Mark Pearson - The Killing Season

I smiled again and pulled out my warrant card. Somewhat out of my jurisdiction, and, technically, not serving presently. But I figured he wouldn’t be able to read the small print.

‘I’m all kinds of trouble,’ I said and slipped the card back into my pocket. ‘You know, and I know, that you have had the woman over. Put it right and we don’t have to get official. Everyone’s a winner. You don’t get sued and she gets her extension.’

‘And if I tell you to go stick your head in a pig?’

‘Well then, I would have to take action.’

‘Don’t!’ he shouted out suddenly. I was puzzled for a moment until I realised that someone was coming up behind me.

I turned round and saw a man even bigger than the one who was dangling above me.

I reacted on instinct as the newcomer hammered a fist into my stomach. I moved in time to lessen the impact. Even so, it felt like a steam-hammer. I gasped and staggered back.

‘Leave it, Sam,’ shouted the man above. But his colleague seemed not to hear him. He swung a slow roundhouse punch to my head. I stepped aside and snapped a fast punch to his jaw. He stumbled, shook his head, looked puzzled and then turned to face me. I shot a quick jab to the bridge of his nose and then a fast left-right combination. He fell to the floor, dazed.

I picked up the ladder and leaned it against the wall, just out of the dangling man’s reach.

The other one lurched to his knees, making a ragged, gurgling sound.

‘What are you going to do? He didn’t know you were a copper,’ said Bill Collier, gasping as he struggled not to fall from his precarious perch.

I shrugged. ‘Sort out that repayment for Helen Middleton and everything, I am sure now, will be fine. We can put this behind us and just move along.’

‘You have no idea who you are dealing with, you fucking mick! You’re not going to get away with this!’

‘Yeah, I will. One way or another. Up to you how hard you want to make it on yourself.’

I turned and walked slowly back to my car with a confident smile on my face.

I used to play poker, after all.

William

His parents had been killed soon after he was born.

He had been told when he had been old enough to realise that he was an orphan. He had never known them and nobody ever talked about them. Not that there was anybody to talk to apart from his aunt. She was his sole surviving relative and she had brought him up without ever sparing the rod. She never mentioned her dead sister or her husband and he learned from an early age that he should not bring the matter up. She seemed to have no friends nor the desire to make any. She worked hard, brutally long hours and he was left pretty much to his own devices. He had no friends, neither in the squalid street where he lived nor in the school he was sent to. He and his aunt had moved around the country before coming to King’s Lynn and what little education he’d had hadn’t prepared him for much. He wasn’t bothered. He was used to being different, other, used to being a loner.

Poverty wasn’t an abstract concept in his life. It was a hard-faced reality that ran through every part of their existence like the rings of an oak tree. Their place in the world had been clearly defined for him since he’d been old enough to walk. They were scum. And they deserved no more and no less than they got. Pain, hardship, and sorrow. He had been sent to school finally but that was no refuge. The Brothers were of a cruel and sadistic nature. He had always been a strong boy, but amongst grown men he was as weak as a woman and he knew that. So he kept his head down and minded his own business as best he could. That didn’t stop the Brothers using the strap and the stick, of course. They didn’t need a reason to beat. Spare the rod and spoil the child, just as his aunt proclaimed. He had never been spared or spoiled.

When three older boys had cornered him one day, he had tried to walk away. He had no wish to hurt others and he knew how brutal the beating would be if one of the men in rough cloth caught him fighting. But they had left him no option. And by the time the boys had come to regret their decision to corner him and taunt him, it was too late. Two of the boys managed to get away with little more than bloodied noses. But one of them lay on his back, unmoving. His nose had been broken, two ribs fractured and his jaw dislocated. As the red mist cleared William realised he had wet himself. But not from fear.

He looked down at his disproportionately large hands, at the blood already beginning to dry on them, and then he looked up as he saw two men running angrily towards him.

The red mist came down again. In the end it took three of them to restrain him. His body was battered and bruised before they took him into the room. There his trousers had been taken down and his bared backside had been strapped with cruel leather until blood was drawn.

He was eight years old.

Shortly after the incident he had been sent to a special school. A boarding school for troubled youth. Where discipline and exercise and moral guidance were supposed to forge a virtuous man from a miscreant youth. He was forged, sure enough. But into something hard, and brutal and vengeful.

They had kept him locked in an empty room for over three hours. When the key turned in the lock he looked across at the door and swallowed hard as it scraped open. He didn’t regret what he had done to the boys — they had brought the fire down on their own heads — but he was aware that there would be consequences. One thing he knew now, though, was that although he had not wished to inflict pain on them, when his hand had been forced he’d found that he enjoyed it. He could have stopped but hadn’t wanted to. It was as though something had been released within him, something that had defined him through blood. Whatever happened to him in the future, he decided, he’d make a pact with himself to repay it with interest. He looked down at the front of his urine-stained jeans and felt not shame but anger. A red flush rose in his cheeks as he clenched his fist and dug unclean and ragged nails into his palm.

The man who entered the room was Luke Carlow. A forty-five-year-old unrepentant sodomiser of children. He had a degree in sociology and was the person in charge of the home for delinquent youth that William had been placed in. ‘Delinquent’, Carlow often thought, was such a quaint and ridiculous term for the criminal scum he had to deal with. Too young to be sent to a proper prison, they were kept segregated from the public to whom they were a threat. But they themselves were not protected from other men who might do them harm — men like Luke Carlow.

William was allowed to shower first before Carlow buggered him. Cleanliness is next to godliness, after all, and one thing Carlow couldn’t abide was a filthy boy.

Later, curled up on his bed, William didn’t cry. The bleeding was staining his sheets but he forced himself not to shed a single tear. Later still, when the older boy that he was forced to share a room with came in, he could see the look of appetite squirming in the other boy’s eyes and knew that the ordeal was far from over.

Eight years on, Luke Carlow would be discovered dead inside a damp cubicle in a filthy public lavatory in King’s Lynn. He was found with a pair of filth-stained underpants stuffed in his mouth. His penis had been severed with a pair of secateurs and he had been stabbed repeatedly in his throat.

The older boy who had shared that cell with the eight-year-old William would disappear and would never be found. Even if he had been, his own mother would not have been able to recognise him from the mass of mangled flesh to which he had been reduced.