Steven Dunne - The Disciple

‘Yeah, well. When you’ve done time, walking outside at night, when you’re locked in … well, it’s something you think about.’

‘Thought you said it was easy time,’ accused Grets.

‘Look, I’m bladdered…’ began Jason.

‘The fuck you are,’ spat Stinger. ‘You’ve hardly had a drop. And you passed the spliff after one draw. We used to have to taser your ass to get it off you. Innit, Bang?’

‘No doubt.’

‘He might not be used to it,’ explained Grets.

‘That’s no excuse.’

Jason eyed Stinger. ‘Can’t yer take a joke, bredrin?’ he said eventually, finding his party face again. ‘Pass me that bottle. Let’s get this party started, fam,’ he said, downing a litre of rust-coloured liquid in one go.

‘That’s the Jace we know. Don’t neck it all, bitch.’

Brook looked at his watch. One am. He was early. Good. Another hour and he would know. The chill wintry air had turned to fog and clung to the potholed roads and bald grass verges of the Drayfin Estate. The noise of his car cut through the still air with a deliberation born out of Brook’s desire to move quietly through the streets, as though not being noticed meant that he was somewhere else. He didn’t want to be here, that’s for sure, revisiting his past, a past that he thought he’d conquered once and for all. But The Reaper was calling him. Even in death, Sorenson would never let go. Brook should’ve known.

He turned slowly onto the road he’d been on so many times in his dreams, eased past number 233, not looking at the Wallis house, just knowing it was there. It had a presence even now.

Parking around the corner, he stepped from the car and gingerly closed the driver’s door, leaving it unlocked — a rare deliberate act on the Drayfin. He walked back through the gathering fog to the scene of The Reaper’s last atrocity — a path that perhaps The Reaper himself had once taken — and ran his eye over the former home of the Wallis family, as it materialised out of the gloom like a ghost ship.

The house was boarded up and, unusually for the Drayfin, had stayed that way. No need for the council to brick up the doors and windows. Nobody came near the place — no kids, no tramps and certainly no neighbours. The house was a lure only for passing ghouls, unlikely tourists who craved a glimpse at infamy, assuming they could find the place in this sprawling, redbrick jungle. Even then such visits were made only in daylight.

Brook stood before the house and turned again to see if his presence was being monitored. It appeared not. All neighbouring houses were dark, all streetlights inert and broken. Even the faint light of the moon had taken the evening off. Brook felt himself in the grip of a black hole, being drawn towards the Wallis house, unable to pull away, his orbit decaying, his body and mind hurtling towards the stench of evil that still lurked there.

As he stepped over the splayed front gate, Brook pulled his dark coat tightly round him and yanked up his collar. He approached the front entrance slowly and, as he moved, he heard something that the deep recesses of his memory had warned him to expect: music. Brook stopped to listen, glaring at the house to search for an opening. The years began to melt away, and Brook remembered standing at the front door of Sorenson’s London home, minutes before their first meeting, listening to the aria from La Wally leaking out of the window in his study above.

Then he realised that the music was not coming from the Wallis house. Nor was it a song for The Reaper. The pulse of this music came from elsewhere. Brook looked around, sensing the direction — a neighbouring home, maybe even a garden. Some kind of rap music. The music of violence and confrontation, guaranteed to irritate and cow anyone over thirty, especially at this time of night and in this place. Even this late the self-centred who blighted the urban landscape saw fit to inflict themselves on long-suffering neighbours. Mind yer own business. It’s a free country. We can play our music loud as we like. What yer gonna do about it?

Brook returned his eyes to the Wallis house. He moved to the door he’d last opened on the night of the murders. It was now a piece of chipboard. It had been wedged open, recently by the look of it. The gap was too slight for Brook to get through, so he forced the board further open and ducked through the enlarged gap. In the same instant, he snapped on a small torch to check the floor for scurrying rodents.

The hall was just as he remembered. No carpet now but the wallpaper was the same grimy flock. The door into the murder room was gone, taken away by forensics to eke out possible evidence from the bloody smears on the handle. There’d been no prints and no clues on the door, on anything. The carpets had eventually yielded a footprint and a shoe size, but neither Brook nor Inspector Greatorix, who’d taken over the inquiry after Brook’s suspension, had ever found a suspect or even a pair of shoes to seek a match.

Brook stepped into the room in which Mr and Mrs Wallis and their daughter Kylie had been killed. No, not killed, slaughtered like animals for the table, almost as ritual. Their throats cut from ear to ear, their life blood everywhere except their veins.

The armchairs on which the Wallis parents had died were gone, so too the once-white rug on which Kylie and her unborn child had been butchered. Even the wallpaper sporting the bloody daub ‘SAVED’ had been torn away. The room was completely bare. Brook stepped further in, wincing at the explosion of sound that his shoes created on the uncovered floorboards.

His veins turned to ice at the sight of the bottle of wine sitting on the fireplace, exactly as it had the night the Wallis family had faced The Reaper. Next to it were two wine glasses. Both were grime- and dust-free. He was expected. He forced himself to step nearer. The bottle was uncorked and full. He stared at the label. It was a Nuits St Georges, the same as it had been two years ago. Brook picked up a glass with his gloved hand and sniffed it. Clean. This time The Reaper hadn’t had a celebratory drink after doing his work. His work. The Reaper was dead. And what work was there for The Reaper in an empty house?

‘Sorenson’s dead,’ Brook muttered softly, clenching his fists.

A creaking noise from above made Brook drop the glass. It shattered at his feet. He abandoned all pretence at stealth and hurtled out of the room, bounding up the stairs three at a time and tearing into the bedroom above the living room, flashing the torch wildly to be sure he wasn’t about to be attacked. But the torch was unnecessary. There was already light. A candle in a holder burned in the corner and had been alight for some time, judging by the knot of melted wax around the stem. Brook gazed into the centre of the room at a small mattress; next to it sat a small camping stove and a few unopened tins.

Brook nodded sadly and stepped closer. How many years since he’d been in Laura Maples’s bleak squat in London? Twenty? And now here in Derby, in reproduction, it was just as he remembered it. But instead of her blackened, bloated, rat-infested corpse before him, Brook saw only the framed picture of the girl, resting on the mattress.

‘Laura,’ he said before he could stop himself. He kneeled to look at the likeness of the bright-eyed schoolgirl, staring back at him. It was the same photograph he’d used in her murder investigation in the early nineties. The one plastered over the London Evening Standard and printed onto flyers in a futile effort to find her, then her killer. It wasn’t the face ravaged by hungry rats, the face that tormented Brook in his sleep.

Well, the dreams had ceased for a while because, where Brook had failed, Victor Sorenson had found Laura’s killer and had executed his family for the offence, offering her killer up to Brook as a gift. A gift. To show Brook that The Reaper’s work, the destruction of entire families, was righteous and just.