These Darkening Days (Mace & Brindle Book 2) Page 2

  He saves the document and then climbs into his bed, the wad of blankets sitting heavy on him as he turns on his side and tilts the screen of the laptop so that the warm colours of the digital flames are only a foot away. He closes his eyes and listens to the rain.

  BODIES. FLEXING AND lunging.

  Bodies stretching and sweating.

  Contorting.

  Around him, Detective Sergeant James Brindle sees muscles, bones, ligaments and tendons being pushed to their limits. Bodies preened and pumped, shaped and sculpted.

  He counts out the reps. First squats and then press-ups. Ten of one and ten of the other. The sweat of his palms glues his hands to the warm rubber of the matting.

  He stands and breathes and paces in a circle. Around him the gym is alive with the grunt and clatter of flesh shifting metal, of men driving iron. It’s the early morning session, all men.

  Brindle counts eight TV screens, each tuned to a music channel that plays nothing but Eurotrance and bombastic chart hits at full volume all day and long into the evening. The relentless 4/4 beat of the mindless pop music has a tendency, he notices, to dictate the tone and rhythm of the room, with the same auto-tuned vocal tic that seems to be inflicted upon all the songs, creating the effect of stepping into a hyper-real dimension narrated by a relentless chorus of chattering, pitched-up voices. Almost every song is accompanied by a flesh-filled video depicting lithe young men and women in states of emotive reflection or sustained wild abandon.

  Here colour, music and physical exertion merge to create a surrealist symposium of sweat and sensory overload.

  Occasionally one of the songs goes into a breakdown, during which time Brindle can hear the symphony of coughs and groans and heaves, along with the occasional motivational mantra – Push it, do it, feel the hurt – being uttered through clenched white teeth or barked by one of the two personal trainers who stalk the gym, militantly putting their latest charges through their punishing paces with sadistic and self-satisfied glee.

  A man with an oversized upper body waddles past Brindle in a purple vest with the words IF THE BAR AIN’T BENDING THEN YOU’RE PRETENDIN’ printed on the front of it in white lettering.

  If the modern man is in crisis, thinks Brindle, then it is narcissism and self-love to which he has turned for succour.

  The top-heavy man glances at him and Brindle nods but, perhaps adhering to some unspoken hierarchy based upon physical bulk, he offers neither response nor recognition in return. Maybe it is because Brindle is not one of the big boys.

  He is not here to get ripped. He does not pop steroids or spray himself the colour of stewed tea. Bulk or beauty is not his goal, but rather a sense of regained control over his day, his week, his month. Where others seek definition for their glutes or abdominals, he seeks to shape his life in a more oblique way: through the careful timetabling of his every waking moment.

  Not for Brindle the excessive pampering of the body-beautiful; he shaves only his face, waxes nothing, and does not leer at the ladies until they are forced to leave the room under a cloud of intimidation and disgust. He is not one of the silverback gorillas who hits the racks in anger and insecurity.

  Nevertheless he is in here three days a week and once on weekends, worshipping at the altar of weights, because ever since he was ordered to take an indefinite sabbatical on medical grounds – at one point that catch-all phrase ‘nervous exhaustion’ made it onto his file – he simply has nothing better to do with his time.

  At first all that time stretching ahead of him caused a mild panic. He had to find ways to slow the whirr of his mind, and physical punishment seemed like one of the obvious outlets. Also it appeals to his propensity for numbers, repetition, statistics, counting. And above all else, control.

  So now James Brindle, resting detective, clings to the routine that this absurd place provides as his sole anchor to the moment, and has in fact grown to depend upon the ache in his body, and the thirst and appetite that follows, and suspects that he would be here every day if daily workouts did not offer diminishing returns. There is no socialising to be had in the gym either, and for this he is grateful; there is only the brute force of flesh moving metal in this preening parade of strutting, pneumatic peacocks. That’s all.

  He walks over to the free-weights racks and selects two kettlebells. He lets them dangle by his waist, and feels a pleasurable pop as something loosens deep in his shoulder sockets. He does ten shrugs, then ten curls. Feeling like an automaton, he counts them out, each number quietly hissed.

  Cold Storage have been sympathetic to his situation, to a degree. They have to be. Again – to a degree. His chief superintendent, Alan Tate, has fought his corner, ensured his job is protected, kept open, and that he has been given the help he needs. But it was still a suspension, whatever way they worded it. Papers, pills and half-pay, then be on your way. See you in six months for a review.

  A psychologist would say that the warning signs were there for years – and the three experts that he has seen have all remarked as much – but he is already way ahead of them. He knows all this already. It was not the tics or the refusal to follow clear commands, the counting or the obsession with hygiene, the rudeness, the desire for solitude or the long-unexplained absences from the office, but the mistakes he made in the biggest case of his career – the murders and the moors and the men up there in the Yorkshire Dales – that prompted this suspension. Nothing else. Before that he was ably maintaining.

  Cold Storage had always tolerated all sorts of fucked-up behaviour previously; as a secret, under-the-radar, high-tech department comprised of brilliant minds, social misfits and scientifically minded savants handpicked for their unique talents, the department prided itself on this very fact.

  But when the story broke big, Brindle broke too. Something in him snapped. Seeing his every fault and every failing, and those of the department he represented, illuminated so publicly prompted the mental landslide he had always managed to avoid, yet, perhaps deep down, always knew was coming. It concerns him only slightly to think that the murders, the torture cases, the stuff with kids – the meat and bones of his work – had never really kept him awake at night. He kept himself awake at night, and he had never hated anyone or anything so much as he hated himself.

  Indefinite leave with a small degree of compassion was what they offered him. Take it or leave it.

  So now two six-month sabbaticals have passed and he keeps coming back to this vulgar church of noise and pointless toil, where the rumpus of the men and the music and the simple repetition of numbers soothes his mind and helps him sleep.

  Repetition, repetition. Ten of one and then ten of the other.

  James Brindle replaces the kettlebells. He catches himself in the mirrored walls of the gymnasium and sees himself frozen there in the centre of a tableau of men and their machines. He sees meat versus metal and his hair pressed flat, short strands of it stuck to his brow, grade one round the sides and back, his chest broader than he remembers. Sunless buttermilk skin. Eyes unblinking from behind expensive glasses. He sees an intensity there that scares him, and that he knows unnerves others too.

  And he sees the mark across one cheek; the flowering Beaujolais-toned puck of toughened flesh that he has never grown to accept.

  As a child he had tried to rub it off with a scouring pad, but his mother caught him, scolded him, and then when she saw tears, explained that it was the flaws that made people individual, and that in time he would be blind to it. That moment has never arrived.

  He hits the rowing machine, sets the timer to ten minutes then starts heaving the handle that turns the cord that spins the wheel that replicates motion through water, his shoulders flexing to the resistance. The seat is warm and it slides on its runners with ease.

  Brindle’s legs bend and then straighten as he counts out the revolutions of the wheel. He holds his breath and rows in cycles of even numbers – two, four, six, eight – then exhales on ten. Over and over he repeats this. Even number
s are good. Even numbers are square and ordered and their patterns fit; they are not obstinate. Even numbers are the parts of the personalised puzzle that his mind has been trying to solve for years.

  He feels the strain in his thighs, stomach, shoulders. The crunch and pull of repetition. Brindle wants to stop. Brindle wants to rest. But to stop and rest is to disrupt the pattern and jumble the numbers. Such disorder leads to disarray and disarray to disintegration.

  Sweat runs down Brindle’s brow. His vest sticks to his back. The music thumps.

  After he has completed his second circuit Brindle goes to the showers. They are communal but today he has them to himself. He turns the jet to ice cold and steps under it. The shock steals his breath and his skeleton feels as if it wants to leave his body in an instant, and although he hears himself panting he forces himself to count to thirty before turning the temperature up to full heat. It scalds him, but again he counts to thirty until it hurts so much that he welcomes the cold once more. He repeats the pattern then goes to a medium heat for soaping down and rinsing. Thirty more seconds of cold at the end for firming up. His skin pinkening. Everything retracting.

  Towel off, talc, deodorant.

  Hair wax, comb.

  No shave today.

  He unfolds his shirt and trousers, both ironed last night.

  He wears a tie too – just because he is not currently in full employment does not mean Brindle is prepared to embrace the complacency of casual attire. As in all other areas of his life, sartorial consistency is everything.

  He brings his own juice. Carrot, apple and ginger one day; blueberry, basil, lime and cayenne the next, and though it’s always warm by the time he drinks it walking to the car, swallowing a pill from his pillbox on the way, it is cheaper and its properties are healthier than the branded lifestyle drinks that they sell in the gym’s reception. Also he is living to a budget now.

  He clicks his key fob and the car beeps. He opens the door and climbs in. The windscreen has steamed up slightly; autumn has carved an edge to the air, and it is there in the large crimson-coloured leaves that litter the car park and which appear to him now like bloody hand-prints pressed to the ground.

  Brindle sees himself in the rear-view mirror.

  He inhales and put his hands on the wheel to steady them. He rests his brow there too.

  A MIASMIC WISP of mist swirls over the towpath and drifts across the water. It is a single ribbon, hanging there softly, only a foot or so deep.

  It is another sign of autumn’s plunging temperature; a signifier of the season of mourning.

  Roddy Mace could imagine hating this canal with its brown stagnant runs, deep arcane locks and swirling pools that hold curdling peaks of creamy foam which make him think of the stuff that oozes from horse’s necks when they are overheated. But living on water is still just about a novelty. He gives that feeling of novelty six months more, when he fully expects to plumb a deeper level of despair and despondency. From this distance the concept of spring seems fanciful, an impossibility. A foreign country.

  His shins cut through the mist and when he turns back he sees that it has all but gone.

  Sobriety has done little for his timekeeping. Despite the office only being a short walk along the towpath and across town, he arrives in the office late, last. His editor, Malcolm Askew, is not at his desk to see him dash through the door and to his desk, trailing towpath-footprints across the old carpet.

  Roddy Mace pours coffee and sips it as his computer boots up, then checks his emails. It is the usual waterfall of spam messages and press releases for events he is not interested in, or that don’t fall within the remit of the region the paper covers – that of the town and its surrounding hilltops, a catchment area with a radius of little more than seven or eight miles – or concerning products or people he is unlikely ever to write about. Gigs in London. Yoga retreats in the Scottish Highlands. Performance-art pieces in Manchester warehouses. A two-hour-long press launch for a new smartphone. Dog choirs. A drystone wall course for the disabled.

  The invites aren’t personalised, he has simply been in the job just long enough to have made it onto far too many mailing lists. Each day a fresh digital deluge to be deleted.

  He works his way through them while scanning the BBC headlines online. First international, then the national stories. Then regional. The West Riding.

  The news updates offer the usual litany of the horrific and the banal: Cab driver jailed on three counts of indecent assault. Local man kidnapped in Syria. Drunk student dressed as Harry Potter rescued from the Wharfe. Cow chaos in Haworth. Horsemeat products found in local food plant – again. Cider festival cancelled.

  He sips more coffee and looks at the flat-plan for the issue. There are still ten pages to fill before they go to press. With what, he has no idea.

  They will manage, like they always do, but the thought of having to conjure ten pages of stories from thin air in fewer than two working days, with little likelihood of new advertising accounts coming in, is not a prospect that excites him.

  But it is easier here. That is something this place has over London. He concedes that. Life runs at a slower pace. Things are cheaper here, things are easier. Less competitive. London was cut-throat.

  All those late nights under office striplights, sweating out the hangover in order to make way for the next one. The gnawing anxiety caused by the endless pressure. His liver like a wrung rag. The covert visits to the toilets to scrape the last white residue from the paper wraps, warm and crumpled after being stuffed into his wallet five or six hours earlier in some dingy grief-hole, just like thousands of young clichés before him.

  He does not miss that part now. None of that.

  Nor, he thinks, is it like up in the Dales, where the last job had crushed him in a very different way, when he had found himself lost and alone in all that space, thrown into covering a crime case he was in no way prepared for, but which somehow brought him a book contract whose obligations he is nowhere remotely close to fulfilling, and the shadow of which looms in his every waking thought and most of his fitful sleeping ones too.

  Maybe they could increase the font-size this week, he thinks. Would anyone even notice? Half their readership has cataracts anyway. They only buy it for the obituaries and horoscopes. The other half use it for their cat-litter trays.

  He is smiling at the brilliance of his own idea when Malcolm Askew walks in.

  Morning, says Roddy Mace, looking at his watch with mock disapproval.

  Have you heard?

  Askew crosses the office.

  Though he looks exactly like a product of the valley – weather-worn, with skin the colour of a pork pie and the stout frame of a countryman – Malcolm Askew nevertheless carries himself with a certain grace and lightness of foot that Mace continues to find fascinating. He moves like a ballroom dancer, and inside him he can see the much thinner, younger and more handsome man that his boss surely once was.

  Heard what? says Mace.

  The news.

  I’ve heard about horsemeat and Harry Potter.

  About Jo Jenks.

  He sips at his coffee and then swallows.

  Who’s Jo Jenks?

  Josephine Jenks. Lives up on Greenfields estate. You don’t know her?

  No.

  Then you’re the only man who doesn’t. Then again, you’re not—

  Askew catches himself.

  I’m not what? asks Mace.

  You’re still fairly new to the valley. To some folk around here Jo Jenks is a legend. And further afield too.

  Is she famous?

  Infamous maybe. Or notorious. Or perhaps just fondly remembered.

  Why?

  I’ll get to that.

  Malcolm Askew has been editing the Valley Echo for close to four decades. He started out as a cub reporter back when the local newspaper still mattered. Before that he delivered copies around the farms and hamlets at the top of the valley as a schoolboy, a fact he likes to remind his sta
ff of with great frequency.

  It seems almost incomprehensible to Mace that one man can have had the same employer for the entire time that he has been alive, and whenever he thinks back over the things he has done in his own life, the various places he has lived and the countries he has visited, and then compares it to Askew, who still chooses to come into the same office day after day, year after year, it causes within him a rising sense of panic. Panic, perhaps, that he himself might find himself forever trapped in this strange wet valley to which he fled little over a year ago.

  The prospect seems unlikely. The Valley Echo, like all regional papers, is ailing. Dying, in fact. Even at his job interview (number of applicants: one) he saw that it had long been stripped back to its bare essentials and was nothing like it had been in its glory days. Perhaps it was this that drew Roddy Mace to a job that once again required little long-term commitment. Ambition is not an affliction from which he has ever greatly suffered.

  Mal Askew loves the place though. Loves the job, the town, the people and their queer ways. Loves the steeply angled streets that are perpetually wet with Pennine rain and slick algae, and cluttered with squat stone over-dwellings that spill across the distant hillside as if from a child’s upended toy-box, all the way up to the moor’s edge.

  She was found, says Askew. In the early hours. Stabbed.

  Stabbed?

  Mace’s editor nods.

  Where?

  In the face. Slashed.

  I meant where in town.

  Askew points behind him with a thumb.

  Off Crowhill Lane. Down in the ginnel that leads to the car park.

  Hellfire. That’s two minutes away. Is she alright?

  I don’t know, says Askew. I just had a text from a friendly face at A & E. I’ll bell him now. This is one or two pages at the very least. Maybe more. Check and see if there’s anything online yet.

  While Askew makes the phone call Mace does an internet search. He tries various search terms but finds nothing. This is good. The story has not broken. For once they might be able to report on something greater than the usual Women’s Institute cake-bake or abandoned-factory asbestos row.