The Long Dark Road

by P. R. Black

  ‘I was at the Hephaestians’ cheese and wine night, that night. There are dozens of witnesses. I could not have had anything to do with it.’

  ‘I know all that. But there’s something wrong. She mentions that she had made the Kingfisher jealous. She was with someone she called Cornfed, and that annoyed you. Do you know who the Cornfed might be?’

  ‘Riley Brightman certainly looks Cornfed.’

  ‘He was part of the Hephaestians, wasn’t he?’

  ‘As I’m sure you know, yes. My most famous pupil. Even ahead of the physicist.’

  ‘It’s odd that Stephanie didn’t go to the Hephaestians’ cheese and wine night, don’t you think? It was her favourite element of academic life. She loved it. Loved the social reach it gave her. So why wasn’t she there?’

  Sillars paused. ‘Something happened after the last meeting of the club. The cheese and wine was going to be something of a damp squib as a result. But there was a bit of a row, as it happened, between two of the boys.’

  ‘What kind of row?’

  ‘I’ve told all this to the police.’

  ‘What was it that happened?’ Georgia’s voice broke on this last word. ‘I’ll beg you if I have to. I don’t care that you slept together. I really don’t. She was an adult – just. It’s up to her to make mistakes, to have these experiences. I don’t grudge her them. In a way I’m proud she came out of her shell enough to appreciate herself and to get on with life. I always wanted that for her. She was shy, introverted. Deep as the ocean, but not everybody sees that in a beautiful girl. I think you saw that. She said you told her that. She said you loved her work, even if you didn’t say that you loved her. She hurt you, though, I suppose. I’m sorry she hurt you. Just like she hurt Martin Duke. He was in the Hephaestians, too, wasn’t he? Was there something…?’

  ‘At the pub trip after our last session, Riley Brightman beat Martin Duke up.’ Sillars was tense, his fingers splayed out on the desktop. ‘I think it was meant to be a fight, a confrontation Martin had engineered, but it was ugly… Martin started it, but Riley finished it. Though it’s fair to say his bandmate was involved and helping out. That troglodyte who plays guitar along with him. It was all a bit of a mess.’

  ‘You saw this?’

  ‘I did. I tried to break it up.’

  ‘Was he hurt badly?’ She thought she remembered Martin Duke with a thick lip at the press conference. This had seemed suspicious, to everyone.

  ‘Not really. I’d say Riley Brightman looked worse for it. He had a bloody nose. But Martin Duke ended up on the floor, I’ll say that. There was only one winner there, if you’re wanting a boxing score.’

  ‘Do I need to ask what the cause was?’

  ‘You tell me. You’re the one with the secret diary.’

  ‘Was it Stephanie?’

  ‘So far as I understand.’

  ‘Please be specific. I need you to be on the level. You’ve got no idea what this is like.’ Georgia gestured out of the window, where a phalanx of trees was discomfited by the wind. ‘I can’t have sunny days. I can’t have weekends off. I can’t take pleasure in the seasons. Or a cup of tea. Or just drawing breath. There’s something fundamental missing. It’s like someone took my lungs, or my heart, but I kept going. An evil force keeps me alive. And it’s torture. Torture.’ She was weeping now. This caused him horror, and he shrank away from it.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Sillars said. ‘Truly I am. I am sorry.’

  ‘I think she had an appointment to meet someone. I think that someone might have caused her harm. I want to believe she’s alive, but I’m a doctor and I’m trained in realities and I know the realities in this case.’

  ‘Dr Healey, there is a theory that Stephanie caused herself harm. There’s a poem she wrote. You’ll know it. It’s called “Where The Dark Waters Flow”.’

  ‘Where the dark waters flow… under the long dark road… yes. I know that one. I could recite it for you. If you can bear it. I understand the connotation. But that’s the part that I think is least likely to have happened.’

  He shook his head. ‘That’s not the official line from the police.’

  ‘You think she’d have honestly done that without leaving a note? Without telling anyone else? Without writing anything to her mother? You think that was in her personality, because she was a bit quiet? You think I wouldn’t have noticed?’ Georgia was sobbing, now. She fought the clasp on her handbag, then struggled to pull out a clean tissue from the pack.

  Sillars clenched his jaw. Then he said: ‘I can’t say anything else. That’s it. We’re done. Finished.’

  ‘If you find the Project, let me know. If you have a copy, let me know. There could be a clue. Even if you only read it – anything. Any detail you can spare. Please. From the bottom of my heart, I’m begging you. Tell me.’

  His head was in his hands, briefly. She thought he had broken down, too. But when he looked up again, he was angry, seething. ‘I already told you. I don’t have anything to say. Now take your coat and get out. If you don’t, I’ll call security and have you removed. Then I’ll be going straight to the police.’

  6

  One day a horseman came by while Princess Melinda was gathering wild flowers. He brought his steed to a halt and tried to get her attention with a loud, braying, ‘Hello there!’ But Princess Melinda simply continued to gather the wild flowers.

  From ‘The Stubborn Princess’, by Stephanie Healey, aged eight (on my next birthday)

  A quick dash through the meadows with Cornfed. There’s a purity, here, something you’d struggle to explain to anyone but your fellow lovers. It sharpens everything.

  From the diary of Stephanie Healey

  Georgia was falling, or spinning. Lights followed her around and then spurned her, the diamond spark of a distant star that was getting further away by the second.

  When she settled, she realised she wasn’t in space, or falling, or spinning, but held fast in the ground. Perhaps a mine shaft, or a grave. Somewhere dark, rank and crawling in any case. There was just enough light to see the pinpricks of moisture on black soil. It was hard to say whether any creatures moved in there, or whether the ground simply sweated. She couldn’t say where the light came from – a thin effulgence perhaps from a phone.

  Georgia felt around and to the side, and finally up above. She was in a crawlspace, a natural tunnel gouged out of the earth, perhaps by a giant earthworm. The edges of stones nicked her fingertips, but by and large the tunnel was smooth. There was a little give in the earth above her head; this frightened her more than anything, the notion that she might be buried down there.

  She edged her way forward, where the light grew a little brighter. The soil trickled down as she edged forward on her sodden knees and elbows, tickling her nose and dusting her hair. All the while she was aware of her slow, deep breathing.

  Georgia reached what she was sure was a dead end; then she saw that the wall of the tunnel curved to her right. It was surely too narrow to go down, but she knew she had no choice. The lights to the right were a little brighter, a flickering pale blue. A phone, surely. A way of calling for help.

  She noticed that the space above her head had increased – nowhere near enough for her to stand up, but certainly an improvement. Georgia kept going, until the space suddenly broadened out. Then she saw the source of the light; not a mobile phone or a laptop computer, but an old analogue TV, tuned to static. It made the gritted surface of the tunnel wall dance, and seem to writhe.

  In this stroboscopic glare, Georgia could see a head sticking out of the earth. Black-haired, with fine cheekbones, eyes closed.

  Stephanie.

  Georgia doubled her speed, elbows braking painfully off raised stones. ‘Steph!’ she yelled. Her voice sounded muffled, as if a blanket covered her face. ‘Oh Steph, I’m here!’

  Stephanie’s eyes opened. Black and liquid in the weird light. She smiled. She was buried up to her neck in the rank earth. Two hands appeared, clods of soil clinging
to the fingertips like tiny bin bags slung over the dustmen’s shoulders, black grime seaming the fingers and knuckles. Stephanie smiled.

  Georgia gripped the hands. They were cold and slick, as if she’d gripped the belly of a fish. Stephanie grinned, but the eyes were blank. Georgia had seen those blank eyes before, the frank glare of an elderly woman who had passed in the night, a cancer patient whose body had finally quit like a flickering old bulb, and once, a little boy whose asthma had finally choked the life out of him after he was put to bed—

  ‘Steph, let’s go. We have to go back out.’

  Georgia couldn’t be sure if her grip became tighter on Stephanie, or vice versa.

  Stephanie shook her head, slowly, not blinking. Her mouth brimmed with dark liquid, as if she’d taken a brew made with the earth that swallowed her, and finally spilled over in inky rills.

  Stephanie began to draw Georgia down.

  She would not let go. ‘No! You’re coming with me!’

  Georgia pulled, as hard as she could, teeth gritted. Something tore, and split; Stephanie’s wrist bones escaped her pallid flesh. Then the smile grew wider as the skin split along her cheeks and the hinge of her jaw. Her teeth emerged, gums grey rather than pink, then the flesh pulled away from her skull. The skin was retracting into the earth, though the bones remained. Still Georgia clung on, watching the hair yanked off her daughter’s skull, the skin undulating backwards into the final darkness.

  ‘All you have to do is let go,’ Georgia heard herself say. ‘Let go – or go with her.’

  That was the end of it. That’s when she woke up.

  *

  Later, Georgia took tea at a vegan restaurant, which she vaguely remembered having been a video shop back in the day. It was simply furnished, clean and wholesome enough, and the hummus, spicy tomatoes, home-made bread and oil-drizzled rocket salad was filling enough, but as usual she only managed about a quarter of it before giving up. She paid up, apologised to the waitress, then took herself on a short walk across the square to the police station.

  It was quite a new building, but she was familiar with this one, having been driven in and out of it a few times in a near-stupor when Stephanie had first gone missing. The queueing system at the main reception was maddeningly laid-back, a fact pointed out more than once by an agitated-looking man in badly soiled sweatpants who Georgia took great care not to make eye contact with.

  Finally, she was called through to the security door and then taken to a side office down a long dark corridor. It was an interview room, she realised with an odd thrill.

  She was left waiting long enough to have stretched and yawned, before Detective Inspector Neal Hurlford appeared.

  He was much as he’d appeared the last time she’d seen him – only a little above average height, but bald, bullet-headed and very thick-set. She wouldn’t like to guess at his collar size, with a powerful neck and shoulders betokening someone who certainly made an effort at the gym, whenever he decided to go. In build he was a doorman, one who you would obey should he raise his voice, and possibly even before that; but the eyes and the set of the cheeks were kind, even cute, and even allowing for the circumstances in which they had met, she remembered someone who had been prone to wide-eyed surprise and quick mirth.

  He nodded at her and grinned. ‘Mrs Healey – it’s been a while.’ His handshake was warm. He sat across from her and sat back in the chair, scratching the back of his head and stifling a yawn. ‘Excuse me! Long day, here. How have you been keeping?’

  ‘Well… all right, is the expression, I suppose.’

  He drew a long breath. ‘All right is as good as I could have hoped.’

  ‘I know you’re busy. I just wondered if you’d been able to have a look at my thoughts on the paperwork that was turned up.’

  ‘The diary you mean?’

  She nodded. ‘It’s not much, but…’

  ‘It’s a lot. I’ll level with you, I was excited when I found out about it.’ He opened up the buff folder and pulled out some printed sheets. ‘It’s a lead, no matter how small. Something new. Something we can work with.’

  Georgia felt a blossoming of that treacherous creature whose name she dared not vocalise; a strange levity in her breast that she had learned not to trust. Still, there it was: hope. ‘Have you found much else? Can you say?’

  ‘We certainly had some new conversations with people.’ Hurlford’s eyes met hers. ‘It did help clear up one or two loose ends we’d struggled with.’

  ‘I understand. You can’t say much.’

  ‘We have some procedures, I’m sure you understand. What I can say is it helped give a clearer picture on one or two incidents that had been bothering us.’

  ‘But no new leads.’

  ‘Not quite, no. But it was useful,’ he said hastily. ‘This “Cornfed” character… it gave us an insight into one or two things. We had to conduct some new interviews. It didn’t exactly tell us new information, but it did make the picture that bit sharper.’

  ‘I’ll bet you can’t divulge the details, et cetera et cetera.’

  He smiled, shyly. ‘There’s no fooling you, missus, is there?’

  She met his smile and raised one of her own, but she said: ‘You could have told me that over the phone.’

  ‘True. But what I’m interested in, is what you got out of the diary.’

  ‘Come again?’

  ‘You have some ideas of your own, I bet.’ Hurlford pulled his chair closer, bending his head conspiratorially towards her. ‘Share them. Don’t keep them to yourself. I’ll listen to any theories, anything that gives me a more complete picture.’

  ‘All right then. Cornfed, I think was the musician who was in her class. The one who’s going to Glastonbury next year. The one who was in the top twenty the other week, and got interviewed by Steve Wright. I’m sure you know who I mean?’

  Hurlford made no indication of agreement or disagreement. ‘Go on.’

  ‘I think my daughter was involved with Riley Brightman – obsessed with him, for sure. She talks about him all the time. Now, admittedly, a lot of it is in abstract terms, so I can’t be sure. But I think she was carrying on with this Brightman boy, at the same time she was supposedly going out with Martin Duke. That’s point one. Point two is that I don’t think my daughter was as closely involved with Martin as he made out. To look at him, to hear what he said, you’d think they were a close item. I don’t think they were. If anything happened between them, it was a drunken fling that he took far too seriously.’

  He took no notes; but he paid close attention to Georgia. ‘What else?’

  ‘I think she may also have been having a fling with Tony Sillars – the lecturer, contemporary literature.’

  Hurlford took a little longer before replying: ‘I see.’

  ‘None of this is news to you, I suppose.’

  ‘We’ve looked into a lot of aspects of the case. We’ve had hundreds of officers, over thousands of hours, looking into every aspect of it.’

  Georgia smiled. ‘You’re really good at this, you know. I can see why they wanted you to front the investigation. Have you thought of entering politics?’

  He did not appear to take this as a slight, and certainly Georgia hadn’t intended it as such. ‘Nah, I think that level of villainy is beyond even me, Mrs Healey.’

  ‘Is sleeping with students a crime? Abusing his position of power?’

  ‘It’s not illegal for consenting adults to develop relationships, regardless of how it happens. It is, however, unprofessional, and lecturers are required to notify their governing body if they have a relationship with a student. To avoid an obvious conflict of interest. To make sure they are blocked from marking the work of a person they are romantically involved with. If they break those rules, then they could face losing their job. So there are no laws, exactly, but there are rules, and they have to adhere to them.’

  He’s rehearsed that line, Georgia thought. ‘And I take it he did notify authorities abou
t my daughter?’

  ‘I’m not at liberty to disclose that. I can say that Dr Sillars still has tenure at the university, and the full support of his colleagues.’

  ‘So – he did report it. Or, he reported something.’

  ‘Dr Sillars is married, did you know that?’

  She hadn’t noticed a ring. Certainly, there were no pictures on his desk. ‘Really?’

  ‘Yes – to a former student.’

  ‘I have heard that he’s somewhat fluid when it comes to relationships.’

  ‘As I said, Mrs Healey, Dr Sillars is held in very high regard among his employers and his students. I understand that he has an agent. He’s been in talks to appear on a television documentary.’

  He hadn’t mentioned that, either. ‘Well. So long as you’re aware of what he’s like.’

  ‘It can be very hard to prove relationships happen between lecturers and students.’

  ‘He must be a suspect, though.’

  Hurlford sat up, and grew very serious. ‘Dr Sillars’ movements have been accounted for on the night Stephanie disappeared.’

  ‘But not all night. He was at a party, wasn’t he? A cheese and wine event. I know that. But there’s every chance he could have got away, got into a car. He could have driven down there. By car it’s not far at all. He could have done this.’

  Hurlford sighed. ‘Dr Sillars’ movements have been accounted for, and we are not treating him as a suspect in the case.’

  ‘How about Cornfed – Riley Brightman? And Martin Duke?’

  ‘We are aware of Stephanie’s social background – we’ve gone into it in some detail. We’ve interviewed just about everyone she was involved with at the university. We have made no arrests at present.’

  ‘Then you think she was abducted?’

  Hurlford pinched the bridge of his nose – the first outward sign of any agitation. ‘We are keeping an open mind about what happened to your daughter.’