The Killing Hour

He reaches into the duffel bag and pulls out a wooden stake. I recognise the craftsmanship. He must have picked it up on his journey through my house. He waves it back and forth, his eyes following it as if out of all the wooden stakes he’s seen this one has to be the nicest. Eventually his gaze moves back to me, and the confusion I saw earlier has gone. ‘Which one did you murder first?’


I listen to the rain. It’s still heavy. I wonder if I’ll be dead before sunrise. I sigh and turn my attention back to the question, not bothering to count off my final minutes in this horrible world.





20


The rain is pouring heavily on the tin roof. The inside of the cabin is damp, his skin feels clammy, his feet cold and he feels sick at being in a place where such depravity took place. He feels sick, too, sitting opposite this piece of human trash. Coming here is without doubt the worst decision he’s ever made, and he can’t see a way out of it. If he shows up at the station with Feldman he’ll have to explain this little outing, and it’s going to look as though he withheld evidence just in case he felt like killing the suspect. He’ll blame as much as he can on the cancer. He’ll say the pills have affected him more than he realised. They’ll send him home and they’ll wonder how many other people he brought out here. He’ll pass from this world to the next under a cloud of suspicion.



Jesus, what a mess. The plan had been to bring Feldman out here and scare the hell out of him but obviously he hadn’t thought it through. But really, had that been the plan? If it was, it was a poor one. There has to be more to it, doesn’t there?

He pictures the two dead women. He pictures the contents of the cardboard box. He pictures the other cases he’s never been able to let go even long after they were solved. He remembers the young woman floating facedown in the bathtub in this very cabin, her grey, wrinkled skin, her milky eyes. He thinks of other young women face down in alleyways and hallways and ditches. Maybe it isn’t such a mess after all. Feldman’s as guilty as they come – he’s doing the world a favour by taking him out of it.

‘I asked which one of them you murdered first, Feldman. Are you going to answer?’

‘I wasn’t sure if I was allowed.’

He hates Feldman. Hates his sarcasm. In the end it’ll be the smugness that’ll make his transition from judge to executioner easier to bear. So will the confession. As soon as Feldman admits what he did then he can happily …

Happily?

That’s the wrong word. The last thing he wants to do is take a life. This is the last place he wants to be. In six months when his sins are weighed up in whatever magical-afterlife-landscape he goes to, a large piece of him will still be back here.

The other problem is that Feldman is delusional. His account of what happened is a testament to that – assuming he believes even a fraction of what he wrote in his letter. If he truly is insane then punishing him for having a sickness is in itself sick. No, he has to believe Feldman is of sound mind. Has to believe he knew every step of the way what was going on and was enjoying it. When the confession comes he won’t feel so bad about ending Feldman’s life. Yet he needs that confession because with it comes the feeling of justice. With it, dying from the cancer will be easier to do. Without it, he’s just one more bad man doing bad deeds.





21


‘I didn’t kill either of them,’ I reply, not that it matters to him.

I try to think about things logically. Like a mathematician. Or one of those thinking-outside-of-the-box riddles: two people are in a room, one has a gun, the other is handcuffed. No wonder I never liked riddles.

‘Why did you stake them through the heart?’

‘I didn’t.’

‘I saw the bodies. Damn it you even had a stake on your bedroom floor.’

‘I can explain that.’

‘Hopefully you can explain it better than your letter. That was obviously the ramblings of a madman.’

‘It’s all true.’

‘Uh huh. If you were hoping that string of lies would throw us off the real truth then you’re crazier than I first thought.’

‘It’s all true.’



‘It’s all bullshit.’

‘It’s not. Look, Kathy was asleep when he first attacked her,’ I say, and in the front of my mind the lounge we sat in while she told me this starts to form, slowly at first, and soon I can smell the blood on my clothes and taste the last mouthful of beer. Kathy brought me into a world where evil happened and I had loaded my hands full of its treasures. I can see Landry sitting opposite me, but standing just over his left shoulder is Kathy.

‘I never heard anyone come in,’ she says.

‘I know you didn’t. It wasn’t your fault.’

‘Jesus, Feldman, you’ve lost me,’ Landry says.

‘I didn’t know what time it was, Charlie, maybe ten-thirty, and I woke up as his hand pressed down against my mouth. I wanted to scream, but couldn’t. He held the tip of a knife next to my eye.’

‘I killed him with that knife,’ I say.

‘Him? What the hell are you talking about? Which one did you kill first, Feldman?’