Sutty laid the luggage out on the desk.
It was a sturdy, unbranded, brown leather suitcase. The kind of vintage, worn-out steamer trunk you often see in pawn or charity shops. Completely unremarkable. It had a dark leather handle and a rigid external frame for reinforcement. There were two catches, each with a button and a keyhole beside it. It looked like it had been around the world and was scarred from decades of use, having no doubt passed through the hands of several owners.
‘Prepare to be a rich man,’ said Sutty, clicking open the catches. ‘Unlocked? Maybe he’s not your international man of mystery after all …’
‘If it was locked, it’d mean he had a key for it. With a case this old that would have to mean he was the original owner.’
‘So what?’
‘It’s unlocked and there was no key on his person. That means it’s second hand.’ I looked at the battered case, the underside edges, worn smooth by years of use. ‘Or third, or fourth, or fifth hand. Completely untraceable. I bet he’d never seen this case in his life before he bought it with cash and packed it.’
‘Mr Fucking Brightside,’ said Sutty. The case opened with what sounded like a sigh and we both stood there, absorbing it for a second. The stale, boxed-up smell of a lonely, cornered life. There was a thin, stained paper lining, which looked like it had been inside the case for many years. There were a handful of objects. On top was a small thread card of orange yarn. I recognized it as the same colour thread that had sewn the torn paper and cloakroom ticket into the man’s trousers.
‘Well, that solves one mystery,’ said Sutty, daintily moving the thread aside. ‘He did his own sewing.’ Beneath the thread were a couple of simple items of clothing. Bland, shapeless underwear and a crumpled T-shirt. Sutty only touched them to examine the labels.
As expected, they’d been unstitched and discarded.
‘And he was removing his own labels, too.’ He moved the clothing aside to reveal an unusual pair of scissors. They’d been Scotch-taped shut, with the sharp edges visible at the end. Beside the scissors was what looked like a normal butter knife, sheathed in more of the Scotch tape. Using index fingers and thumbs, Sutty pulled the knife free of its ad hoc case to reveal that the blade had been halved and dramatically sharpened.
We shared a glance.
Both the knife and the scissors looked like vicious, hastily improvised weapons. The only other item in the case was an old hardback book.
The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám.
Sutty picked it up by the spine and dangled it upside down. Nothing fell out. He disinterestedly flicked through the pages, frowning as he did so.
‘Poetry,’ he grumbled.
‘Look at the back. The last page.’ He did so. It was torn, with part of the page missing. ‘That’s where the message in his pocket came from. Ended or finished. It was the end of the book.’
‘Hm,’ said Sutty, leafing back through the book, more slowly this time. He stopped at the front, the title page, and held it out to me. It was a neat, legible handwritten inscription.
Indeed, indeed, Repentance oft before
I swore – but was I sober when I swore?
And then and then came Spring, and Rose-in-hand
My thread-bare Penitence apieces tore.
With love,
Ax
We looked at each other.
Beneath it there was a phone number written in incredibly light pencil.
‘Zero one six one,’ said Sutty, squinting. ‘Local …’ I started to take my phone from my pocket but he shook his head. ‘We don’t know who or what’s at the other end. We’ll get the address and go over there, rather than give them an early warning. Too much of this case has passed us by already.’
‘Who do you think it is?’
‘Sounds to me like we’ve got ourselves a smiling woman.’
* * *
The boy stood paralysed in the doorway of the kitchen, the death room. Because of the light he’d flicked on, that split second he’d held down the switch, he couldn’t see in the dark any more. Instead, a neon imprint of the open-throated woman was burned into his retina, like the first seconds following a camera flash.
When he breathed again he was suddenly retching, overwhelmed by the metallic smell of blood coating the back of his throat. All thoughts of slipping quietly through the house evaporated and he stumbled, crawled, backwards from the room, gasping, as far as he could go, until he thudded into the closed front door. He pushed himself up, choking, panicking, feeling the sweat bleed out through his palms, making them so slippery that he almost slid back down the door. His chest tightened and he crushed his eyes closed, trying to breathe. He tried to re-engage the rising, to lift effortlessly out of his body and watch this like it was happening to someone else, but the floating sensation wouldn’t come. For a moment he thought this was how his life would end, lost in the darkness, his chest caving in on itself. So similar to the blackness that his mother predicted.
He passed through the worst of the pain, his head shaking with the effort, and his breathing began to normalize. The blood drumming through his ears served as an unwelcome reminder that he was still alive, he was still here.
And then slowly, reluctantly, the boy acknowledged the time delay. The difference between the breaths that he could feel, moving in and out of his lungs, and the breaths that he could hear, coarse and rasping, moving in and out of someone else’s. They weren’t coming from the kitchen, the death room. They were much closer than that. Muted by something, a door, a wall.
The boy could hear a prisoner, crying, somewhere in the house.
The sound brought his sister to mind. He thought of her, powerless and confused, holding her bruised arm, staring at him with wide, wet eyes from the corner of a room, communicating something to him alone, and trying not to draw Bateman’s attention back to herself. He thought of her now, sitting afraid in the car, waiting for him to come back.
He followed the sound to a closed door beneath the stairs. When he reached it the sobbing stopped. The boy leaned in and put an ear to the door.
‘Tracy?’ came a hesitant voice.
It belonged to a man, but one whose mouth was filled with pain. The boy withdrew his hands from the oak, brushing against the sturdy, iron key sticking out from it and, just for a second, felt like they were looking at each other. As though the person behind the door could see through it, into him, and acknowledge that they were both prisoners. The boy took a step backwards, on the balls of his feet. He saw the aluminium pole, discarded on the floor, and picked it up. He returned to the foot of the stairs, to the job.
‘Tracy …’ the voice called out again.
The boy put his hands over his ears and climbed the stairs to the landing.
He didn’t dare turn the light on, so he edged open a door, letting the moon cast its pale glow across the room. There was a chair lying on its side and he picked it up, positioned it in the centre of the landing and stood on top of it. Then he reached the aluminium pole upward, inserted the plastic end into the hatch on the ceiling and twisted. With a pull, the hatch opened and an unfolding staircase slid down from the attic.
The hatch above the boy was a square of perfect darkness.
He dropped the pole and climbed up into it.
The attic had one small porthole window, through which the boy could see the moon, the only source of light. There were no floorboards so he walked carefully across the beams, breathing through his mouth to avoid the stale smell of cobwebs and dust. Following Bateman’s instructions, he went away from the light, towards the far wall. Towards a narrow rectangle that went from the floor to the ceiling, but wasn’t much wider than a football. He plunged his arm into the void, as far as it would go, and felt around. When his fingers touched nothing but air he took a breath and began forcing his body into the gap.