Feeding Frenzy #3
Oughtn’t he to be telling the police all this?
He might be putting himself and all but one of his colleagues at risk by not doing so.
But what excuse could he give for not having come forward earlier?
And what reason could he offer for having got rid of the book when they asked to see it?
He could say it had been stolen, he supposed, gone missing from the break room.
He wasn’t much good at lying, but suddenly he knew what to do.
He would write an anonymous letter, give the police what information he could, but explain that he didn’t want to get involved.
The letter was harder to compose than he’d thought.
It took several attempts before he was satisfied, after which he spent a laborious hour writing it out in block capitals.
The exercise made him feel oddly depressed, and he sat staring at the sealed envelope in the stealthily darkening flat before the effort of leaning forward to reach for the telephone produced a sigh that was more like a groan.
On a whim he dialled a number and listened to four distant rings before a weary voice said, “Hello?”
“Ange, it’s me.”
“Adam. Why are you ringing so late? I was just about to go to bed.”
“Is it late?” Adam said, and angled his watch under the desk lamp whose light was all that held back the darkness. “It’s only quarter past ten.”
“I go to bed earlier these days. It was only your influence that kept me up till midnight.”
My sparkling personality, you mean, he wanted to joke, but didn’t think he’d be able to cope with the silence that might provoke.
“Sorry,” he said. “I just thought you might have rung to find out how my job was going.”
“The bookshop thing, you mean. Yeah, sorry, it’s just been full on here, you know what it’s like. Laura had gym yesterday, then swimming today, then I took her to the Pasta Parlour for tea.”
“Very nice,” he said, trying to swallow his bitterness. “How is my gorgeous girl?”
“Which one of us do you mean?”
The darkness in the corners seemed to swell and thicken as sourness rose in him. He couldn’t help blurting, “Well, you’ve made it clear you’re not my girl any more, so of course I mean Laura.”
There was a silence, then a thin sigh. “Don’t get like this, Adam.”
“Like what?”
“I can do without you going off on one just before I go to bed.”
He closed his eyes for a moment, then said, “Sorry, I’m just feeling a bit lonely, that’s all. It’s been a tough day. Someone was murdered in the alley by the shop last night.”
“Oh, how awful. Do they know who it was?”
“If they do they haven’t told us. Anyway I don’t want to talk about that. I just want to know how Laura is.”
“She’s fine. Doing well at school and gym. Lively as ever.”
“Is she looking forward to seeing me on Saturday?”
“I’m sure she is. She hasn’t said so.”
“Okay. Well, I’ll be there at the usual time. Give her a kiss from me, won’t you?”
“Of course I will. Good night, Adam.”
“Night.”
To stave off the despair that he knew would anchor him to the sagging armchair all night if he allowed it to, Adam forced himself to the light switch and then the bookcase.
Despite what had happened that day, he still found the gratuitous titles on the lurid spines of his paperbacks oddly comforting.
Here was Cannibal Vampire, here Revenge of the Face-Eater, here The Demon Rapist. Adam ran his finger along the spines until it came to rest, seemingly of its own accord, on Night of the Blood Fiend.
He hooked the top of the spine and liberated the book from the shelf.
The cover depicted a figure, whose face was in shadow aside from its pointed teeth, reaching for the reader with hooked, blood-coated talons.
Angela had never been able to understand Adam’s fondness for books she’d described as having no literary merit.
Or more specifically, she had been unable to understand why a man who preferred classical music to more modern styles could demean himself by choosing to read trash.
As far as Adam was concerned, her inability to comprehend what made him tick was ultimately responsible for their split.
Not that the decision to part had been his, or even mutual.
Despite his and Angela’s failure to connect he had been content with his lot.
They had (had had) a nice house, a car, a lovely, happy, well-adjusted daughter, good friends.
The failure of his business had been a blow, but it was something they could have overcome, if they had only tightened their belts and pulled together.
But Angela had not been prepared to do that.
She had used the collapse of Strings as a catalyst to confess she didn’t love him, was no longer happy in their relationship, and that she saw no future for them together.
And so it had ended, and despite the fact that she was the one who had rocked the boat, he had been the one out on his ear.
He didn’t realise he was clutching Night of the Blood Fiend so tightly until he heard it creak.
He turned away from the bookcase, and as soon as his eye lighted on the letter he had written to the police, he realised why he could never send it.
Even if they didn’t identify who the fingerprints which must be all over it belonged to, they would carry out a hand-writing analysis of everyone who worked at Hanson’s, or perhaps simply question the store’s employees.
Jacinta and Oliver knew he’d been reading Satan’s Beast and that would be enough.
By the end of the week he would be in a police interview room, desperately trying to convince a cynical audience he was innocent of murder.
In a rage bordering on self-loathing, he crossed to the armchair, snatched up the letter and ripped it to shreds.
After that there was nothing to do except go to bed, which he did, taking Night of the Blood Fiend for company.
He read with a feverish intensity, until the fiend in question had eviscerated a young mother and fed her baby to the family alsation, handcuffed a girl to a railway track and listened to her screaming for mercy until a train dismembered her, and ripped the face off a pizza delivery boy with his bare hands.
The series of killings, which seemed as distant from reality as the stories about a teenage witch and her talking cat which Laura liked, served to soak up the anger in his gut and allow sleep to take its place.
He could think of several reasons why the previous day’s headache was waiting for him with added intensity when the alarm roused him on Wednesday.
Perhaps he had strained his eyes from reading; perhaps spores from the lumps of damp in his flat were slowly poisoning him; perhaps his stress had coagulated into a knot of pain in his skull.
The headache smelled of ink and paper, which made him dread getting to work where the odour, and perhaps therefore the pain too, would be doubled.
In lieu of breakfast he swallowed four Nurofen which he sluiced down with several pints of water, and by the time he arrived at work he was grateful to be left with nothing but a vague buzzing in his ears, like the fading aftermath of a pop concert.
He was more aware than ever on this third morning at Hanson’s of the growing familiarity between his work mates.
Bizarrely it seemed that yesterday’s terrible events had encouraged his colleagues to seek solace and unity with one another - or at least the ones who had gone out drinking last night as a remedy for what they had been through that day, which seemed to be everybody except him.
Because of his eagerness to rid himself of Satan’s Beast, he had sneaked away before Jacinta, or anyone else, could put him in the awkward position of having to refuse her (their) invitation a second time.
He had no doubt he would have been invited along, even though Jacinta was barely acknowledging him this morning.
She was chatting away with a round-faced, bespectacled girl called Ellie, who reminded Adam of Penfold from the Danger Mouse cartoons.
He had no reason to feel like a pariah, he told himself, but at the shift meeting before work he felt as though he might as well have been invisible.
No one asked for his contribution, nor left a gap into which he might add one – not that he had anything to say.
He was glad when the meeting was over and it was time to work, though he felt so anonymous that he was almost surprised when Gordon, the ‘leader’ of the day, turned to him and told him he would be spending the morning in the Book Sorting room.
The ‘Sort’ room was cavernous and maze-like, filled with rows of metal shelves, each labelled with an index number, on to which books and magazines were stacked.
In one corner was a desk and computer terminal.
On the far side of the room a ramp led down to a loading bay where the deliveries came in.
Unlike the shop floor, the Sort room was drab and dusty, the concrete floor littered with shreds of cardboard, bits of polystyrene packing, screwed up chunks of brown tape.
There was a large table in a gap between two of the shelves and a heavy fire door between the Sort room and the shop floor, which could only be opened by tapping in the four-digit combination on the locking panel by the handle.
For the most part Adam worked alone, though occasionally someone would come in to fill a trolley with books or fetch a box that had been pre-consigned to a particular section.
Each time the fire door opened he would hear chatter and music from the shop floor as if there was a party going on out there.