The Receivers

Joel Lane

People don’t talk about it now. They’ve forgotten, or pretended to forget, just how bad it was. New people have moved in, and new businesses have started up. ‘Regeneration’ would be putting it a bit strongly, but most of the damage has been repaired. Or at least covered up. As for the madness - well, nothing healed it, so maybe it’s still hidden. When you’ve seen what people are capable of, it’s hard to believe that they can change.

To begin with, it was nothing out of the ordinary. The local branch of Safeway reported a sharp increase in the level of shoplifting. No one had been caught. In the same week, a Warwick-based building firm reported the theft of a truckload of bricks. Ordinary items are the hardest to track down. Once they go missing, it’s already too late.

At the time, a much more serious theft was concerning us. A former local councillor whom we’d been investigating for corruption had died of blood poisoning at Solihull Hospital - the result of a ruptured bowel, apparently. I don’t think we’d ever have got enough on him for a conviction. We’d just closed the case when his body went missing, three days before the funeral. The security guard at the mortuary swore he’d not seen or heard anything. But there was clear evidence of a break-in, in the form of a missing windowpane. Not broken: missing.

I won’t tell you the ex-councillor’s name. It’s all over Birmingham in any case, on plaques set in hotels and shopping arcades and flyovers. He’d have attended the opening of an eyelid. I don’t even remember what party he belonged to. It doesn’t matter these days. He’d been cosy with the building firm that had some materials nicked. That was the first hint I got of how this might all be connected up.

That October was hazy and overcast, the clouds dropping a veil of warm rain. I remember things were difficult at home. Julia had just turned eighteen, and Eileen was torn between wanting her to stay and wanting her to move in with her boyfriend. It was a kind of territorial thing. Julia was too old to stay in her room when she was at home: she needed the whole house. As usual, I tried to stay out of it, using my awkward working hours as an excuse to keep my distance. I believe in peace and harmony; I’ve just never been able to accept how much work they need.

It was a while before the police in Tyseley, Acock’s Green and Yardley got round to comparing notes on recent theft statistics. What we were dealing with was an epidemic of shoplifting. No one much was getting caught, and the stolen goods weren’t turning up anywhere. Most of it was basic household stuff anyway, hardly worth selling on. Shoes, DIY equipment, frozen food, soft-porn magazines, cheap kitchenware, bottles of beer. If there was an organisation behind all this, what the fuck was it trying to prove? Of course, we had our doubts. Rumours of invisible thieves were a gift to dishonest shop staff - or even owners working a scam. It was happy hour on the black economy.

To start with, we encouraged shop owners to tighten up their security. A lot of younger security staff got sacked and replaced by trained professionals, or by hard cases from the shadows of the hotel and club scene. Suspects were more likely to end up in casualty than the police station. We put more constables on the beat to cut down on burglaries. But stuff still went missing - at night or in broad daylight, it didn’t seem to matter. Cash disappeared from pub tills. A couple of empty freezers vanished from an Iceland stockroom. A junk shop lost a shelf of glassware. It made no sense. i

Walking out of the Acock’s Green station at night became an unsettling experience. There was hardly anyone around. The barking of guard dogs shattered any sense of peace there might have been. Dead leaves were stuck like a torn carpet to the rain-darkened pavement. The moon was never visible. Every shop window was heavily barred or shuttered. Slogans began to appear on metal screens and blank walls: HANG THE THEIVES, THIEVING GYPPOS, SEND THE THIEFS HOME. I must admit, I laughed out loud when I saw someone had painted with a brush on the wall of the station car park: WHO STOLE MY SPRAY CAN?

People were being shopped to us all the time, but we never got anywhere. Without the stolen goods, there was no evidence. Some of our informants seemed to feel that evidence was an optional extra when it came to prosecution. Being Asian, black, European, unusually poor or new to the area was enough. As the problem escalated, letters started to appear in the local evening paper accusing the police of protecting criminals, or insisting that the homes of ‘suspicious characters’ be searched regularly. If they have nothing to hide, they have nothing to fear. In truth, we were questioning a lot of people. And getting a lot of search warrants. We were even catching the odd thief. But not as odd as the ones we weren’t catching.

Julia really summed it up one evening, during one of our increasingly rare family meals, ‘It’s like some children’s gang,’ she said. ‘Nicking all the things they see at home. Then hiding somewhere, dressing up, smoking cigarettes. Pretending to be their own parents.’ She looked sad. Playfulness was slipping away from her. I wondered if she could be right. Maybe it was some whimsical game, a joke played by kids or the members of some lunatic cult. But the consequences weren’t funny. People were getting hurt. Homes were getting broken up.

I remember the day, in late October, when I realised just how serious things had become. I was interviewing some people who’d been involved in a violent incident at the Aldi supermarket on the Warwick Road. A Turkish woman shopping with two young children had been attacked by several other shoppers. She’d suffered a broken hand, and her four-year-old daughter was badly bruised. No stolen goods had been found in her bag or her bloodstained clothes. She told me a young woman had started screaming ‘Stop thief!’ at her in the toiletries section, near the back of the store. People had crowded round, staring. A man had grabbed her arm and held her while the young woman started throwing jars of hair gel at her. Someone else had knocked her down from behind. She’d woken up in hospital, and it had been a while before she’d found out that her two children were safe.

Then I talked to the young woman who’d thrown the jars. She was only nineteen, a hard-faced AG girl with china-white skin and hair tied back. She chain-smoked throughout the interview, flicking ash over the table between us. Her answers were mostly monosyllables, but a few times she interrupted me with sudden outbursts. ‘She wouldn’t let go of her little girl. That means she was using her as a human shield.’ And later, ‘Are you a copper or a fucking social worker? Wake up and join the real world.’ I don’t think she really heard a word I was saying.

A couple of days later, a tiny padded envelope was sent to the Acock’s Green station. It was full of crushed stink bombs. The smell lingered in the building for days. Groups of neo-fascists took to patrolling the streets in combat jackets, led by dogs on steel chains. Meanwhile, the thefts continued. In desperation, all the local police stations joined forces in a massive raid on the homes of suspects. We found next to nothing. But local racists used the operation as a cover for their own little Kristallnacht. Asian shops were broken into and smashed up, and a few homes were set on fire. We were caught off balance, too busy hunting for stolen goods to stop the violence. I still wonder if our superiors knew what was going to happen and turned a blind eye.

November was unexpectedly cold. It never seemed to become full daylight. The frost made everything slippery or tacky, difficult to handle. Car fumes made a smoky haze above the streets. I spent the days and nights rushing from one crime scene to another, from thefts to fights to arson attacks, my hands and face numb with cold and depression. It felt like the meaning was being sucked out of everything.

Julia’s boyfriend moved to Coventry to start a new job. She started moving her own stuff over there in batches, a suitcase at a time. It was strange to find things missing - pictures, books, ornaments - that I’d come to take for granted as part of the house. Maybe Elaine was letting Julia take some things that weren’t strictly hers, just to avoid arguments. I felt too tired to mediate between them; all I wanted to do at home was sleep. Without Julia there, filling the house with her scent and music, I was reminded of how things had been before she was born. When Elaine and I had first set up home together. Maybe we could get some of that back.

* * * *

It was maudlin retreat into the past that sent me to the allotments in Tyseley, near the street where I’d lived as a child. The allotments occupied a strip of land between an industrial estate and a local railway line that carried only freight trains. There was a patch of waste ground at one end, with some derelict railway shacks and a heap of rusting car bodies. It was overgrown with fireweed and pale, straggly grass. I’d spent a lot of time there at the age of ten or eleven, getting into fights and spying on couples. Somehow I remembered the place as having a kind of mystery about it, a promise that was never fulfilled.

It was my day off - either Monday or Tuesday, I’m not sure. Another chilly, overcast day. I’d been walking around Tyseley all afternoon, trying to make sense of things. How quickly it had all changed, once the fear had taken hold. I wasn’t immune either. How easy it was to blame. How hard it was to know. In some way I couldn’t understand, the police were being used. Not to find the truth, but to cover it up. There was a time, I thought, before I was caught up in this. There must be a part of me that can stand outside it. The light was draining away through the cracks in the world. By the time I reached the alley at the back of the allotments, a red-tinged moon was staring through the ragged trees.

I was so far up my own arse by then that the first time I saw the child, I thought he was one of my own memories. The light was fading anyway; his face was indistinct. He was reaching through the chain-link fence from the railway side. I remember his fingers were unusually thin and pale; they looked too long for his hands. He glanced at me without making eye contact. His eyes were large and very dark, but his skin was so white it seemed translucent. His brand-new ski jacket made him look bulkier than he probably was. Something about his posture suggested need. I wondered what he was looking for.

A flicker in the half-light distracted me. Another child, ducking behind the derelict shacks. Then a third, somewhere beyond the fence. I realised I was surrounded. But I felt more tired than scared. There was a smell in the air like ash and burnt plastic; probably there’d been a bonfire nearby on the fifth. The evening light felt dry and brittle, like old cellophane. There was no colour anywhere in this world. I could see a double exposure of my own hands as I moved from side to side, trying to catch one of the paper-faced children. The way they jittered and grabbed and hid reminded me of silent films. I wondered how far they’d go to become what they appeared to be.

It was getting too dark to see anything much. I stumbled to the end of the line of shacks, where three old brick garages backed onto an alley. I’d once stood here and watched an Asian kid getting beaten up by skinheads. There was a smell of mould and cat piss. No one was around. I glimpsed two of the film children in a garage doorway, pretending to be a courting couple. I lunged at them, but caught only a rusty metal screen. One of them touched my wrist with soft fingers. It took me a few seconds to realise that he’d taken my watch. My mind kept asking me what was wrong with the garages. I looked around the alley in the unreal glow of city lights reflected off the clouds. Three garages. When I’d been here as a child, there’d only been two.

I hardly said a word at home that evening. Near midnight, I came back with a torch and a spade. The children were gone. The third garage had been clumsily knocked together with bricks of different sizes, mortar slapped on to cover the gaps. It was a faux building, made from stolen materials. I prised the metal door loose and stepped inside. The ground was soft under my feet.

Between the uneven walls, every kind of stuff was heaped up: clothes, food, cushions, magazines, all of it beginning to moulder. There was a pane of glass attached to the inside of the brick wall. Beetles stirred in the waning light of my torch. I saw bags of pet food that had been torn open by rats, flesh gleaming from the damp cases of porn videos, soft pizzas rotting in an open freezer that couldn’t be plugged in here. My foot slipped on dead leaves, and I put my weight on the spade.

Have you ever dug into a cat litter tray and realised what was buried under the wafer of soil? The blade sank inches into the ground, then lifted a sticky wedge that smelled like a museum of disease. I pushed my left hand against my mouth and bit down. My torch fell and stuck, its light reflecting from pale spots in the exposed slime. Metal glittered. A face swam into view on a scrap of paper, then vanished.

I dug for a while. The ground was full of cash: crumpled fivers and tenners, verdigris-covered coins, all slippery from the layer of nearly liquid excrement they’d been buried in. I gagged and retched any number of times, but I hadn’t eaten since lunchtime. Daylight seemed a long time ago. Eventually I got down far enough to reach a number of yellowish, brittle sticks wrapped in dark cloth. There was nothing left of his flesh. I did as much damage as I could with the spade, then covered up the fragments with the strange earth I’d removed from them. The contents of the garage had drained my torch; I doubted it would ever work again. Heft it there with the other rubbish.

The moon’s small, bloodshot face peered at me as I stood in the allotments, wiping my shoes with dead leaves. I thought about the power of damaged lives. How a corrupt politician might try to come back, feeding on money like a vampire on blood. How he could attract followers desperate for an illusion of normality. No wonder the police couldn’t make a difference.

Money talks. But you wouldn’t want to hear its accent.

As I walked home, the streets around me were deserted. The sodium light gave the pavement a faint tinge of gold. There were no thieves, no vigilantes, no children, no beggars. If anyone had got in my way, I’d have killed them. I needed someone to blame. We all do. But there was nothing except a smell of shit, and an icy chill in the air.

* * * *

Joel Lane lives in Birmingham. His tales of horror and the supernatural have appeared in various anthologies and magazines, including Darklands, Fantasy Tales, Little Deaths, Twists of the Tale, The Third Alternative, The Ex Files, White of the Moon, The Mammoth Book of Dracula, Swords against the Millennium, Hideous Progeny, The Museum of Horrors, The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror and Dark Terrors 4 and 5. He is the author of a collection of short stories, The Earth Wire, a collection of poems, The Edge of the Screen, and a novel set in the world of post-punk rock music, From Blue to Black. His second novel, The Blue Mash, was published by Serpent’s Tail in 2002. Lane has also edited Beneath the Ground, an anthology of subterranean horror stories from Alchemy Press, and with Steve Bishop he edited Birmingham Noir, an anthology of tales of crime and psychological suspense set in the West Midlands, published by Tidal Street Press. ‘ “The Receivers” is one of an ongoing series of supernatural crime stories I’ve been working on for a while,’ explains the author. ‘They aim to combine traditional weird elements with modern social and political themes. This story was written last year, and its theme hopefully needs no explanation.’