Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 127, No. 5. Whole No. 777, May 2006

Colour Me Blood by Jerry Sykes

Jerry Sykes’s work has appeared once previously in EQMM (“Symptoms of Loss”; 4/2000) and he has had stories in a number of other magazines and anthologies, including World’s Finest Mystery Stories. He is a two-time winner of the British Crime Writers’ Association’s Short Story Dagger. In early 2007 he will add a novel to his list of published writings. See Lose This Skin (Five Star Press).

The side of the building had been painted in a thin coat of white emulsion, but the solid colours of more than a decade’s worth of graffiti still showed through the paint like blood vessels under pale Irish skin. In front of the wall, a tall scruff of a man with thick knots of dark hair was making shapes in the emulsion with a piece of charcoal. His name was Rob Blake, a local artist, and he had been commissioned by the local residents’ association to create a mural on the side of the Community Centre.

Surrounding him in a loose arc, all ADD head jerks and hot feet, was a group of around ten children aged between twelve and fourteen, holding in their hands face masks and cans of spray paint in a rainbow of colours. The idea was that once the artist had laid out the basic outline of the mural on the wall, the kids would then fill in the larger shapes to create the solid cast of the image, leaving the artist to add the final details later.

Across the street from the Community Centre, Detective Sergeant Marnie Stone sat and watched from the open window of her old blue Saab. In the centre of the group surrounding the artist, little more than a short head taller than the children, she could see Kate Phillips, one of the hardier members of Camden’s Social Services department and an old friend. After a couple of minutes, Marnie called out her name and stuck her hand in the air, but, like the children, Kate seemed fascinated with the workings of the artist, the fluid motion of his hand, the beats of creation, and appeared not to have heard. Marnie could not see much of what was happening through the forest of shuffling limbs, just the occasional glimpse of the hand leaking sinuous lines of soft carbon, and so she had no choice but to sit back and wait.

Marnie had read about the project in the local paper and was curious to see if it would lead to a reduction in crime on the estate, as had been promised in the tenants’ association’s pitch to the police and the council. There were a couple of faces that she knew for a fact were responsible for a string of robberies and muggings in the area, she had just not been able to gather sufficient evidence, and so at least a couple of old people would be able to walk home in peace tonight. But she would be fooling herself if she thought it would go further than that.

A few minutes later, the artist stood up to stretch his back and the spell he held over his audience was broken. Kate glanced around and saw Marnie watching them. She stooped and said something to one of the kids nearest her, and then walked over to the Saab. The closer she came, Marnie noticed, the deeper the lines that bracketed her mouth became. But then it had never surprised Marnie that social workers appeared to age faster than the rest of the world, including police officers.

“Hello, Marnie, what are you doing out here?” asked Kate, smiling. “You’re not going to arrest Rob, are you?”

“You mean that vandal trying to make the estate a better place to live?” replied Marnie, reflecting the smile. “Sure, I just wanted to see who his accomplices were first...”

“Ooh, don’t be cruel,” replied Kate, resting her hand on the lip of the door.

“What’s it going to be, anyway?” asked Marnie, pointing towards the Community Centre.

“A warning about the perils of drink and drugs,” said Kate. “There’s going to be the usual logo, Keep It Clean, and then a street scene with kids and families and stuff like that. I don’t know, I think I also heard Rob say something about a large bin with needles and guns sticking out of it or something...”

“And here’s me thinking Walt Disney was dead,” said Marnie.

“Hey, don’t knock it,” Kate chastised her. “If it gives these kids some stake in the estate then it’ll be worth it.”

“Yeah, I know,” agreed Marnie, glancing away. She still had her doubts, but she also knew that she would never be able to win an argument with Kate. She started the engine and put the car in gear. “Anyway, I better be getting back to the station. I just thought I’d drop by and see how you were getting on...”

“Much better than I thought,” said Kate, nodding. “There are far more kids here than I thought there would be... Including one or two I never expected to see in a million years.”

“Yeah, I know who you mean,” said Marnie. “So just remember to count all the paint cans at the end of the night...”

Kate gave her a look of mock admonishment, and then broke into a smile. “Go and chase some real villains,” she said.

The children had been filling in shapes for a little more than ten minutes when the first argument started. Calum Breen, a short kid with dark hair and a pronounced lower lip that made him look like he was sulking all the time, a mask that suited his character to the ground, had been assigned a couple of letters at the end of the slogan, but what he wanted to do was something a bit more artistic, or something a bit more real, as he put it.

“Why can’t I do one of the people, or even some of the background?” he asked, a sneer pushing his lip out further.

“Because that’s just the way it worked out,” replied Blake, wishing that Kate was still there with him. Five minutes earlier she had told him that she had to go and see a client on the estate but would be back in an hour. He was not used to dealing with a bunch of kids on his own and, although he was loath to admit it to himself, having her there made him feel safer.

“But I don’t want to do the letters,” replied Calum.

“Well, how about you just do one of the letters and then we move everyone around,” said Blake. “That way everyone’ll get to do a figure and a letter, or a bit of background, or whatever...”

“He’s just scared of getting it wrong because he can’t read,” called out a kid in the centre of the group.

“There’s no need for that,” said Blake.

“Yeah, piss off,” said Calum.

“Come on, let’s not fight about it,” said Blake. He could feel the group starting to slip out of his grasp, but he wasn’t quite sure what to do about it.

The two kids shuffled around in the pack for a brief moment, alternating between hiding behind their colleagues and stepping out into makeshift clearings, before squaring up to one another. Blake waited until the last moment, fearful of wounding their pride, perhaps, and then stepped between them with his palms raised. And just stood there, still and silent, waiting for them to return to the growing spread of colour on the wall. Long minutes later, egos satisfied, the pair traded final insults and then broke up and returned to the task at hand. Blake folded his arms and waited to make certain that it was indeed all over, and then stepped over to watch Calum work. It did not take him long to realise that behind the brash tongue the kid had a natural talent and that perhaps he should give him a break and let him have a bit more input on the project. Trouble was, he would have to do it without looking like he was cutting out the other kids.

But fifteen minutes later, two minutes after the kids had traded shapes, Calum had another complaint.

“How come we’re just doing a picture of the estate, anyway? It’s pretty boring, don’t you think? I mean, we live here all the time. Why can’t we do something a bit more interesting?”

Blake sighed. “I thought we talked about this.”

“What about a beach with horses running through the surf,” suggested Calum. “I don’t know, just something different...”

“I thought we agreed to do a mural of what we wanted the estate to look like,” said Blake.

“Calum wants it to look like a building site with sand and shit,” piped up a small kid from the centre of the group.

“I never said that,” replied Calum, looking for the source.

“Clubbers sleeping off their highs from the night before,” said another kid, his idea of a beach.

“No, that’s not the kind of beach I mean,” protested Calum, still looking for the source of the first voice.

“Grannies pumping coins into slot machines,” suggested another, stretching the beach connection to breaking point.

“What the hell is wrong with you people,” squealed Calum. “You’ve got the chance to bring a bit of colour into your lives and what do you do? Paint a cartoon version of what you’ve already got. Jesus, give it some imagination, won’t you?”

“Imagine this,” said one of the kids, giving him a finger.

“This is for all of us, not just for you,” said another.

“Yeah, piss off and find your own wall,” said yet another.

With faceless jibes coming at him from all directions, Calum felt a sickness rise in his throat. He took a deep breath and tried to shake it loose, dampen the tension, but it just seemed to make things worse. Seconds later, past frustration, he turned and pointed his can at the wall, pressed down on the button and held it there, as if that could relieve the pressure within himself. Dark blue paint bubbled and frothed on the wall and a thin trail soon snaked down through the white emulsion.

“Oh, for Christ’s sake, Calum,” said Blake.

“I knew he’d turn it all to shit,” said one of the kids.

Calum continued to press down on the button.

“Give me the can,” said Blake, his long fingers beckoning. But Calum just ignored him, and after one more polite request, Blake stepped forward and slammed the can out of his hand.

Calum snarled at him and watched the can as it bounced and rattled on the ground, and then stormed off across the estate.

Blake watched him go, and then ran forward a couple of steps and kicked the can into the wall as hard as he could.

Calum was still feeling a little out of sorts a few hours later. Sitting on the back of a bench in the centre of the estate with a couple of his friends who had not been part of the mural project: Match, like the name suggested — kids are nothing if not literal — tall and thin and with a shock of red hair, and Tusk, a regular-looking kid with a left canine tooth that poked out from between his lips even when his mouth was closed. The pair had been messing with his head ever since he had joined them on the bench after supper; word had travelled fast, and he was starting to get dark and pissed off, to believe that there was nowhere left to run. At one point, Match had accused him of losing his balls, and as the night had progressed and the more he had brooded on it, the more he had started to believe that Match might in fact be right. A couple of solutions had passed through his head — for an instant he had considered damaging the mural, but then he knew that he would be the main suspect — but nothing had made itself clear. Approaching midnight, he knew that he had to act soon to distance himself from the project and thereby restore his ego.

Taking a final drag on his cigarette, Calum flicked it out into the air and climbed down from the bench. He set off across the estate, breathing hard through his nose like a minotaur.

“Yo, what’s happenin’, man?” Match called out, standing up and following him. “What’s going on, Calum?”

“Yo, wait up,” cried Tusk, setting off after them.

Match and Tusk fell into step beside Calum, and the three of them headed up through Kentish Town before cutting a right into Dartmouth Park. Here the streets were quieter, darker, and there were fewer people about, less traffic. Calum led them through a labyrinth of back streets and alleys, streetlights sending shadows to track them, making no attempt to hide themselves, confident in their solid presence. Fifteen minutes after leaving the comfort of the estate, he led them behind a dark parade of shops that represented another kind of comfort.

The off-licence sat in the middle of the parade between a vet’s surgery and a greengrocer’s, and was well known to all the kids in the area as a cheap target. Calum himself had broken into it at least three times, three that he could remember, and almost every other kid he knew had burgled it at least once. It was like a training ground for them, a rites-of-passage kind of place.

Match had been following Calum in glum silence, but as soon as he figured out where Calum was going, a broad grin had spread across his face as he knew his friend was coming back to them. It had been a bad time, with Calum either buried in paint and a social conscience or in despair. Match leaned into Tusk and told him the news, watched the other kid respond in the same manner.

“You going to hit the cashpoint,” said Match, his nickname for the off-licence.

“Time I felt the muscle working again,” replied Calum, clenching a fist in front of his heart.

“Yo, back in the world,” said Tusk.

“Oh right, let’s get it on,” said Calum. He led them down the back of the buildings, their feet creating scuffles and echoes in the trash that carpeted the ground. At the back of the off-licence, he held out his right hand and gestured to Match with his left. Match lifted his jacket aside, pulled out a short-bladed knife from the deep thigh pocket in his cargo pants, and handed it to Calum. As Calum lifted the knife to jam it into the gap between the door and the frame, he noticed the line of dried blood at the base of the blade and an icicle threaded his spine. The blood was from where Match had stabbed some kid in the hand the week before when he had been too slow in handing over his mobile phone. Calum had seen the attack, and although he had been witness to unprovoked violence before, the cold action of his friend had shaken him more than he cared to admit. It had been an insight too far into the mental state that went with their situation.

The uncomfortable thought stilled him, and when the door creaked and opened a fraction, he thought for a moment that he must have popped it open himself without realising it and looked at the knife for a second in disbelief. And when it creaked again and opened a little further, a slice of light falling across the ground, he was still none the wiser, even when a look of keen surprise appeared on Match’s face and his friend turned on his heel and fled. Understanding what was happening, Tusk too was soon up and off on his jaundiced feet into the darkness.

Stuck in that awkward space between thought and action, it was just when the manager’s scared face appeared around the door that the truth of the situation hit Calum. Shaking the indecision from his limbs, he took off after his friends, but not before the manager had caught a clear glimpse of his startled face.

At nine o’clock the following morning, Rob Blake, the artist, and Kate Phillips, the social worker, were sitting on a threadbare sofa in the living room of the flat Calum Breen shared with his mother. DS Marnie Stone had been on the phone to Kate first thing: The owner of the off-licence had recognised Calum at once but because he had not committed an actual offence she was reluctant to speak to him; could Kate go round there and have a quiet word? “Sounds like I don’t have much choice,” Kate had replied, but here she was with Rob at her side for moral support.

Calum’s mother was sitting in a matching chair, a cup of hot coffee in one hand and a cigarette in the other. She looked as if she had a hangover, bloodshot pupils and red skin.

“So who else was there last night, Calum?” asked Kate. “The manager said he saw two other kids running off.”

Calum twisted in his seat and said nothing.

“It was almost midnight,” continued Kate. “Somehow I just don’t think that you’d have been out there on your own at that time of night. Do you want to tell me who you were with, Calum?”

Again Calum said nothing.

“Was it Match and Tusk?”

At the mention of the names Match and Tusk, Blake glanced at Kate, a little surprised, and then turned to Calum.

“I thought you said you’d left those two behind when you signed on for the mural,” said Blake, feeling a little hurt.

“Yeah, well, maybe if I’d been allowed to put something of my own in—”

“Is that what all this is about?” said Kate, pressing her hands between her knees. “A cry for attention?”

“You mean you jeopardised your freedom just because you didn’t get your own way?” interjected Blake, incredulous.

Kate rested her hand on his forearm and tried to ease him back, but he pushed on regardless.

“If it really means that much to you, then I’m sure we could work something out,” said Blake, feeling the soft touch of the hand on his arm fade. “It’s one thing being a tortured artist, but there’s no need for you to go and get into trouble over it.”

“You’ve torn yourself away from those bad influences before,” said Kate. “It’ll be easier the second time around.”

“I’ll think about it,” muttered Calum, and Kate knew then that that was as much as they were going to get from him for now.

Kate touched Blake on the arm again, and this time he knew that it meant something different.

“It’ll be good to see you again,” he said, rising to leave.

Under normal circumstances, stubborn pride would have kept Calum from the mural for at least another afternoon, but knowing that it would take no more than three sessions to complete, he understood he had no choice but to swallow that pride and return to the site that afternoon if he wanted to be a real part of it.

And so four o’clock found him walking across the estate with the other kids, together but apart. Without having to ask, the other kids intuited what had happened. Most of them had been witness to his original strop, and also knew his street reputation, and so knew better than to irritate him further. When the group arrived in front of the mural, Blake also tuned into the common mood and just handed Calum a can of paint with a smile and motioned for him to do as he pleased.

For two hours Calum worked in silent concentration, the shadow of the other kids staining his back like perspiration. And the following night he was there again, Blake impressed with his dedication and the sense of Calumness that he brought to the character of the mural, little touches that added a much-needed sense of humour — a man in an open window shaving the hair on the top of his ears, a woman in a tracksuit watching aerobics on TV with a cigarette in her mouth. At the completion, both Blake and the kids were pleased with how it had turned out. Not quite as it had been planned, but perhaps all the better for that.

As the kids were cleaning up, or rather sneaking off and leaving Blake to do the cleaning up, a tall black man in a crumpled suit approached the scene. He stood and stared at the mural, smiling, tilting his head from side to side, and then after a couple of minutes looked across at Blake.

“That’s some piece of work,” he said.

“The kids did a great job,” agreed Blake.

“I like the little comic touches the best.”

“You mean the figures in the windows?” said Blake, pointing.

“Yeah, those,” said the man, whose name was Johnson.

“Yeah, I like those, too,” agreed Blake, stuffing tins of paint into a canvas holdall. “A touch of original thinking.”

“It wasn’t part of the plan, then,” said Johnson.

“That was one of the kids,” admitted Blake, not too proud to give credit where due. “Nothing to do with me, I’m afraid.”

“I think it was the kid with the fat lip,” said Johnson, smiling and pointing at his own mouth.

“You mean Calum,” replied Blake, reflecting the smile.

“And he lives here on the estate,” said Johnson.

“In one of the blocks near Castle Street,” said Blake.

“You think he’d be interested in a solo project? — that’s if it’s all right with you, I mean,” said Johnson.

“Depends what you have in mind, I suppose.”

“You know Carlo’s, the cafe on Kentish Town Road?”

“I’ve been there a few times,” said Blake. “Nice homemade fishcakes, if I remember right.”

“The wife makes them,” said Johnson, and then fell silent, regarding the mural once more. “It could be a nice place, a better place, but the trouble is I have a metal shutter that’s forever covered in graffiti. If I clean it, then it’s covered again the following night. I think the people who walk past at night and see the graffiti must think it’s a bad place and decide never to go and eat there. You must understand what I mean. I’ve been thinking about what to do about it... You think... You think Calum would be interested in helping me out?”

Blake thought about Calum and what he had brought to the project. “He’s got some strong ideas of his own.”

“But that’s what I’m looking for,” said Johnson. “I wouldn’t know where to start if we had to do it ourselves. As long as I have some idea of what he’s going to do beforehand. Perhaps if he had one or two ideas I could choose from...”

“And he’d be paid for the work, of course,” said Blake.

“Whatever’s the going rate,” replied Johnson.

“All right, I’ll ask him,” said Blake.

For his shutter on Kentish Town Road, Johnson chose a cartoon version of his cafe with cartoon customers looking out at the real people passing on the street outside. At the rear of the cartoon cafe were caricatures of Posh and Becks tucking into large plates of pie and mash, fat bellies pushing at their cheap clothing and raw cigarettes burning in a saucer in the centre of the table. Most of the cafe’s trade was during the week, and so Johnson shut the cafe for the weekend to allow Calum to complete the mural in time for opening the following week.

Just as he had learned from Blake, Calum started with painting the shutter in a coat of white emulsion and then sketching the basic shapes of the characters and the furniture with a piece of charcoal. Working hard, he had the outline of the design laid out in full ten minutes short of noon and so decided to have some lunch before starting with the paint. He walked to the newsagent’s on the corner and bought a can of Coke and a cheese bagel in clingfilm, but the woman behind the counter rebuffed his offer of coins, telling him that she was pleased that Johnson was at last doing something to brighten up the area and that she was thinking of following his lead. She just wanted to see how it turned out first. Calum thanked her and told her to keep him in mind. Popping the top of the Coke, he stepped out onto the street and bumped straight into Match and Tusk.

“We’ve been wondering where you’d got to,” said Match.

“Thought you might be avoiding us, like,” added Tusk.

Calum ignored them and strolled back to the cafe. He sat on the step and unwrapped his bagel, started to eat. The other two followed him and stood on the edge of the curb facing him, holding onto a lamppost and swinging their feet in the gutter.

“You coming out with us tonight?” asked Tusk. “Finish off what we started the other night.”

Calum presumed he was referring to the humiliating episode at the rear of the off-licence in Dartmouth Park, but he had no desire for a repeat performance and, besides, he had something else to keep him occupied now. He took another bite and continued to ignore them, looking off down the street towards Camden Town.

“What’s the matter, can’t you hear us or something?” asked Tusk.

“He must think he’s too good for us now,” said Match, his head poking out of his dark hood like a poisonous tortoise.

Still Calum ignored them, drinking from the Coke.

“I reckon the police must’ve put the frighteners on him or something,” said Tusk.

“Turned him back into a child,” agreed Match.

“Won’t be the first time. Still, it’s like riding a bike. He wants to get back in the saddle, it shouldn’t be too hard...”

“If he leaves it much longer he’s going to need those whatchamacallits, those little wheels on the back...”

“Stabilisers,” said Tusk. “Kiddie wheels.”

“If he leaves it much longer he’s going to need stabilisers...”

Calum listened to the barrage of jibes in silence. On the one hand it hurt him, his friends attacking him like that, but on the other he just wanted them to leave so that he could get on with the mural. He finished the bagel, drained the Coke, and then put the scrunched-up clingfilm into the open mouth of the can. He stood and walked across to the curb and stuffed the can into one of the bulging black bin liners piled there like boulders.

“You coming with us, then?” asked Match. “Finish what we started the other night... You can hold the knife...”

“I have to finish the mural,” said Calum, uncomfortable.

“That’s all right, we can wait,” said Tusk.

“It might be awhile...”

“We have to wait until it gets dark, anyway,” said Tusk.

“I don’t know... Perhaps some other time,” said Calum.

“Come on,” said Tusk, a note of pleading in his voice.

“Oh, forget him,” snapped Match, stamping his foot. “He’s not going to come with us, he’s just pissing us about. He’s gone over to the other side. Painting, for Christ’s sake... I bet he’s not even getting paid for it...”

“That’s not the point...” started Calum, frowning.

“Child,” Match shouted him down, rattling his fist at the shutter. “Pissing about with a big fat colouring book...”

A smirk creased Tusk’s face.

“What do we care,” said Match. “You know if we get caught we’re going to say that you were with us anyway.”

This time DS Marnie Stone came to the flat herself. She said hello to Calum and his mother, accepted the offer of coffee, and then asked Calum where he had been the night before.

“I was here,” muttered Calum, looking at the floor.

“You were here all night?”

“I finished working on the mural when it started to get dark and then I came straight back here.”

“And what time would that have been?”

“I don’t know,” replied Calum, shrugging. “I suppose it must’ve been about nine or so. Quarter past... I don’t know.”

“You’re sure about that?”

“Half-past, then,” said Calum. “I don’t have a watch but I’m sure it was no later than about half-past nine...”

“You stop and talk to anyone on the way home?”

Calum shook his head.

“Or call in at any of the shops?”

Calum shook his head again.

“All right, let’s come at it from another direction,” said Marnie, looking out across the estate for a moment. “You know the old ironmonger’s on Kentish Town Road? It’s about two or three doors down from the cafe you’ve been working on...”

“Yeah, I know it,” said Calum.

“You ever been in there?”

“I suppose I must’ve been at some point. Getting new locks and stuff after we’ve been broken into...”

“So you’ll be familiar with the layout of the place?”

“I suppose so,” shrugged Calum.

“Does that include the office in the back?”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“The place was broken into last night, Calum,” said Marnie, leaning forward in her chair. “A large amount of cash was stolen from the office. Cash and a lot of other stuff.”

Calum kept quiet, averted his eyes.

“You know anything about that?”

Calum shook his head. “No.”

“You’re positive about that?”

“Sure I’m positive,” muttered Calum.

“All right, then, what about Match and Tusk?”

“What about them?”

“They’re your friends, Calum, your comrades in arms. You must know if they had anything to do with it...”

“I haven’t seen them in a couple of days,” said Calum.

“You didn’t talk to them last night?”

Calum shook his head again, glanced hard at Marnie in confirmation.

“All right,” said Marnie, sighing. “Let’s look at what we’ve got, shall we: A known thief starts working on a mural in a cafe down on Kentish Town Road and just a few hours later an ironmonger’s shop a couple of doors down from there gets broken into — so that’s just a coincidence, is it, Calum?”

“Suppose it must be,” said Calum, shrugging.

“We like Match and Tusk for this one,” said Marnie. “You case the place for them, Calum? You tell them how to get in?”

Calum kept silent, his attention focussed on the floor.

Marnie shook her head and looked out of the window across the estate. “All right, I’ll leave it there for now,” she said after a short time, getting up to leave. “But just so you know... I don’t think you were there last night, Calum, but I do think that your two friends were, and it’s just a matter of time before I find the proof. If you don’t want to help me then that’s your decision. But when we do nail them, don’t kid yourself that they’ll think we figured it all out by ourselves...”

Although he was at first pleased with himself for not telling the police that Match and Tusk had been around earlier the afternoon before, the following morning Calum awoke to find it troubling him like a burgeoning toothache. On the one hand he still felt a little proud that he had not offered up Match and Tusk to DS Stone, a solid feature of his culture, he knew, but on the other he knew that it was just a matter of time before she arrested them and that when she did so it was almost inevitable that he would be lumped into the gang as the third man. And although he did not like to think about what that might mean, at best he knew that he would not be allowed to continue with the murals.

The dilemma continued to trouble him long after he returned to school, but a couple of weeks later he saw his chance to get out of the situation on what he saw as his own terms.

On the strength of his work at the cafe, word spread and he was soon offered another commission, this time to paint a large mural on the side of a car wash at the foot of Camden Road. The wall faced the traffic coming down the hill, a huge area, and after agreeing to the design he set to work on it one weekend.

But just as Calum might have predicted, Match and Tusk turned up late on the third night that he was there. He had just completed the background and was about to start on the figures in the cars he had painted — the mural was on a side wall of the car wash and Calum had created a full-scale cartoon version of it as if the wall were made of glass: In the centre of the wall he had drawn a giant foam-and-rain machine with a grime-streaked car going in one end and a bright clean car coming out of the other — and the sight of his friends made his heart sink in his chest. But Match and Tusk seemed to have lost some of their fire, poking Calum with sullen and blunt jibes as if taunting him had become a bore, and it did not take him long to get rid of them. Watching them walk across Camden Road, Calum felt a smile touch his face.

But it was a brief success: The following morning Detective Sergeant Stone was on his doorstep once more, the electrical store two doors down from the car wash having been burgled the night before. She went at him harder this time, refusing to believe that he had had nothing to do with it. And the harder she went at him, the more Calum dug in his heels. But even as he did so he felt something stirring deep inside, something far deeper than a cultural mistrust of the police and a refusal to grass. This time he knew that it was nothing less than fight or flight.

Ten minutes after Stone left the flat, Calum returned to the car wash to complete the details in the mural.

A little before two o’clock the following morning, chasing up on a call that had come in to the station, DS Marnie Stone pulled up in front of the mural with anger and sadness in her heart. Someone had made a good attempt at defacing it, scratching and rubbing different colours of paint across the artwork, but from what she could still make out, the mural looked to be of a police car chasing another car through the car wash. And after taking in some of the finer details the message was made clear to her: Calum was giving her the people she was looking for. In the front car were two clear characters, their features a little smudged but still recognisable: a match with human features and another face with one huge tusk curling out of its mouth. But Calum had not been clever enough, and after his old friends had seen his latest artistic efforts they had meted out their own retribution. Calum had been nailed to the wall where he had painted the chasing police car. His feet were hanging in the air about three feet from the ground and his head rested on his chest in a thick splash of blood. For a moment Marnie had the horrific thought that perhaps his tongue had been cut out, but when she climbed out of the car for a closer look she was relieved to see that he was still breathing and that he had in fact been silenced with a cork rammed in between his bloodied and swollen lips.

Copyright © 2006 Jerry Sykes

“There’s a thin line between micromanagement and stalking, Danvers.”