Shooting in the Dark

so cold that they had lost feeling in their toes. JD’s breath steamed his window. ‘I thought we were going to follow him.’
    ‘Change of plan. I wanna see what he lives like.’
    ‘Don’t be long, Sam. I’m feeling more like Cap’n Scott every minute.’
    There was a window with a small screw lock on the inside. Sam cracked it, removed the lock, opened the window and was through it within five minutes.
    In someone else’s space now. He stood quite still for a hill minute. He closed his eyes and listened to their silence. There was a yearning in the hush, something similar to the quiet of his own house, but there was taciturnity as well. It was as if the house was trying to tell him something and he could detect the sounds of the vowels and the consonants but was incapable of hearing the words.
    He walked through the rooms. The guy was tidy, his clothes hung up or neatly folded on shelves or a chair. On his side of the bed the book was placed squarely on the bedside table. The Undermining of Psychological Principles. There was nothing of his that was on the floor. She was the opposite; instead of a book there was a Walkman and a mess of tapes and magazines by her bed. On the wall were pop singers wearing skimpy and transparent clothes, an abundance of glossy lipstick. Her clothes left a train between bed and bathroom, her underwear drawer was half-open and had slips and pants hanging out of it as if they were trying to escape.
    The obsessive and the trollop.
    A corner of the bedroom was given over to a personal torture chamber. There was a home-made rack there and some kind of electric-shock machine, handcuffs, gags, blindfolds, leather belts and restraints and a selection of instruments with which to pierce or cut or bruise.
    In the sitting room there was a bookcase with hundreds of textbooks on psychological practice and theory. They were not for show either, they were well thumbed and many of them had bookmarks and scribbled notes in the margins.
    By the door on a chair was a worn leather satchel. It had a brass fastener with a keyhole and it was locked. Sam carried it back into the bedroom and prised open the lock with an implement that looked as though it was designed to remove stones from horses’ hooves.
    He tipped the contents of the satchel on to the bed. Syringes and needles and a small bottle with no label containing a tiny amount of colourless liquid. Must be the stuff that Ralph had been injected with, a drug for sedating animals in the wild.
    ‘This’ll wrap it up,’ Sam said aloud to himself. His voice was out of place in the room, not simply because there was no one there to hear it but because the room was predominantly a place of silence, of emptiness. He left everything where it was and walked back through to the sitting room, looking for a telephone. But before he picked it up there was a knock on the outer door. Must be JD telling him the guy was on his way back.
    Sam lifted the latch to let himself out, expecting to see JD on the step. But it wasn’t JD. The blond guy was standing there, the yale key in his hand and an expression of complete surprise on his face. ‘You,’ he said.
    He recovered fast and pushed Sam into the house, sending the detective staggering back towards the bedroom. Sam stopped himself falling but before he had recovered the bigger man had pushed him again. Sam bounced off the edge of the bedroom door and went down on all-fours. Immediately the blond had him in a lock, the man’s forearm wrapped around Sam’s neck while with the other hand he pushed Sam’s right arm into a tight halfnelson. The man was sweating, his skin suddenly slick as his pores oozed an oily combination of adrenalin and fear and absolute conviction.
    Sam felt himself being lifted clear of the floor and saw the bedroom wall coming at his head, fast. He tried to struggle free but was not quick enough to avoid the impact. The room reeled around him. White painted walls with a couple of Bruegel prints and a smear of red blood freshly squeezed from his own forehead. Once again the blond ran him head-first into the wall, then dropped him on his back over the wooden foot of the bed.
    In the dream Sam was a character in a soap opera. It felt as though the budget had been cut and the director was getting ready to write him out. There were three angels playing horns, all too tired to sing; and there was a disembodied refrain coming from concealed speakers. He couldn’t make out the words,