The Smiling Man (Aidan Waits Thriller #2)
Joseph Knox
About the Book
‘I usually experienced the presence of a dead body as an absence, but in this case, it felt like a black hole opening up in front of me.’
Disconnected from his history and careless of his future, Detective Aidan Waits has resigned himself to the night shift: an endless cycle of meaningless emergency calls and lonely dead ends.
Until he and his partner, Detective Inspector Peter ‘Sutty’ Sutcliffe, are summoned to the Palace, a vast disused hotel in the centre of a restless, simmering city. There they find the body of a man. He is dead. And he is smiling.
The tags have been removed from the man’s clothes. His teeth have been filed down and replaced. Even his fingertips are not his own. Only a patch sewn into the inside of his trousers gives any indication as to who he was, and to the desperate last act of his life …
But even as Waits pieces together this stranger’s identity, someone is sifting through the shards of his own.
When mysterious fires, anonymous phone calls and outright threats start to escalate, he realizes that a ghost from his own past haunts his every move.
And to discover who the smiling man really is, he must first confront himself.
For Stephen K.
‘It’s as if I know something and don’t know it at the same time.’
Thomas Ligotti, ‘The Frolic’
* * *
It started with a knock at the door.
When he thinks of that now he grimaces. Closes his eyes and runs a hand across his face. It’s a bad memory in a head full of them, and the smallest thing can spark it. The electricity in the air before a storm, or the lancing smell of ozone after heavy rain. Sitting across the table from a new girl or a new colleague, and caught off guard like this, he might allow himself to drift off into it, knowing that neither one of them will last anyway. His vision blurs and a haze of sunspots passes in front of his eyes, like he’s staring into a bright light.
‘I think there’s someone outside,’ he’d heard the old woman say.
It was after ten on a Sunday night and they’d probably been on their way to bed.
Their house was a stubborn mid-sized Tudor-build, designed to withstand everything, apparently, but the rain. Through the pane of smoked glass set into the door, the boy could make out two or three buckets in the hallway, collecting dripping water, and perhaps that’s why they hadn’t heard him at first. He knocked again, stepped back and looked at the house. It seemed too big for one old couple, but it had something he didn’t associate with the narrow, thin-walled rooms he’d lived in, some personality.
It had to, out here in the middle of nowhere.
The old woman got to the door first. When she opened it she called out for her husband. He looked even older than she did, and it seemed like a struggle for him to get around. When his head appeared over his wife’s shoulder, when he saw the small, shivering boy on their doorstep, he adjusted his glasses in surprise. The boy was rake-thin, glass-eyed, pale. Wearing just a T-shirt and trousers, both soaked through by the rain. The old couple looked about him, but it seemed like the boy was on his own.
The woman frowned, crouched. ‘Are you OK, sweetheart?’
The boy stood there shivering.
She squinted into the night again then took him by the wrist, led him gently inside and closed the door. ‘He’s frozen,’ she said to her husband, drawing the boy past him and into the front room. The old man re-locked the door, pushed the deadbolts back into place and followed them through, looking at the wet footprints on the tiles.
The boy wasn’t wearing any shoes.
‘I’m Dot,’ said the old woman. ‘This is Si.’
When the boy still didn’t answer, Dot shrugged. Found a blanket and went to boil some water. Si sat on the sofa, worrying his hands. He guessed the boy was about seven or eight years old but aged prematurely by the dark rings around his eyes. He didn’t look about the room, or even focus on the things in front of him. He just stared blankly ahead. When Dot returned with a hot-water bottle, Si reached up and put an affectionate hand on his wife’s arm. The boy’s eyes flicked suddenly on to them, as if unfamiliar with the gesture.
‘Can you tell us your name?’ said Dot, lifting the blanket and pressing the hot-water bottle against the boy. His shivering intensified, until his teeth sounded like a baby shaking a rattle. He forced his eyes shut and clenched his jaw to control it. ‘Should we call the police?’ said Dot to her husband. He was nodding, already getting up, glad of something practical to do. She rubbed the boy’s head while she waited. It felt like his blood was boiling.
‘Dot …’ Si called from the hall.
‘Hold that thought,’ she said.
When she left the room the boy smoothly removed the blanket from around him and went to the light switch beside the door. He flicked it off and on, off and on. He put his head out into the hallway and watched. Si and Dot were both frowning at the phone, which they’d discovered wasn’t working. The boy went to the porch, walking on the balls of his bare feet, unlatched the front door, drew back the deadbolts, and opened it.
A shape dislodged itself from the shadows and moved slowly towards him. The rain had stopped and there were stars visible now that the boy had never seen in the city before. As the shape grew closer it stood out against them, looking somehow darker than the night.
‘Good lad,’ said the shape, the man, nodding at the boy. The man’s face was flat and angular as a blade, and he wore a trained inexpression that gave nothing away. It was his body that said everything, erupting with messy, overlapping networks of muscles and veins, like the storage device for all the hate in the world. He had a claw-hammer in his gloved right hand and used his left to tousle the boy’s hair.
He stopped, retracted the hand in awe.
He’d produced a coin from behind the boy’s ear and held it out for him to take.
‘What do you say, Wally?’
‘Thanks, Bateman,’ said the boy, accepting the coin solemnly.
He sat on the porch as Bateman went past him, inside the house.
‘Hey …’ he heard the old man say. ‘What are you—’
There was a wet thud and something heavy hit the floor.
The old lady started to scream. ‘No,’ she shouted. ‘No—’
Another wet thud, the sound of something else hitting the floor. Straining, the boy heard a low moan coming from inside. A determined gurgle and perhaps another word. Perhaps her husband’s name. Then there two more footsteps, a final blow and total silence.
The boy closed his fist around the coin Bateman had given him and stared out into the darkness. His mouth watered and sunspots started to pass in front of his eyes. They were just a shimmer at first, then they came thicker and faster, until they were roaring down in front of him like the rain. Like he was staring into a bright light instead of pitch-black darkness.
* * *
I
Midnight City
1