Summers noticed she had a touch of blood on her shoe and slowly moved away from the head of forensics, who would quite rightly give her a good telling off for potentially contaminating the crime scene.
As per usual, there were no witnesses to offer any useful information to the investigators, and no cameras on the residential street meant that there wasn’t much point in the detectives hanging around.
It had been a long day, so Kite drove Summers home, before retiring for the night himself.
38
Ben sat at the kitchen table, drinking out of the wine glass his mother had poured for herself before evidently passing out. She was sat on the chair opposite him, her arms and head rested on the hard wood table, unconscious from the alcohol.
He’d been crying again, over the situation he found himself in, the loss of what once seemed to be a bright future. And he cried over pain he now felt in his heart, the heavy ache he carried in his chest since leaving Eve’s apartment. He’d never believed in love at first sight, thinking it was only ever lust that could grab somebody’s attention that quickly, but now he wasn’t so sure.
Was twenty-four hours enough to fall in love? It was for Ben, he believed that now. And it was real love, the kind of love where you would sacrifice for that person to do the right thing, even if it meant breaking the two hearts that until that moment had bonded as one.
He’d also cried over the ever-increasingly complicated relationship between him and his mother.
For years she’d had problems, mental problems, she’d been prescribed all sorts of medication to balance herself out, but hadn’t taken the pills as routinely as needed, even with her husband placing the pills and a glass of water beside her bed in the morning, and next to her dinner plate in the afternoon. Was she deliberately disobedient? She started refusing the treatment altogether.
It was almost as if someone was telling her not to take the medication. On one occasion, Mr Green found around a month’s worth of pills under his wife’s side of the bed, which led to him to try and force the tablets into her, which led to physical struggles, which Ben once saw.
There is nothing quite as sickening to a child, regardless of age, as witnessing the two people you love and care for more than anyone else, fighting and shouting and screaming at each other, and then seeing your mother forcing herself to throw up, if your father was lucky enough to get her to take her medication in the first place.
She should have been in a home for the mentally ill a long time ago, but Mr Green was old school, for better or for worse, in sickness and in health. Looking back, Ben could now see that this was a mistake on his father’s part.
Was it his only mistake?
Ben had moments when he believed in the awful words his mother had mumbled to him in the last day or so, the fact that his father had been a serial killer, that he carried the same murderous gene that his father had, and that he could only fight his natural instincts for so long before they took over.
Why did his mother have to tell him that? Why couldn’t she leave Ben to believe that his father was a saint? Just let him think his father was a great man who loved and cared and gave and shared.
Why did she have to break Ben’s heart again? Why?
Ben felt a rage build in his body and before he knew it, he’d smashed his fist down hard onto the kitchen table, his mother’s head bounced up from the surface from the impact. She awoke from her alcohol-induced slumber and smiled as she stared bleary-eyed at her son, as she sat back in her seat and looked for her glass of wine before realising it was in Ben’s hand.
‘So, Charlie’s dead,’ said Ben, staring into his mother’s eyes, searching for a reaction, a sign of how much she knew, how much she understood or cared about the torment he was going through.
‘You did well, my son.’ she replied. ‘Yes, I heard it on the radio. How do you feel?’
‘How do I feel?’ said Ben, ‘I didn’t do it. The police had me in the station for a murder I didn’t commit. Thank god they’re so stupid they didn’t realise I’m the bastard who killed those fucking kids!’
Ben leaned in towards the table, finished the glass of wine and poured some more.
‘Of course you killed him, Ben,’ said his mother, ‘who else?’
‘I bottled it, mum,’ he said. ‘I couldn’t go through with it. I ran away. Then the next thing, four policemen are at my front door, asking me to the station to answer some questions.’
Mrs Green held out her hand and Ben gave her the wine glass.
‘Your father used to forget as well, Ben,’ she said, before taking a large gulp of the red wine. ‘He would sometimes wake up, specks of blood on his face and in his hair, and deny he’d done anything wrong. He denied it so much. I could only believe that he didn’t know what he had done, like he’d chosen to forget.’
She emptied the wine glass with another large gulp, slid it along the table to Ben, who filled it again.
‘He chose to forget?’ said Ben. ‘You can’t just forget these things, mum, not even you with your unstable mind and fucking drinking problem.’
Ben swiped his arm across the table and the glass flew into the wall to his left, broken glass crashed to the floor and wine ran down the wall.
His mother didn’t flinch.
‘Now, now, Ben,’ she said, ‘calm down. This is not the moment to panic. Your mind lets you forget what you have done because you are not ready to accept what you are, not yet. It will come. For now, your mind is protecting you, hiding your ills deep down, and we’ll wait, we’ll wait until you’re ready.’
It was at this point, Ben realised how much he hated his mother. He hated looking at her, he hated the sound of her voice, but more than that, he hated the awful words that she spoke. She spoke them like the truth, and Ben didn’t know if she was lying, and exploiting his instability to fulfil some bizarre fantasy she had turning around in her sick head, or if she was telling the truth, that not only was he a cold-blooded killer, but his mind was also playing incredible tricks on him.
Sometimes when you hate someone, you don’t want to believe what they are saying is the truth, even if you haven’t an argument against it.
Mrs Green was now telling Ben how she first discovered that his father was The Phantom. There was the stress and the anger, things that Ben never saw in his father, then his late night walks and coming home late at night and crying himself to sleep on the sofa, thinking that his troubled wife upstairs couldn’t hear.
She explained that she took some of the blame, for being such an exhausting wife, that her illness affected the people around her, she knew that, but ultimately, it was Ben’s father who had this desire inside him, the need to shed the blood of another to ease the pain and torture inside of him.
Eventually, at a time of weakness for Mr Green, she approached him and told him that she knew what he had been doing, he broke down in tears, she swore to secrecy, and together they’d get through it.
He’d explained he did it to quieten the voice in his head, how he’d put on some of his painting overalls, take a knife and stalk the streets, keeping to the shadows until he found a victim, someone on their own, someone who wasn’t ready to defend themselves, then he’d claim them as his own, sacrificing them, in the hope that their death would buy him peace of mind.
‘I pledged my allegiance to my husband, like I’m doing to you now.
Ben despised every single word she said. How could he not know the evil that lived inside his father? It seemed impossible. He was the kindest, gentlest man. But then, until recently, so was Ben.