This Is How You Die Read online

  Irene lived in a semi-detached house at the end of a long street. The house was big and at one point had probably cost quite a lot of money, but these days—judging by what surrounded it—anyone brave and stupid enough to live there was welcome to it for the price of a padlock and a baseball bat.

  When Irene answered the door, Lester thought he had the wrong house. She was nothing like her former self, and drawing a resemblance between the two would be like searching for recognition in the before and after photos of a meth addict. She looked very tired. She had probably spent nearly a decade sleeping with one eye open, alert and awake to the sound of any movement.

  The house was horrible, the street was worse, and the village was the modern-day extension of hell, but Lester doubted she cared or even acknowledged any of that. This woman had been through much worse, so much more than a gang of delinquent teenagers or drug dealing neighbors could ever throw at her.

  “I don’t sleep these days,” she said when she caught him looking at her.

  That much was obvious, and he understood that “these days” probably stretched back a good fifteen years. The irony was that while those years had no doubt dragged on slowly, feeling like centuries, the night she lost her family and her hope probably felt like yesterday.

  He gave her a sympathetic and pitiful smile and she did her best to reciprocate, but smiling was alien to her. In her pictures, she had one of those lively faces that seemed almost constantly prepped for a smile, as if she spent her life in a perpetual state of joy, but that smile and that face were now a distant memory.

  She showed him into the living room, a small and musty room that light was barely allowed to enter. Not only had the curtains been drawn, but there was a set of blinds underneath them that had also been closed. The kitchen door was open and, from where he stood, Lester could see that the windows above the kitchen sink had also been covered, while a square of glass in the top half of the back door had been taped up.

  “The light does me no favors,” she said, following his eyes. “Please, sit down.” She gestured to the sofa, which had seen better days and probably had several generations of creatures living inside it, but he didn’t want to be rude and so he perched himself on the edge and watched her as she sat next to him, curling her legs underneath her.

  “I still see him when I close my eyes,” she said. “It’s like I’m stuck on repeat, always going back to that day, telling myself that I should have done more, that I was to blame and that it was all my fault.”

  “That’s not true, you know that.”

  “I know, or at least I should know, but it’s not always easy convincing myself. I mean, he didn’t kill me, he kept me alive for a reason, so maybe it was all about me.”

  Lester shook his head but he didn’t elaborate; to do so would mean dragging her dead son through the mud. Her sane mind knew that it had always been about her eldest son, that his bullying had driven Herman to do what he did, but she struggled to grasp that sane part of herself.

  “Darren was alive at that point,” Irene said, a tear rolling down her cheek as her already bloodshot eyes reddened even more. “I didn’t know what he was going to do, but when he tied me up and left me there, Darren was still alive.”

  Lester nodded. “You couldn’t have known. You had more important things to worry about.”

  He didn’t want to drag her back to reality, to remind her that she couldn’t have possibly contemplated what Herman would have done when she was surrounded by the blood and flesh of her husband and her youngest child, but it was the only way to stop the guilt. Guilt had obviously eaten her over the years and that, combined with a constant state of paranoia, had turned her into the pathetic excuse for a woman that she had become. Some people sought justice and revenge, some people turned to drugs or drink to block out the memories, some people killed themselves, some people just sucked it up and managed to get on with their lives. Then there were people like Irene. They were the ones who had been to the brink of suicide and drug addiction, but had refused both. They were the ones for whom death or inebriation were the only options, but couldn’t bring themselves to do either and therefore just remained in a constant state of purgatory.

  “So …” She lifted her eyes and looked directly into his. He didn’t see pain there, he didn’t see anger. He saw emptiness. “What do you want from me?”

  He told her about his theory, watching as her entire body seemed to twitch when he mentioned Herman’s name. “Not a lot has been written about that night from your perspective,” he added. “You confirmed their suspicions, but after that …” he shrugged and allowed himself to trail off.

  “After that I disappeared.”

  Lester nodded.

  “The police stopped caring,” she explained. “Like you said, they got their man—boy,” she corrected, expressing great distaste as her tongue curled around that word. “That was all they wanted. It was the press who tried to track me down. The people who wanted to write articles, film documentaries. My parents even got a request for someone looking to sell off items in my home.”

  She gave him a look of disbelief at that point, as though she had never heard of or imagined anything more disgusting than that. He gave her an understanding smile in reply, but he had heard a lot worse.

  “I guess there is no end to the sickness of the human race.”

  Lester nodded again—she was onto something there. “So, you never did any interviews, any documentaries?”

  She shook her head. “They found me in the beginning, when I was still living in that house, but when I moved I didn’t tell anyone. Except my parents, of course. This house is rented in a false name and paid for with cash. The landlord doesn’t have an issue with that, and I don’t think that he would find a tenant otherwise. It’s not like I’m going to wreck the place.” They both looked around, but she clearly wasn’t embarrassed by the state of the house. It wasn’t a home. It was a hideout, a refuge.

  “Why didn’t you just stay with your parents?”

  “I couldn’t do that to them, and they—they just handle things differently.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “You’ve met them, right? There’s no grief there, not on the surface anyway. They hide everything. They go around smiling, laughing and joking as if nothing ever happened. I can’t do that.”

  “I understand.”

  Irene sighed and slipped her legs out from underneath her. She took a cigarette pack from the armchair and clawed one out with her trembling fingers before offering the pack to Lester. When he refused, she put it to one side, lit the stick in her mouth, and then watched him as she sucked and inhaled. “So,” she said, breathing a cloud of smoke into the fetid air. “You’re the first person I’ve spoken to about this in years. What is it you want to know?”

  “I want to know everything,” he explained. “We know he did it, we know who he is, that’s all irrelevant now. I want to know why he did it and what he is.”

  “I don’t like the way you say is,” she said.

  “I think he’s still out there,” Lester said, seeing her shudder. “But don’t worry, he won’t harm you.”

  “How can you be so sure?”

  “He’s moved on.”

  She nodded, but she didn’t look convinced. “There’s not much I can tell you,” she began, her eyes on the tip of her cigarette, which she held loosely between two fingers on her right hand. “He took us by surprise and before we knew what was happening, he had beaten my husband and my little boy—”

  “I know all of that,” Lester cut in, keeping the painful memories to a minimum. “I want to know how he was with you, what did he want from you? I mean, what I don’t understand is that there was something there, something that drew you to him. He was fascinated with you, but there was no sexual assault, right? Did he even touch you?”

  She shook her head softly, a half-smile on her face. “You know the weird thing? I’ve seen the documentary and I’ve read the stories. Sometimes I t
hink that if it’s in my head all the time anyway, why not try to embrace it, right?”

  Lester shrugged.

  “Well, they all say that he had something for me. That I was his crush. There are even some who say I was the reason he went to my house that night.”

  “But you don’t think that?” Lester asked, intrigued.

  “Of course not. Some of them also say that he touched me, some even go further than that. I suppose it makes sense for them to say that—hell, it would make sense to me if that had happened, but he didn’t so much as hold my hand.” She paused to take a long draw of her cigarette, the misery at the memory now turning into a bitterness as she spoke about the boy who had ruined her life.

  “It wasn’t sexual. It was weird. I mean, he just sat there and talked to me, ranting and raving like some cynical old man.”

  Lester nodded; it had been Irene’s statements about that cynicism that led him to link Herman to The Masquerade in the first place.

  “But there was something else, something in his eyes when he looked at me. It was like…” she shrugged. “I’m not sure. Pity maybe. Regret. Loss.” She took another draw, another inhalation, another billow of smoke into the fetid swamp. She raised her eyes to look at Lester as something seemed to dawn on her. “It was like I was his mother, or like he wanted me to be his mother.”

  That surprised Lester. “His mother?”

  She nodded slowly and watched as her cigarette burned to the end, and as a cloying stench filled the musty air when the flame began to eat into the filter. “I think he wanted my company, my approval.” They locked eyes at that point; pity on her face, realization on his. “I think he wanted my love.”

  ——

  Lester had never looked into Herman’s mother. It had never been an angle he had even considered. She was gone, out of the picture, probably living it up in a disturbingly British part of Spain with a disturbingly hairy Spanish man, or shacking up with her second husband, who proved to be just as much of a disappointment as the first. There was also a chance that she was dead, just like Herman’s father, but there was nothing on record and if that was the case then Herman certainly hadn’t known. She had simply disappeared out of his life, and that, Lester realized as he left the stagnating town Irene called home, was probably a sizable part of the big picture he had overlooked.

  Sociopaths weren’t created because their mothers left them. If that were the case, then the world would be an even more horrible place to live than it already was, but if it didn’t explain the cause, it certainly went some way to finding a solution. Lester had known nothing about Herman other than his name, which was now irrelevant; his father, who was now dead; and his house, which was now ash. But with this new link, it opened up a whole new world.

  He discovered that the mother’s name was Gertrude, or Trudy for short. The name made him wince and he wondered if it was she who had chosen Herman’s name, perhaps as a way of projecting her own misery onto her newborn child. There were records of where she was born and where she gave birth to Herman, all of which were angles previously explored. But what he couldn’t find was any information on what had happened to Gertrude around the time she had disappeared.

  The police reports said she had been reported missing by Herman’s father. She had gone to the shop in the morning and had failed to return. Lester saw cases like that all the time. They were much more common than they should have been, but this one was different. He remembered looking into a similar case a few years back. The father had gone to buy some cigarettes in the morning and hadn’t returned. The mother phoned the police just five hours later, as worried as you would expect her to be. But this, this was different. According to the report, the shops were a ten-minute walk away from Herman’s home, but at no point did Herman’s father attempt to find her himself, and he didn’t phone the police until forty-eight hours later.

  Why had it taken him so long?

  Trudy worked at a local factory, peeling potatoes and stacking boxes for much of the day. Herman’s father also worked, so it would have been difficult for them to juggle their child and their careers. Their jobs didn’t pay well enough for them to hire a nanny, and as far as Lester knew, there were no relatives nearby other than the uncle, someone who Herman had clearly despised. None of it stacked up, and as with Herman before her, there was little information to help him. It was as though the entire family worked on the fringes of society, trying their best to stay out of the records and away from the public eye.

  “Anything interesting?”

  Lester looked up from the computer screen, tucked away on a partitioned desk at Whitegate Police Station. A local officer named Matthews was standing above him with a cup of coffee in one hand, a biscuit in the other, and a look of intrigue on his face. As much as Lester hated this little town, he hated the police station and its officers even more. They were cleaners more than anything else—people whose job it was to skim the scum off the surface of the fetid swamp and then stand back as others delved deeper. They dealt with delinquents, addicts, and domestic abusers, and when anything interesting happened, the detectives were called in and they were shoved to one side. This turned them into nosy, annoying little twerps who insisted on offering their worthless two cents in the hope of getting a buck in return.

  “Anything I can help you with?” Matthews pushed.

  Lester thought he would humor him. “You knew that Herman had a mother who ran out on him, right?”

  “Of course,” Matthews said confidently, looking like he was about to step above his station and claim some underserved respect. “She went out one day to get some milk or something. Never came back.”

  “Did you know how long it took his dad to phone the police?”

  He shrugged. “In these cases? I don’t know, usually a few hours. I mean, the shops are only—”

  “Forty-eight hours,” Lester cut in.

  Matthews seemed surprised. “You’re shitting me?”

  Lester shook his head. “She also worked for most of the day, and so did he, yet I can’t find any information on who looked after Herman during that time.”

  “Well then.” Matthews straightened up and looked like he was going to say something profound, which Lester knew was unlikely. “That is a toughy, isn’t it?”

  Matthews breathed out deeply and then took a long sip of his coffee. He made several lip-smacking noises, followed by a long sigh, and when his eyes finally returned to Lester, and when his mouth finally opened to do something other than ask questions and feed his face, he simply said, “A toughy indeed.”

  “Well, thanks for all your help,” Lester said, doing as little as possible to hide the sarcasm. “I’ll let you know if I need anything else.”

  Matthews paused and looked Lester over, seemingly trying to work out if he had been insulted or not and what his next move should be. Lester hadn’t forgotten this wasn’t his territory, and he knew he was stepping on other people’s shoes, but as distrusting of them as he was, and as much as he walked around thinking he owned the place, none of them stood in his way. That was another issue with small-town cops—they had been stuck in a rut for so long they no longer cared. It was just a job to them, and Lester couldn’t blame them for that. They didn’t deal with murderers, rapists, or even armed robbers; they dealt with the bottom rung of society’s worst, and no matter what they did, the ones who were destined to climb that ladder and commit bigger crimes would still go on to do so.

  Eventually Matthews walked away and Lester watched him sit behind his desk, put his feet up, and then pick up his tablet and begin to browse his Facebook profile, playing the latest mind-numbing game and generally doing whatever he could to avoid doing any actual work. Lester watched him for a few moments and then decided he needed to get some air—just being in the same room as Officer Gump and his numb-nutted friends was sapping the life out of him.

  He took a stroll down to the local park, a hotbed of dog-walkers through the day, a place for the local yokels duri
ng the night. The poorly manicured lawns, overgrown hedges, and graffitied trees were a testament to a town that had stopped caring. At one time, maybe even during Herman’s time, this had probably been a decent area, with lush green lawns that stretched on as far as the sun shone, but those green lawns were now dry, patchy, and covered in dog shit and broken beer bottles.

  He sat on a park bench, which, according a number of misspelled, poorly penned graffiti etchings, had at one time been party to three different varieties of the name Maddison (or one girl who hadn’t decided how to spell her name), a promiscuous boy with a small penis whose sexual failings had been scrawled for all to see, and an unfortunate girl whose name looked like a brand of cheap wine.

  Lester had only been in the town for a couple days and already he could understand why Herman had done what he did. He was clearly a bright kid, and for someone like that to be stuck in a place like this, surrounded by these people, was enough to send anyone over the edge.

  Lester was interrupted from his thoughts when his phone rang. First he ignored it, realizing that no news was ever good news and he’d had enough bad news to last him a lifetime. Then curiosity got the better of him so he decided the least he could do was take a look at who was calling. As soon as he reached that point, he knew there was no turning back.

  It was his mother, who, as pleasant as she was, never had any good news for him. She was listed on his phone as Banshee due to her high-pitched voice—brought on by a throat condition—and the fact that she only rang him when someone was dead or dying. Four years ago, she called to tell him the family dog had died; then, almost in yearly intervals, she informed him about his father’s passing, his uncle’s demise, and the time that his cousin was diagnosed with a terminal condition. He dreaded to think what news she had for him this time, but he took solace in the fact that very few members of his family were still alive.