Stuart MacBride - Halfhead

‘Nothing.’ Will forced a smile. ‘Nothing’s wrong.’

DS Cameron raised an eyebrow. ‘Bollocks, nothing’s wrong. I’ve interviewed thieves and murderers remember? I know a lie when I hear one.’ She dumped her kitbag on the table and sank down into the seat opposite. ‘Spill the beans.’

‘Honestly, there’s nothing-’

‘William Hunter, if you expect dinner, dancing or anything else this evening you’ll come clean. Understand?’

‘“Anything else”?’ This time the smile was genuine. ‘And just what did you have in mind?’

‘Talk.’

After a moment’s silence he nodded and said, ‘I bumped into an old friend when you were getting changed. Told me to keep my nose out of the PsychTech files, told me to stop digging for information on him and his boss. Said if I played nice, “no one would have to get hurt”.’

‘He threatened you?’

‘Yup.’

‘But you’re a Network Assistant Director!’

Will just shrugged.

Jo frowned. ‘Why the hell would someone care if you went rooting about in a defunct, debunked, psychology programme that died years ago?’

‘No idea.’ Will stood. ‘I’ve got to go see Doc Morrison at Glasgow Royal Infirmary in forty minutes. Would be a shame if I accidentally hacked into the PsychTech files while I was there. Want to tag along?’

‘Just how dangerous is this “old friend” of yours?’

‘That’s what I’m trying to find out.’

Jo hauled on her jacket. ‘What we waiting for then?’

She walks through the wards like a diner examining the menu. There are so many to choose from: some that no one will miss, others that will leave a family in mourning. Some are young, some are old and none of them look as if they’re going to put up much of a struggle. She likes that best of all. This is no time to take any unnecessary risks. A quick, clean kill and then a little bit of post-mortem fun. She’s not due in surgery till half eleven: she can take her time with the remains.

But first she has to get them downstairs.

The dumb-waiters are no good, they’re only designed to transport things up from the automated storeroom, not down. Being inside one when it collapses into the wall and starts its rapid descent back to the basement would be…messy. Nothing left to play with. Nothing but mush and a few broken bones. Where’s the fun in that?

She pulls her mop from its bucket and spreads some disinfectant over the floor. It’s a mundane task, but it helps her think. When she has her real life back, whether it’s in the New Republic or Asia Major or even the Colonies, she’s going to have the cleanest home in town.

In the next bed a small child cries. It can’t be much more than four or five years old: too small to be any real sport, though it would just about fit in her bucket if she snapped its arms and legs. But its head would stick out of the top, someone would see…

She drifts through to a more grown-up ward.

There are a few other halfheads working the room. One manoeuvres a floor-polisher back and forth across the scuffed terrazzo; another pushes a disposal buggy from one bed to the next, picking up the patients’ wastepaper baskets and emptying them into the big box on wheels. She stops for a moment to watch him-or her-work. Pick up the bin, tip it into the buggy, put the bin back. A nice un demanding job, just the thing for a surgically edited mass murderer. Or rapist. Or hedge-fund manager. Or whatever it was the thing in the orange jumpsuit had done to deserve half its face being cut off.

A nice big buggy, just the right size to take a fully grown adult. Perfect.

She crosses to the end bed. The man lying beneath the crumpled white blanket is wearing stripy pyjamas and a VR headset. His hands are above the covers, so whatever fantasies he’s living out can’t be too rude.

Dr Westfield takes a look up and down the ward: no one is watching. So she goes up to the curtain, grabs it and walks it round until the bed is hidden from view. The man doesn’t even look up.

His name is Liam Holdstock and-according to the case notes that flicker across her datapad-he has an infected liver. Better not eat it…And then she remembers she hasn’t got a mouth to eat it with. Not yet anyway.

Seven and a half hours and counting.

She balls her right hand into a fist, then taps Liam on the shoulder.

‘Whatta hell d’you want?’ he grumbles, still buried in his little computer game. ‘Can you no’ see I’m busy. Jesus, hiv youse lot nithin better tae dae wi’ yer time than bug me?’

She taps him again, enjoying herself as the moment stretches out.

‘ What? Jesus-effin-Christ. Can ye no’-’ He pulls up the side of his headset and peers out. He frowns, slack mouth hanging open. There’s no one there, just some stupid halfhead. ‘Aw, fer fucksake,’ he says at last. For a brief second he glances up at her and his flabby face breaks into a smile. ‘Aye, an’ you can fuck aff as weil, y’bucktoothed wee bast-’

She hits him across the bridge of the nose, breaking it. Blood pours down his face. His hands come up, palms open and facing out. Classic defence posture. But she’s not playing that game today. She grabs the clock from his bedside cabinet and smashes it over his head. He goes limp.

For a minute she just looks at him lying there, not moving, and then she reaches forward and feels for a pulse. And there it is. She hasn’t hit him too hard; he’ll survive the trip downstairs. But not what waits for him there.

Right on cue, the halfhead with the disposal buggy pushes through the curtain, looking for Liam Holdstock’s bin. She takes the buggy and steers the lobotomized slave to the other side of the bed, where she presses her mop handle into its hands, then pushes it back out into the ward.

Liam’s heavier than he looks and getting him into the buggy isn’t easy, but she manages it, forcing him down into the basket. She doesn’t want him making any sound on their little trip down to the storeroom so she pulls a tube of skinglue from her pocket and with quick, economical movements draws a line of surgical adhesive on both his lips, then presses them together. He looks funny like that, as if he’s forgotten to put his teeth in. Just to be safe she runs a spiral of the same glue onto both of his palms and slaps them over his ears. Hear no evil, speak no evil, but he’ll be able to see and feel everything.

Emptying Liam’s waste-paper basket over his head she pushes her way through the curtain. The halfhead is still standing there, frowning at the mop in its hands. She has confused its little brain. It was emptying bins, but now it’s mopping floors. Sooner or later its training will kick in. She doesn’t have to worry about it.

Which is just as well, because she’s got an appointment in the basement with a man who isn’t going to enjoy the next few hours even half as much as she is.

Will and Jo squelched their way through Glasgow Royal Infirm ary’s lobby, en route to the private Network wards, a good half hour early for Will’s follow-up appointment with Doc Morrison.

On the thirteenth floor he led the way through security, then down the corridor to the doctors’ consulting rooms. Doc Morrison wasn’t in, so Will slipped in behind her desk, powered up her computer, and asked Jo to keep an eye on the door.

‘Right,’ he said, hacking his way into the hospital network. ‘Let’s see what the little gimp was so keen to hide…’ He entered ‘KEN PEITAI’ and ‘TOMUKU KIKAN’ into a stealth engine and sent it off to look at every single record on the hospital servers. They weren’t listed in PsychTech-he’d checked before leaving the house this morning-but they were bound to be somewhere, and the hospital’s systems were the only ones Will hadn’t broken into yesterday. Ninety percent of them weren’t accessible from outside the building.