Tony Black - Long Time Dead

I schlepped round to the side entrance and let myself in with the janny’s keys. There were no lights on here and the corridor lay in semi-darkness. I listened out for anyone, but the place was quiet as the grave. Stevo usually put the lights on when he knocked off. Seemed, if not strange, irregular. I closed the door behind me and paced towards the doocot. Something stopped me halfway there – instinct or whatever – and I made a detour to the main hall.

The sound of my footfalls on the old boards unnerved me; they echoed off the walls and the high ceiling and repeated like I was being followed. It was all just nerves, I knew it, my imagination was running away with itself. I hauled it in, gave myself a shake.

‘Get yer shit together, Gus,’ I told myself.

As I got to the hall, I creaked open the door and flicked the light switches – nothing.

‘ Shit !’

It was just like the night I’d found Calder; the thought jarred me. A cold bar of sweat formed between my shoulder blades, ran the length of my spine in one slow trail.

I edged back through the noisy door, made my way into the corridor and headed for the doocot. The usual disinfectant smell was strong in my nostrils, mixing with the musty, damp odour of aged buildings. There was another smell I couldn’t quite put my finger on, seemed familiar enough, though. I sniffed the air a bit more and then I sussed it – Stevo’s ganja. The boy had obviously been having a fair old toke. He usually kept that kind of thing in the doocot, though, didn’t seem like him to be smoking out in the main corridor. Maybe he’d left the door open by mistake, I thought. But that didn’t sound like Stevo either. My palate started to dry over. I pressed my tongue into the roof of my mouth, felt the gap in my teeth where the bridgework had been destroyed. My nerves were playing up – they were getting out of control.

As the doocot came into sight, my pulse quickened. There was no sign of life. The place was in darkness and the door closed. I kept my eye on the handle of the door as I walked, thoughts mashing with every step. I don’t know what I expected to see: Stevo, armed with a crowbar, cowering inside… maybe a tale of more threats taken from Paul and his crew. He was a smart lad, Stevo, maybe he’d legged it at the first whiff of trouble. Then again, maybe he hadn’t been able to… maybe they did get to him. Paul had been fairly ropeable when I’d seen him at Gillian’s earlier; there was no telling what he would do. He was clearly off the scale; he’d some form for fronting up to Stevo – I just hoped that our recent chat hadn’t prompted him to go any further.

I reached the door and I grasped the handle. It felt cold. I turned it anticlockwise. It clicked hard; The door was locked. I went back to my keychain – the red-topped key for the door was an easy find – and slipped it in the lock, turned once. The door opened up to a quarter of a foot from the jamb, then seemed to stick. Something was blocking the entrance, pressing against the other side. I pushed harder and it gave a little, but not enough. I pushed again, gained another few inches, which revealed a pool of dark liquid spilled on the floor. I reached for the light switch – this one worked. As I lowered my gaze to the floor again, I saw the liquid was red and sticky. I was standing in what looked like blood. Lots of it.

‘Stevo… Stevo…’ I yelled.

There was no reply.

I put my shoulder to the door, pushed harder. The blockage eased some; the more of the floor I brought into view, though, the greater the amount of blood I saw.

‘Stevo… fucking hell… You in there?’

I pushed enough of a gap for me to squeeze through. My Docs slipped on the blood as I wedged myself between the jamb and the door. I had no purchase and skidded onto my arse. As I did so, the door jerked out of my hand and the pressure of the weight pushing against it forced it to slam shut.

For a moment I lay with my back on the blood-covered floor. I felt the freshness of it, it was still warm on my fingertips. I jerked up my hands, wiped them rapidly on my jeans.

‘Christ!… Holy Jesus.’ I was covered in the stuff. ‘Fucking hell!’

I got up quickly and looked about the room; saw a bale of barbed wire pushed against the door. It had been untangled: a solitary, jagged strand had been fed up to the rafters and wrapped around one of the beams. As my eyes followed the line of the wire my hand shot up to my mouth. My stomach heaved as I caught the smell of blood again. But the real shock was the sight of Stevo, a barbed-wire noose around his neck, dangling from the roof beams.

I looked away. ‘Oh, no… Stevo, Christ, no.’

The barbed wire had dug deep into the flesh around his neck. When he had been hoisted up the points had cut in, ripping open his jugular. Both front and back of his dustcoat were soaked in blood; it dripped from his chest to the tips of his shoes, where it fell with minute splashes into the pool beneath him. I turned away, but felt compelled to look back at him. Stevo’s eyes were dark and ruptured. His tongue, black and bloated to twice its normal size, hung from his mouth.

I felt my insides settle – the fear and shock were replaced by anger. I looked about the small room. The place was in disarray. Paint cans had been knocked over, chairs pushed to the floor. Even the coffee cups Stevo and I had drank from were smashed. I tried to find focus, think what I needed to do, but all my thoughts ran into finding Paul and tearing him limb from limb.

‘You fucker…’ I yelled. I fired my fist into the wall. It stung like a bastard but seemed to calm me a bit. I turned back to Stevo. His face was a horrific mess: he’d been soundly beaten before they’d hanged him. I needed to get the police, but I didn’t know how to play it.

‘Think, Gus… think!’

Surely there could be no way of covering this up; the Craft couldn’t get away with calling this suicide. Fitz would know how to handle it; I prayed he would, he was my only hope. I dialled his number.

‘Hello, this is DI Fitzsimmons, I can’t take your call right now but if you…’

‘Oh, fucking voicemail.’ I let the preamble end, ranted, ‘Fitz, Fitz, there’s been another death… another fucking murder. It’s Stevo… he’s swinging from the roof beams and dripping fucking claret-’

I didn’t get any further – the phone was snatched from behind me. I hadn’t heard anyone come into the doocot. They must have moved stealthily; didn’t want to give themselves away. As I turned to see the mobi being casually switched off by a stooped figure, a hand grabbed at my arm, then another latched onto my wrist, turned it up my back. I was immobile, fully bound up as the figure raised its head.

‘I don’t think you’ll be needing this,’ said Paul.

At the sight of his watery eyes and his pale, freckled skin, I wanted to kill him. I lunged for him, but was held back by arms stronger than mine. I tried again, aiming my head at his face, but I couldn’t reach. ‘You fucking piece of shit,’ I yelled.

He stepped back, put the phone in his pocket as he watched me struggling before him like a fitting lunatic, said, ‘I don’t think anyone’s coming to save you, Mr Dury.’

I spat out – didn’t faze him. Knew he was right, though: I hadn’t given Fitz my location before he’d taken the phone off me. I was dead meat now. I looked up, caught sight of Stevo, bloated and beaten, his wounds still bleeding onto the floor. I knew I was next. The thought brought a vivid image of Amy in tears once more and it felled me. ‘You’ll get yours, y’cunt,’ I yelled out. ‘Fucking sure you will.’

Paul leaned in, grabbed me by the hair, twisted it like a deadbolt. ‘You really haven’t a clue, have you?… You’ve no idea about any of this. You’re just lurching from one disastrous gamble to the next, and you still think that somehow it’ll all come right.’