The End

Brighton as Miami. A splendid idea marred only by the fact that Miami is a stifling seedy armpit of a city with rampant crime and drug use. So is Brighton, but why look at it that way?

I stand shakily, with my back to the dark bricks of a high wall at the back of Hove Courthouse, far within the perimeter of eager journos. It's been two months, half of which I slept through while the swelling pressing my spinal cord went down and my brain started talking to my body again. Oh, and I learned to walk again. It's harder than you think. Maynard came back, his grudging respect obvious from the moment I saw the bag of grapes. He came off-duty, another officer handling my statement. Maynard talked for a while, made a frank admission that my evidence gathering bagged the two men responsible and I suspect saved his career from an untimely setback. He smiled, warmly, and said thank you. I croaked a little, moved my wired-up hand and moved my head. It was early days and I still thought of the door.

Getting well, my head shorn and my face drawn with the long starvation of coma, was like boot camp. Instead of shouts and obstacles I had care and allowances made for me. It was still hard, caused doubt, brought despair, and the only way I was going to get through was perseverance. And now I had persevered, I was better, and though I'll be walking with a cane until my muscle tone comes back, I can still hold a camera.

The trial finishes today. Carnassal got down to accessory on Richard's death only, plead guilty, and will probably be getting ten years thanks to expensive lawyers.
Massiter plead not guilty on both murders, defended himself, failed to convince anyone he was crazy, and is expected to get life. I wonder how he feels, in his holding cell with its glass-brick window and hard bench. Does he know how over his life is? That he is to be sentenced to the slowest execution possible? I hope he sobs like a baby, pitiful in his failure. He deserves it.

Now I stand next to Maynard, leaning on the cold wall, with orange sun slanting over on the willow tree by the car park. Massiter will come out of this door. No towel on head, no other cameras can reach him. Smile, you're on candid camera. It seems cheap to get a career boost, an exclusive out of a man's misery. Not to me, but in general. I remember that this man is a monster, the worst kind. Stupid, greedy, and human.

There is a noise behind the door, the verdict is through. I smile when I hear the news. "We won." The uniformed man says. We won. I won. Time to shoot a lot of film: this is the end of a fantastic story.

Death's Door

I sat on the bleached sandstone steps of a building. It was a vague sort of time, aggravated by the door. There didn't seem to be anything other than the door. The door was all there was here. The doorway and the door and the step. There was me of course, but I didn't feel like mattering.

I was so tired, or rather so weary. My limbs were heavy, though my mind seemed more alert than normal. I thought quickly, flashing my mind's eye across realms and leagues of memory. Murderers, friends, dark nights and fifth birthday parties. The grainy quality of them astounded me. I wondered if children had lower resolution eyes, briefly. That way madness lies, burying yourself in minutia. Detail had been so important once.

I went into the shadow then, only a little way. I put my hand out, and felt the door. Dark wood, deeply ridged with irregular planks sealed by depth and resin. Iron banding with fleur-de-lys ends and thick rivets. The wood seemed soaked, smelt of brine like a boatdeck despite the dusty dryness of the library air. I realised then that was probably why the stone was so smooth, the wood so warped. They had been soaked again and again in salt water. Tears, perhaps. The thought chilled me. Other people pass through this door all the time, though nobody will rescue me from it. Perhaps there is no rescue.

I knew the door then, knew there was no handle or purchase on the other side. No return tickets from this boat ride. Only the choice to go on, or go back if I could. How to go back? Why to go back? What held me? There is nothing I cannot leave back there. No friends worth having, no matters worth resolving. The police had my quarry. They cannot be trusted. Justice must be done. The people must know. The truth will out, I replied to myself, half-ironic. This is getting too James Joyce, too self-indulgent. The dying don't feel such self-pity. I have suffered spinal trauma. The words came unbidden. Coma, limited response, damage to neurons, swelling, blood in the lumbar puncture, always love me, nice outside, time to make a decision, quality of life to think about. These commas are bloody great gaps! The thought was not a surprise, more a rebuke to my shattered central nervous system.

Teenagers always feel invincible. A four inch nail in the neck is life's way of telling you to slow down, I assume.

I turned away from the door, to the nothing. No running, nothing worth tiring myself over. After all, I'm here to get well. Just a long walk until my feet were scratched with keys, until my back was creased with hospital sheets and the taste of Tabasco ran across my mouth. Yes, I can hear you. No, I can't move. Get that fucking thing out of my nose, doc.

Catch as catch can

The whole thing plays out in worryingly fast motion, no adrenaline slow-mo to sharpen my reflexes or help me dodge bullets. I run on distorted legs past blurs and hazes, as the fat man rushes up on me like the Earth to a parachute jumper.

He catches me across the shoulder with the nailgun, the motors in it whine and hiss as it passes me by. I don't realise I'm hit until I'm off balance, and I tip a wheelbarrow of sand under his feet. We fall, he rises but I'm faster. I run, turning and getting a surprisingly good shot of his face as I do so. The flash throws his next blow wide and he instead hits into me with his shoulder. We careen forward, clasped like lovers in the angriest embrace.

Of course, the world would be so rude as to break us up. Luckily, this time he takes the hit, a girder to the shoulder-blades and my head to the nose. Bruised and bleeding to my shit-scared, he begins to falter. I'm so lucky. He bounces back onto me, the impact sending me into odd thoughts (He smells like milk...), and rolls onto me. I'm flat on my back and he's on top, all eight tons of his apparent weight now sat on my pelvis. This is the stage of fights where the bigger man wins.

Of course, he reaches down to choke me, stupid in the heat of the moment, and I hit him in the eye with two fingers extended, wishing they were a Desert Eagle instead of a Cops-and-Robbers Imaginary Special. It's enough. Blood geysers down onto me, hot and coppery and vile. I throw up a little and writhe up-and-right. He backs off, clutching his face and swearing like a ship full of Tourette's suffering sailors. We try the running game again. This time, it's not the flash of my camera that throws him off. I'm so close to the fence, and the blue light of a siren flashes on, comforting in it's animal howl. Tarzan's mother, the gorilla, loving and fierce.

Massiter takes advantage of my surprise, smashing forward with the nailgun and pressing me into the fence itself, my world shrinks to the quarter inch in front of my eyes and the howl of motors behind me. I feel the metal press into my neck, and realise They only fire when they're pressed to the target. Fat Man reads my mind, and the world goes very dark indeed.

Hiding under the bedsheets

I sat on the bus, grim-faced, scaring the people next to me. Jumping at distant sirens, looking out the back window, they had to know. Somebody was bound to top me and say "Hey, you're that guy, that burglar guy!"
The sick feeling rose in me, fear of being caught. My rational mind tried to square away these fears with simple knowledge: no fingerprints, nothing taken, no cameras, too fast to be spotted, not arrested at the scene... I still knew they'd find me out. That bastard cop Maynard was probably laughing into his stake-out dinner and flicking through the tapes now.

And suddenly, I was off the bus. Standing in the cool night air and listening to the quiet of residential roads. I wished I'd brought my mp3 player, wished I could whistle. I hummed in the dark instead. Probably better to be quiet. I thought, as I grunted and squeezed my way through a gap in the plywood building site barrier. I fell to the ground behind a cement mixer, and crawled on my stomach. Two men were talking in front of car headlights. My camera was whirring almost before I knew about it. Shot after shot, hard to focus and expose right in the near-silhouette lighting. I managed.

It's easier than it looks to sneak around people when you have a lot of room to manoeuvre. Normally, sneaking up on someone means getting in arm's reach. Not so with a telephoto lens. I boldly went from crawling like a snake to like a dog, then a crouched walk, and finally darting between piles of breeze blocks and girders. It was them alright, Carnassal and Massiter. I heard snatches of conversation, "complications" and "chasing up weak links". Soon I was getting facial expressions and proper detail, from the closest stack of blocks. I could hear them talking.

"You didn't have to be so bloody dramatic!" Carnassal, accented, his station gives way to his roots when he's angry.
"I did what was best for both of us. You even gave me the tools. It's not my boat they'll be searching, is it?" Massiter, larger in floodlit dark, smug beyond reason.
"You ignorant fat shit, don't you threaten me." Carnassal, panic rising. "I made this happen for you, remember?" Strident, emphatic now. "You need me!"
"No." Massiter, cold and dismissive. Then we both did something dramatic. Massiter hit Carnassal on the side of the head with a nailgun from the workbench.

I knocked over a toolbox and swore.

Breaking and Entering

I'll admit now, because nobody's going to do anything about it, that I broke into 34 Carnelian Avenue, Carnassal's home. I didn't even do it surreptitiously. I knew he was out, his car gone, but I should have had a little more finesse regardless of my little experience. It was a little after 10 in the evening, the night sodium yellow from streetlamps, which helped me gracelessly go undetected as I hopped onto a council wheelie bin and over his garden wall. He lived alone, I guessed, because all the lights were out and the kitchen was a manly mess. I stepped gingerly through the crunchy window glass (glad of my thick-soled trainers) and into the house, picking up my half-brick from the epicentre with a gloved hand.

There's a feeling we all know. We get it when the ghost train's doors open, when the film's heroine goes wide-eyed looking through her own house for the axe murderer, when Tommy's tricycle loudly rolls over the hotel's floors. It's not a shock, it's a fast winding of the heart's spring. The soaring rush that lets you know the next little noise will sound like cannonfire and screaming. I was getting all of it dumped over me, thinking too fast. I gripped the small table by the front door and let the world sink and plunge. A tiny boat in the maelstrom of too much tension. The red dot of the answerphone gazed up beadily, like vulture's eyes. I hit the button and sat on the floor.

LAST MESSAGE: "Robert, I'm waiting for you. The site, at 11. Don't be late. I've left a message on your mobile too."

The site! The houses they'd bought with clean money soaked in blood and lies. Going to crow over their victory? A double-cross, perchance? I had to know. The bus would take me just in time. As I got up, a glint on the coffee table caught my eye. I entered, wary of my shadowy reflection in the TV screen. Less than an inch long, three small loops at the top, a stubby rectangular tooth at the bottom like a toddler's first. A handcuff key.

I gripped it tightly, and swallowed the curses.

Sometimes you just know

I saw the news the next day at five, "Unnamed girl dead in docks, police suspect foul play." A dangerous call to Sally's mobile and then hastily researched home told me all I needed to know. If I'd have thought it through, however, I might not have brought a particular policeman to my door.

Maynard sat in my mother's kitchen, while she was thankfully out, and drank tea from my favourite mug. Curiously enough, "favourite mug" was what he was just calling me. He commended my judgement in linking myself to two prominent murders, and put down his cup. The air cooled two degrees as he laid out his offer. I'd surrender my notes, my laptop, and my camera, and he wouldn't reel me in as a murder suspect. What could I do? I couldn't live with the mark of a killer on my brow, surely. I couldn't face having my name on every tabloid's lips connected with a pretty girl and a bloodied box cutter. In the end, I did the only thing I could.

Once I'd finished swearing, and closed the door on DI Daniel "The F stands for fucker" Maynard, I went into the loo and let my hands shake. It was all coming apart. I could believe Sally was dead, unlike every story of sudden death I'd ever read, but my problem wasn't being struck down by tragedy. I was trapped. Somebody was setting up the walls in this maze, hanging weird symbols from them and ushering me down their ever-shrinking channels until I ran smack-damn into one. I was paranoid, obsessed, and over the course of the week I'd made powerful enemies on both sides of the law. I went to my room, surfed the net, and lasted thirty seconds before getting straight back into the facts. Massiter's fat face loomed from the screen, and I had seen him before. He'd been the one that launched that terrible quiet in Sally in the copy room. I'd looked at her stress, felt the resignation as she'd let the paper go. I'd let her reveal herself to him, and she'd been left to bleed and hurt and die. Because of me. Now the killer (killers?) knew my face, and they would have to come for me.

I waited until dark, until mum had thrown my dinner away, and tossed my camera in my bag with some other things. I wouldn't be gone long, but I left one thing behind me. Danny, you've got mail... I thought to myself. The whole archive. Every thought I've typed up, every image, every note. The evidence in a black holdall on my desk for you to find and use. Enjoy.

Drink up my friends, tonight we face death, and by dawn we shall know its mettle as well as it knows ours.

Domino Dots

I had to shoot a parade-type thing for the paper the next day. It was quite nice, night shots with candles and children and spooky tissue-paper costumes. The night seemed to have a mystical air to it, the smell of melting wax and nighttime mixing with burger van food and the faint tang of burnt pitch. Someone had lit a tiki torch somewhere.

There was a weird chain growing in my mind, a cobwebby mass of links and relationships. I suddenly understood why Hollywood obsessives wallpapered rooms with notes, clippings, and ribbons. Richard lay in the middle of it, spreadeagled as I imagined he was under the water, not confined to a cold drawer in some drafty tiled place. Even as my camera complained about the low-light and I absently racked the ISO up, I thought of where I was going with this. Mrs Clements would be dead of Chardonnay by the time I had enough information for her, and giving her half the facts was unwise on a lot of levels. I actually stood to be harassed, not helped by the cops, and if I gave it up to the paper I'd be off it faster than you can say "more experienced journo". I was on my own.

Perhaps not, I thought to myself, as I spotted a familiar black car. The lightbar in the windscreen gave it away when you looked for it. I took the oppertunity to snap some shots of PC Plod and his family. A wife, pretty brunette with thick-rimmed glasses, and a daughter with a pudgy smile and fairy wings. I hope you're a reader, Mr Maynard. I'll see this gets printed.
I left with a self-satified smile, hopped on a late bus with ELO's "Twilight" in my ears and a humming joy in my heart to fight the coldness in my hands. Quite a breeze tonight. I had hopes for a sunny day tomorrow though.

Sadly, rain broke out a little after midnight while Sally Clarke died of her injuries in a Shoreham dockyard.