Blood Men: A Thriller

“Jack the Hunter,” she says, and she flinches away from me, just a little, but enough to notice. “Hang on a moment,” she says, and she buzzes for one of the guards. “Take a seat.” I do as she says in case she stands up and throws me into one.

It takes a couple of minutes for the guard to appear. He’s older than me and a lot bigger and looks as if he can’t wait for me to say the wrong thing.

“This way,” he says, and I follow him.

“No touching,” he says. “No yelling. No passing any objects. That’s pretty much all you got to know, but you break any of those rules and you’re out of here. You get me?”

“No touching, no yelling, no handing over anything. I get it,” and I wonder if the rules are the same for everybody.

The corporate image disappears. We head down a concrete hallway to a heavy metal door, passing an office on the way full of video monitors showing images from the prison. There are a few guards there, and one of them comes out and pats me down and passes a metal detector over me. It beeps a few times and I have to leave my keys and wallet in a tray. The original guard leads me toward another door. It’s buzzed open, and then we’re in another corridor. Another metal door. Another buzzing sound. The guard opens the door and takes a step back. “In there,” he says, and then he follows me inside.

I was expecting a row of phones with a thick piece of Plexiglas between them, covered in palm prints and scratches. Failing that, it’d be an interrogation room, my dad handcuffed and shackled to a chair. Instead it’s a large room with about a dozen tables. There are plenty of other prisoners in their orange jumpsuits talking to family members. One of them I recognize, a man very much like my father. I’ve seen him scattered over the pages of the papers, his face always on TV. He’s sitting opposite a woman and a man in their midsixties—perhaps his parents, because the woman is an older, female version of him. The man is the Christchurch Carver, and the media made the connection quicker with him and hyped him up as the city’s most infamous serial killer—even though he has maintained his innocence. The Carver looks up at me. He’s got a scar running down the side of his face and an eyelid that’s all twisted and doesn’t seem to fit right. He smiles and his broken eyelid droops.

A door at the opposite end of the room opens, and my dad comes through, a guard right behind him. For a second I’m back in time, watching his smile, then I’m further back, Dad throwing a ball with me, hugging me at night, putting a Band-Aid on my knee or removing a splinter, and back then Dad was the best dad in the world. When I was eight years old I even bought him a coffee mug that said the same thing. The mug lied. The memories lied too. He walks over toward me, but before he can reach out the guard following him reminds us of the no-touching rule—which is perfectly fine with me.

“Hello, son,” he says, and I wonder if he rehearsed what his first words would be to me. I don’t answer him. I don’t know how. “I can’t believe how much you’ve grown,” my dad says, and he sits down and I keep standing.

“You thought I’d still be a kid?” I ask.

“No. Not at all. Take a seat, Jack.”

“It’s Edward these days.”

“Not to me.”

The thing that strikes me the most is how much Dad has changed, but at the same time how much he is exactly the same. He has to be in his midsixties at least, though I’m not sure of his exact age. He could almost be seventy. He looks seventy, if that’s anything to go by. He was as large as life when I was kid—perhaps that’s because he was out there taking everybody else’s. He was a bigger man, certainly, but in jail the weight has slipped away from him, and my memories are old, and the combination of them means the man sitting ahead of me is not the man who raised me for the first third of my life. The time here has not only taken his weight, but also his hair. He’s bald on top with a ring of grey hair around the edges, and sideburns that don’t seem to match. He hasn’t stopped smiling since the moment he saw me, his lips peeled back, showing teeth that are slightly crooked that I don’t remember being crooked. His jaw is covered in stubble, his eyebrows longer now, hair sprouting from his ears and nose. But his eyes, his eyes are the same. Warm, friendly, smiling blue eyes that look at me with tenderness, and the wrinkles to the sides of them, the small wrinkles that appear when he smiles are the same, and Dad could be a hundred and ten years old and you’d still know him by his eyes. Is this me in the future? Is this the face I will one day have?

“It’s been a while,” I say, finally coming up with something. I sit down and the guard takes a few steps back and tries to pretend he isn’t listening to what we’re saying while Dad’s guard wanders off to the other side of the room.