This is my G.C.S.E coursework assignment from last year. I think it's alright, but the conclusion has too rapid a climax.
My last villain was Bill Strum. I only met him once, back when I was on a case in New York. God knows what year it was, and he can keep his knowledge to himself for all I care: years are only numbers. It was during a sweltering summer when the kids would play outside under the sprinklers all day if they could and the women would lounge sweating on their doorstep damning the housework, their husbands and, most of all, the heat. But that’s irrelevant too... or maybe it isn’t. But what really matters is what happened on the day I met Bill Strum for the first and, last time. What he showed me was horrific but so sad. It was sad because what once seemed terrible had become the ordinary.
Like I said, it was hot. You couldn’t escape the fact that it was the warmest and most humid July (at least I remember the month) in New York's short but fast-paced history. In the office I worked in we had no air conditioning, courtesy of the N.Y.P.D.‘s financing sector, so we had to keep the windows wide open every hour of every day, even when it rained. Because the offices were only on the second story of the police building they were in, we could always hear the traffic: you’d hear the heartbeat of the city as cars clogged the roads at rush hour and their collective engines hummed and spluttered, you’d hear the city’s mind as irate drivers screamed from their windows and vendors advertised their wares on the sidewalk and, if you leaned out of those office windows, you’d see the city’s hands as they delved in and out of handbags and pockets.
Of course, stealing outside of a police station is not a clever career move for an aspiring pickpocket. Once in a while, the police and secretaries in my office would hear shouts from outside and flock to the windows to see the excitement of an arrest. The almost daily event was known as The Migration by some of the wittier detectives, who believed that the gossips who ran were no better than geese and that if they wanted to see crime they should go out and work in the slums for a few days. But even these hard-boiled, old-school agents of the law dropped their files and rushed to the windows when the unmistakable sound of a gunshot echoed around the Manhattan streets. One of those detectives was me.
Below us on the pavement a circle of blood was spreading from beneath a young lying face down on the pavement . Standing next to him was another young man holding a smoking gun, a man I would soon know to be Bill Strum.
He was taken inside by several officers with no fuss, and five minutes later, as the ambulance pulled up outside, one of the phones rang. My phone. There had been an eerie silence in the room that hung between solemnity and curiosity before the phone had rung, and that silence returned amplified tenfold when I walked to my desk and picked up the telephone. It was broken by the resounding click that immediately followed. I held the receiver to my ear.
“They need you in the cells, James.”
* * * * * *
The station’s cells were hellish any day, but this summer they had been particularly unpleasant for prisoners and officers alike. The pipes of the first-floor toilets had burst, and the resulting sewage seeped down through into the cell’s ceilings and created an unbearable stink. I was taken through the dingy corridor by a jailer with a sweat stain from his chest to his belly, his huge set of keys tinkling in the gloom. He seemed to be doing it for dramatic effect, and in the quiet, cramped corridor it worked. The jailer turned and opened up one of the cells. I saw his hand motioning for me to enter and went through the doorway. The door was locked behind me.
There was yet another short corridor, again not well lit. At the end was a heavy steel gate that had been left ajar. From there a harsh white light pierced the darkness of the corridor. I stepped into the light and pushed open the gate. Shielding my eyes from the light, I peered inside. There sat the prisoner in front of me, hands cuffed to a metal folding chair. He looked straight ahead, and didn’t even seem to notice my entrance. One of two police officers in the cell came to my side.
“We tried talking to him, but he don’t talk back. We shout, he just sits there. We hit him, he flinches a little, but he still don’t talk” I saw the man in the chair’s nose was bleeding “What should we do?”
“What’s his name?” I asked.
“Bill Strum. It was on his licence.”
I kneeled down in front of the sitting man. I’d seen people in shock before but this wasn’t like that. His eyes were perfectly focused, just not on anything you or I could see. The cop that had been speaking earlier started to talk again
“We know you’re the best, James. You’ve had... You’ve had more experience then anyone else in this station. Maybe in New York.”
I turned to face him. He squirmed noticeably.
“More experience in what, officer?” I said sharply, “And since when have I been ‘James‘? I’m a serious crime detective, not a prisoner.”
The officer stared at his feet and I turned back to the prisoner. To my surprise he was looking straight at me. The policeman who hadn’t spoken to me reached slowly for his gun, but I gave him a look and he lowered his hand.
“Your name is Bill Strum“, I said
“Yes. Take me to the mouth.” His pale face grew paler as he said it. The other two officers looked startled.
“Why’d you shoot that man?”
“Take me to the mouth.”
“Where do you live?”
“Take me there.”
"To where you live? Or to ‘the mouth’? I had found during my time in law enforcement that confusion was the most effective form of interrogation, even better than violence. For some reason, this was especially true in New York, a city that normally thrived on confusion. But Strum surprised me.
“You can’t fool me. I’ll say only one more thing : take me to the mouth.”
* * * * * *
And we did. The other cops shouted a bit, but he would only smile sickly. Eventually we dragged him into a waiting car outside. The talkative officer replaced the driver and the other cop sat on the passenger side. I led Strum into the back seat and followed him in.
“So where are we going?” I asked the boy.
“Go to the Docks, at the mouth of the River Hudson.”
“Oh, that’s the mouth. Why there?”
Before he could answer a secretary from reception trotted up to the car. She opened the door and leaned inside.
“The man he shot is doing fine, Detective.”
I began to thank her but Bill Strum interrupted:
“Good. I don’t think he was one of them.”
* * * * * *
We drove through Manhattan then over Brooklyn Bridge, then into Brooklyn itself. It was rush hour, so I had plenty of time to find out what this Bill was about; he soon gave up his 'i'll say one more thing' thing. He was nineteen and lived in Harlem with his mother and teenage sister, Susan. He’d left school at sixteen with no qualifications, like most kids in that area, and had to look after his mother after she was crippled in a factory she worked in. He now worked in a factory next-door to where his mother had lost her hands. I tried to get him to talk about his crime, but he seemed determined to tell me in length what his life was like.
“She got no hands but she sure as hell got a mouth.” he said on the subject of his mother, “She’s an evil woman, a bitch if there ever was one, my sister too.” I wondered how he could call anyone evil after shooting someone he apparently didn’t know just to get the police’s attention.
Susan’s fourteen but she acts like she’s two. Or twenty-two. They’re so contradictory, that’s the thing. Mom tells me to get off my ass and get a life one minute and then tells me to tell her I’ll never leave as long as she’s still alive. And she’ll never die, not that witch. It’s the same with my boss…”
He continued talking about the ‘villains’ he’d encountered until we got to the docks. The car parked, but he went on, showing me once again that he was only occasionally aware of his surroundings. I waited for him to stop. His head was bowed and almost touched the seat in front. When I saw he had calmed down, I softly asked him a question that had preyed on my mind since almost the beginning of his speech.
“What about your father, Bill?”
He almost winced then looked through the window in silence. I nodded and knocked on his window, signalling for one of the other officers to let us out.
The boy took us right to the end of on of the concrete piers. The river shimmered in the unrelenting but sinking sun, the river’s usual polluted grey polished to a brilliant silver. We could see Manhattan across the water and it’s towers wavered in the heat. From the docks, the rich Big Apple was only a mirage. Strum looked at the mirage in a trance.
“Now we’re in Hell.” he said.
“Mmm. The hell mouth.” His attempt at drama annoyed me.
I turned around and surveyed the more real buildings. They were all the same: dilapidated and rusted, dead or dying. One of the officers shouted and I turned around.
Both officers held Strum by the arms and hitting him with their batons. He fell to the ground.
“Hey! Stop!” I barked.
They did as they were told and the talkative officer glared at me.
“He tried to run!”
“Sure, officer. Or did he just look at you funny, officer? Since when did we employ scum in the N.Y.P.D?” I advanced on him until he was forced against a railing. My nose barely reached his chest, but had a look of fear in his eyes. “This kid may have shot some poor innocent man, and by the look of things, he may have killed a few more and dumped their bodies in this crap-hole! He might have left them to rot in the heat with the flies! But how much better than him would you be if you cracked his skull? You’d have kicked him in the river and be pleased with yourself, then you’d go home and you’d never regret it. I’ve seen it happen myself.” I calmed down a little and backed off. The officer remained pinned to the railing.
‘The kid’s sick in the head. We might find his sister in a warehouse, or his mother under the pier.’ Strum looked stunned and stared at me with frightened eyes. ‘Your not the first, boy. Think you can surprise me? Think you can come across all dramatic by leading us down here? You’ll say they deserved it, then you’ll blame it all on your absent father, then you’ll cry and say your sorry and they didn’t deserve it. You’ll try to be human. But your not. And he’s not.” I pointed at the talkative officer, Those people you’ve killed may well have deserved it. They weren’t human, not really. It’s all so bad and screwed up there’s not one person left in this city that’s not dead inside. Just look at this place-Ó I held my arms out, This city’s dead. This is all New York is; a load of crumbling buildings filled with corpses.”
My eyes were still fixed on the boy. I took three long strides towards him and grabbed him by the collar. Still looking deep into his eyes I dragged to the lip of the pier. He kicked at me, but I felt nothing.
‘You are just like the rest and the rest are just like you.’
I dropped him over the edge and the city swallowed him.
* * * * * *
After the incident, I was quietly retired. Nobody ever knew what I did apart from the two officers I was with on that evening. They said the boy had jumped, and I just couldn’t face up to it. After so many murders and rapes and assaults and who-knows what else, nobody was surprised. I’d always known that the world was crooked, but for some reason it was that boy, Bill Strum, that pushed me over the edge. Maybe it was the heat. On that day, I smelt the city’s rot.
