But the damage had been done. The media were not about to let the story die. A few of the more intrepid reporters were starting to ask, at the daily Task Force press conference, some pretty awkward questions. How was the investigation going? What, if anything, had the massive dig in the backyard unearthed? And all that stuff that had been taken away for forensic testing – when could the public expect to hear some results on that? Had Aggot’s alleged presence in the house been scientifically confirmed yet, or what? How long did it take to look at a come stain through a microscope?
The whiff of a major cover-up/fiasco was in the air. Alarming flaws in the police case were starting to show. For example: a local newspaper, after a cursory bit of legwork, was able to track down all three of the home’s “missing” tenants. They proved to be alive and well, living in separate households not far away, and still attending classes at the University of ——. They denied, to the satisfaction of the newspaper, having had any involvement whatever in Aggot’s escape or harbouring. They were not members of SNARBY. They professed to know nothing of the whole House of Darkness affair. They claimed to have moved out of the premises only a day or two prior to the commencement of the Task Force probe. At no point in the days leading up to their departure had they witnessed any person of Aggot’s description to be resident in the house. They believed they would have noticed him if he’d been there.
Then Pamela Scratch resurfaced, or at any rate made telephone contact with a talkback radio show, to affirm that she too was by no means buried in the home’s backyard. Speaking from an undisclosed locale, she denounced the excavation effort as a cynical publicity stunt on the part of the Aggot Task Force – not to mention a grotesque violation of Aggot’s right to receive, once recaptured, a fair trial for having escaped.
Then the forensics data began to leak out. First the report on that much-vaunted “hoard” of pubic hairs found in the home’s bath-tub. Its conclusion: there had been no foul play. The hairs had hailed, without exception, from the genital areas of the home’s three live tenants. Far from being a grim testament to a killer’s perversions, they had simply fallen out in the bath, accumulated in the plug-hole through a combination of natural pubic attrition and poor cleaning practices. The dead cat, the maimed voodoo doll, the vomit traces on the carpet, the unpaid bills, the apparent death list, the cluttered kitchen benches, the oils and lotions – these things too turned out, on analysis, to be wholly unconnected with the work of Aggot, or indeed with that of any other fetishistic killer. They were simply standard student fare, staple features of any undergraduate home. Even the cache of Aggot’s prison letters turned out to have got into the place by legitimate means. On item after item, not the faintest trace of Aggot’s deposits or fibres could be found. If the emerging forensics picture established anything, then, it was this: the House of Darkness was the one piece of real estate in the city, in the nation, in the world, in which Neville Claude Aggot could now be said, with near complete scientific certainty, never to have set foot or blown a load in his life.
Finally, after weeks of stonewalling, the Task Force was obliged to release the last and most damning of the laboratory findings. The Sheets of Shame, after minute inspection under every available type of lamp and laser, after meticulous application of all the appropriate dyes and reagents, after exhaustive triple-checking by a hand-picked panel of the world’s foremost analysts of encrusted organic material, had proved to be entirely devoid of Neville Claude Aggot’s DNA. As copiously stained as the sheets were, not a speck of the damage had been done by Neville Aggot. They were, in terms of the Aggot investigation, clean. They were not even illegal. They were simply the unwashed bedclothes of a no more than averagely depraved single male.
The sheets were quietly returned to their rightful owner. The Head of the Aggot Taskforce resigned in disgrace. The news showed chastened members of the Taskforce returning a procession of seized items to the home: curtains, a whole door, a showerhead, sagging rolls of lino and carpet from which large square portions had been summarily hacked. Compensation of an undisclosed order was paid to the landlord. The gaping trenches in the property’s back yard were refilled, the surface expensively returfed. Jack Durack’s purported “sighting” of Aggot at the house next door, originally dismissed as spurious, subsequently reclassified as almost certainly genuine, was once again deemed to have been fraudulent, and plans to prosecute the old man to the fullest extent of the law were vigorously revived.
But where was Neville Claude Aggot? As the House of Darkness debacle played itself out, the mystery of the fugitive’s true whereabouts only deepened. Where was he holed up, if he hadn’t been holed up there? Where had he disappeared to, after his abortive visit to the apartment of Pamela Scratch? Why had there been no authenticated sighting of him in the weeks since? Why had he declined, so uncharacteristically, to go on a multi-state killing spree? This was a man with no track record for subtlety, with no known capacity for lying low or staying at large. So where was he? Where could he have gone? Had he fled the country? Found God, assumed a new identity? Gone bush? Gone straight? The trail simply stopped dead on the night of the Scratch incident: at the ransacked apartment, at the torching of the stolen car. It was as though by the light of that flaming vehicle Aggot had vanished from the earth’s face, had stepped from that lonely and lambent roadside into another world …
Months passed without an answer, without a sign. Reported sightings of him petered out. People started to forget. They went back to not locking their doors again, to walking the streets at night. Pamela Scratch grew steadily bolder, appearing more and more often in public, launching a new incarnation of SNARBY, arguing that Aggot’s having murdered nobody at all during his months at large entirely vindicated her view of him as a misunderstood man of peace. Gradually the Aggot Task Force was wound down, its members redeployed to higher priority cases. When the day of its official dissolution finally came, there wasn’t a whisper of public complaint.
But where was Neville Claude Aggot?
More months passed. A year. Two years. Five years. Ten. Eleven full years would go by before the fugitive finally resurfaced, before his disappearance was at last explained, before the large and terrible thing of which it was a part began to be understood. But that is another story, locked away in a future we can’t properly see. This story, Fenton’s story, is coming to an end. We don’t have eleven years. We don’t even have eleven pages. We don’t have time to let the mystery resolve itself organically, bit by unspectacular bit, as all real-life mysteries do. We need closure on Aggot now.
We must therefore turn around, and loop back to an unvisited cranny of the past. We must return to the night of Aggot’s escape. We must rejoin him as he drives inexpertly away from the sacked apartment of Pamela Scratch, enraged, incomplete, boiling with thwarted need, with a still-unsated craving to be the boss. The one in control. Her kitchen knife rides shotgun on the seat beside him. He trawls the dark and empty streets, hungry for someone to be the boss of. His idiot eyes are rat-narrowed, blade-thin, twitching like nostrils, peeled for necking teens or possible lover’s lanes. The virgin knife mocks him from the empty seat, taunting him with his failure to get it wet.
And then he sees it: a broken-down car at the roadside, bonnet up, hazard lights flashing in the rain. Beside it stands a large man with one arm in a white sling, waving down Aggot’s car with his one good hand. He wears heavy spectacles. This four-eyed freak in the rain, one arm raised, frozen in time, moronically waving, a minute shy of becoming a statistic, the name of a dead man, the name of a person in the wrong place at the wrong time. So Aggot draws slowly up on to the road’s shoulder, taking his time now, savouring the build-up, the awful sense of urgency gone. He allows his left hand to move to the handle of the knife, to touch it, to stroke it perhaps, knowing the moment of release is at hand …
What Neville Claude Aggot did not know was this. The man in the rain was a multiple murderer too. He was, indeed, a serial killer. And rather a good one at that. Certainly he was a far more able and prolific taker of human life than Aggot ever had been, or would now get a chance to become. The sling on the man’s arm wasn’t real; a loaded revolver was concealed in its folds. A home-made silencer, fashioned from rubber garden hose, was gaffer-taped to the muzzle. He had a shovel in his boot, and a tarpaulin, and a tin of petrol. He had already dug a shallow grave in dense bushland, near other shallow graves that he had dug in the past. His signature was to ask people for help and then shoot them a lot of times in the face until they were dead. Then he would place them in his boot and drive them into the dense bushland and wrap them in the tarpaulin and bury them in the shallow grave. If they had a car, and if he got blood in it, he soaked the seats with petrol and torched it. No one had detected a pattern in his work yet. No one knew yet who he was, or that he had a signature. Nobody even knew he existed. Nobody knew his name. But one day they would.
His routine was sure and honed. He moved swiftly and with precision. Before Aggot could work out what was happening to him, much less appreciate the deep karmic relevance of it, the man in the sling and spectacles had pumped six quick bullets through the glass into his nonplussed face.
A minute or two later the man in the heavy spectacles was driving calmly from the scene, seatbelt on, driving well below the limit, fake sling unfurled on the back seat, Aggot dead in the boot, the glow of the burning car diminishing slowly in his rearview mirror.
And so, as the manhunt for him proceeded controversially above the ground, as Heads of the Aggot Taskforce came and went, as unconfirmed sightings of him dwindled into a baffled silence, the elusive Baker Butcher quietly biodegraded in his undeep grave, lying low under his loose blanket of earth and leaf matter, secure in the annals of competent mass homicide at last.