Ross Armstrong - The Watcher - A dark addictive thriller with the ultimate psychological twist

I take her pulse with two fingers, pushing my hand between her chin and the floor to get to her throat. She’s cold. I’ve never felt anyone so cold. But then I’ve never felt a dead body before. I put the back of my hand in front of her nostrils, doing my best work from what I’ve gathered from old episodes of ER . No breath. I imagine her sitting up, gasping as the crowd reels, someone screaming at the back. She tells me to ‘get off, ya silly cow’, picks up a wooden spoon and throws some beans into a pan, muttering to herself all the while. But she doesn’t do that.

I take a leap of faith and open her eyelids. I don’t know why. Getting into it? Curiosity? It’s so intimate. My middle finger and thumb pulling apart the tissue paper eyelids of this formidable woman. I try desperately to hold back my gasp as I stare into her, the pupil dominating her eye. Doctors tend not to squeal. It doesn’t engender much trust.

Her eyes were so alive, so fidgety last time I saw them. I look into the pupil now and I’m struck by the emptiness of it all. How quickly we can all become ‘the body’. Where has the rest of Her gone? I’m struggling to come to terms with something. I’ve never seen anything like it before. Never been confronted so directly by what used to be an idea, death and nothing. No literature, television drama or gossip can prepare you for its glare. It’s so mundane. It’s a familiar tune. Hummed many times before, which will be hummed many more. And it chills me how quickly I can shrug it off, take the torch from my keys out of my pocket, shine a light in this whale’s eye and play out the final part of the artificial inspection. At the last, somewhere between the role and myself, I touch her hand and hold it for a second.

I turn to the crowd who proclaimed me their leader and shake my head. Some sympathetic groans. A couple shuffle away at the back shaking their heads. It’s as if they’ve just found out the bloke who comes to clean the windows isn’t coming this week. Even death itself seems an anticlimax I suppose, especially if it’s not happening to you. Or if you weren’t staring into the face of it.

‘Can someone call an ambulance, please?’ I shout to them all.

‘Isn’t she dead?’ a voice comes back.

‘Yes. I believe she is, but either way an ambulance will have to come and take her away.’

‘Why? If she’s dead, she’s dead,’ the voice comes back.

‘Because we can’t just throw her in a skip and be done with it.’

It comes out before I can stop it. I’m angrier than I thought I was.

‘She has to be pronounced officially dead. They’ll take away her body to be examined.’

‘Oh. You don’t think there’s… er… foul play, do you?’ replies another voice. With a tone that suggests the speaker thinks he’s in an episode of Diagnosis Murder . Rather than reality.

How detached we all are. Safe in our tiny dwellings. Hidden from the natural world, our windows and TV screens soft lenses that beautify. I feel like I’m the only one that really feels sometimes. If that’s not too narcissistic a sentiment.

‘No. I don’t think it’s… “foul play”. Personally. But that’s not up to me to decide.’ Just a dash sardonic. Classic Dr Gullick.

In reality, I can’t say whether there has been ‘foul play’ or not. It looks to me like a woman dropped stone dead and gave herself an almighty whack when she hit the ground. But maybe that’s the way it’s supposed to look. Because, maybe, someone gave her an almighty whack first, and then lay her on the ground to make it look like the injury was caused by the fall. She’s certainly gone down hard.

I could be more sure about my assumption. If I turned her over. But I don’t want to do that. I’d be scared to move her. I don’t want to ‘contaminate the scene’. Plus, I probably shouldn’t leave any more of my fingerprints in this place than there already are.

So I can’t be sure exactly what caused that blow. But then, you see, I’m not a doctor.

As someone volunteers to dial 999, I take one last look at her. A young woman dials as she holds her boyfriend’s hand. I think they live further down on the estate. I’m sure I’ve seen them before. I scan the other faces in the crowd too, just to check.

Before I go I have a last look around the place. I poke my head around the corner to see the living room more fully than I did the night before last. Then, coming back to the kitchen, I see a strange thing. The black metal poker she kept by the door. Is gone.

Her other weapons. The cricket bat and pipe sit by in their usual place for safe keeping. But not the poker.

Perhaps she needed it for something. I wonder where it is now. It wasn’t the sort of thing she’d ever be without. It was for her own protection. Jean was all too aware of the sorts of people that hang around here at night and what they’re capable of. I wonder if anything else is missing.

I play a quick game of spot the difference. The room the night before last. Versus the room today. I spy something else. With my little eye.

The porcelain figurine. The monkey. No longer smiles at me from the sideboard. She could’ve moved it, or broken it, after I left, I suppose. But by the look of the dust around it, I’d say it’d sat right there since about 1982. I don’t know why she’d choose last night to finally throw the thing away.

Someone’s been moving things around. And I’m the only one that would know it.

‘Well, there goes another one,’ a passer-by drops, a touch macabre. And anyway, who was ‘the one’ before this one? The student from the poster? I make a mental note to look into that. I wonder what her story is. I guess I’m developing a far keener sense of civic duty than I’ve ever had before. I’ve grown a conscience. I’ve grown curious.

There’s not so much care on display on the estate this morning. As if her death held a lower price for everyone else than it did for me. An old lady dies. So what? After the interest of it, everyone just goes home and sticks the TV on.

‘I’ve seen blood shed in front of me,’ she said the night before last.

‘But no one cares about the things I see,’ she said. And that’s how it feels this morning. Like this is just going to be it. Her relatives in Portugal will be informed, appropriate tears will be shed for Grandma, as her bones hit the trough a thousand miles away, her insurance barely covering an empty ceremony, as in a distant room the relevant form is signed, and only I will care that someone may well have bumped her off. My only question is, why anyone would want to do that?

I walk away, slotting my black bag into my rucksack as I go. Relieved no one has got the chance to see inside it and catch me for the fraud I am. I’m going to have to stop doing that. Or invest in a stethoscope. I take out my phone to see if Aiden is worried about me. But there’s nothing from him. I see one missed call from a number I don’t recognise. I don’t usually answer calls from numbers I don’t recognise. But then I don’t usually call them back either. Which is what I’m doing now. I’m doing a lot of things that don’t make me feel myself lately. I turn as I call because it’s ringing. I don’t hear it through my phone, it seems to be coming from the direction of the crowd.

Christ. It’s coming from inside number forty-one and now the assembled mass hear it too. Late drama shoots through them and a man in shorts is heading back into her flat. He picks up the phone from her sideboard, shrugs and puts it back where he found it, as I make my way out of there. I put up my hood and head quickly back to my place, undetected.

I look at my missed calls and find she had tried to call me at five-thirty this morning. And, all of a sudden, I’m thinking a lot more seriously about that missing poker and figurine.