Dying Eyes (7 page)

“What about the DCs?”

“They’re on their bloody way down there already. Just get on with it!”

“Right, right, Detective Inspector, we’ll be right on it.”

Price, shaking his head, disappeared down the corridor.

“Told you you were gonna get your cock burned,” Cassy said.

Chapter Seven

The car pulled up outside the derelict old hospital just down the road from lovely old Ms. Stocks’ house. Brian passed this place often. Its decaying brick and ghostly presence stared down at him like something out of a haunted-house flick. At night, stoners and scrotes filled it. Now, they knew that Danny Stocks and Scott Watson were amongst those people.

Brian brought the car to a sudden halt, and Cassy jerked forward, her food almost flying across the dashboard. “Smooth parking, Brian. Very smooth.”

“I’d like to see you do better.”

“Yeah, yeah,” she said, closing the lid of the half-finished box of Won-Ton noodles.

“Nervous?” Brian asked, smiling for reassurance.

She looked up at him with a sort of “What the hell are you on about?” face that gave Brian his answer.

“It’s okay,” Brian said. “You’ll grow to love Preston’s finest abandoned old buildings soon enough. They aren’t as creepy as they look on TV, I swear.”

Cassy rolled her eyes as she ejected her seatbelt. “Oh, it’s not the abandoned buildings I’ve got a problem with. I saw to plenty of those in Bolton. It’s just…‌I dunno. This case. It’s bigger than anything I’ve been involved in before. Raises the stakes a bit.

Brian shrugged. “We’ll be fine. I know my way around this place.”

“I get that, but…‌Brian‌–‌your phone. You’ve got Location Services switched on, haven’t you?”

“Wouldn’t have a bloody clue.” He handed his phone to Cassy. She seemed to be a whizz with all this technical stuff, like most of the young ones were.

She tapped around on his phone. “It brings your location up. Just in case anything happens and we need someone to come for us, y’know? I always prefer to be cautious.”

“Don’t go soft on me now, DS Emerson. The cavemen didn’t have bloody Location Services, did they? We’ll be fine. Come on.”

The sound of Brian’s radio crackled as the pair stepped outside the car and into the fresh January air. “DS McDone, we’re at the west side of the hospital. What’s the P.O.A?” DC Peters said.

“Finished spewing your guts out yet, Peters?”

“Har-har, very funny. Now come on. I want to get home as much as the next man, so let’s get this done with.”

“DS Emerson and I will go in there and have a look around. We have info that suggests the ex-boyfriend could be inside. If he is, we’ll bring him in for questioning. Doing a runner the day after his girlfriend goes missing isn’t the smartest thing to do.”

“Okay, okay. Do you need us, or…?” Peters sounded eager not to get involved.

“Stay outside. We’ll give you a shout if we need any backup. The sooner you rest that poor little head of yours, the better.”

DC Peters muttered something inaudible then switched his radio off.

Brian looked at Cassy. “You ready?”

“Why the hell not, eh?”

The door echoed through the vast expanse of the derelict hospital as Brian pushed it open. A thick layer of dust coated the filthy reception area. Old chairs lay on their sides, the long-lost voices and drones of receptionists and life-support machines still audible if you listened closely enough. Wall-mounted telephones dangled from their cradles. Crumpled papers and cracked vodka bottles lined the floor. It was like the opening scene of
28 Days Later
, where Cillian Murphy wakes up with his cock out and the whole world’s gone to shit.

“Where do we start in a place like this?” Cassy asked.

Beside the abandoned opening desk, a long corridor led towards the old maternity wards. The door to the corridor was slightly ajar, and barely any light peeked through the boarded-up windows.

“Used to be one of the best maternity hospitals, this place,” Brian said as fragments of broken glass crumbled beneath his shoes. “My mum gave birth to me in here. Strange, isn’t it? This shithole was the first building I ever lived in.” He brushed his hand against the dusty old documents on the desk. Something clattered down the corridor. A flock of crows flapped about, squawking at the disturbance. It was their territory now.

“What happened to this place?”

Brian moved closer towards the corridor door. “The same thing that happens to everything good in this city‌–‌it went to shit. Hospital just got closed by the government one day, along with a few others in the north, because, y’know, we’re less important than those rich toffs down south. Nobody bought the place. Nobody knocked it down. It’s just kind of…‌here.” He crouched down; somebody had been here recently.

Very recently.

“Cassy, come over here.”

“What is it?”

Brian dabbed his finger in the blood on the floor and wiped it off on his dark trousers. More blood trailed through the slightly open door. “Certainly looks fresh to me. Either we’ve got a dying animal on our case, which would explain the crows, or we’ve got…‌well, something else.” He pulled himself up and winced as he pushed the door completely open, shining his torch down into the boarded-up darkness.

“Wait, shouldn’t we call for…?”

“Let’s just have a quick look around, okay? See what we can find.”

“If you say so, I guess.”

“Good girl. You’re learning.”

“Piss off.”

The farther they walked down the corridor, the messier it got. Things creaked, and sudden movements glimmered in the light of their torches. Damp, sticky glass cracked under their feet. It was an industrial jungle, filled with mysterious old cures and undiscovered secrets. A man-made Amazon gone to waste.

As they progressed farther into the mouth of the beast, Cassy began to cough. Brian glared at her. “Keep it down,” he whispered.

“Weed.”

Brian’s eyebrows twitched. “You’ve done
what
?”

Cassy held her hand to her face and covered her mouth to prevent further coughing. “No,
weed
. I can’t handle weed. There’s someone been smoking in here.”

Brian twitched his nostrils like a sniffer dog, and the ghastly dull smell hit him. How hadn’t he smelt it before? Was a decline in the sense of smell another thing the curse of middle age stripped away?

“We’ll go a bit further in, and see…”

“Brian,” Cassy whispered. She stared somewhere beyond him and switched off her torch.

“What’s up?”

“Look. Up there.”

Brian squinted ahead and kept his torch low. At first, he didn’t see anything. Then a miniscule light, flickering just in the distance, became visible.

He turned back to Cassy. “How shall we go about this?”

“I thought
you
were the fucking expert?”

Brian gulped and lowered his torch even more. The person had to have seen them. It
had
to be Danny.

“We’ll go in quiet,” Brian said. “Keep your light off. Anything happens, we turn them on straight away and blind the bastard. Okay?”

Cassy turned back to the door they’d come through. “You sure we shouldn’t call for backup now?”

Brian mulled the thought in his head.
Call for backup or get it done with?
“We’re here now. Let’s get it done with.”

Brian took lead and started walking. He waited for the sound of Cassy’s footsteps behind him. No chance he was venturing too far into this dark abyss alone.

The light grew even closer as broken glass cracked beneath Brian’s feet. Had he seen them? Was he even there?

Then, the light went out.

Brian stopped walking, and Cassy edged into his back. What now? Did he turn the torch on, or what? Danny could be anywhere, waiting to ambush them…

Fuck it.
He pulled up his torch and aimed it in the direction of the light.

That’s when he saw him lying there.

Thick vomit trickled out of his mouth. A bottle of pills rested between his limp fingers.

“Call a fucking ambulance,” Brian said as he rushed over to Danny’s lifeless body and eased his neck upright.

A solitary spliff lay on the floor as the lit end gradually burned out.

Chapter Eight

Brian couldn’t get the image of Danny Stocks out of his head that night. Bottle of pills in his hand. Lone spliff burning out beside his fingertips.

He couldn’t sleep. He knew what he had to do if he wanted to sleep, but he didn’t want to do it. Nobody in their right mind would want to do it. But it wasn’t about want. It wasn’t a choice.

He should’ve felt triumphant about their discovery of Danny, but a part of him couldn’t help but sympathise.

Danny was to spend the night‌–‌maybe longer‌–‌in hospital, on suicide watch. Any form of interviewing was postponed until the doctor considered him “fit for questioning”. Just what they needed.

If only they’d got to the hospital quicker. If only they hadn’t taken a detour back to the station on the way back from the Watson household, they could’ve had him. Now, they just had to hope.

Brian took a sip of whisky and cringed. He hated the stuff, but he had to keep up the image at work. Keep it on his breath.
The recovering alcoholic.

His phone vibrated. Who would be calling him at eleven p.m.? He grabbed it from his cluttered bedside table and lifted it to his ear the second he saw the name on the screen: Vanessa.
Shit
. He was drunk, too. Was he drunk?
Shit
.

“‘Ness, I, erm…‌Hi.”
Smooth, Brian. Real smooth.

“Sorry to call you so late,” she said. “I just…‌Well, I heard about it on the news. The boy you found. Is that it? Is it over?”

He hadn’t spoken to his wife since Christmas, and now she was ringing up and asking about the case. That meant the media were all over the events. The powers above keeping the press sweet after a recently strained relationship.

“Hard to say. We won’t know more until we have a chat with the boy. But it doesn’t look great for him, in my opinion, anyway. Running off and trying to kill himself. Either depressed that his girlfriend’s gone, or something more complicated.”

Vanessa sighed. He pictured her twiddling with her long, silvery blonde hair as she always did when she was on the phone. “How you doing?” she asked.

“Good.” Brian gripped the bottle of whisky in his other hand. “And you? How’s Davey?”

“We’re good. He’s good. He got a new toy car today. Can’t wait to show you.”

“I bet. I bet he loves it.”

A moment’s silence passed before Vanessa started speaking again. “Listen, I was wondering if you wanted to meet up for a coffee tomorrow?”

“I…‌A coffee? Course, course, that’d be…‌Will Davey be…?”

“Just me and you,” Vanessa cut in. “I wanted to talk about, um, the divorce. Get things moving further with that. If that’s okay?”

“Oh…‌yeah.” Brian’s enthusiasm deflated. He cleared his throat to mask the disappointment in his voice. “I mean, yeah. I’m busy lately. Probably better if Davey and I hang out when I’m a bit more focused…‌or something like that.” He gritted his teeth after saying the words. They sounded as if an alien was speaking through him.

“That sounds very mature of you, Brian. You have a lot of making up to do. If you’re busy, then maybe now isn’t the best time.”

He knew what she was implying by the way she said “busy”.
Judgmental cow.
But who was he to argue, lying here with empty bottles around the room, whisky in his hand? Still, only he judged himself. What he did in his spare time was nobody else’s business. No doctor’s. No therapist’s. Nobody’s.

“What time would be best for you tomorrow?” Vanessa asked.

“One-ish, perhaps? Lunch?”

Vanessa kept quiet for a few seconds. “All right,” she finally said. “One it is. Be there, Brian, seriously. Goodnight.”

“Good‌–‌”

The phone cut out. He pressed it against his cheek for a few moments, then popped it back on his bedside table, next to the turned down photo. He started to turn the photo up, have a look at them again, just to remember. Just to remember how it was.

He stopped himself. He screwed the bottle cap on the whisky before walking to the bathroom cubicle. He pulled the flimsy light cord and saw his bushy stubble staring back at him, ready for a shave.

He picked up the razor blade. The sense of dread welled in his stomach.
You know you have to do it. You know you’ll feel better if you do it. You know you’ll be out of control if you don’t do it…

He closed his eyes and squeezed the handle of the razor. He didn’t have to do it. He was seeing Vanessa tomorrow‌–‌he would feel better then. She would make him feel better.

“I wanted to talk about the divorce…”

He pressed the razorblade against his forearm and clenched his jaw.
Almost over, almost over…

The tang of whisky seared the back of his throat as the metal cut into his flesh, but soon he would be okay again and he’d be able to sleep, and everything would be back to normal.

The drunken detective.
He wished it were as simple as the cliché.

Brian’s breath frosted like steam from an engine as he walked down to the police station the following day. He smelt of sour whisky. His clothes stuck to his skin, but he hadn’t found the time to take a shower. He’d done the usual‌–‌dabbed a bit of whisky under his armpits and on his neck, just to give off the strong boozy smell. He’d cleaned the wound on his arm and wrapped a bandage around it, but soon after that, he’d fallen to sleep. Maybe back in the day, he would’ve made an effort to impress his colleagues. But as age progressed, it was becoming less and less important.

As he walked inside the station, Amanda, the desk officer, did a double take and nudged the work experience intern by her side. Both of them had a little giggle and avoided eye contact with Brian.
Perfect.
He must have done a good job of looking the drunken mess. Then again, Amanda always seemed to find something to laugh about, like a high schooler who never quite matured.