Where the Birds Hide at Night Read online

  ‘I see.’

  ‘Do you want a lift or something? Where are you headed?’ he asked her, dropping any false smiles of happiness.

  ‘I was thinking of popping into town for a quick drink.’

  ‘After what we’ve just witnessed in there?’ Noose replied, a little stunned, turning to look back at the house of horror behind them.

  ‘I never mix work with pleasure.’

  ‘Do you not?’

  She came out with: ‘Fancy joining me?’ whilst sticking her hands in her pockets.

  ‘I see,’ was Noose’s response as he scratched his chin. ‘You not meeting up with some handsome young man then?’

  ‘I think young men are rather stupid.’ She stepped past Noose, opening his passenger door without a moment’s contemplation. ‘It’s just a work drink, Sir. If we’re going to be working together we need to get acquainted.’ She got in and slammed the door shut, busying herself by belting up as Noose got in the other side.

  * * *

  ‘So what is all this business with that neighbour?’ Helen pushed, leisurely bringing her half-empty wine glass to her lips. ‘What did she say her dead daughter’s name was – Lucy?’ She sucked at the glass, extracting some of the liquid it contained. Noose topped it up for her, spilling a little on her hand.

  ‘I’m ever so sorry,’ he gulped as she put the glass down and he took her soft hand to wipe it clean with a napkin. ‘You’ve never done a day’s work in your life,’ he gasped drunkenly, rubbing her smooth fingertips. They both laughed.

  ‘My hands have done all kinds of jobs in their time,’ she retorted, pulling it gently away from Noose’s in order to pick her wine glass up again.

  ‘Not many young women like red wine, I’m quite impressed,’ he uttered, leaning in and staring longingly at her. His hands now rested boyishly on his lap as his head moved about loosely.

  ‘How often do you take young women out for a drink?’

  Noose laughed. ‘Good question.’ He looked up to the heavens, screwing his mouth up in feigned puzzlement as he pretended to recall. ‘Not even my ex-wife was ever young!’’ Noose suddenly blurted out, falling into a fit of hysterical laughter. ‘Ten years older than me.’ He sighed, lost in painful memories. ‘Her father begged me to marry her, lest she be left on the shelf!’ He picked his glass up and limply raised it to his lips. ‘Trout could have kept her for all I cared.’ Taking a large gulp of wine, his face relaxed as he sighed in relief.

  ‘Did you ever take Lucy out for a drink?’ Helen kept on, moving closer to him over the table. ‘Is that why her mum is so angry at you?’

  ‘Lucy was involved with a very close friend of mine – a troubled friend.’ Noose filled his glass up to the top and drank half of it in one go. ‘He’s dead now.’

  ‘I saw it all on the telly,’ Helen responded. ‘He wrote that book, then was going to commit suicide live on TV.’ Noose did not reply. He wanted this particular discussion to end immediately. Helen sensed this, edging away and briefly looking around the bar at the other drunken strangers before deciding on another tact. ‘If we’re going to be working together, we need to get to know each other.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘It will bring a healthy dynamic to our working relationship,’ she explained.

  ‘No it won’t, it’ll just complicate things and I’ll get attached.’

  ‘Do you not like getting attached? Are you afraid of being hurt?!’ She laughed at him, grabbing his hand and squeezing it tightly. Initially he struggled to get away from her grasp, frustrated at her head-on attack. But, someway between her starting this and the eventual outcome, she came into the light above their table and he again caught a clearer sight of her arresting beauty. It was raw, unfettered in its acceptance of what it really was. Suddenly he regarded her very highly indeed, drawn to her sheer determination to just be who she was. At least, that’s how he saw it. He let his hand take hers. ‘You’ll never have to get attached with me. There are no strings attached,’ she said.

  ‘I have a lovely Côtes du Rhône back at mine,’ he suggested, raising the glass back to his lips. He kept on at it until well after it was empty, too far gone to even care. Rather, he found it quite funny and let out a little grin. Helen just pressed her finger to the side of his mouth and giggled.

  * * *

  They both rolled out of the taxi, full of burps and giggles, and just managed to get inside the house before collapsing in unison on the sofa. Helen, although she’d never stepped foot in here before, seemed rather at home. She cosied up to her superior with ease, he accepting and allowing her to do so. They felt the warmth of each other, needing it after the chill of the night air, and stayed close on the sofa for a while without speaking. Suddenly her arm flopped onto his leg and he jumped up. ‘Wine!’ he gasped, hobbling off towards the kitchen. She got up and followed, turning the light on for him as he fumbled around in the dark. ‘Corkscrew,’ he mumbled to himself as he searched in the cutlery drawer.

  ‘How long has it been?’ she playfully asked him, thrusting her chest towards him as she leant back against the counter.

  ‘How long?’ he queried back, lost in his drunken quest to find the corkscrew.

  ‘Since you’ve had a good screw?’ she blurted out, straightening her back and stumbling towards him. He turned to face her just in time, pushed backwards by her weight. ‘Let’s fuck,’ she giggled, slipping her jacket off.

  ‘I’m your, your,’ Noose thought, puzzling over an excuse. He couldn’t think of one. She undid his belt and dropped his trousers to the floor. There, underneath, his penis momentarily ached for solace as nerves briefly pulsed through his being. It was indeed fleeting, blood rushing to harden it as Helen dropped to her knees and slipped it out of his underpants. ‘What are you doing?’ Noose questioned stiffly, a little taken aback at his luck.

  ‘What does it look like I’m doing, dickwad?’ she laughed, grabbing hold of his penis and placing it in her mouth. She masturbated and sucked, taking a break only from the penis itself to suck on his balls. His heart pounded, but not quite from pleasure. Overcome with trepidation, though still very much erect, he pulled away from her.

  ‘No. I don’t want to take advantage of you.’

  ‘Don’t be a retard,’ she growled, getting up and slapping him hard across the face. Stunned, he stumbled back onto the kitchen table – his penis flapping about like a stray buddleia branch. ‘I’m a big girl. Do you wanna pound the fuck outta my pussy tonight or not?’

  He gulped and nodded, deciding it best to be honest with both himself and this strange open woman in his house. Slipping his shoes off and his feet out of his trousers, he led her upstairs and they systematically removed their own clothes before flopping on the bed. Rather lacking energy through vast alcohol consumption, they lay still for a time beside each other.

  ‘You’re very attractive,’ Noose decided to say, thinking it the right thing to do.

  This seemed to spur her into action and she knelt over him. ‘Don’t patronise me,’ she fired, punching him in the face.

  ‘What the hell are you doing, you crazy cow?’ he howled, holding his bloodied nose. She merely grabbed his penis and started wanking it, dragging her nails hard down his chest with the other hand.

  ‘Why don’t you do it back, you stupid twat?’ She pushed her face right up to his, spitting in his mouth. ‘Show me what a tough guy you are, Inspector.’

  He just couldn’t hit her back – he wasn’t that sort. But, he found himself swallowing her spit and wanting her to carry on this mad episode. Again she put his penis in her mouth – all of it this time until she was close to gagging – and dragged her teeth along it as she pulled her head off it. Noose writhed in part pain and part pleasure, perplexed at the unfolding session. Desperately he just wanted to penetrate her, missionary style. Soon he got his wish, as she pushed him aside and got down on the bed, opening her legs and rubbing her clit as she waited for him to keep up. ‘I haven’t got a condom,’ he whispered
.

  ‘You’ll just have to suck your wet tadpoles outta there once you’re done then, won’t you?’ was her luminous response.

  He pushed himself into her as she smiled, her eyes closing and her hands clenching his buttocks. Soon he felt something sharp running along the crack of his bum before her finger disappeared up his anus. He did not want to stop penetrating her so let her carry on. With every thrust he gave her, she now replicated with her finger inside him. Initially it was something awful and icky to him, but he found himself lost in the moment and as he climaxed he was overcome with the deepest burning joy he’d ever experienced in his entire life. They just kept on going until he was well and truly flaccid and it would no longer go in.

  She got up off the bed as he collapsed onto it in exhaustion. She left the room and went to the bathroom, closing the door and putting one foot on the toilet. Looking dreadfully through herself in the mirror, she clenched her fist and began punching her vagina. Harder and harder she got, biting her lip as she resisted screaming.

  * * *

  It wasn’t the daylight that wakened Noose. No, it was a banging headache – throbbing, rather. Worse than a mere hangover, it was almost like he’d been put into a heavy sleep by something he had been unaware he’d taken. As his eyes realised their surroundings, they caught sight of Helen’s head down the bed. In fact, his flaccid penis was in her mouth. The problem was that it was just her head, and head alone, that was down the bed. Noose lay dead still for a moment, frozen in vast unfathomable grief and anger at the sight of this young woman’s decapitated head fitted loosely between his naked legs. His hands were mucky with dry blood and she had clearly been dead a few hours – he could tell by the greeny colour and sag of her skin… and the smell. Green had always been a favourite colour of his. The green of nature’s unspoilt landscape, even the gorgeous dark green of his mother’s lawn all those years ago. No moss, no weeds – just perfect green grass.

  * * *

  As is always the case in situations like this, Noose found himself under suspicion of murder. After all, he had bruises on his face and claw marks on his chest – not to mention teeth marks on his penis. To all intents and purposes, an unbiased onlooker would have concluded that quite a struggle had occurred between the pair, considering the horrendous bruising between Helen’s legs. As he now sat waiting in the interview room at Myrtleville police station, he kept looking down at his hands expecting them to still be clutching her head. He could still feel the weight of it in his hands as he moved it. He had had to move it of course, in order to get up off the bed and call the police. He hadn’t called them straight away though, had he? No, he gave it quite some thought as panic set in when he came across the rest of her body in the bathroom. There was an absolute hell of a mess in there, with blood and gore flung carelessly about, and some of it had gone down the sink when he’d washed his hands. The bathroom was, Noose reasoned in between the chaotic maelstrom, where the murderer had done the deed. Yet, there was no sign of breaking and entering. Had Helen let them in? Noose contemplated trying to make it look like somebody had forced their way in, but luckily reality kicked in and he thought better of it. Maybe he had actually done it during some sort of sleeping attack on the girl? That’s the fear that now occupied him.

  He’d never really sat this side of the table for any length of time before, and he saw the room in a completely new light. What most seized his attention was the face on the carpet by the door that kept looking at him. The floor was covered in grey carpet tiles and he suddenly felt like tearing this specific one by the door with the face on it up. It was a man’s face, one he did not recognise, but it just kept staring up at him with unrelenting malice. No amount of adjustment of Noose’s look would change this mark on the carpet from a face. Who’s face was it? Was it the killer who’d slain Helen under his very nose last night? Mother and daughter Dani and Beth Henderson also remained very dead, and Noose couldn’t get his head around any of it. He’d given their terrible rape and murders so little thought. All he’d been up to was shagging this new sergeant of his, who’d ended up dead herself. He felt like a creepy old man who’d violated some innocent young thing. A thing, yes; just an object that had come bouncing into his closed little world and back out again as quick as that. Her life had come to a painful, undignified end and he’d slept through it all. If he had slept. Maybe he did do it.

  Some serious thought needed to be put into all this. If he had done it, Noose reasoned, then he’d have had to have suffered some sort of illness that made people do bad things during their sleep. He’d certainly heard of cases where husbands, or wives for that matter, had accidentally strangled their loved ones whilst both parties slept. But, to behead someone? The murder weapon was one of his own kitchen knives, so it was not beyond feasibility that nobody else was involved. No signs of forced entry, no introduction of a foreign weapon – Noose could have done this. It didn’t take him long to practically accept that he was the murderer and he began formulating ways of punishing himself. No, suicide was not an option – that would mean he would go unpunished in the eyes of Helen’s family and the law. Quite soundly he laid out a plan of action for pleading his guilt and making the whole trial as easy as possible for her grieving loved ones. After all, that was the right thing to do. Then, he would live out his final years in prison, coming to terms with the violent act he’d been capable of whilst doing something so seemingly innocent as sleeping after a particularly stormy session of one-night stand sex. Maybe he would one day emerge from his long prison sentence and be reintegrated into society. Could that ever be possible now that he had this condition where he murdered people in his sleep? Obviously his life was over, if this was the case. He’d have to be locked up alone in a cell every night for the rest of his life.

  He’d wasted his life. Not just this latest problem – because that’s what it was to him, a problem – but everything about his life in the past. Things had been gone at in the wrong way, and it had led to unpleasant incidents and unnecessary changes. Problems could always be solved, though. Couldn’t they? Whilst he sat here waiting he felt he had time to have a proper think about all this stuff. Here he finally was, the centre of attention at last and with good reason to study his own problems. Forever he’d taken everyone else’s tragedies and issues on board, absorbing them like a flimsy stained sponge that should have been chucked out long ago. They had dragged him down, emptying their sordid baggage onto his shoulders as he’d tried to aid and manage their lives for them with “the law” as his bible. Now the roles were reversed. Should he seize this opportunity and empty all of his shit onto the next person to come through that door? Again he looked over at that door. There was the man’s face, still on the carpet, looking up at him. Ignorance was not bliss, because this face had not gone away. Paying the face attention would not make it retreat either. Only getting lost in his own thoughts, and bringing old things to his vision to look at once more, would help block this face from view. And it did, for a moment, as Noose remembered blabbing about his ex-wife to Helen. Oh how he’d slagged the poor bitch off to the stranger. Would he really not have been arsed had Trout actually formed a relationship with her? Perhaps that would have been for the best, giving her the security and love she had so claimed she needed. Her father would have been pleased that at least some man had come to save her after Noose had done the dirty. Any man! Luckily her father was dead by then, and Noose escaped at least one rollicking. She had been such a drab wife, though, if that is any excuse and clearly Nicola Williams had filled a vacancy. He’d never loved his wife, and he’d never loved Nicola. He’d never loved any woman. This hurt him the most. He’d been close to his mother, of course, and in this respect it could be said he’d loved her. But that is a different kind of love, and Noose had long separated that portion of his affections from the desire side. He both longed to love and be loved at the same time, but as the years had unfolded and a number, albeit a small number, of women had passed through his life he’d shru
nk back more and more in acceptance that he would not experience that kind of love. Naturally, as he entered middle-age, he was not without just cause to think this. The evidence was there when you looked at his shitty marriage and affair with Nicola. Even last night’s romp with Helen was a case in point. Had he in any way led her on? He was unsure, but felt he had somehow taken sexual advantage of her – after all, how could a young attractive woman find him appealing? He was balding, tubby now and generally a bit grubby all round. There was no love involved in this bizarre one-night stand. It had all been about pleasure, and about pain. The whole thing had hurt Noose, certainly, and Helen hadn’t come off lightly, had she? The pleasure had not been worth it, and the pain was all too unwanted to wish to dwell upon. Yet, he couldn’t help but dwell upon it as he sat here waiting for something – anything – to happen. This whole thing had helped manufacture a rock and a hard place situation that he’d rather not have had to face.

  That face on the carpet now looked even more defined. There were eyebrows, one raised, and a distinct curve to the lips. Noose could almost hear the face talking, with a sly lilt, about how funny the whole thing was. Noose didn’t find it funny at all, and this face was mocking him. He got up and put his foot over the face, rubbing and stamping at it in the surety it would go away. Surely this face would go? It did not. Surety turned to hope, turned to rage, turned to despair. Acceptance was not forthcoming, but a blind resign delivered Noose back to his chair. He dropped in it, wondering how long he’d now been waiting here. He didn’t care, so long as he didn’t have to wait much longer. That thought suddenly sparked in him a desire to be kept waiting for infinity, never to have to deal with the predicament he was in. Was he even in a predicament? If indeed he hadn’t beheaded Helen, which was still a possibility, he was a free man and could hopefully go about solving her murder. Perhaps they were linked to the Henderson slayings, and he could pool the whole thing together. This could be his chance to redeem himself in both the eyes of the press and in his own mind. Solve these crimes and be a hero! For so long he had thought himself a failure. Well, when all you read about yourself in the papers day after day is your shortcomings, is it any wonder? He needed to give himself a good shake, straighten his back and sort this pile of crap out. As if he had beheaded Helen in his sleep! It sounded such rubbish – silly, silly rubbish. Bad things had happened, but who cared? At least things had happened and his life wasn’t just a long list of nothing. It all added to the bag, reminding him every so often that he was still alive. His lungs still drew in oxygen, and blood still slid through his brain and heart. He could still use his brain, too, in solving these latest three murders. Three murders – three little, inconsequential murders. Damn! Noose slammed his fist on the table and grunted at himself in exasperation. No murder was inconsequential, when he really sat down and thought it through; but he’d fallen into the habit of thinking a life was just a life. A life was more than just a bag of deady slush to be toyed with and discarded. Noose knew this, and what he hated was the fact he kept having to remind himself of this. That was the price you had to pay when you were exposed to murder after murder for twenty years. And there weren’t just three murders to solve, there were countless. One still at Noose in particular was Lucy Davies. Would he too die before her killer was brought to justice like Peter had done? What did bringing to justice even solve? All it meant was more tax payer money going on sustaining the cosseted life of a cunt who didn’t deserve to exist. Noose was angry, he needed to calm down. It didn’t do to show too much anger in this sort of situation. And, he didn’t want his fellow officers patronisingly suggesting he “calm down”. That would be the worst thing that could happen right now. The face on the carpet had seen his anger.