Prologue
2 a.m. August. 12 years earlier.
The baseball bat is wet and sticky with blood as Paul Whittacker opens the door to the master bedroom. He’s already killed the young boy and the young girl. Sleep tight, little ones. Now it’s the parents’ turn to die.
The landing light, probably left on for the children, casts shadows across the bedroom and turns it into an old black-and-white movie set. Even the blood on the bat appears grey and less indicative of its macabre history.
He stands for a while, catching his breath, observing, listening. His arms are shaking from the exertion of the kill. He needs a fix. To slip into the warm syrupy blanket of oblivion. But there is still much to do before he can allow his body to succumb to the needle.
He takes a few steps into the room and stops. His heartbeat pulsates in his ears. Sweat dribbles down his back. He tells himself to calm down and make ready for the kill.
The man snores and makes a strange gurgling noise in his throat. He smacks his lips and rolls over to face his wife. Hesitancy, that powerful adversary to careful planning, suggests it might be better to use a knife on him, but he doesn’t want to waste time going downstairs to look for one.
He creeps towards the bed, weapon raised, threat-level raised, blood pressure raised. He makes ready to strike. The woman sighs. It’s a seductive sound that arouses him. He considers raping her once he’s finished with hubby, but that means getting into a whole new area of forensic jiggery-pokery.
Sweat dribbles into his eyes. He stops, bat hovering two feet above the man’s face. He wipes an arm across his forehead. He’s seized with an uncontrollable urge to laugh when a bright-pink moth flies across the bedroom and lands on the wall just above the headboard. It’s strikingly beautiful in this black-and-white movie. He knows it’s just a hallucination. Residual imagery from last night’s acid trip.
He raises the bat and brings it crashing down on the side of Hubby’s head. The man responds by pawing his wife’s face as if trying to provoke foreplay. His legs kick out under the duvet.
Whittacker smashes the bat down again, this time eliciting a muffled scream from the victim, who raises his head six inches off the pillow. The bat wastes no time sending that head right back to where it came from. This time he is motionless. Not so much as a whimper.
Whittacker considers checking the man’s pulse, but his wife is now awake and exercising her right to scream. Her arms flail in what appears to be an attempt to defy physics and fly.
Whittacker steadies himself, takes aim, and raises the bat. But he is stopped by a sudden sharp pain between his shoulder blades. At first, he thinks he’s having a seizure. This thought is replaced by a more serious self-diagnosis – a heart attack brought on by stress.
The pain comes again, accompanied by a wet slapping sound. He cries out, blood bubbling on his lips. He drops the bat, legs bucking, spilling him to the floor.
Too many drugs spoil the moth.
He checks above the bed for the bright-pink insect, but the only splash of colour in this black-and-white world has gone. Something warm and sticky runs down his back. Sweat? Too thick. The golden-brown liquid from every needle he’s ever jabbed into his veins? Too painful.
The woman screams again. The sound bounces around the walls and pounds on his eardrums. This can’t be happening. Not now. Not when he is so close to…
The room suddenly goes quiet. Deathly quiet, you might say. Paul Whittacker doesn’t hear the woman wailing like a malfunctioning police siren. He doesn’t feel his body being turned over, or hear a male voice trying to soothe Mrs Wailing Siren with assurances that everything will be all right.
By the time the police arrive twenty minutes later, Paul Whittacker is lying on the bedroom floor in a pool of his own blood. The baseball bat lies next to him, pieces of skull and tufts of hair decorating the wood like ghoulish artwork.
The ceiling light has now switched the room from black and white to high-definition colour. Blood drips onto a white rug next to the bed, and Hubby’s gore saturates the pillows and duvet.
Whittacker doesn’t hear a policeman walk into the room and tell his colleague that there appears to be two child fatalities. One male, one female. He doesn’t hear Mrs Siren sobbing on the deathbed.
The world is now as black and silent as death itself.
Chapter One
At six-foot-two, with a knee-length black Burberry coat and an umbrella tucked underneath one arm, Mathew Hillock appeared to be the only man in Feelham who was unaware of the heatwave sucking all the air out of the town.
He crossed the road to Abbasi’s Convenience Store and plucked a Daily Telegraph from the display stand. Entering the shop, he joined a small queue at the counter. Mr Abbasi was talking to an elderly man about the stifling heat.
‘This goes on much longer, I’m emigrating to Iceland.’
Mr Abbasi gave the man his change. ‘You need to get air conditioning.’
‘I’ve got a fan, but it ain’t much use.’
‘That’s because it only swirls the heat around.’
The old man picked up his cigarettes. ‘I can’t afford any of that newfangled stuff on my pension. Barely enough money to eat as it is.’
Mathew didn’t understand why people always talked about the weather. It wasn’t as if they could do anything about it. And people who couldn’t afford food shouldn’t waste their money on cigarettes either, but that was a thought best left inside his head unless he wanted to start an argument. Which he didn’t.
By the time he reached the front of the queue, it was almost ten past six. That meant he had enough time to sit on the bench at the corner of Croft Road for twenty minutes before heading home for his tea.
Mr Abbasi smiled, his moustache curled up at the ends. ‘Hello, Mathew.’
Mathew returned the grin. ‘Can I have a big bag of Skittles, please?’
The shopkeeper reached up and plucked the sweets from a display behind the empty chocolate stand. All the bars had been transferred to the fridge because of the heat. ‘Isn’t it a bit warm for that coat?’
Mathew shook his head. ‘Might be a storm tonight.’
A man browsing the magazines turned around. ‘Are you for real?’
Mathew ignored him. For a man of thirty, Jim Bentley was childish and ignorant.
Abbasi scanned the paper and the skittles. ‘Anything else, Mathew?’
‘No thanks.’ And then, without any conscious thought, ‘Someone’s going to die.’
Abbasi squinted at Mathew. ‘Pardon me?’
Mathew picked up the Skittles and stuffed them into his coat pocket.
‘He’s off his fucking trolley,’ Jim Bentley said, the words slurred.
‘Please don’t swear.’ Abbasi turned back to Mathew. ‘Who’s going to die?’
Mathew scooped up his paper and shrugged. ‘I don’t know.’
The door chimed. A young girl walked in. Maybe ten or eleven years old, brown hair scraped back in a tight ponytail.
Bentley stood behind Mathew. ‘Who you gonna kill, retard?’
Mathew smelled the foul odour of tobacco and alcohol on Bentley’s breath. He ignored him and walked out. He didn’t want to discuss anything with the likes of Jim Bentley, especially something as serious as death.