Where the Birds Hide at Night (3 page)

He'd wasted his life. Not just this latest problem – because that's what it was to him, a problem – but everything about his life in the past. Things had been gone at in the wrong way, and it had led to unpleasant incidents and unnecessary changes. Problems could always be solved, though. Couldn't they? Whilst he sat here waiting he felt he had time to have a proper think about all this stuff. Here he finally was, the centre of attention at last and with good reason to study his own problems. Forever he'd taken everyone else's tragedies and issues on board, absorbing them like a flimsy stained sponge that should have been chucked out long ago. They had dragged him down, emptying their sordid baggage onto his shoulders as he'd tried to aid and manage their lives for them with “the law” as his bible. Now the roles were reversed. Should he seize this opportunity and empty all of his shit onto the next person to come through that door? Again he looked over at that door. There was the man's face, still on the carpet, looking up at him. Ignorance was not bliss, because this face had not gone away. Paying the face attention would not make it retreat either. Only getting lost in his own thoughts, and bringing old things to his vision to look at once more, would help block this face from view. And it did, for a moment, as Noose remembered blabbing about his ex-wife to Helen. Oh how he'd slagged the poor bitch off to the stranger. Would he really not have been arsed had Trout actually formed a relationship with her? Perhaps that would have been for the best, giving her the security and love she had so claimed she needed. Her father would have been pleased that at least some man had come to save her after Noose had done the dirty. Any man! Luckily her father was dead by then, and Noose escaped at least one rollicking. She had been such a drab wife, though, if that is any excuse and clearly Nicola Williams had filled a vacancy. He'd never loved his wife, and he'd never loved Nicola. He'd never loved any woman. This hurt him the most. He'd been close to his mother, of course, and in this respect it could be said he'd loved her. But that is a different kind of love, and Noose had long separated that portion of his affections from the desire side. He both longed to love and be loved at the same time, but as the years had unfolded and a number, albeit a small number, of women had passed through his life he'd shrunk back more and more in acceptance that he would not experience that kind of love. Naturally, as he entered middle-age, he was not without just cause to think this. The evidence was there when you looked at his shitty marriage and affair with Nicola. Even last night's romp with Helen was a case in point. Had he in any way led her on? He was unsure, but felt he had somehow taken sexual advantage of her – after all, how could a young attractive woman find him appealing? He was balding, tubby now and generally a bit grubby all round. There was no love involved in this bizarre one-night stand. It had all been about pleasure, and about pain. The whole thing had hurt Noose, certainly, and Helen hadn't come off lightly, had she? The pleasure had not been worth it, and the pain was all too unwanted to wish to dwell upon. Yet, he couldn't help but dwell upon it as he sat here waiting for something – anything – to happen. This whole thing had helped manufacture a rock and a hard place situation that he'd rather not have had to face.

That face on the carpet now looked even more defined. There were eyebrows, one raised, and a distinct curve to the lips. Noose could almost hear the face talking, with a sly lilt, about how funny the whole thing was. Noose didn't find it funny at all, and this face was mocking him. He got up and put his foot over the face, rubbing and stamping at it in the surety it would go away. Surely this face would go? It did not. Surety turned to hope, turned to rage, turned to despair. Acceptance was not forthcoming, but a blind resign delivered Noose back to his chair. He dropped in it, wondering how long he'd now been waiting here. He didn't care, so long as he didn't have to wait much longer. That thought suddenly sparked in him a desire to be kept waiting for infinity, never to have to deal with the predicament he was in. Was he even in a predicament? If indeed he hadn't beheaded Helen, which was still a possibility, he was a free man and could hopefully go about solving her murder. Perhaps they were linked to the Henderson slayings, and he could pool the whole thing together. This could be his chance to redeem himself in both the eyes of the press and in his own mind. Solve these crimes and be a hero! For so long he had thought himself a failure. Well, when all you read about yourself in the papers day after day is your shortcomings, is it any wonder? He needed to give himself a good shake, straighten his back and sort this pile of crap out. As if he had beheaded Helen in his sleep! It sounded such rubbish – silly, silly rubbish. Bad things had happened, but who cared? At least things
had
happened and his life wasn't just a long list of nothing. It all added to the bag, reminding him every so often that he was still alive. His lungs still drew in oxygen, and blood still slid through his brain and heart. He could still use his brain, too, in solving these latest three murders. Three murders – three little, inconsequential murders. Damn! Noose slammed his fist on the table and grunted at himself in exasperation. No murder was inconsequential, when he really sat down and thought it through; but he'd fallen into the habit of thinking a life was just a life. A life was more than just a bag of deady slush to be toyed with and discarded. Noose knew this, and what he hated was the fact he kept having to remind himself of this. That was the price you had to pay when you were exposed to murder after murder for twenty years. And there weren't just three murders to solve, there were countless. One still at Noose in particular was Lucy Davies. Would he too die before her killer was brought to justice like Peter had done? What did bringing to justice even solve? All it meant was more tax payer money going on sustaining the cosseted life of a cunt who didn't deserve to exist. Noose was angry, he needed to calm down. It didn't do to show too much anger in this sort of situation. And, he didn't want his fellow officers patronisingly suggesting he “calm down”. That would be the worst thing that could happen right now. The face on the carpet had seen his anger.

Maybe the point of keeping him waiting was to let him stew; mull over in his mind what he'd apparently done. Equally possible was the fact that everyone was really busy, tied up with all these latest problems. Problems needed to be solved, and Noose was the man to do it. Was he even a man at all? That blasted Helen had punched him around and fingered him up the arse. Well, he wasn't too concerned about that… just a little. A niggle kept twirling around, egged on by the face's wry grin, and centred on Noose's perception that having had a finger up his arse would make him the butt of jokes at the station. The information would soon seep out into the lower echelons of the station like everything else. It didn't take a lot to get the lower officers chuckling behind your back, murder or not. His affair with Nicola had left vast unerring scars on his reputation and identified an emotional weakness in his character. Such flaws took many successfully solved cases to patch up, and even then they were only patched. Another event, however small, could so easily tear it off again and reveal the old sordid silliness. Noose had had plenty of those. And, then there were the unsolved cases to his name. Peculiarly, perhaps saying more about the police as a whole than Noose himself, these weren't as much of a scar as the affairs and the other personal problems. Police were only people as well, and people are very faulty. No, he was treated with mild pity and comforted over the unsolved murders as other inspectors either took the cases on or they were confined to the vaults of failure. Should he bonk his boss or take an unexplainable liking to the young Peter Smith, however, and he would find his credibility in tatters. Odd, eh? Really, really odd. It didn't do to either have sex or befriend people. That was a lesson Noose kept learning over and over again. With so many of the best lessons in life, sadly, he would keep on forgetting it and letting himself get dragged in again. Dragging in was exactly what had happened last night.

The more he thought about it, the more he felt Helen had somehow put herself rather forward onto him. Was it all an elaborate and cruel set-up? But why would she willingly go along with having her own head removed from the rest of her body? That is quite a commitment to make; though Helen had certainly come across as a very committed kind of person. Committed to helping ruin Noose's life, by the look of it. The sunlight had come around the corner of the building and now tried its best to look in through the high, narrow frosted window. The face could get a nice tan as the angle was just right to catch it. So much did it sun the face, that whoever it was started to bask in the delight and shared the joy with a string of inaudible words. How frustrating that these words were going unheard by Noose! He doubted they were important anyway, ignoring them for a while. But, as the sun shone and they persisted, he got up off his chair again and dropped to his knees, pressing his ear against the carpet in a desperate bid to pick up any sound. Was it a message of hope from divine intervention? It might as well have been Noose's own inner conviction, for it was as unbearably impossible to decipher. So close did his ear get to the face, that he felt a little nip on it and jumped up. That the face could have bitten him was of mild concern; that he'd put himself in such a situation where that could have occurred troubled him immensely. He was now completely overwhelmed by existence.

He collapsed against the wall and he cried there, sobbing to his heart's content about things in general. He'd become so numb over the years that this felt especially self-indulgent to him, and rather enjoyable. He was crying both at recent events and for himself overall and it was such a great buzz. There, on the floor against the wall, he blossomed into what he'd always hoped he would become; though he couldn't quite place what that was. He knew it, however, because he now felt good about things and wanted to thank the dead Helen for allowing him to reach this emotional peak of release. But, then he was awash with the ever-constant circle of realisation that it was not Helen but her killer who had opened him up to this sensation. The briefest of flickers in Noose's mind told him to congratulate the murderer on a job well done – luckily this passed and he was loathe to warrant it credence again. That's when the sobbing thankfully ended, and he winked at the face in dominance. It did not wink back – it
could
not. The everlasting period between Noose being told to wait in here and somebody coming to question him now felt ever-tightening and he renewed his efforts to encourage its arrival. Standing up and about to check the door, he changed his mind and sat back down again. He neither wanted to find it locked nor unlocked. Had it been locked, this would amount to him having been found guilty in the eyes of his colleagues already – had it been unlocked, an officer would no doubt have been standing guard outside and he'd reach the same conclusion anyway. He could not win, obviously they thought he had done it. Hard he tried to conjure up an image of Hastings coming through the door to relieve his worry and set him on the case, to no avail. Hastings was neither forthcoming, nor likely to be the one. It was not his place to anymore. That place would be filled by somebody lesser known to Noose, no doubt, so as to avoid any emotional connection during questioning. Questioning – hah! He'd already answered all the questions he could to the officers who'd answered his call earlier today. There was nothing more he could actually give, aside from making something up to satisfy the interrogator. Should he do that? Perhaps it was easier that way, avoiding endless circles and circles of mental crap.

The door opened and rubbed the face off the carpet. In walked Nicola Williams. There she stood with her wide brown eyes oozing their leathery impenetrability at her old flame, as he looked up and caught sight of her. He hadn't seen her for a long time – perhaps too long, perhaps not long enough. All he knew was that she was going to delight in all this. She was exactly the same as she'd always been, and he could tell in an instant that she had not changed. Well, he certainly thought that. He wished she had not changed since last they met, and her lack of physical ageing only added to this as a credible belief. Her hair, possibly, had changed style and was now much shorter and bobbed, but Noose really didn't recognise this much. He wasn't interested in hair – he was interested in getting right back down to business. Whatever that meant.

‘So she was the one who initiated the sex?' she asked with as much stress on ridicule as she could muster in her cadence.

‘Is that too far-fetched a concept?'

‘There was something between us, once,' she said coldly, ‘but now there's nothing. I'm here in an official capacity to question you.'

* * *

After he'd finished at the urinal, he stepped up to the sink and turned the cold tap on. Never did he like washing his hands in hot water. Either it got too hot too quickly and burnt his hands, or it ran cold anyway; so there wasn't much point even bothering with the hot water tap. Anyway, he knew that the hot tap at this particular sink – the one on the left – hadn't worked in eight years. He didn't really like washing his hands at all – but he did wash them. Well, the tips of his fingers. He didn't really like looking at himself in the mirror either, especially now. But, on this occasion, he gave himself a nod of acknowledgement before preparing to move over to the hand drier. It was now, at this exact moment in his life, that he saw his face for the first time. Yes, he'd sort of had a look at himself before now, but never really seen himself. There he was in the mirror, never exact but existing, and for all the world he was at once satisfied. He
could
give a crap what he looked like, and he looked alright. A foray into personal physical acceptance was just what was needed at a time like this – anything to occupy his mind.