How It Starts

Piccadilly Village, Manchester – 4.07am

Though it was impossible to tell from the scowl on his face, Angus Fisk was happy.

This was his time, the magical hours between the last of the late-night revelers collapsing face-first into a sofa splattered with their own vomit and the first appearance of the early-morning fitness freaks, straining against their too-tight Lycra. Those precious hours when the streets were empty and you could almost imagine that the city had been deserted.

Those were the hours that Angus lived for, and now some fucker had decided to ruin them by dredging a body out of the Ashton Canal.

The air was cold and though it had stopped raining, it was only a matter of time before it started again. Angus turned up his collar as he stalked along the side of the canal, towards the torch-beams sweeping through the gloom. The uniforms had already taped off the section of the canal where the body had been found - but taping off a crime scene smack in the middle of a residential area was about as effective in deterring interference as erecting a ten-foot neon sign that played the Benny Hill theme on infinite loop, all the while proclaiming to the world: EVERYBODY - HERE'S THE CRIME!

As Angus ducked under the yellow tape, one of the uniforms protecting the scene perimeter flashed a torch beam into his eyes. He squinted, the after-burn of the torchlight lingering like a smear of petrol over his vision. The beam dipped and Fisk picked out the familiar face of a beat constable. “DI Fisk, morning. DS Wright's just up ahead-”

Only half listening, Angus's eyes swiveled across the surrounding area in a scouring glance before his focus settled on the familiar figure of Detective Sergeant Nina Wright, twenty-five feet in front of them on the canal side path. “Walk and talk, constable.”

“Victims an IC4, male, late twenties, DOA. Body was found in the canal by a passer-by. Literally fell and landed on him.”

They passed by a pair of uniformed officers standing beside a young man wrapped in what looked like an over-sized sheet of tin-foil, damp hair plastered to his forehead. Typical. It wouldn't be a proper night in Manchester if there wasn't a least one inebriated arsehole falling into somewhere he shouldn't be falling. Ordinarily, they'd at least wait until it was deep into winter before trying to prove you could skate on the canal.

“So cautionary tale back there takes a moonlight dip and comes out with more than just a fistful of used condoms. What about all these gawping fucks?”

Angus jerked his thumb over his shoulder. Flanking both sides of the canal were three story flats, many with window balconies directly overlooking the footpaths that skirted the water. Red brick and wrought iron, expensive enough that no one came out-doors to see what was going on – though there were a few faces in lit windows, mouthing into mobile phones as they watched what was unfolding below.

“Preliminary survey's under-way, but nothing so far.”

Angus lengthened his stride - the unspoken yet universally understood code for I'm done with you - as they neared where Nina stood, watching the corpse intently.

“Sergeant, what am I looking it?”

"A very sloppy job."

Nina snapped off a pair of latex gloves with signature distaste. From her coat pocket she plucked a small bottle of sanitiser gel, squeezed off one pea-sized dollop, and started to scrub her hands clean. The inspector was already taken with the corpse. Understandable. She circled it slowly. In the glare of the lamplight, phantom shadows ticked around her like clock hands.

"No I.D. No possessions. Just the clothes off his back, what's left of them."

She gave her superior officer a searching glance. His eyes were narrowed, hawk-like, curious. There was no spark of recognition, nor the old flash of victory, so this at least wasn't one of his regulars. She wondered if that disappointed him. Palm-to-palm. Back of hands. Left, first, then right. The gel glistened and squeaked against her skin. Behind, the familiar burst of radio static. Soon there'd be a tent, campers in coveralls, and scuba divers.

"There's a lock just outside the village, so he hasn't had far to travel. No debris lodged in the throat. He's been adrift less than an hour. And whoever dumped him was in quite a hurry. It's not hard to see why."

The corpse at their feet was almost wholly unremarkable. Age, ethnicity, build; pick a combination and there was an archetype to explain away each of them. What she and Detective Inspector Fisk were asked to do was find the anomaly, the piece of the puzzle that didn't quite fit. Sometimes it took weeks. Sometimes it was easy. It had never before been quite this easy. The corpse was almost wholly unremarkable, excluding the severe burns to the chest and face. Burns like hand prints scorched into the skin. And a hand-shaped hole in his shirt, charred black into the cotton. Underneath, angry blistered flesh bubbled up, shining like fish scales in the torch light. What remained of the face was inscrutable - the bone had in places turned brown.

"Sir, this didn't happen far from here. And I don't think it's a stretch to imagine... someone heard something."

“You're telling me.”

For a moment his eyes lifted again to the flats, trying to imagine how anyone could have slept through the screams. Wherever he looked, though, Fisk's eyes were drawn back to the burns. It was hard to look anywhere else. However many dead bodies it took to numb a man to the sight of broken or mangled flesh was ten fewer than Angus Fisk had seen, but there was something about this one. Something that made Fisk think he was going to regret getting out of bed earlier that morning.

The burns, shaped exactly like hands. Localised, precise, uniform; everything that fire wasn't. Fisk's brows creased together into a well-worn scowl as, knees stiff, he crouched.

“Why go to all this trouble, only to ditch your handiwork in the canal? What's the point?”

One 'hand-print' covered the corpses mouth, the heel of the palm on his chin with the fingers stretching over his lips. The others – the cheek, the chest, one at the throat – looked like the products of a struggle, but the mouth? That was no coincidence, no random bar-fight turned tasty or mugging gone a step too far.

“I'd say someone's sending a message, here - but I'll be fucked if I know what they're saying or who to - or, for that matter, how,” he added, shaking his head as he gave the blistered flesh one last look before straightening to his feet.

"Well, if they wanted this to be seen, they couldn't have picked a better place."

Given an excuse to put some space between herself and the body, Nina seized it gladly. She wandered to the canal edge to afford herself a better view of Piccadilly Village. Even then, she found herself inwardly scoffing at the name. It was an estate for people who couldn't afford to live in Venice. The floors were immaculate, the greenery neat, the lamps were nostalgic, and there was even at its heart some monstrous black sculpture of a crane; a reminder to the good villagers of the kind of graft they'll never have to do. Ahead, the canal-hugging flats turned out of sight, and a bitter wind tumbled in from the dark, electrifying the black water with shocks of white.

"I did a walk before," she nodded ahead, "Three cameras, each looking in that direction. Reckon we could get a more accurate time-stamp of delivery if we check them out."

There was no need to underline the improbability their suspect would appear on one of the security feeds. That would be stating the obvious to a man like Fisk. Nina had encountered that sort of soured mentality in other veterans of the service, who claimed the only hope was false hope, but not personified quite as purely as in the detective inspector. And he was right, too. About the body. It was a message, not some nervous newbie's last-minute drop-off.

"There's no way he was dumped from Great Ancoats. Too much traffic and it's lit up like Christmas. Just like this bloody place."

Overhead, windows were lighting up on both sides, curtains suspiciously aquiver. One of the bolder residents threw open a window to make enquiries, then another, opposite, complained about the noise; neither of whom appeared to be in shock from having recently heard a stranger's death throes. The village was just the dumping site, then.

"Ever seen anything like this before, sir?"

Though he was loathe to admit it, Angus had seen something like it before. Confronting that fact meant willingly opening the floodgates to a veritable tsunami of piss. If the burns hadn't been so exact, he would've written it off as your average common or garden psychopath in the making, but there was no avoiding it.

“Years ago. Some kid done in by one of those... what're they calling them now? Mutants. Looked like he'd jammed a fork into the worlds biggest plug socket, hair like Einstein.” With a sigh, Fisk held up a hand before Wright could speak. “Wilmott and the spooks kept it out of the papers. Thought it was some kind of... IRA plan gone wrong. Now everyone and his granny's got a story about a run in with one of the freaks.”

It hadn't been his case, but Fisk remembered all too well the debriefing that the Chief Constable, David Wilmott, had given: no one had seen anything and if anyone had, they would keep their lips buttoned up tight. At least until MI5 had the chance to get a handle on what was quite literally the new breed of criminal in the country. Fisk shoved his hands into his coat pockets and swore under his breath. Just thinking about it all was enough to boil his piss.

"In America, they have specialist units to deal with this sort of thing. Mutant crime."

The two words tumbled out at speed. There was something inherently unprofessional about the expression, because it effectively classified a minority group as a type of crime, when what they were really faced with was a violent crime. But this sort of thing was so much more and there needed to be a name for it, even if the journalists, and the whistle-blowers, and the bleeding hearts didn't like it. Americans were more brazen in their criminal justice endeavors: the Mutant Crimes Division. Christ. They still ran things like the Wild West over there.

Underfoot, they traded off the click of quaint cobblestones for the soft ring of steel as they crossed the bridge. Maybe they were scouting their surroundings. Maybe they just wanted to get away from the body and the myriad questions that had surfaced along with it.

"Since the best specialist training we can hope for is a team-building day in Llandudno, I'd say we need to start making friends with the local mutants, if we want to get anywhere. Don't suppose you have any on speed-dial, do you?"

“America! America's half the problem. Sticking them on the payroll of government goon squads. What bright spark came up with that idea?”

The less said about the Americans approach to handling mutants the better. For every mutant crimes team, there was a dozen costumed wankers with farcical nicknames and a White House stamp of approval on their unitard, prancing about like they owned the place. It was tantamount to giving a monkey a shotgun, sticking a Stetson on its head, then declaring it fit to be the new chief of police for the NYPD. Standard practice really where the Americans where concerned. God forbid the Home Office ever allowed the same lunacy.

As he crossed the bridge, Fisk took a moment to scan the length of the canal from the vantage that the bridge afforded. The further they walked away from the yellow tape, the deeper the silence around them grew. Fisk's brain was rattling with questions, buzzing with agitation, but the night was still, with many of the villages residents unaware that anything out of the ordinary was going on within spitting distance of their front door.

“And to answer your question – I hope that was your abysmal attempt at a joke, sergeant.”

"Only half, detective inspector. You know as well as I do that if we want answers then we need to play nice," she smiled at the face he made, "I'm just saying it out loud. There's a mutant out there who knows something about our red hand man."

On the other side of the canal it was deceptively calm. There was only the crunch of gravel underfoot and the soft sloshing of water to upset the tranquility. It struck Nina as odd that, of all places, this was where the body was dumped. Amongst criminal fraternities, there was nothing noteworthy about Piccadilly Village, at least not to the best of her knowledge. And when it came to Manchester and its dark and ugly underbelly, she had it wholly mapped. No wonder Fisk was stumped, and that was a source of some selfish comfort.

Ahead, there was a a dark recess, a channel between two blocks of flats which led onto Chapeltown Street. Nina's gaze ticked from building to building, relocating the security cameras she had previously discovered: one, two, three. None of which were pointing in her direction. It was a blind spot. Now that was something. Inwardly, she waited with curiosity to see whether her superior officer had noticed it, too.

"I heard Jack Callahan is back in town, sir. You don't suppose there's a connection?"

“Red hand man?” He could see the headlines already. It was just the kind of story that the papers would eat up: a mysterious murder, inexplicable evidence, the dumping of the body drawing back the veil of safety and security that Piccadilly Village had been cocooned in. The coroner might well discover that the cause of death was choking to death on a Malteser, but the moment word got out that there'd be an unusual suspected homicide, the serial killer wack-jobs would start frothing at the mouth.

“Callahan? Well, if that isn't just the moldy cherry on top of this three-tiered shit cake-” Whatever grousing Fisk had been about to indulge in was silenced, his attention snapping to the alleyway to Chapeltown Street. His eyes narrowed, glaring into the shadows, daring them to do again what he could swear he'd just seen them do – yes! Something had moved. Someone was eavesdropping on their conversation.

“Police. Show yourself,” he barked into the shadows, already stalking towards whoever was skulking in the alleyway.

Startled by the outburst, the shadowy figure withdrew from the cover of darkness, and stood frozen halfway between the detectives and escape. Framed in the cold and luminous haze of Chapeltown Street, it was clear to see it was a man, and that, judging by his apprehension, he had no intention of coming quietly. Once the shock subsided, he bolted for the gate at the end of the alley, and the detectives gave chase. Nina fumbled for the radio strapped to her hip, and Fisk took off like a greyhound, shrinking the gap between himself and their quarry. Then, with a resounding clang of metal, their pursuit was cut short, as the fugutive slammed the heavy alley gate shut behind him and vanished up the road. Pressing her face hard against the gate to catch a glimpse of him, and the direction he was fleeing, Nina barked into her radio:

"This is Echo 101 requesting immediate assistance. We have a Code 4 on Chapeltown Street, heading for Longacre Street. Suspect is IC1, male, in a grey tracksuit."

Seizing the bars of the gate with both hands, tight enough that his knuckles turned white, Fisk swore at the night: the gate was jammed. Naturally. Behind him, Wright was calling in a request for help, but the sound of the runners footsteps was already growing distant. Every second that passed was one second closer to losing a potential lead. Even if he had nothing to do with the body in the canal, Fisk had to catch the toe-rag on principle. Anyone who ran was, to Fisk's mind, guilty of something. He took a step back, eyes wide as he looked up and down the length of the gate. He snapped his fingers at Nina to snatch her attention away from the radio.

“Wright! Give me a leg up – now!”

The radio was immediately stashed. Nina came to her superior officer's aid with an offer of hands, fingers interlaced. She crouched beside him and was for an instant reminded of all the times she was sent to retrieve the football from old Mrs. Wilson's yard as a girl, and consequently being chased back again. It struck her as odd then to see Detective Inspector Fisk going up and over as he did, with a hiss and an obscenity, and then, to his credit, taking off again the moment his feet hit the ground.

Nina didn't waste another second. She appeared from the alley and signalled to the officers on the other side of the canal. One of them abandoned his corpse-watching duties and clattered across the bridge. More windows were lighting up all around, and some uppity pensioner demanded an explanation from his porch. His cries went unanswered however, as Nina and the officer departed the village and piled into a squad car. Up ahead, she spotted Fisk's flapping coat vanish around a corner.

"There! Cut him off at Bidstone Close! Let's go!"

The squad car took off with a growl, igniting the street in blazing blue.

Fisk didn't run. Running wasn't his jurisdiction. That was what the force had uniforms for: pelting off after toe-rags, carried along by the inexhaustible momentum of their own inexperience, scrambling their way over and inevitably getting their freshly ironed pants caught on fences. Fisk had done enough running in his day, long long ago, and now made a point to avoid it wherever possible – and yet his feet were punching the concrete and tarmac beneath them. Lungs burning and coat flapping at his heels, about as streamlined as a hedgehog. He was running and he was damned if he wasn't going to catch the little shit who'd pushed him to it.

Following the curve of Longacre onto Heyrod Street, he froze and frantically looked up and down the length of the empty avenue. There was a burst of movement to the left, a shadow ducking into Betley Street. No time to catch his breath, Fisk sprinted after it.