Halfhead

18

Jo was sleeping with her mouth open, lips pouted, showing off a glimpse of teeth and the soft pink tip of her tongue. Will picked his head up off the pillow and watched her breathing. Slow and gentle. The first time had been wild and furious, the second a lot gentler.

She hadn’t told him what had happened that afternoon.

He pulled his arm out from under her head and Jo shifted, making herself comfortable. Will pulled the duvet up, tucking her in so that only her face showed, framed by an explosion of curly black hair. Then he leant forward and planted a soft kiss on the end of her nose. She wrinkled it and brushed the back of her hand across her face as he slipped out of the bed and into the lounge.

Outside, the rain continued to pound the city into submission. It drummed against the glass, danced on the balcony, wrapped itself around the world for as far as he could see. Low black clouds, laced with reflected sodium-yellow, blanketed his world. Ten thirty on a Saturday night-even with the heating turned up full blast he was overwhelmed by the urge to shiver.

Will picked a tumbler from the coffee table and poured himself another small whisky. Wasn’t as if he had anywhere to go tomorrow. The liquid went down smooth and warm, worked its magic, soothed away the chill.

The terminal was still on-he’d only switched off the screen-so, pushing the discarded socks, pants, and trousers to oneside, he pulled the keyboard onto the coffee table and went back to reading Jo’s notes. She didn’t want to talk about it and he wasn’t going to force her. But he wasn’t prepared to let it go.

Jo’s files were impressively tidy, she even had live footage-captured from Sergeant Nairn’s headset as they went in-all cross-referenced and annotated.

Will spilt the screen and let the footage play on one side as he sifted through the background notes.

Colin Mitchell: twenty-seven, single, no family. He’d had three lots of psychiatric treatment, two for arson and one for assault, even did a short stretch in the Tin.

On the right hand side of the screen the picture crackled with static. That would be the Dragonfly landing. And suddenly the ship’s drop bay was full of green light as weapons came online.

It was too dark for Will to make out anyone’s face as they leapt out into the rain, but he recognized the voices. Sergeant Nairn’s hands popped into view, holding a powered-up Thrummer.

Three years ago Colin Mitchell invites a young woman back to his small flat on the lower south side and gets her stoned on Mouse. When she’s unconscious Colin removes her clothes and ties her to a chair. Then he masturbates over the back of her head. That’s it. No other sexual contact.

When the woman wakes up she kicks up hell and calls the Bluecoats. Colin gets seven months in the Tin for indecent assault and illegal imprisonment, and another round of therapy.

Will watched two figures jog down the corridor, one holding a Bull Thrummer-that would be Dickson, she was the only one cleared to operate siege weaponry-and another with a Whomper. They counted off the doors as they went, until Dickson flattened herself against the wall and made a fist. The one with the Whomper took the other side of the door and gave the same gesture. Nairn nodded and Will got a good view of the hall carpet before the apartment door was kicked in.

The psychological notes on Colin Mitchell were a lot more comprehensive than Will had expected, and he skimmed through them as Nairn and his troops slunk from room to room, weapons at the ready. Their lightsights cast a ghostly green glow across the walls.

Social dysfunction, brief flirtation with VR syndrome during the riots-nothing unusual in that, half the city went down with the damn thing-but mostly Colin’s problems seemed to stem from a general sense of dislocation. The people around him had nothing to do with his life, they were just shadows, they weren’t real.

There was a spare bedroom, towards the rear of the property, the window boarded up, leaving the room in darkness. A dozen cleaned skulls sat on a shelf against the back wall, the bone covered with engraved squiggles. They’d been hollowed out, just like the Kilgours’. You could tell by the way the lightsights shone through the empty sockets and onto the wall behind.

Mitchell’s mother and father had been in therapy, getting treatment for alcoholism and anger management. Referred on by social workers…Will’s breath caught in his throat. Their therapist was Dr Fiona Westfield.

He gulped down the whisky and poured himself another.

No big deal. It was a surprise, that’s all. Hadn’t been expecting to see her name like that.

Bloody woman was like the bogeyman, even dead she still had the power to make his skin crawl.

Will settled back in front of the computer.

Colin Mitchell’s parents never wanted kids, resented the little brat, blamed him for ruining their lives, used that as an excuse to repeatedly beat the hell out of him. During one therapy session the mother claimed her husband was sexually abusing the boy, but there was no evidence. She retracted the statement later, said it was just the drink talking.

A small camp bed sat against one wall, two pairs of chains snaking out onto the plastic-coated mattress.

Colin’s father died from an overdose of H when the boy was eight, and after that his mother caught a bad dose of God. It just meant Colin got beaten more often.

There was a chair in the centre of the bedroom, surrounded by plastic sheeting. Shackles were attached to the arms and legs: big ones, with locking pins down the sides.

Colin’s mother died three and a half years later. Back on the booze, she’d slipped and fallen down the apartment block stairs. Four floors. By the time she reached the bottom she had two shattered legs, a fractured wrist and a broken neck. Colin wasn’t charged, but he went straight from the inquest to a care home.

The troopers on the right-hand side of his screen froze and Will turned the sound up.

Nairn said, ‘Can you hear something?’

The camera made a slow sweep of the room. There was nowhere to hide. No cupboards, nothing under the bed.

A hand swam into view and the picture crackled as Nairn flipped the viewing monocle into place. The screen went black, and when it faded up again the troopers were bright yellow and red balls of heat in the cold room. Another slow sweep, left to right, and then the camera stopped: there was a patch of pale orange on the wall, beneath the shelf with the skulls.

Nairn moved forward and the image on the screen grew. There were two figures, one wrapped round the other. Will couldn’t see the hidden entrance, but Nairn obviously could-he dug his knife into a join in the wall and twisted.

Sudden motion. Swearing. A jumble of limbs. Someone making a run for it. Shouting. The hard crackle of a Field Zapper at full charge. More shouting, the words all running together, then, ‘Jillian? Can you hear me, Jillian?’

Jillian Kilgour, eighteen years old, was curled in a ball on the floor of the hidden alcove.

Someone knelt down next to her and felt for a pulse. The trooper hauled her upright, cradling the young woman in his arms as he checked for wounds: making sure there was nothing life threatening. There was something wrong with the back of Jillian’s head. Will leaned forward in his chair to get a better look, but the picture was too fuzzy. He could see the trooper’s hand come away from the bulge at the base of Jillian’s skull:

‘What the fuck?’ The voice was low and shocked. The trooper stared at the back of the young woman’s head: ‘Oh Jesus Christ…’

And then Jillian’s body was on the floor again, dropped so the person holding her could be sick. The eighteen-year-old just lay there, shivering quietly until someone covered her up.

The other troopers gathered round…and then the signal died, leaving Will with nothing but angry, grey static. He didn’t need to read the duty doctor’s report on Colin Mitchell to guess what happened next. He was given a kicking. Not enough to kill him, or do any serious damage. Just enough to really hurt. The report would say he’d fallen badly when they zapped him. That he’d caught his head on the door handle. That he’d broken a rib on the occasional table. That someone had accidentally stood on his hand hard enough to dislocate all of his fingers.

Will turned down the sound on the film window, waiting for the picture to come back while he called up the hospital report on Jillian Kilgour.

‘What you doing?’ Jo’s voice made him jump. He looked around and she was standing just behind the couch, looking rumpled and sleepy. She hadn’t bothered to dress.

‘Reading your notes on the Kilgour case.’ He pointed at the screen, there was no point in lying.

‘It was horrible.’ She picked the other tumbler off the tabletop. The motion was casual, but it was enough to get Will’s heart, and other parts, throbbing.

‘Want to talk about it?’

Jo shook her head. ‘No.’ She pulled the top off the whisky and filled the glass half-way up.

‘OK.’ He switched off the screen and pushed the keyboard away. He didn’t power down the machine or close the connection, though.

She wandered over to the patio doors and stood there, sipping her drink and staring out into the rain. Will watched transfixed. She was so unselfconscious. There was no way he could have paraded about in the nip like that. Not with the blinds open.

‘He fell down a bit when we arrested him.’

Will nodded, but didn’t say anything.

‘Nairn was all for taking him out on the roof and seeing if the fucker could fly.’ She wrapped an arm round herself, her skin golden caramel in the reflected city light. ‘Had my vote.’

He picked himself up out of the settee and joined her in front of the glass, slipping a hand round her waist. Jo leaned against him, her skin hot to the touch.

‘Jillian Kilgour was dead before we got her back to the Dragonfly. Duty doctor said she was lucky: if she’d lived she’d’ve spent the rest of her life in a tank. Neurological trauma.’ Jo sniffed and Will could see her teeth clamping down on her bottom lip again.

She dragged in a couple of deep breaths and wiped her eyes on the back of her hand. ‘Mitchell thrummed a hole in the back of her head, just about here.’ She tapped Will’s skull at the very back, just above the line of his left ear. ‘Doctor said the hole went straight through to the prefrontal lobe. All the way through.’ She let her hand drop back to her side. ‘He used a hot-glue-gun: fixed a condom to the back of that poor girl’s head.’

Will had a nasty feeling he knew what was coming next.

‘He was fucking her. In the head.’ The tears were flowing freely now. ‘He was sticking his dick in the back of that girl’s head and fucking her. It…It…He…’

Will folded her in his arms and sank to the floor with her, rocking her back and forth until she cried herself dry.