by Luca Veste
That was enough to make me leave.
*
The tracks were on the southernmost edge of the city – past Speke and Hale, a few hundred yards until the signs started to say Widnes. Most of the access to where the trains passed at high speeds was fenced off by metal railings. I had already checked on Google Maps and Street View, finding where I thought Stuart may have started his final journey.
The day was overcast, but not raining thankfully. All the same I zipped up my jacket as I left the car, the wind gusting around me and whistling into my ears. The traffic was sparser than it had been in town, but there were still cars passing over the hill that shielded the road from the tracks.
At the end of a lane that ran from a main road into an old yard – countryside on one side, the humming of electricity and power on the other – overhead power lines stretched above the multitude of tracks beneath. I could walk directly to the small wall that served as no barrier to the tracks themselves.
Only when the metal gates were open, of course. Which they were in the day, I presumed, but hoped not at night. At the end of the lane, however, I saw how someone could easily gain access at night – three large stones blocked any further route down the concrete path for cars, but were also close enough to the railings that you could hop onto one of them and then launch yourself over to the other side. You might hurt an ankle or two on landing, but that wouldn’t matter if you were trying to meet a train at three in the morning.
I parked up and walked towards the stones, making sure I was correct in my assumption. There were a few tired-looking bunches of flowers tied to the railings. I stopped to look at the cards, seeing names I didn’t recognise underneath Stuart’s. The cellophane wrappings were wet and cold to the touch. The railings were the metal kind, with the spikes on top that were dull enough that they wouldn’t pierce a shoe if you stepped on them.
In the yard to my left, a couple of vans were parked up and workers in hi-vis vests were leaning against the bonnets, talking between themselves.
I looked further up the line and saw the bridge that had been pictured in all the news stories on Stuart’s death. A few yards away, if that.
This was planned, I thought. Stuart had found this place and come here. Maybe more than once, so he could get the timings right. It wasn’t as if freight trains passed this way every few minutes – especially at that time of night. He would have known exactly when to come and what to do.
‘Why? What was going on in your head?’ I heard myself whisper. I looked towards the men in the yard, making sure they hadn’t heard me. They didn’t seem to have noticed my presence at all.
I walked further past the stones, looking for any other access. Looking for some sign that Stuart had been there.
He hadn’t left a note behind, according to his sister. That had been something that she’d mentioned at the funeral. More than once. As if knowing what was going through his mind would have made any difference. Instead, we were left to speculate. I tried to picture him in my mind, but nothing came to me.
‘I didn’t expect to see anyone here.’
I span round, recognising the lilting voice from behind me. I tried to smile, but found I couldn’t. Not there. Not then.
‘Michelle,’ I said, putting my hands in my pockets for something to do with them. ‘I could say the same thing.’
‘I’ve been coming down here quite often,’ she replied, closing the distance between us, but avoiding eye contact. ‘I’m not sure why.’
‘Are you still as angry with us? With me?’
Michelle smiled thinly, then looked away from me. ‘Don’t worry. I’ve calmed down a little since yesterday. I shouldn’t have said those things.’
I waved away the apology. ‘Is this where . . . ’
‘Yeah,’ Michelle said, before I had the chance to finish a sentence I never would have finished anyway. ‘But you already knew that. I’m guessing you read the stuff in the papers.’
I nodded in response, following her gaze and looking over towards the train tracks. ‘They didn’t say much. I kind of worked it out for myself.’
‘There’s a camera further up the road. It’s the last sighting of him. He was walking over the hill, then turns down the lane. He knew where he was going.’
‘It didn’t say that. It didn’t say much at all.’
‘Well, I spoke to his sister,’ Michelle said, shivering suddenly as the wind picked up again. It blew across us from the field behind and whipped Michelle’s hair from her face. She smoothed it down with one hand. ‘She told me what she knew. There wasn’t . . . there wasn’t much left of him.’
I winced internally, wishing I didn’t want to hear the details. But I needed to know. I wasn’t sure why.
‘They found ID in a pocket – driving licence and credit cards in his wallets. She was shown a picture of the tattoo he had on his shoulder. You know the one he got in Thailand?’
‘The panther. Or the jaguar. I forget which.’
‘I’m not sure he knew either,’ Michelle said with a joyless laugh. ‘That’s all they were allowed to see.’
I could fill in the rest myself. I didn’t want to picture what they had found of him. What state he was in. I’d never sleep again.
‘It’s my fault.’
I shook my head, surprised how quickly she had shifted the blame from the rest of us to just herself. I looked at her and saw the sleepless nights and endless questions running through her mind. I knew what she was going through and even thought I didn’t believe it, I said what you’re supposed to in those circumstances. ‘No, it’s not, Michelle . . . ’
‘Yes, it is,’ she said, loud enough to turn the worker’s heads from the yards. ‘I could have stopped this. I could have helped him.’
‘No, you couldn’t. He knew what he was doing.’
‘You don’t understand,’ Michelle said, stepping backwards now as her entire body seemed to shake a couple of times. ‘He reached out to me. Tried to talk to me and I ignored him. I wouldn’t listen to him. I never did.’
The wind whistled past us again as a train approached in the distance.
‘Michelle,’ I tried again, but she was turning away from me now.
‘It’s not over, Matt. It never was. And now we’re all going to pay for what we did.’
Seventeen
The café was a few minutes from the train tracks – old-style with Formica tables and red and white chequered tablecloths. The smell of grease was hanging in the air, so thick I almost held my hands up to part the mist as I walked in.
Tea was served in mugs, plonked down in front of Michelle and I. Sugar from a bowl on the table that looked as if it had been sitting there since the café originally opened decades earlier.
I loved the place.
I wanted bacon on toast, but didn’t want to eat alone. Michelle looked as if she hadn’t eaten for days, but had shaken her head when I’d offered to order something. I didn’t want to push it any further.
‘We’ve never done this,’ Michelle said with a tight-lipped smile. ‘We were always together in the group. Never alone.’
‘You’re right. That’s strange, isn’t it? All those years and we were always together, just never alone together.’ I thought about the past couple of decades, wondering if I’d ever made much of an effort with Michelle. We were friends, but would we have been without the others? Probably not. That wasn’t to say I didn’t like her a lot. I knew my life wouldn’t have been as good without her in it, even if we hadn’t really been that close in the past. I wanted to change that.
‘That’s not to say I hadn’t wanted to,’ Michelle continued, looking towards the table and tracing a pattern in some sugar that had fallen onto the surface. ‘I suppose it’s one of those things that happens in groups of friends. There’s always a few who don’t really interact outside the whole.’
‘I suppose so,’ I replied, but I knew there was more to it than that. I remembered years earlier – how Chris and me had met Nicola and Alexandra.
It was just expected that once Chris and Nicola had got together, and Alexandra and I didn’t, that Michelle and I would do the same. It had never got to that point though. It was friendship and nothing more. We were very different people.
It took a couple of years, but Alexandra and I eventually ended up together. I remembered those years from age eleven to thirteen, when I had tried to pluck up the courage to tell her my feelings, even when I didn’t really understand them myself. Too young to realise, too young to act on them. We had met Michelle by that point and I knew she was the only one in the group who could see what was going on with me.
Stuart was later, but Michelle had boyfriends throughout high school. None of them had stuck.
I had a memory then – stark and vivid. Sitting on the promenade, down by Otterspool. A day out, an adventure. Probably the furthest we’d been from our little estate alone.
A clear and bright day. The kind you remember years later as being how all the summer days were. The sun on our faces, Chris and I making each other laugh. Nicola rolling her eyes at us. Alexandra dangling long legs over the side of the promenade wall. Me trying to perfect my impression of Mick Johnson from Brookside. Chris quoting Austin Powers in the most cringeworthy way imaginable.
It was Michelle I remembered most now. That day, her bouncing round as we sat. Singing a variety of different songs, providing the soundtrack to our day. One day it would be Spice Girls, the next No Doubt. The one I remembered most vividly was the day we heard ‘Barbie Girl’ by Aqua on repeat.
‘Do you remember going down the prom when we were kids?’ I said, wondering if she recalled those times still. Whether they had been diminished and forgotten about. ‘Summer holidays and all that?’
‘Of course,’ Michelle replied, a small smile appearing then vanishing just as quickly. ‘They were good times.’
‘Every day you had a new song that was suddenly your favourite. You’d sing it all day. Used to drive me mad, but I miss that now.’
‘I can’t believe I used to do that,’ Michelle said, shaking her head. ‘My self-awareness wasn’t something I was known for, I suppose.’
‘I thought it would be like that forever. Just a group of us, having fun, not taking life too seriously. What happened to us?’
‘We all grew up, Matt. Things change.’
‘I know, I just wish we could go back to that time, that’s all I’m saying. Things were changing from the second we left high school. And I’m not just talking about singing in the street. Everyone seemed to become a little more miserable day by day.’
‘That’s being an adult for you.’
I shrugged in response, but I wasn’t sure. I tried to track the moment when life had begun to become different for us. When we had started not to appreciate what we had – the friendships, the relationships.
It was probably around the time we went to university.
The fact we had killed someone had only compounded it. We had a shared secret now. One we never discussed and that had driven us all apart.
‘I’ve never spoken to anyone about what happened,’ Michelle said, seeming to read my mind. She leaned forward as she spoke, wrapping her hands around the mug of tea for warmth. ‘I’ve been waiting for someone to say we got it wrong, but I have nothing. People online still think he’s around, but we know he’s not. We know the Candle Man is done. It’s all over.’
‘We know why that is.’
‘I don’t think anyone would understand.’
‘I agree,’ I replied, leaning an elbow on the table and scratching the back of my head with the other hand. ‘It doesn’t mean we can’t think about it. Which is what Stuart was probably doing a lot of, if you ask me.’
Michelle shook her head. ‘It wasn’t just that. There were other things happening.’
‘What kind of things?’
‘Have you had anything sent to your house? A message about what we did?’
I shook my head. I didn’t really understand what she was asking. I was about to question it, but she continued talking before I had the chance.
‘He was messed up after what we did in those woods,’ Michelle said, looking past me and out of the window behind me. ‘I tried to talk to him a few times, but he was just numb to it all. Then, a couple of weeks ago, something happened.’
‘What?’
‘I don’t know, but whatever it was made him scared. He wouldn’t talk to me anymore. He slammed the door in my face and wouldn’t reply to any texts or messages. Nothing. He just said it wasn’t over and that we were all going to be next. That we weren’t alone in those woods and now we were all going to have to face what we’d done.’
I sat back in my chair, trying to figure out what Michelle was telling me. ‘Someone else knows what we did, is that what you’re saying? And wants what? Some sort of payback?’
‘That’s what I think. And Stuart was just the first one they got to. But we’re all going to be found out . . . ’
‘I’m sure that’s not going to happen,’ I said, talking over Michelle. Shaking my head. Even as my leg bobbed up and down nervously under the table. On some level, I’d known this would happen. As if the past year had been spent in a holding pattern, waiting for the fall to come. It wouldn’t be a smooth descent either. We were going to plummet to the ground. ‘No one knows as long as none of us has talked to anyone. Have you?’
Michelle shook her head. ‘Of course not. I haven’t talked to anyone. Not since that night. I just wanted to forget about it, but I can’t. It’s always there, just a voice at my shoulder, reminding me how wrong we were.’
I’d said the same thing to myself time after time, but that didn’t mean I completely believed it. I had spent so many sleepless nights trying to rewrite history – how I would have done things differently if I’d known the consequences. It was impossible though. ‘We did the only thing we could in the situation.’
‘You don’t believe that,’ Michelle said, and she was right. ‘That’s just the lie we all told ourselves. Well, now we’re going to have to face up to what we’ve done.’
‘We saved him.’ I lowered my voice, even though we were the only customers in the café and the cook/waitress was nowhere to be seen. ‘He would have died out there. You know that. Stuart saw something he wasn’t supposed to and that’s why that man had his hands wrapped around Stuart’s throat. It’s that simple. If we hadn’t done it, he’d have been dead a year ago and we would never have been able to forgive ourselves.’
‘Maybe,’ Michelle replied, but she held no conviction in her tone. ‘Doesn’t mean we didn’t do something wrong. If someone knows what we did, isn’t that a good reason to come back after us? And what about Mark Welsh?’
‘What about him?’
‘Someone moved his body, Matt. Why do we never talk about that?’
‘I . . . I don’t know.’
I remembered when we first learned the name of the young lad who Alexandra had found in the woods. The Candle Man’s last victim, it seemed. A day or so after the festival had ended, his face was everywhere. A young man who had disappeared and never returned. His family had never really been out of the news since.
‘What if the man we killed wasn’t working alone? What if someone saw what we did out there, moved that lad’s body, and is now out to make us pay for it?’
‘What are you saying? That someone hid his body to blackmail us a year later? That Stuart killed himself because he was worried about being outed for what we did?’
Michelle looked across the table, catching my eye for the first time. I found myself wanting to look away.
‘No,’ Michelle said, lifting the mug of tea to her lips and taking a small sip. She set it back down and drew her coat closer around her. ‘He wouldn’t kill himself. All I know is that I’m next. I don’t know how, I don’t know when, but I’m next.’
‘How can you know any of this? I think you’re letting your imagination run away with you. What happened to Stuart isn’t going to happen to yo
u.’
‘I knew him better than any of you did,’ Michelle said, her chair sliding back on the floor. She rose slowly from it, running a shaking hand through her hair. She sighed and shook her head. ‘I would have known if he was going to do something like that to himself.’
‘Michelle, wait . . . ’
‘I’ve got to go,’ she said, cutting me off before I had the chance to ask her to stay. ‘I can’t be here anymore. I just . . . I just wanted to see if you had anything to tell me. That’s all. Maybe I’m just going crazy. Grief can do that to you.’
I tried again to keep her there, but she was already out the door. I left some money on the table – too much for a couple of mugs of tea, but I didn’t have time to wait for my change. Chucked my coat on and left the café, looking up and down the road to see where Michelle had gone.
There was no one around. I thought about trying to find her again; chasing up and down the road, calling out her name. It would have been useless. She had already told me as much as she was going to, I felt.
And what had she told me? That she couldn’t believe that Stuart had killed himself. That someone was coming back for them. It wasn’t possible, I decided. Michelle was simply upset and didn’t know how to handle it. That was all it was, I told myself. Grief and fear were a chilling mix to have to deal with, I supposed. It could make us more susceptible to ideas we would never soberly think of, thoughts we would usually ignore.
Still, as I walked back down to where I parked my car, I couldn’t help but feel that someone was watching my movements. The hairs on the back of my neck rose in response to the feeling.
I looked over my shoulder, but the road was empty.
1996
In the dark, anything is everything. A shadow becomes a monster. A whisper becomes a scream. Silence becomes fear. Yet, there was always excitement lying in the darkness too. A sense of facing something and staring it down.
I loved the night.
We’d broken up from school the previous day – late July. We’d stopped singing ‘Football’s Coming Home’ for now and even though Chris wasn’t that interested in football, he’d still let me take penalties against him.