Exit Wounds, page 22
THE NEW LAD
PAUL FINCH
Adam had always supposed the most important thing about being a policeman was behaving like one. OK, that might sound profound – hell, it might sound like the only thing you really needed to know – but now that he was in, so to speak, now that he was wearing the actual uniform, he wasn’t at all sure what it meant.
If he was honest, he was confident that he looked the part. He was a youngish guy, tall, with chiselled, handsome looks – or so he’d been told – and short spiky hair that was totally in regulation. He was lean, but not thin, a physique ideally suited to the paramilitary look the job affected these days: combat trousers, the duty belt adorned with its various bits of kit, the radio harness, the stab vest, the black, padded anorak with POLICE stencilled across the back. He didn’t have a mirror to check himself in, and theoretically he shouldn’t need one – everything fitted as it should. But when you were as new to the role as Adam was, you couldn’t help wondering: Am I right for it? Is this really me?
Not that he’d ever expected his very first shift to maroon him for a whole night in a mobile command post out in the woods. He strode up and down the narrow interior, the soles of his boots clipping the worn linoleum floor, hands clamped behind his back. I’m alert! was the image he sought to project. It might be after two in the morning, but I’ve got a job to do here and I’m ready for anything!
It was a pointless exercise, of course. Adam was alone, so there was no one to impress. His one job was to hold the fort, a task so simple at this time of night in midweek that even a brand new constable could manage it. He occasionally had to step outside to check on the crime scene, but there was nothing going on at this ungodly hour. If anyone needed him, they’d call him on the radio, but that was unlikely to happen, the small device clipped to Adam’s collar giving off nothing but a steady hiss of dead air. He might as well just sprawl in the chair next to the desk or make himself another cup of coffee; he’d had several of those already, but the sticky jar of Nescafé contained enough granules to see him through till morning, and there was milk left in the fridge.
Sit down, then. Put your boots up. Have another brew.
No harm there at all. Except that to Adam it would feel slovenly and unpolice-like. Not only that; if he relaxed, he might doze. And what would happen if some senior rank arrived?
He walked up and down again, finally deciding to have another snoop around outside. The interior of the command post was heated, which made it warm even with the square skylight in the ceiling jammed open a couple of inches. But outside it was a different story. Adam zipped his anorak up, fitted his helmet in place and pulled his gloves on before stepping out into the crisp autumn night.
It was halfway through November, but the encircling wood was not damp. It was a deep, dry kind of chill, almost frosty – the sort that indicated winter was well on its way.
Adam’s vaporous breath plumed as he explored around the outside of the command post, feet crunching bracken when he got to the rear. He couldn’t go much further as thorns and thickets came up to the back in such density that there was barely room to slide past them. Everything looked to be in order, though.
The command post was boldly marked with the distinctive Greater Manchester Police logo, but was little more to look at, in truth, than an overlarge and somewhat battered caravan with wire mesh over its single letter-box window. It was about thirty yards long and ten yards wide, but there was less room inside than you’d expect. This had taken Adam by surprise on first entering a few hours ago, though the mystery was explained when he’d seen how much of its interior was taken up by cupboards and storage lockers, the bulk of them crammed with traffic cones, visi-flashers, POLICE STOP signs and the like. In comparison, the living quarters – if that was what you called them – were spartan. Apart from the desk and the chair, the coffee-making equipment and the fridge, and the complex-looking radio set on the wall – which Adam didn’t dare touch, having already found the personal radio a difficult enough thing to work out – there was nothing of interest.
Either way, it was a basic object both inside and out. There wasn’t much to attract thieves or vandals, so he hadn’t expected anyone to be hanging around, looking to cause mischief.
Satisfied with that, he walked out to the leaf-strewn road.
It was deafeningly quiet. Which was what he’d expected all the way out here.
Springburn Wood was located almost exactly halfway between the former coal-mining townships of Tyldesley and Leigh, on the dividing line between two separate subdivisions – and that made it a fifteen-minute walk from the nearest bunch of houses. At one time, all this had been colliery spoil land; but nature had long ago reclaimed it – there were trees, bushes, even fishing ponds. Footpaths and wildlife trails sneaked through it. Some local folk regarded it as a beauty spot, though it wouldn’t have won a prize tonight.
Adam crossed the small road, stopping at the verge and squinting as he tried to peer into the tangled, skeletal undergrowth. There ought to be mist here, he thought; thick drifts of it hanging shroud-like between the twigs. But an absence of such didn’t reduce the “creep” factor. The branches overhead were leafless, but interlaced into a roof, intensifying the darkness at ground level, only hints of moonlight glimmering on gnarly bark or strips of forest floor. Adam knew that his vision would adjust, but not by much. The autumnal woods would be dim rather than dark, but it still wouldn’t pay to go tramping off the road; you’d never see the root that tripped you, or the low-slung branch that hooked you in the eye.
Not that strolling forward from here was an option anyway. The strand of blue-and-white incident tape drawn horizontally across his path prevented it. If you really wanted to go further from this point, and that privilege was restricted solely to police personnel, you had to walk thirty yards north to the “common entryway”, and even this had been laid with forensic duckboards which you must rigidly stick to.
Adam hovered with indecision. He wasn’t entirely sure which parts of the scene he, as a simple sentry, was permitted access to, but hell – he was the one in charge and he had to check the place out every so often.
So, he wandered left, one hand gripping the hilt of his baton, head pivoting. Springburn Wood wasn’t an ideal place for a crime scene; this late at night, it would be easy for some interloper to get close. But again, Adam didn’t anticipate that. Mainly because by now there was nothing here of interest. Gillian Howes had been murdered over five weeks ago. As far as he knew, the forensics teams had just about finished on the site. There might be one or two additional things they needed to check, but mostly it was done – which was why there was only one person, an ordinary uniform like him, standing guard.
They took these things pretty seriously, though.
As Adam started along the entryway, boots clomping on PVC, he switched on his Maglite to ensure that he didn’t accidentally step off it. Thus far, he was only inside what they referred to as the “outer-cordon”, but already, his powerful torch shed light over numbered flags planted in the woodland floor on either side.
A short distance in, the duckboards ended at a small forensics tent, the entrance to which was zip-locked closed. As far as he knew, this was the changing room, where detectives and SCIs gloved up and put on their coveralls and overshoes before entering the “inner cordon”, and after that the actual murder scene. That area lay further away still, and was distinguishable by the squarish, boxy outline of the much larger forensics tent covering the place where the body had been found.
Several dozen yards beyond that, vaguely discernible through the twisted, naked branches, stood the infinitely taller and more ruined outline of Springburn Special Hospital. From this distance, there wasn’t much of it visible; it was an immense, monolithic structure, a stark, angular blot of darkness lowering among the trees, which more than hinted that the vast bulk of the old building, though gutted now and empty, remained intact.
Adam regarded it coolly.
Special hospital.
That was quite a name, given the place’s history.
He supposed it would have been funny if it hadn’t been sad, the way the unlikely legends surrounding this drear edifice had suddenly dovetailed with reality.
Formerly a facility for the criminally insane, Springburn Special Hospital had once provided confinement for men and women so mentally disabled that they’d never even faced trial for their crimes. But it had closed down nine years ago after a scandal that shook the entire country. No one in the outside world had known what the conditions were like inside that place until an undercover reporter penetrated it, and discovered a regime that was harsh beyond imagining, run by bullying, sadistic staff (several of whom would go on to be prosecuted not just for physically assaulting their charges, but for sexually assaulting them too). With mass overcrowding, neglect and brutality at every level, and living accommodation bereft of hygiene, the so-called hospital was later described by the local MP as a “den of filth and hopelessness”.
When the story broke, the resulting uproar saw the institution closed and the patients removed to other facilities, such as the new, state-of-the-art Woodhatch Centre, located not twenty miles from here and regarded as one of the best and most modern in the UK. But alas, the sad tale wasn’t over. Not long after that, rumours had started spreading that one of Springburn’s most dangerous patients had escaped from Woodhatch and returned to live in the rotted shell of the rathole he’d once called home, and that this person was not just demented, but horribly disfigured – that he had a hook for a hand, and would slaughter anyone who came close.
It was the substance of nightmares, but it was slasher-movie stuff too.
Adam shook his head at the lack of seriousness with which so many people responded to the tragic and seemingly insoluble problem of mental illness.
A disfigured madman … with a hook for a hand, for God’s sake!
He knew that he was inclined to be an idealist when it came to his fellow men, perhaps more than was sensible for a policeman, but really, that stuff was all so demeaning.
Of course, the chance was that the whole grisly story would gradually have faded into that morass of urban mythology popular mainly with school kids if Gillian Howes had not gone and got herself killed a few weeks ago. That unexpected event had started the whole thing up again. Suddenly, it was all over the papers, the news, the internet.
Mythical Woodland Monster May Be Real! one hysterical headline read.
Search On For Hook-handed Killer! screamed another.
Nubile Teens Beware! had been a real doozy, accompanied as it was by the strapline underneath: Lovers’ Lane Maniac Butchers Babe in Hollywood Horror Scenario!
That last headline had been a particularly irresponsible one, because as far as Adam knew, Springburn Wood was not and never had been a lovers’ lane. The eerie presence of the abandoned asylum had seen to that. The ominous shape of that sinister place supposedly prevented anyone coming here at night, let alone gangs of horny teens. From what Adam had heard, the Howes girl, who was in her late twenties, had come here with her boyfriend to carry out an amateur investigation. They’d called themselves “urban explorers”, which apparently was the big new thing online; those involved investigating abandoned structures and complexes, and documenting whatever they found on photograph and video. From a law enforcement perspective, it was unacceptable given that it involved trespassing and maybe causing damage, while the danger of accident and injury had to be high. Plus, there was the ghoulishness factor. These guys claimed to be creating an invaluable record of forgotten sites, but so often their focus was on the lurid: places guaranteed to disturb or distress because once they’d been famous for pain and suffering. Like prisons, hospitals … and mental institutions.
In this case, of course, the joke was likely to be on the urban explorers themselves, not to mention all those gorehounds eagerly awaiting the next chapter in the hook-handed killer saga. Because as far as Adam understood it, the investigating detectives were increasingly interested in Gillian Howes’ boyfriend and fellow trespasser, Nick Jessup. Oh yes, he’d been injured himself, found wandering and dazed several miles from here with head injuries, but it wasn’t impossible that those had been self-inflicted after he’d realised that the fight with his girl had turned fatal.
Then a snap – like a branch breaking – echoed through the trees somewhere behind.
Adam spun around, ears pricked.
Nothing else followed.
Only silence, but it was an odd kind of silence, a hush – as if all the nocturnal creatures scurrying about their business out here had suddenly stopped what they were doing to listen.
He headed back along the entryway, treading as softly as possible. When he reached the road, he glanced left. Thirty yards off, the command post sat against the far verge, its pale bodywork dappled with moonlight. Its door stood ajar.
Adam felt a pang of unease.
He was sure that he hadn’t left the door open, though on reflection there was no guarantee that he’d closed it firmly. It could have opened naturally, of its own accord. But in truth, that didn’t seem very likely.
He hurried along the road, stopping once to listen. He’d have liked to have turned down that hiss of static on his radio, but he was so new to the job that he wasn’t sure how to do that. He listened out anyway, but heard nothing else.
Most likely, that sound had been some heavy nightbird taking off from one of the boughs overhead, causing a ruckus among the twigs and what remained of the leaves.
He continued on, glancing past the crime scene tape as he did, trying to penetrate the depths of foliage but seeing nothing out of the ordinary, though now that he thought about it, it was eerie how that slivered moonlight out there between the trees caused vague, hallucinatory images. Several were near human in their outline.
“Stupid,” he muttered to himself. “Stupid.”
As the command post loomed out at him, a dark form darted out of sight at the other end of it.
Adam stopped dead, the bristles on the back of his neck tingling. He licked his dry lips.
He knew it hadn’t been a hallucination this time.
Quick as he could, he took stock of his position.
He was standing at the north-east corner of the caravan. He’d only glimpsed that dark form in his peripheral vision, but it had leaped out of sight around the south-east corner.
Adam’s heart thudded. This was a nervy situation and no mistake, but it was also an opportunity.
Was he about to make his first arrest?
OK, he didn’t know who this was, so he didn’t want to jump the gun; but whoever it was, they quite clearly should not be sneaking around a crime scene like this.
They had to be collared. The question was: did he go right, and slide stealthily around the back of the caravan, or did he dash forward and charge around the corner where he’d just seen the interloper take cover, catching him out with sheer force and speed?
Before he made a decision, he drew the expandable baton from its pouch, and as he’d seen them do on the TV, snapped it open to its full length. About twenty inches, he reckoned. He wasn’t sure what it was made of – some kind of lightweight steel, though when he’d practised with it earlier, it was strong and sturdy, and had delivered a terrific thwack.
A rustle of leafage sounded from somewhere ahead and to the right; by the sounds of it, at roughly the opposite corner of the caravan from the one where he was currently lurking.
OK – that was all he needed to know.
Adam went forward quickly, but sidling rather than striding, his tall, rangy body flattened against the front wall of the caravan, passing its open door and approaching its south-east corner. There, he halted, holding his breath, before spinning around the corner at top speed, baton to his shoulder.
There was no one there.
Directly ahead, beyond the caravan’s south-west corner, stood the wall of motionless undergrowth. Adam crept towards it like a cat. When he glanced around this next corner, he’d be peering down the full length of the vehicle. Given how close the bushes were, it would be a good place for someone to hide – but it was too late to pull back now.
He went for it again, though this time he gave the corner a wider berth, convinced that someone would be lying in wait for him.
But again, there was nobody there.
The very narrow gap between the caravan and the foliage led all the way to the far end, with no figure of any sort hovering there. He turned his Maglite on and thrust the bright beam forward, but it revealed nothing out of the ordinary. Frustrated, Adam fought his way along the passage, lashing angrily at the twigs and branches that groped his face. When he rounded the north-west corner, he’d circled the entire vehicle, and still he saw no one.
He held his ground.
Silence. Absolute stillness.
Was it possible he’d been mistaken? Could he have imagined that darting shape?
“No … I couldn’t!” he said aloud, going hard for the north-east corner, the point where he’d first started. Adam was now angry. OK, this was his first night, but he was damned if some little hooligan was taking the piss out of him.
He flung himself around the corner, and the two people waiting there flew right at him, arms raised, as in unison they shouted: “BOO!”
Adam stood frozen, scalp prickling, baton locked overhead – as it gradually dawned on him that the unexpected twosome, both already reeling about the road, laughing and high-fiving each other, were also wearing police gear.
It was a man and a woman.
The man, who had red hair and a beard, had to knuckle at both eyes to remove tears of mirth. The woman shook her head, though her eyes were moist too.
Slowly, stiffly, Adam lowered his baton.
His cheeks burned as his lips crooked into a wry smile. He was humiliated, yes, but he was a policeman now, and this was the sort of nasty trick they played on each other. You had to go along with it. As he closed the weapon up and put it away, he noticed that about sixty yards along the road, a car with Battenberg flashes was parked in a patch of shadow.
