Shoulders stooped as if he was carrying heavy bags, Harlan made his way up to his flat. As quickly as his battered body would allow, he changed into clean clothes. Then he headed for his car. Its interior had been cleaned, but there were still faint brown tide-marks where Jones’s blood had soaked into the front passenger-seat. He drove to the garage he’d bought it from and part-exchanged it for an Audi with tinted windows. Then he bought some black electrical-tape and scissors. After cutting the tape to the right width and length to alter the Audi’s registration number, he headed for Jones’s house. He parked a few doors along from it. Nothing had changed, except the bowed, water-logged window boards had been replaced with metal grilles — no doubt, by the police. They had a duty to protect all citizens, even scumbags like Jones. There was no way he was breaking into the house again. Not that he intended to. As far as he could see, there was only one way to connect Jones to Jamie Sutton — the painting. He had to find the painting. He doubted whether Jones would reveal its hiding place, even under torture. If he did, his life would be as good as over anyway. Besides, Harlan was convinced that sooner or later Jones would unwittingly lead him to the painting. Jones’s paintings were his trophies. He needed them to keep his fantasies alive. Right now, that need, that desire, might only be an itch in his groin, but it was an itch his ruined hands were unable to scratch, an itch that in a week, or maybe a month would develop into a craving that demanded to be satisfied.
Harlan settled down to wait for Jones to appear. He didn’t have to wait long. The front door opened, and as cautiously as a rabbit emerging from its burrow, Jones poked his bleary-eyed, unshaven face out. After making sure no one was lurking around, he left the house, wheeling a little tartan shopping trolley behind him. Moving with quick, shuffling steps, gripping the trolley’s handle clumsily in his plaster-of-Paris-encased hands, he made a pathetic sight. When he reached the end of the street, Harlan got out and followed him. He guessed Jones wouldn’t be going far, and he was right. Jones crossed a road and went into a Co-Op. Through the storefront window, Harlan watched him load the trolley up with White Lightening. After paying, Jones hauled his liquid diet homeward. Harlan stayed well out of sight until Jones was back in his house. Then he too went into the store. He bought a six-pack of Coke, plenty of sugary snacks and some Pro-Plus to keep himself awake and alert through the long hours of the night.
Jones didn’t emerge from his burrow again for a couple of days. When he did, it was only to visit the shop for more booze and some bread and milk. That afternoon, figuring Jones was more than likely slumped in an alcoholic stupor, Harlan allowed himself a short nap. He dreamt about Eve. She was on some swings, massively pregnant. “Be careful,” he kept shouting at her, but she ignored him, swinging higher and higher, nearly falling. He awoke with an intense urge to call her. He resisted it, telling himself she’d call him if there was anything wrong, knowing that the sound of her voice would only cause him to question his resolve to do what was necessary, what was right.
What is right? Harlan asked himself that question a lot during the tedious hours of his vigil. He’d once thought he knew the answer: the law was always right simply because it was the law. A few years on the force had knocked that naivety out of him, but he’d still retained a basic faith in the importance of obeying the law. That, too, was all but gone now, leaving behind a chasm full of doubt and more questions. Questions like: what if Jones leads you to the painting, and you hand him over to the police, and they somehow let him squirm through their fingers again, is that right? He knew he couldn’t allow himself to listen to such questions. If he did, he might as well just snatch Jones off the street, drive him out to some isolated spot and cut his throat. And that would make him as much of a monster as Jones. Wouldn’t it? Of course it would, he kept telling himself. But every time he did so, his mind’s voice was a little more hollow, a little less sure. Often he would raise his eyes to the sky, like a doubting priest imploring God to give him the crumbs of faith he needed. Sometimes those crumbs came in the form of news articles about criminals who’d been convicted and got their just deserts. But such crumbs never sustained him for long. Always the doubting, questioning voice returned. What if, what if, what if…
Harlan quickly got to know Jones’s routine. At eleven PM Jones’s bedroom light came on and stayed on all night. At nine AM Jones opened his upstairs curtains, but never the downstairs ones. Every two days at noon, when the street was quietest, Jones visited the shop. If he encountered anyone in the street, they would often cross to the opposite pavement, shooting him wary glances. Some stared at him with open hostility. Whichever, he would quicken his pace, gaze fixed on the ground. Harlan spent some time watching the backyard gate, but Jones never left the house that way, probably because he was afraid of being jumped in the alley. He never left the house after dark either. Which was just as well because gangs of hoodie-wearing teenagers often bombarded it with bricks and bottles, until the police arrived and sent them scattering in all directions. One night Harlan was awoken from another thin, troubled sleep by the sound of two drunken men trying to kick their way into Jones’s house. After five minutes of vainly pounding away, they satisfied themselves with pissing on the front door, then staggered off, laughing.
After several weeks, a man wearing what looked like a medical uniform visited Jones. The next time Jones showed his face, his plaster-casts had been removed. His fingers were still too swollen to fully curl around the trolley’s handle. But from then on, the man, whom Harlan assumed was a physio, visited every three or four days. And with each visit Jones’s fingers grew a little more flexible, until finally they could curl into fists. Harlan saw them do so one afternoon when a couple of boys, maybe thirteen-years old, abused Jones in the street. “Fuckin’ pervert!” yelled one of them. “Peado!” added the other, flinging a bottle that popped on the pavement next to Jones. He threw back an angry glance, hands balled at his sides. The boys sneered at the warning in his eyes, but didn’t approach him.
After that a change came over Jones. His posture became more upright, less shuffling. He stopped lowering his gaze from the people he saw in the street. He began to venture further afield, visiting other shops. One time, he lingered outside a toy shop, pretending to read a newspaper. Harlan’s blood burned as he watched Jones watching the children play in the aisles, the more so because the store had been a favourite of Tom’s. The thought that Jones might’ve sneaked yearning peeks at his son made him palpitate with the urge to violence. That afternoon, Jones visited an art supplies shop. Harlan’s heart dropped as he watched Jones browse its aisles. If Jones started painting again, his urges would be kept in check for a time, maybe for a very long time. Jones picked up a brush and practiced moving it up and down a canvas. With every stroke, Harlan could feel his chance at being the father he so desperately wanted to be slipping further away. Jones’s fingers fumbled the brush. He retrieved it and tried again. The same thing happened. Shaking his head in pained frustration, he stormed from the shop. Harlan released a breath of relief.
Now another change came over Jones. When he next left the house, a new haggardness had come into his face. His piggish eyes shone with a repulsive light — a light of hunger that, day by day, grew until it was feverishly bright. He often took to muttering to himself, occasionally nodding or shaking his head in response to some internal dialogue. One day the head shaking grew more agitated, until it seemed there was a full scale row going on between Jones and his mind’s voice. He looked more crazed than dangerous. Someone to be pitied rather than feared. But Harlan felt no pity. He simply hoped something was coming to a head within Jones, so that he could get far away from here and start living.
That night Jones’s bedroom light came on at the usual time, but after half an hour or so it went off. Harlan frowned up at the window, wondering what was going on. Had Jones worked up the courage to sleep in the dark? He doubted it. More likely the light-bulb needed changing. Several minutes passed. The window remained dark. Another thought came: what if Jones had switched the light off because he was leaving the house. He waited a couple more minutes. Still no light. No sign of Jones either. Maybe he’s sneaking out the backdoor. The thought prompted Harlan to jump out of his car and sprint to the end of the street. He peered cautiously into the alley, which was patchily illuminated by house lights. Jones’s house was unlit at the rear too. Harlan squinted, straining to penetrate the darkness. He thought he could see something by Jones’s gate. Something moving. An arm. On the edge of his hearing, he caught the sound of a lock clicking. A figure moved away from the gate, back turned to Harlan, hurrying. It was Jones! Harlan couldn’t see his face, but he recognised his thin, scruffy hair and hunch-shouldered gait.
Hugging the shadows, Harlan followed Jones. After ten or fifteen minutes, they came to Lewis Gunn’s church, and the thought flashed through Harlan’s mind, is the preacher in on this? But Jones headed past the church. He crossed the road and descended some steps at the side of a canal bridge. His pace slowed as he made his way along a towpath illuminated by the moon and the ambient glow of the city, which seeped through the hollowed-out hulks of derelict steel-mills — mills where, Harlan recalled, Jones had once worked. A tall wall overgrown with vines and other creeping plants ran alongside the path. As the hum of the unsleeping city receded, Harlan became hyper-aware of every sound he made — the faint crunch of his shoes on the hard-packed pebbles, the rustle of his clothes, the murmur of his breath, the thud of his heart. He allowed the distance between himself and Jones to grow, until Jones was little more than a faint outline against the darkness. Then suddenly, as if the ground had opened up and swallowed him, Jones disappeared.
Heart lurching, Harlan rushed forward as quietly as he could. He almost missed the door. It was set into the wall at the bottom of several worn stone steps. A straggly beard of foliage overhung it. He could just about make out the words ‘DANGER! KEEP OUT!’ daubed in white paint. Brushing aside the foliage, he looked for a handle. There was only a keyhole. Feeling around the edge of the door, he found a gap he could slide his fingers into. The paint crackled and the hinges squeaked as he pulled the door open a couple of feet. The noise reverberated almost painfully in his ears. He slid through the gap and found himself in a cavernous, dank building, its floor strewn with the debris of its partially collapsed in roof. The mill had long since been stripped of its blast furnaces and other machinery, but the smell of coal and smelted iron still hung faintly in the air. His attention was attracted by the rattle of metal against metal overhead. Craning his neck, he made out the dim shape of a walkway suspended thirty or so feet above the factory floor. There was no sign of Jones, but it had to be him up there. Who the hell else would it be?
Harlan scanned the moonlight-mottled walls for a way to reach the walkway. There was no stairway. To his right a metal ladder was bolted to the wall. He picked his way through the rubble to it and grasped a rusty rung. ‘BEWARE! DANGER OF DEATH!’ was painted in foot tall letters on the wall. Harlan reflected that whatever was up there Jones had to be desperate to see it if he was prepared to risk hauling himself up this death-trap. The ladder rattled against its bolts as he climbed. He emerged through the walkway, which was about five feet wide and attached to the roof beams by metal rods. The walkway traversed the right-hand wall of the foundry. As Harlan edged out onto the metal grating, it swayed a little, but held. At its far end was a door. Cautiously opening it, he saw it led to another walkway that bridged a narrow gap between the mill and a door to the uppermost floor of a neighbouring building. A sickly, yellowish light glimmered through the cobwebby, cracked panes of windows to either side of the door.
Hunching low, Harlan crossed the walkway and peeped through a window into an attic room maybe twenty feet wide by thirty feet long. Jones was stood with his back to him at its far end. In one hand he held what appeared to be some kind of oil lamp. With his other hand he removed bricks from the wall. He reached inside the hole and withdrew a black plastic sack. He put down the sack and took a cardboard tube from it. Very carefully, he slid a bunch of rolled up canvases out of the tube.
I’ve got you, thought Harlan. I’ve fucking got you! With a look of twisted glee, he burst into the room. Jones barely had time to turn, before Harlan was on him. He knocked Jones to the floorboards with enough force to wind a bull. Thrusting a knee into Jones’s back, he twisted the canvases out of his grasp and unfurled them. His triumph dissolved into sick rage. There were three paintings. Two of them were of young boys he didn’t recognise. The third was of Jamie Sutton. The artist had captured perfectly the benumbed horror in their eyes, the agonising vulnerability of their naked bodies, the destruction of their innocence.
What is right? The thought tolled in Harlan’s mind like a death knell. He savagely dismissed it. In that instant, he didn’t care what was right. He only knew that he wanted to kill Jones so badly it gave him the shakes. He snatched up a brick and raised it over Jones’s head. Jones struggled weakly, whimpering, “Please, please don’t…”
Harlan’s shaking intensified. Tremors contorted his face, as if he was torn between two directions, two warring identities. A wild voice — a voice he barely recognised — burst from him. “Do it!”
In reply, Garrett’s accusing voice rose into his thoughts, you’re a menace to society.
“Kill him!”
Garrett’s voice came back, a madman.
There was a sudden splitting, dislocating sensation in Harlan’s head. “No,” he cried, silencing both voices. He slammed the brick against the floorboards an inch from Jones’s skull.
Jones’s screamed, then realising he was unhurt, gasped out, “Thank you, thank you.”
Harlan ground his knee into Jones’s spine. “Shut the fuck up or I’ll change my mind.” He returned the canvases to the plastic sack. There were other things in there too — pencil sketches, bundles of Polaroids. He jerked Jones to his feet. As he did so, Jones grabbed the lantern and swung it at him. The lantern shattered, splashing burning oil over Harlan and the sack. He dropped the sack, and frantically patted out the flames on his arms and chest. Scooping up the burning sack, Jones ran for the door. Harlan pursued him, catching him up as he reached the walkway. Jones flung the sack over the railings, before pitching forward onto his face. Harlan watched it sail through the darkness and hit the concrete thirty feet below, bursting and scattering its contents like burning coals. He watched any chance of connecting Jones to Jamie Sutton go up in flames.
“Help me,” groaned Jones, holding up his hands, which were coated with smoking, melted plastic.
The wild voice stirred inside Harlan again. And this time no other voice rose up in opposition. He looked down at Jones, his eyes blank as the night that surrounded him. He stooped to haul him upright. “I don’t think I can make it down the ladder,” said Jones, his voice grating with pain.
“Is there another way down?”
Jones shook his head. “You’ll have to call a fire engine or something.”
“There’s no need.”
“But how else am I going to-” Jones broke off as Harlan reached down, grabbed his legs and flipped him over the railing. For an instant, his shrill scream raked across the derelict steel-mill’s courtyard. There was a dull, crunching thud as he hit the floor head first. Harlan stood for a moment, listening to the silence outside and inside. Then he crossed to the opposite doorway. Holding onto the doorframe, he stamped on the walkway and felt it give a little. He drove his heel into the metal grating again and again, until all of a sudden the bolts came loose and it collapsed, swinging against the opposite wall, dangling there for a few seconds, then clanging to the ground. Even before the echoes had died away, Harlan was making his way quickly but carefully to the ladder.
Keeping his head down, sticking to side streets and unlit back alleys, Harlan returned to his car. He drove through the empty city night, keeping well under the speed limit. He kept expecting to feel something — relief, guilt, satisfaction, fear — but he didn’t. It was as though the part of his brain’s circuitry that controlled his emotions had burned out. He pulled over outside Eve’s flat, got out of the car and pressed the intercom button. After a long moment, she answered, her voice sleepy but concerned, “Harlan, is that you?”
Still nothing. Not even a flicker of feeling. What’s wrong with me? Harlan asked himself detachedly. Am I in shock? Or did my emotions die along with Jones? A kind of numb panic closed his throat. He heard his voice come out tight, choked. “Yes.” Eve buzzed him in, and he climbed the stairs, moving like a man unsure of what would happen next. She was waiting for him at the door to her flat. When he saw her face, when he saw the slight swelling of her belly, all he felt for her, all he’d once felt for Tom, came rushing back. He stopped a few paces short of her, tears welling into his eyes, stammering, “I…I’ve done…something…I had no…” He trailed off. I had no choice, he’d been about to say. But he realised that wasn’t true. There was always a choice.
“Shh,” soothed Eve, moving towards Harlan, resting her head against his chest. “I don’t care what you’ve done. I love you.” She drew his hand to her belly. He felt a pulse of life under his palm, faint and hardly there, but strong enough to make him tremble. Tears fell from his eyes onto her neck.
“Will you still go away with me?”
Eve looked at Harlan as if to say, do you even need to ask? “Where would we go?”
“Somewhere…somewhere where it never gets dark.”
“I don’t think any such place exists.”
“Neither do I,” said Harlan. “But let’s see if we can find it anyway.”