Excerpt from The Smiling Man by Joseph Knox, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

1

The heat that year was annihilating. The endless, fever dream days passed slowly, and afterward you wondered if they'd even been real. Beneath the hum of air conditioners, the chink of ice in glasses, you could almost hear it. The slow drip of people losing their minds. The city was brilliantly lit, like an unending explosion you were expected to live inside, and the nights, when they finally came, felt hallucinatory, charged with electricity. You could see the sparks--the girls in their summer clothes, the boys with their flashing white teeth--everywhere you went.

There's a particular look on their faces between the hours of midnight and 6 a.m. Falling in and out of bars, kissing on street corners, swinging their arms along the pavements. Whatever's happened to them before is long gone and, for a few hours at least, they feel like tomorrow might never come. Most of them are students, sheltering from the economic downturn in degree courses they'll never pay off. The others work minimum-wage jobs and live for the weekend. When I see them they're living in the moment, for better or worse, and the doubt, their default setting during the daytime, is replaced by some kind of certainty. I was on my 120th night shift in a row. Six months into what felt like a life sentence.

My own kind of certainty.

So I watched their faces, the young people, between the hours of midnight and 6 a.m. I watched life literally passing me by. I nodded when they did, smiled when they smiled and tried to stay in the moment. I kept my head down and took the positives, the sparks, wherever I could get them. 

We were already on Wilmslow Road when the call came through. An enormous interconnecting through-line, it runs almost six miles, linking the moneyed properties south of town with the struggling city center. It's the busiest bus route in Europe and always alive with taxis, double-deckers, commuters and light. And lately, with fires that someone had been setting in the steel dustbins lining the road. Because these fires were low priority, likely meaningless, and always set after dark, they fell to us, the night shift.

There were only two permanent members of the team.

Young detectives rotated through, just to say they'd done it, and some of the no-hope floaters did a few shifts a month to cover our days off, but permanent night duty meant one of two things. No life or no career. In my few years on the force, I'd managed to satisfy both requirements.

The dustbin fire was already out when we got there. My partner and I arrived to smoldering cinders, asked some questions and had begun to pack it up when we saw a crowd gathering on the other side of the road. I checked the time and drifted through the traffic toward them.

They were preparing a midnight vigil for a kid called Subhi Seif. Supersize to his friends. Until a few hours before, Supersize had been an eighteen-year-old fresher, living in a city for the first time in his life. Then he'd seen a girl being mugged and gone after the man who did it. He'd run into the road without looking for traffic and been obliterated beneath the wheels of a bus.

The mugger got away.

Alongside the torches, UV lights and flowers already laid in tribute, ten or so of Supersize's friends were standing marking the spot. They played sad songs from their phones and passed sweating cans of beer to keep cool. I reminded them not to stray out into the road themselves, then crossed back to the car where my partner was waiting. We drove an unmarked matt-black BMW that criminals could still spot at a glance. Mainly because of the man usually crammed into the passenger side. My superior officer, Detective Inspector Peter Sutcliffe. At a glance he could only look like a cop or a criminal, and I still wasn't sure which was closer to the truth.

"How are the Chicken McNuggets?" he said, not looking up from the sport section. Sutcliffe was one of life's great nature–nurture debates. Was he a born shit, or had he just grown into one because of his unfortunate name? His suit jacket, filled to breaking point by his body, looked water-damaged with sweat, and he was giving off so much heat that we sat with the doors wide open.

Excerpted from The Smiling Man by Joseph Knox. Copyright © 2019 by Joseph Knox. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.