at this coffee shop’s jacked-up prices.

  “Way cool!” the barista said. He leaned across the counter. “Actually, we modified the recipe. It seemed a bit weird, if you know what I mean?”

  “A hint of brie?”

  “Yeah ... like, well ...” he spluttered. “Anyway, we had to change the label, too. Would you believe, we had some tourist return a half-eaten doughnut saying she couldn’t taste the oxygen. I mean, Christ!” His tongue clicked in exasperation. “What did she expect? A cooling waft of mountain air from inside a fucking pastry, huh?”

  The barista’s hands hovered over oxynuts festooned with the Stars and Stripes and the Union Jack, but he settled on two with the Rainbow Flag. “These are on me,” he said with a wink.

  Dale walked back to Steve with the lattes and doughnuts, wishing their vacation could start all over again, bypassing landing at Heathrow, taking a rain check from the high-speed journey to the emergency room and leaving out Trafalgar Square and its goddamn pigeons. There were more tourist traps to come, though, and he didn’t fancy their chances at Madame Tussauds, which was the nearest to a museum of haircuts that London had to offer. Families with screaming kids in strollers were clearly best avoided.

  Traffic on the street outside was moving fast and the sidewalks were full to bursting with people scurrying to work, pushing past stationary foreigners trying to decipher miniscule maps in all the languages of the world. Dale heard the sound of an ambulance, the pitch of its siren dropping suddenly as it reached its destination close by. A squad car screeched past just in front of the coffee shop, its blue lights flashing. Dale recognised the look on the driver’s face: that tell-tale combination of fear and excitement, fuelling the adrenaline rush of the cop in the hot seat. He carefully set the carryouts on their table. He didn’t want to cause someone to slip in a spill, after all. And he started running ... and running. The ache in his balls propelled him on. He was dimly aware that someone was following him, calling his name. It must have been Steve. Perhaps he’d picked up one of the lattes and was trying to drink it on the run. He smiled at the thought of it; he’d trained him well. Then he remembered that the oxynuts were rainbow striped. That made him grin, too.

  Dale reached the end of St Martins Lane where it met William IV Street. The sirens had stopped but he continued running towards the flashing lights. A vacuum seemed to have descended on the street that sucked away the sound of everything other than his heartbeat and his pounding feet. Passers-by had stopped dead in their tracks to stare. The ghouls were sure out in force this crisp November day. The mangled remains of the stroller lay in a store’s window display amidst chocolates, candies and shattered glass. He wondered whether there’d be a half-price sale of
the tainted goods. With Thanksgiving in three weeks, and gifts to buy for Steve’s folks, that sure could come in handy.

  Burly paramedics crouched over the three tiny bodies forcibly separated from each other by the SUV. The driver must have taken the wrong turn down the one-way street. Perhaps someone had messed with the sign. That sort of vandalism was happening back home. Turn it through 180 degrees and make life do an aboutturn. There was way too much blood for such small people. Dale recognised the triplets’ parents huddled together on the sidewalk, shivering and crying, trying to focus on anything other than the carnage that was their kids. A police officer offered blankets but the father pushed him away. Dale knew that macho stance well. Hell, it’s probably what he’d do if he had children. That’s when the man noticed Dale and stared at him.

  Dale came to an abrupt halt in the middle of the street. He stood there, rooted to the spot. He was just another dumbass cop in the wrong place at the wrong time – and the squeezing of his man parts hadn’t let up. A manhole cover was directly beneath him and he wished he could just vanish from sight. Life as a sewer rat would be a whole lot better. He felt utterly sick to his stomach and crumpled over. Gentle fingers touched his shoulders. He turned slowly and looked into Steve’s pools of blue. Perhaps he should just get lost in them. He saw love, fear and something approaching understanding.

  “Steve, I knew that was going to happen,” he said, forcing the words through frozen lips. “I could have stopped it.”

  The parents were pointing out Dale to police officers. They were coming towards him. “It might as well have been me that killed them,” he heard himself saying, far too loudly.

  The triplets’ father opened his mouth and it wasn’t to scream silently.

  Charing Cross Police Station wasn’t usually included on the London tourist trail, although it was a fine example of late Georgian architecture and had been a teaching hospital until 1973. Those tourists who did enter under the impressive portico were usually there to report a mugging while sightseeing in the West End. With the government’s draconian ban on mobile phones still in place, there were rich pickings for thieves on the lookout for handsets that could be sold on the black market. Clandestine mobile phone networks had sprung up around the country and Operation Bloodhound had been established to stamp out the illicit operations. TV license detector vans had been seconded to identify transmitting premises. For those who could remember that far back, it was like the clamping down on pirate radio stations in the 1980s. The Metropolitan Police Service was in the thick of it and Charing Cross Police Station was the centre of the operation.

  Behind the impressive frontage, huge echoing wards had been transformed into large open plan offices that were universally disliked. For some working on Operation Bloodhound, there was a bitter sweet quality to their endeavours: it was satisfying bringing to justice those misguided enough to cash in on other’s misfortunes, but it was damn painful if you had a child languishing in hospital while the government decided what to do with their frazzled brain.

  “Sammy, have you got a minute?” DS Choi said, turning towards a colleague a couple of workstations away. His associate’s face was just inches from a monitor, which made it look as if she was sniffing out criminals. Which, in essence, she was; DS Sampson’s nose was bifurcated at the tip and years of merciless taunting had tuned her skills as a detective. She was fast-forwarding through mugshots of suspects and cursing beneath her breath as she scrolled. DS Choi appreciated that this was deeply personal, as her son was detained in an adolescent unit in South London because of psychopathic creeps misusing the internet and leading him astray.

  “Eh?” came the response, eventually.

  “I said have you got a moment.”

  The detective turned reluctantly from the display of malignant criminality. “No, you didn’t. You said ‘minute’, not ‘moment’.”

  “So what?”

  “Well, a minute is precisely 60 seconds, whereas a moment could be anything.” She glanced at the screen and jabbed at the space bar a few times. “Shit! I thought I’d found him just then.” She glared back at the questioner. “Thanks a bunch, Mike. You’ve made me lose a serial killer in the making.”

  DS Choi shrugged. “Tell me something new. Dropping cases is all we seem to do these days.”

  “Well, for some of us, finding criminals means something.”

  DS Choi raised his hands placatingly. “Sorry, sorry. It’s been a bit of a day.” He frowned. “Look, the thing is, I’ve got these guys in the interview suite. They say they’re American police officers on vacation, but they’ve got no ID on them. One of them took out a mobile phone to take a selfie – ”

  DS Sampson groaned. “And it got confiscated by a concerned passer-by, I suppose.”

  “Yeah, how did you know?” DS Choi grinned. “The weird thing is, the other guy claims he had knowledge that a road traffic incident was going to happen before it did. You may have heard about it. A SUV with some oligarch in the driving seat went the wrong way down a one-way street and carved up a kid’s buggy.”

  “Was that the one in St Martins Lane?”

  “Almost. William IV Street. The Russian is causing quite a rumpus and trying to cite diplomatic immunity. He says he just obeyed the sign. Unfortunately, some bugger had vandalised it, so it was pointing in the wrong fucking direction.”

  “Christ, not that trick again!”

  “Yeah. Kids are certainly coming up with some creative ways to pass the time.”

  “Where do I come in, then?” The left side of DS Sampson’s nose twitched in anticipation.

  “Well, while I was interviewing them, the guy with the premonition grabbed his balls and went berserk. He started going on about people being in danger.”

  “His balls?”

  “Yeah.”

  “That’s not so bad, then. They could have been yours. What happened next?”

  “His friend started complaining about homophobia.”

  DS Sampson wrinkled her nose. “What’s that got to do with the price of fish?”

  “Well, the two of them were wearing that Banksy ‘kissing coppers’ T-shirt and – ”

  “Someone took exception.”

  “You got it. The desk sergeant wasn’t having a good day. The taller one got put in cuffs.”

  “Fuck! You mean, someone put handcuffs on an American police officer who was just trying to be helpful?”

  “Yeah. I know.” DS Choi paused and did his best to look imploringly. “So ...”

  “You mean can I help defuse the situation?”

  DS Choi fiddled with his shoe laces. “Yeah, something like that. A hand across the pond sort of thing.” He wriggled uncomfortably. “Er, there’s something else.”

  DS Sampson’s eyebrows rose.

  “When I asked whether they had someone who could vouch for them, they mentioned Dai Williams.”

  “What?!”

  “Yeah, I thought that was strange. Trouble is, MI5 have confirmed he’s gone missing. His girlfriend reported it to Battersea nick. And to complicate matters, that was just after he had cocktails with the Queen.”

  Charing Cross Police Station’s ‘interview suite’ sounded rather grand, but the reality was dismal and would barely rate a single star on TripAdvisor. Jacuzzis and mini-bars were out of the question. Bleak, windowless rooms, with grubby furniture fixed to the floor, were as far as it went. Smoking was banned, but it happened anyway. Stale sweat and a whiff of urine completed the depressing picture. The interview suite was also situated exactly where the mortuary once ruled the roost over departures to the great beyond. Its only saving grace was that most of the characters passing through the cheaply refurbished doors left breathing spontaneously.

  DS Sampson took a deep breath as she opened the door to the interview suite. She found that a long, hard sniff was the best way of sussing out the department. Today, there was plenty of adrenaline and a touch of testosterone, which was just as she liked it. She wasn’t tall, but
she commanded respect and appreciation. Smiles and the occasional “Hi, Sammy” greeted her as she approached the front desk – and the redoubtable desk sergeant. He was on the phone and displaying his annoying habit of repeating everything the caller said. She waited until he’d finished. The problem was, the Great British public were too ready to complain. If it wasn’t someone whingeing about a bobby swearing in public, it was an evening stroller moaning about the police using unconventional means to transport those who were worse for wear from drink.

  “I hear you’ve got some colleagues from across the pond for me,” DS Sampson said, leaning her elbows on the counter to goad the sergeant.

  The desk sergeant looked up momentarily from the desk to put a face to the voice and arms. DS Sampson wondered when the keyboard had last been disinfected. The same could be said of the sergeant himself. His ginger beard looked in need of some TLC, or, at least, disengagement of stubborn food particles. She resisted the temptation to sniff out the contents of his last meal.

  “Yeah,” he said, his fingers not deviating for a second from their laboured jabbing at the filthy keys. “They make a handsome couple.” The corner of his upper lip curled up ever so slightly. Perhaps he’d been on equal ops training, after all.

  “Mike Choi thought I might be able to help with the interview. You know, break the ice somewhat,” DS Sampson said almost tactfully.

  “Room Three,” the desk sergeant said. “They asked for some water. You can give it them.”

  DS Sampson turned away from the desk in search of the water cooler.

  “Oh, Samantha,” the desk sergeant said, ominously engaging in eye contact.

  “Yeah?” She hated being addressed by her real name.

  “Being gay’s one thing, but that T-shirt is taking the piss.”

  DS Sampson shrugged and followed the trail of spilt water. The cooler beckoned with its choices of tepid and lukewarm water. It hadn’t been the same since a mouse breathed its last on the condenser. Her nose had come in handy tracking the smell. She approached the interview room holding three full cups and pushed the door open with a foot. Two faces looked up at her. The happy couple were certainly cute. Jeans, smart jackets and Banksy T-shirts went a long way in her professional estimation. The older, taller cop had a slightly battered look to him, as if he’d been round the block a few times and still had an axe to grind. He reminded her of that Indiana Jones actor. The other one was pure sex-on-a-stick. She couldn’t resist those puppy dog eyes. And then there was that hair ... Jesus, it’d be tough to go bald with him around.