The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror. Volume 19

JOEL LANE Still Water

IT seemed funny at the time, but in retrospect it wasn't funny at all.

A gang of jewel thieves who'd gone missing in Stoke had turned up in the Black Country, hiding in a street with no name. It was the late 1970s, and there were quite a few anomalies in the local street map: remnants of lost districts that didn't belong to anywhere, and the council hadn't given them postcodes or kept track of who lived there.

In this case, it was a string of old railwaymen's houses in the poorest part of Aldridge, uninhabited for thirty years at least. A pearl necklace that had been stolen in Derby turned up in a Walsall pawnshop; we traced it to a prostitute who'd got it from some men living out there. She said it was a derelict house.

At that time, I'd been in the force for a year. I was working from the Green Lane station in Walsall. There wasn't much going on except drunkenness and domestic violence. This was my first taste of organized crime. We planned a nocturnal raid on the ruined cottages, with at least four arrests anticipated. According to the prostitute, the gang was like a family. They shared everything. Some of what she told us didn't end up on the interview record. My superior, DI McCann, had a sense of decency that was unusual for a policeman.

Four cars full of police officers descended on the nameless street shortly before dawn.

The houses were built on either side of a railway bridge that had been condemned in the 1950s, but never demolished. They backed onto a patch of wasteland where old canals had leaked into the soil, giving the landscape a fertile variety of plant-growth and a pervasive smell of stagnant water. It made me think of unwashed skin.

We'd been told to go to the third house. It looked just like the others, uninhabited and impossible to inhabit. Black lichen and moss caked the crumbling brick walls; the windows were boarded up, the front door covered with rotting planks. Some tree-dwelling bird called to us mournfully in the night.

Behind the house, the marshy ground and thick brambles made an approach difficult. The rear windows were unprotected, though no light was visible through them. What first appeared to be thick curtain was revealed by our torches as a black mould covering the inside of the glass. It was hard to believe that we'd come to the right place.

But in the silence before we broke in, a faint sound reached us. A man's voice, muffled by brick and glass and layers of filth. He was singing: "Baby, You're Out of Time". So was he.

McCann crashed through the back door, and five of us followed him. The rest waited outside. Our torches made crazy snapshots of the interior: rotting wallpaper, a cracked ceiling, broken chairs. Some new-looking food cartons, bottles and candles on a table were the only sign of occupancy. In all probability, this place had never had electricity.

The singing continued in one of the upstairs rooms. Was it a tape recorder? What kind of trap were we walking into?

On the staircase, my foot went through a rotten step and I fell, cursing. When I got up I was alone on the stairs. Ahead of me was only the song. The blues.

Apart from police, there was only one man in the upper room. He was kneeling on a filthy mattress, in front of a small suitcase. The lid was up. The suitcase was full of jewels: pearls, rubies, silver, emeralds. Some were strung or inlaid, some were loose. He was running his hands through them, and singing to himself.

His hair was knotted and filthy; his once-white shirt was streaked with filth and sweat. He didn't look away from his hoard or stop singing, even when McCann clamped the handcuffs on his wrists.

We kept him at the Green Lane station for a week.

His name was Jason Welles, and he was a member of the Stoke gang. An experienced fence, despite being only twenty. Among the station officers he was known as "Mr Pitiful" — and not only because of the singing.

For two days he did nothing but complain that we'd taken his jewels from him, because "She won't come to me if I don't have them. She's an old-fashioned girl. No gifts, no loving." His eyes were a pale, tormented blue.

One night, when I took him his dinner, he remarked to me as calmly as if we'd been talking about her all evening: "That first time, she came out of the wall. Plaster clinging to her like a shroud. I was holding an emerald bracelet, trying to judge its value. She stood there naked and reached out for it. Then she took me into the garden and showed me where her family live.

"I wanted to stay with her, but she said it wasn't time yet. When will it be time?" The last question was asked as if everyone knew the answer but him. I didn't know what to say.

Every attempt to interview him produced the same story. He lived in a twilight world of ghosts and angels, a delusional shell that could have made him a cult leader if he'd had a better haircut.

It seemed likely that the gang's adolescent games with drugs and prostitutes had triggered some kind of buried madness in him. Or else there'd been some hallucinogen in the moulds and lichens that decorated the ruined Aldridge house.

A search of those houses and the surrounding waste ground had yielded no trace of the other gang members. If he didn't tell us where they were, we'd probably never find out.

But how do you interrogate a madman?

I attended three of the interview sessions. Each time, he sang to himself and muttered random nonsense, ignoring our questions. To be fair, we ignored his. His world and ours rarely seemed to touch.

Typically, he'd rock in his chair and run his hands through imaginary jewels — or through the hair of an imaginary woman. He'd sing "Out of Time" or "I Can't Help Myself", then start talking suddenly, as if resuming a conversation we'd interrupted.

The interview tapes and transcripts are doubtless long since thrown away, but I can remember some of his words…

"As soon as I saw the house, I knew it belonged to a family. A real family, not like my mum and her boyfriends after my dad went to prison. Nathan, Mark and Rich, they brought call girls into the house, but I knew the family wouldn't like that.

"Then she came to me one night. Wearing a gown of rotting wallpaper that fell from her, and her body glowed brighter than a candle.

"She showed me where her family sleep under the water. And the thin grey tubes they breathe through, like a baby's umbilical cord.

"I gave her jewels to wear in her long dark hair. To hang in the tunnels under the ground.

"The other three guys… well, they were just thieves. They had no idea what anything was worth. It was just money to them. Money to spend on cars and clothes and cunt. I let her family take them." He giggled like a child. "Not much left of them after a while.

"Poetic justice. What they had was stolen. But she never stole from me. I gave her everything. I opened her and wrapped her around me.

"They say when you come off, it never lasts. But I know how to make it last forever.

"Then the morning comes, and she's gone. Baby, you're out of time… Where are my jewels? The earrings, the bracelets, the necklaces. I need them to give to her. Why have you taken them from me?" He stared angrily at McCann and me. We said nothing. "She can't reach me here. It's too far from the water. You're out of touch, my baby…

"Why don't you let her find me? Why'd you put me in a cell with no plaster or wallpaper, so she can't get through? I've nothing to give her now but myself. Why do you always have to break up the family?"

We weren't getting anything useful from him. And he was a liability as a prisoner. He yelled, kicked at the door, wet the bed, needed a suicide watch. We were glad to get rid of him.

The Stoke police thought he was probably unfit to stand trial, but he'd be on a section for quite a while anyway. It was hard to imagine him getting involved in organized crime. He couldn't even feed himself.

While Jason Welles was dreaming in a secure unit somewhere near Stoke, I took my annual leave.

I'd been going out with a girl called Joanna since the previous year, and this was our first holiday together; a self-catering week in Dorset.

The days were close and rainy, so we spent a lot of time in bed. I kept dreaming about Welles reaching up for something he couldn't touch, saying I opened her and wrapped her around me. His obsession had convinced me there was something dangerous about love. We split up not long after we came back to Walsall.

Joanna came from Blackheath, and had a rather bleak sense of humour. That was something we shared. She used to repeat bits of Dolly Allen monologues, an elderly comedienne who was well known in the Black Country at that time. Like the story about the vacuum cleaner salesman: I opened the door, this young fellow in a suit was stood there. He poured a little bag of dirt onto my hall carpet and said "If my vacuum cleaner can't get that dust out of your carpet in one minute, I'll eat the dust." I said, "Here's a spoon, there's no electric in this house."

One day when the sky was clear, we went for a walk inland. The footpath took us through an abandoned farm. The old farmhouse was in ruins, its roof-beams open to the sky. The sun was burning and we needed shelter, so we slipped into the barn.

Gaps in the roof showed where the rain had got in and rotted the bundles of hay. Something moved at the edge of my vision — a snake or a mouse. Joanna turned to me and we kissed hungrily in the shadows. We made love with some violence, our fingernails and teeth leaving marks in each other. Afterwards, we struggled for breath and held each other more tenderly than we had all week.

At that moment, I recognized the cold fever-smell of stagnant water. Looking over Joanna's shoulder, I saw a barrel standing behind the haystack we'd used as a bed. It was nearly full of water.

In the dim light, I could just see a number of pale tubes hanging down from the water surface. But I couldn't see what they were connected to. I reached over and let my fingertips brush the water. At once, the tubes convulsed. They were connected to long, translucent maggots that jerked in the water. My finger touched one of them. I threw myself backwards and stood there, breathing hard and trying not to vomit.

Joanna started at me as if I'd gone mad. "What's wrong with you?" I gestured at the water-barrel. She turned and stared at the murky surface. "Oh, some rat-tailed maggots. Horsefly larvae. Not very pleasant, are they?" Her biological knowledge was more wide-ranging than mine, as I'd noticed on other occasions. "The long tubes are for breathing. They live in foul water where there's no oxygen. If you see them, you know the water's not fit for anything much."

I'd been back at the Green Lane station for three hours before DI McCann saw fit to tell me the news. "By the way, that nutter of a jewel thief has escaped from the secure unit they were keeping him in. Broke a guard's leg and ran for it. They said he'd been such a good prisoner, they weren't expecting it. You think they'd be used to the insane.

"Anyway, can't imagine he'll come back here. There's nothing for him, now the jewels have been returned to their rightful owners."

I stared at him. "You're joking, aren't you?"

He looked confused.

"Of course he'll come back here. To the house. His woman."

"But that's just madness. There's no woman there."

"To him there is. Look, you interviewed him five or six times. The woman was more real to him than you were."

It took me another ten minutes to persuade McCann to drive out to the railway bridge. Night was falling, and I wished we'd brought more officers along.

This time, we had a key for the back door; but there was no singing inside. The house was empty of life, except for the secondary life of rot and decay.

We used our torches to search the waste ground behind the house. He was where I'd known he would be: in the shallow pond close to the back door. There didn't appear to have been a struggle. He'd used stones to weigh himself down.

When we pulled him out he was curled up, his arms crossed, his knees close to his chest. Like a kid in a school assembly.

Later, we drained the pond and found nothing more, apart from a mass of weeds and insect life. But I wonder about the layers of marsh and silt beneath those houses. How easy it might be to make tunnels, or to close them down.

It's in the nature of life to adapt. If you don't have food, or oxygen, or love, you find a way. It might not be a good way by someone else's standards, but it's a way.

The autopsy confirmed that Jason Welles had died by drowning in shallow, dirty water. The only external damage was some fretting or eroding of the mouth, caused by small fish or water snails.

The only other significant detail had no bearing on the cause of death, and was described by the pathologist as "demonstrating the feverish reproductive activity of aquatic life at certain times of the year".

When they opened up the dead man's body to remove the viscera, they found that the wall of the body cavity was lined with thousands of tiny pearl white eggs.