by Tudor, C. J.
Her battered Fiat Punto sat outside, half propped on the curb. Her neighbor’s blue Escort was parked next to it, almost bumper to bumper. She knew every one of the cars on this street, as well as the cars of all the people who visited. That way, she could spot anyone unfamiliar. Out of place.
Yesterday, she had. Parked a few houses down, on the corner, behind the yellow Toyota that belonged to the Patels at number 14. A small white van. Innocuous. The sort of van people hired if they wanted to do their own removals; and it was true that the Patels had sold their house a while ago. But they were a family of six. She was pretty sure one small white van would not carry all of their possessions.
The van should not be there. Of course, there were probably any number of reasons why it could be. Rational, simple, normal explanations. But she dismissed them.
The van should not be there.
The van had come for them.
As she watched, the driver-side door opened. A man climbed out. Stocky, wearing a baseball cap, a green sweatshirt and jeans. He carried a parcel. Of course. People were always ordering things online now. A delivery driver wouldn’t arouse suspicion. Except Fran didn’t order anything online for that exact reason.
She didn’t have much time. She ran upstairs and threw open her wardrobe. Everything she needed was packed into a small rucksack at the bottom. The house was rented fully furnished. They had no keepsakes or mementoes.
She knocked on Alice’s door and eased it open. Alice lay on her bed, reading, long legs bent up behind her. She was growing fast, Fran thought. There would come a time when there would be questions; when she would no longer acquiesce to this life. Fran pushed that terrifying thought to one side.
“Sweetheart?”
“Yes?” Alice looked up. A few strands of dark hair fell over her face.
“We have to go. Now.”
Fran ran to the wardrobe, grabbed the rucksack and chucked her a hoodie. Alice pulled it over her head and got to her feet, stuffing them into her fake Uggs. Then she hesitated, looking around. Fran fought the urge to grab her, hurry her along.
“Alice. C’mon,” she hissed.
Alice spotted what she was missing. The small bag of pebbles, sitting on the bedside table. She snatched it up and slung it over her shoulder.
They crept out onto the landing and padded softly down the stairs. Just before the bottom, Fran paused, Alice’s small, warm body pressed closely behind. She peered around the corner of the wall. The front door had opaque glass at the top so she could see people approach. She had attached a sign to the door. Casual, handwritten:
Parcels and deliveries, please use the side door. Thanks.
Fran saw a shadow at the frosted glass, waited as the man read the note, then saw the shadow move again, around to the side of the house. Now. She grabbed Alice’s hand and they ran down the hallway. She quickly unlocked the front door. She heard a knock on the side door. They bolted down the short pathway to the car. Beeped it unlocked. Chucked the rucksacks into the back. Alice climbed in the front; Fran threw herself into the driver’s seat. She started the engine.
She was already accelerating away when she saw the man run down the side path of the house, looking confused and annoyed. Fleetingly, she wondered whether he really was making a delivery. Perhaps he had just got the wrong house. Then she saw the flash of metal in his hand. No. She wasn’t being paranoid. He had come for them. She knew.
Within ten minutes, they had been on the motorway, their old lives abandoned behind them, again.
Apart from the brief stop at the services, they had been driving ever since. They hadn’t made bad time to start with, but then they had hit a massive traffic jam on the M5 and, even at such a late hour, been hindered by an endless procession of trucks blocking both lanes on the M42. They were heading up the M1 toward Yorkshire now.
Making time, Fran thought, a line from an old film popping into her mind. I’m making time. What was it? Then she remembered. Withnail and I, the perennial student favorite. We’ve gone on holiday by mistake. We appear to be running for our lives by mistake.
“Where are we going?” Alice asked.
“I don’t know. Scotland, maybe? Somewhere safe, sweetheart. I promise.”
“You promised before.”
And she shouldn’t have. She shouldn’t now. But what else could she say? We’ll never be safe. We’ll never stop running. She couldn’t admit that to herself, let alone to a not-quite-eight-year-old.
“We’ll have a nice new house.”
“Can I go back to school?”
“Maybe. We’ll see.”
Alice didn’t reply.
She was getting used to being let down. To being disappointed and feeling distrustful. Shadows shouldn’t darken her eyes, Fran thought. They should be fresh and bright with hope and expectation. Not fear. Her mind flashed back to Alice on the toilet floor, waking from her sleep.
“Are you feeling okay?” she asked.
“Yeah.”
“You didn’t hurt yourself earlier when you fell?”
“No.”
“You broke the mirror.”
Alice frowned. “I don’t remember.”
“D’you remember anything?”
She risked a quick sideways glance. Alice had stopped frowning. Her face looked calm again, serene. She was thinking about the dream.
“I saw the girl.”
The girl. Alice had mentioned a girl before but, when pressed, she had clammed up.
“D’you know who she is?”
Alice shook her head.
“Did she speak to you?”
A nod.
“What did she say?”
“She said…she’s afraid.”
Fran swallowed. Tread carefully. Don’t let her slip away from you.
“Did she say why?”
A pause. A longer one. A car flashed them then darted out and overtook in the inside lane. Fran realized she was dawdling in the middle lane. An annoyance to other motorists and a way to draw attention. She signaled and pulled over.
Alice sat, fingers fiddling with her bag of pebbles. Clickety-click, clickety-click. The sound set Fran’s teeth on edge. Restless, insistent. Clickety-click, clickety-click.
Just when she thought she wasn’t going to answer, Alice whispered:
“She said that the Sandman is coming.”
Gabe had never seen a dead body before. Not in real life. When his mum finally succumbed to cirrhosis of the liver he had been too much of a coward to view her body in the hospital.
Later, he would wish that he had. It would have made her death more final, more complete. As it was, for weeks afterward he would wake from vivid dreams convinced that she was still alive, that the hospital had made a mistake. Even visiting her graveside felt unreal. It didn’t seem possible that she was gone, forever. It felt more as if she had simply walked away from him, part way through a conversation that remained unfinished, without ever uttering a final goodbye.
This body was some way past goodbyes. It didn’t look much like a body at all. Not anymore. It was mostly bone, with a thin covering of rotted flesh. The skin was stippled a hideous marbled green. In places it had split open, revealing more yellow bone and some kind of unidentifiable grey mush. The face, or what had once been a face, was just a skull, the eyeballs yellow and deflated, cracked lips leering over stubs of yellow teeth.
Gabe’s mind flashed to a drawing Izzy had done in preschool. It was supposed to be her babysitter, Joy (no Mona Lisa, to be fair), but it came out looking more like a cross between Slimer from Ghostbusters and Nosferatu as drawn by someone with psychotic tendencies.
That was what this body looked like. But worse. Definitely worse. A billion, trillion, squillion, minion times worse, as Izzy used to say. And that was before you got to the smell. Jesus Christ, the
smell.
Gabe turned and retched. Nothing in it but bile. Still, he heaved several more times before he managed to regain some control.
The Samaritan stood beside him, seemingly oblivious to the smell, the cold water—upon which now floated the contents of Gabe’s stomach—or the rotted corpse.
“Can you close that?” Gabe asked, straightening. “I think I’ve seen enough.”
The Samaritan obliged. He pulled the trunk down again with a dull clunk. He patted the top.
“I’d say your man here has been dead for around a year.”
“Not longer?”
“Old car. Trunk ain’t going to be air- or watertight. It might have slowed decomp a bit, but not much.”
“You’re sure it’s a man?”
He nodded. “He’s naked. Didn’t you notice?”
“The whole stinking-decomposition thing kind of distracted me.”
But now that the Samaritan had mentioned it, Gabe realized he was right. No clothes. Just a putrefying body, locked in the trunk of a car Gabe had last seen driving away with his daughter inside it. He swallowed.
All these years he had been searching, waiting for this. But this was not what he had expected. Shit. What the hell had he expected? And what the hell did he do now?
“Is there…I mean, anything to identify him?”
The Samaritan shook his head. “No clothes. No wallet. No ID.”
He looked at Gabe meaningfully. “But I haven’t checked the front of the car.”
Gabe looked at the Samaritan, then back at the car, the front still almost submerged in the lake. He sighed and waded further in. The water crept up to his thighs.
“Deeper than it looks, man.”
The Samaritan was right. Two more tentative steps and it was up to his waist. Gabe’s foot slipped on the muddy lakebed. He flailed with his arms, splashing foul water into his face, but just managed to regain his footing.
“Jesus Christ!”
“You okay?”
He glanced back. The Samaritan had glided back to shore and now stood on the bank, watching him with the hint of an amused smile. He took a vape out of his pocket and drew on it. He barely looked damp.
Gabe rubbed at his face with the cuff of his coat.
“Yeah, great.”
He reached the passenger door. Tugged. The weight of the water was keeping it pushed shut. He pulled again. This time it gave a little. Gabe wedged his leg in the gap, fighting against the rancid water. He pulled out his flashight and shone it inside. The seats were ancient leather, torn and moldy with water damage. More water filled the footwells. There was nothing in the driver’s or passenger’s side except for some slimy-looking weeds and an ancient rusted drinks can. Fanta.
Izzy didn’t like fizzy drinks, he thought.
He wedged himself in further, stretched out his arm and yanked at the glove compartment. It fell open. Inside there were a few sodden bits of paper so waterlogged they fell apart the minute his fingers touched them. But there was something else: a clear plastic folder. Gabe took the folder out and trained the flashlight on the contents inside. A pocket Bible, a folded map and a slim black notebook, like a diary or an address book.
Gabe let the door fall shut. He waded awkwardly back out, clutching the plastic folder. He was cold now, shivering. Well, his top half was shivering. His bottom half could well have been doing a tango beneath the water for all he knew—he had lost all feeling below the waist a while ago.
“I thought you couldn’t get any whiter, but right now you look transparent.”
“Thanks.”
“You find anything?”
Gabe held up the folder. “Maybe the police can still get some fingerprints—”
“Whoah.” The Samaritan held up a hand. “Who said anything about police?”
Gabe stared at him. “This is the car. The car they told me didn’t exist. I have to call the police. It’s evidence.”
The Samaritan looked at him with his blacker-than-black eyes.
“The police believe your daughter is dead. This car is not going to change that.”
“But what if they can get Izzy’s DNA or identify the body?”
The Samaritan rolled his eyes. “This ain’t like the TV. You know how hard it is to retrieve DNA after all this time, from a car that’s been swimming in Lake Murk?”
“Oddly, no.”
“Almost impossible. Any DNA would have degraded in days.”
Gabe wanted to argue but he got the impression, as far as this subject was concerned, the Samaritan knew what he was talking about.
“What about the body?”
“Even if you can identify your man here, what have you got?”
Before Gabe could reply, the Samaritan continued: “You got a dead dude who has been dumped in the trunk of a car you have been searching for and only one person with a motive to kill him.”
Gabe blinked. “Me?”
“You.”
“So, what should I do?”
The Samaritan nodded at the folder. “You could start by looking at what you have got. Unless you’re planning to keep it for a souvenir?”
Gabe debated with himself, then crouched down and carefully opened the folder. A small dribble of water trickled out. The Samaritan trained his flashlight on him. Gabe took out the Bible first and thumbed through the pages. They were moldy and stuck together in clumps. No divine inspiration. He put it aside and reached for the notebook. If he had been hoping to find a confession and an address inside, he was out of luck. Most of the pages had been torn out. The remaining few were blank. He felt hope begin to wane. Finally, he reached for the map. One of the old-fashioned Ordnance Survey types that nobody had used since the last century. Gabe opened it up. Something fell out.
He stared at it.
A pink hair bobble. Dirty, damp, frayed.
Daddy.
He looked up at the Samaritan. “She was in the car.”
The Samaritan regarded him steadily. “Then I refer you back to my previous point.”
“What?”
“If this is the car, and this is the man who took your daughter—who the hell killed him?”
The young woman behind the hotel reception desk looked no more than twenty-five; her accent was Eastern European. She was polite but disinterested, which suited Fran just fine. A motorway hotel was hardly the Ritz, but it would be clean and anonymous. They could rest and Fran could try to plan their next move.
They had a room available, the receptionist informed them. But because they hadn’t booked online, they couldn’t take advantage of the special rate. Fran expressed an appropriate level of disappointment, tried not to seem impatient and said it would be okay. She paid with a credit card. She had a few, with slightly different names. Surprisingly easy to obtain. She could have paid in cash, but that just made you stand out more. No one paid in cash for anything these days.
“Number 217.” The receptionist gave them their key card. They climbed the stairs and shuffled along the bland, fusty-smelling corridor to their room. Fran buzzed them inside and they threw their rucksacks on the beds. She stared around. It looked, well, like every other budget hotel room in every other city up and down the country. The carpet was worn, the fittings chipped. And it smelled faintly of cigarettes, despite the “No Smoking” sign on the door. But the beds looked large and comfortable and Fran really was exhausted. After almost eight hours on the road, she just couldn’t drive any farther.
When they first fled, she had taken them north, to Cumbria. When the man had found them, she had driven to the opposite end of the country, the tip of the coast. Where now? Scotland? Abroad? But that meant passports, something she didn’t have.
She glanced at Alice, who stood in the center of the room, shoulders slumped, arms hanging at her sides, too tired even to sit do
wn on the bed. The weariness on her small face cleaved Fran’s heart in two. It was like this at the start. Anonymous hotels. Always running, always afraid. No child should live like that. But then, no child should die a bloody, violent death either.
Her throat constricted. Sometimes it hit her like a sledgehammer. Grief. A desperate, unrelenting sense of guilt. All your fault. But she couldn’t change things now. She couldn’t look back. She’d rather be blinded.
She smiled wanly at Alice. “C’mon. Let’s get some sleep.” She bit her tongue to stop herself saying something else, like, Things will look better after we get some rest, because that would be another lie. Instead, she added. “I’ll treat us to a McDonald’s for breakfast.”
Alice managed the weakest of smiles in return and pulled out her toiletries bag. They brushed their teeth in the harsh bathroom light, pulled on fresh T-shirts and leggings, placed their packed rucksacks beside their beds.
Fran checked that the windows were locked and pulled the heavy blackout curtains. They were on the second floor, which was good. She always refused ground-floor rooms. Finally, she slipped the security chain on the door and tested it a few times.
Satisfied, preparations done, she climbed into bed. Alice lay in the other double, cover pulled up to her chin, eyes already closed. The bag of pebbles sat on the table beside her.
Clickety-click. The Sandman is coming.
Fran shivered, despite the thick duvet and the warmth of the room.
She didn’t understand Alice’s odd sleeping episodes, although she had done her best to research the condition (narcolepsy, she had found out it was called). Unfortunately, there weren’t any easy answers. No simple cause and effect. One of those medical anomalies that prove science doesn’t have all the answers.
And nothing she had read could explain the pebbles. Fran had exhausted Google and racked her brains but couldn’t find anything comparable. Eventually, she had given up trying. What was it Holmes said? “When you eliminate the impossible, the only answer must be the improbable”? The problem was, dear Holmes, in this case the answer was the impossible. Stick that in your crack pipe and smoke it.