The Smiling Man Read online

  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.

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  I: Midnight City

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  II: Red Eyes

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  III: China Town

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  IV: Vanishing Act

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  V: Came Back Haunted

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  VI: Wolf Like Me

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  VII: Ultraviolence

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  VIII: A Pair of Brown Eyes

  Chapter 1

  IX: Turn on the Light

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  X: Demon in Profile

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  XI: Something to Remember Me By

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  XII: Kill For Love

  Chapter 1

  About the Author

  Also by Joseph Knox

  Copyright

  THE SMILING MAN

  Joseph Knox

  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 dis
covered 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

  The heat that year was annihilating. The endless, fever dream days passed slowly, and afterwards you wondered if they’d even been real. Beneath the hum of air conditioners, the chink of ice in glasses, you could almost hear it. The slow-drip of people losing their minds. The city was brilliantly lit, like an unending explosion you were expected to live inside, and the nights, when they finally came, felt hallucinatory, charged with electricity. You could see the sparks – the girls in their summer clothes, the boys with their flashing white teeth – everywhere you went.

  There’s a particular look on their faces between the hours of midnight and 6 a.m. Falling in and out of bars, kissing on street corners, swinging their arms along the pavements. Whatever’s happened to them before is long gone and, for a few hours at least, they feel like tomorrow might never come. Most of them are students, sheltering from the economic downturn in degree courses they’ll never pay off. The others work minimum-wage jobs and live for the weekend. When I see them they’re living in the moment, for better or worse, and the doubt, their default setting during the daytime, is replaced by some kind of certainty. I was on my 120th night shift in a row. Six months into what felt like a life sentence.

  My own kind of certainty.

  So I watched their faces, the young people, between the hours of midnight and 6 a.m. I watched life literally passing me by. I nodded when they did, smiled when they smiled, and tried to stay in the moment. I kept my head down and took the positives, the sparks, wherever I could get them.

  We were already on Wilmslow Road when the call came through. An enormous interconnecting through-line, it runs almost six miles, linking the moneyed properties south of town with the struggling city centre. It’s the busiest bus route in Europe and always alive with taxis, double-deckers, commuters and light. And lately, with fires that someone had been setting in the steel dustbins lining the road. Because these fires were low priority, likely meaningless, and always set after dark, they fell to us, the night shift.

  There were only two permanent members of the team.

  Young detectives rotated through, just to say they’d done it, and some of the no-hope floaters did a few shifts a month to cover our days off, but permanent night duty meant one of two things. No life or no career. In my few years on the force, I’d managed to satisfy both requirements.

  The dustbin fire was already out when we got there. My partner and I arrived to smouldering cinders, asked some questions and had begun to pack it up when we saw a crowd gathering on the other side of the road. I checked the time and drifted through the traffic towards them.

  They were preparing a midnight vigil for a kid called Subhi Seif. Supersize to his friends. Until a few hours before, Supersize had been an eighteen-year-old fresher, living in a city for the first time in his life. Then he’d seen a girl being mugged and gone after the man who did it. He’d run into the road without looking for traffic and been obliterated beneath the wheels of a bus.

  The mugger got away.

  Alongside the torches, UV lights and flowers already laid in tribute, ten or so of Supersize’s friends were standing marking the spot. They played sad songs from their phones and passed sweating cans of beer to keep cool. I reminded them not to stray out into the road themselves, then crossed back to the car where my partner was waiting. We drove an unmarked matt-black BMW that criminals could still spot at a glance. Mainly because of the man usually crammed into the passenger side. My superior officer, Detective Inspector Peter Sutcliffe. At a glance he could only look like a cop or a criminal, and I still wasn’t sure which was closer to the truth.

  ‘How are the Chicken McNuggets?’ he said, not looking up from the sport section. Sutcliffe was one of life’s great nature–nurture debates. Was he a born shit, or had he just grown into one because of his unfortunate name? His suit jacket, filled to breaking point by his body, looked water-damaged with sweat, and he was giving off so much heat that we sat with the doors wide open.

  ‘What’s on the radio?’ I said, nodding at the scanner, the reason he’d waved me back over the road.

  He turned a page, sniffed. ‘The Hamburglar’s struck again.’ I waited and he sighed, folded the paper. ‘It was sexual harassment, or assault, or something …’

  ‘Sexual harassment or something?’

  Sutcliffe’s face, neck and body were swollen in odd, ever-shifting places, and his skin was deathly pale. He looked like he’d survived an embalming. We never used his full name, just called him Sutty to avoid distressing the public any further.

  ‘Jesus Christ, this heat.’ He ran a hand through his glistening, thinning hair. ‘Feels like I’ve had a blood transfusion from Freddie fucking Mercury.’ He looked up, remembered I was there and gave me a yellow smile. ‘You know me, Aid, I zone out as soon as I hear anything “sexual”. We’re going to Owens Park, though, if you wanna crack on …’

  Sexual harassment or something.

  The only thing Sutty hated more than young women was me. I watched him as he began applying the alcoholic skin sanitizer that he used compulsively, whenever I got in or out of the car. It made him look like he was rubbing his hands together with glee. I gave him a smile to keep things interesting. Then I indicated and pulled out into the road.

  2

  It was almost midnight when we arrived at Owens Park. The largest halls of residence in the city and home to more than two thousand students, most of them first years. Set in spacious, leafy grounds, the campus comprises five main blocks, including one tower which can be seen from the street, glowering out over the trees. Grey buildings clash hard with green surroundings. The baby-boomer wet dream. It had been built to last in the sixties but was looking its age now. There was talk of tearing the lot down and starting from scratch but it would be a shame when they finally got around to it. So much of the city already looked like a building site.

  I parked up and looked at Sutty.

  ‘You coming?’

  ‘That’s a personal question. Ju
st give us a call if her knicker-drawer needs searching.’ He returned to his paper. ‘You’re always so good with the little girls …’

  I got out of the car, ignoring his tone, frankly grateful not to be taking him with me. Sutty and I were two different kinds of bad cop. Our being partnered together was a sort of punishment for us both, and we each tried to make things as difficult as possible for the other. It was the only thing we had in common.

  I walked through the gate. Followed the stark white lights, blazing in the darkness. I smelt the freshly cut grass and felt a flicker of excitement. I’d never lived here but had visited a few times when I was younger, crashing parties, seeing friends. It was strange to think that I wasn’t in touch with any of them now, that dozens of people must have occupied their rooms, their beds, their lives, in the intervening years. For a moment I felt like I was walking into my past, going through a gateway into Neverland. I heard a scream of laughter and saw a teenage girl run by, being chased by a boy with a super soaker. Looking over my shoulder, I watched them melt into the darkness, still laughing. It reinforced a cruel, universal truth. I would age. Owens Park would always be eighteen.

  I consulted the campus map, found the block I was looking for, buzzed a first-floor flat and waited. The grounds were eerily quiet now and I turned to look around. Felt the latent power of a day’s heat, humming up from the grass. Across the path stood another firm, grey block of buildings – lit windows glaring at me. I heard the bolt of the door click and turned to open it.

  3

  I went through the hallway. Past some street bikes, under a bare light bulb and up the stairs. The block was badly ventilated, built decades before in a city where heatwaves were unimaginable. I felt the sweat spiking out of my skin. There were listless, conversational voices behind closed doors. Adolescent smells of deodorant, drink and drugs.

  It felt like a pressure cooker.

  On the first-floor landing there was a teenage boy, pacing back and forth. He was black. Handsome and wearing a smart, dark tracksuit. He took a swig from a large, frosted glass and frowned when he saw me.