by Mark Roberts
She couldn’t see it but the front door was opened – by her mother, it must have been, she was the only one in the house apart from her and her baby brother, who was in his room at the back of the house – and the man was sucked into the belly of the house by an in-breath of her mother’s making.
‘What’s this?’ her mother giggled in the hall below.
‘My new book of poetry. And, so, off she floats to nowhere. It is for you.’
Their voices dipped and their words became incomprehensible as they came up the stairs at speed.
Just as they’d zoned out, they faded back in.
She spoke. ‘Do you not like what you see?’ It was her sad voice.
‘But you’re the most beautiful woman I’ve met in my life,’ said the young poet.
‘Is that all?’ she asked, the dent in her pride evident in the injury in her voice.
‘Helen of Troy. Yes, this is who I see when I look at you.’
In the pause that followed, she sensed in the poet the same struggle she had for ideas when her mother asked her questions about the way she looked.
‘You’re divine. You could be Venus.’
‘Could be?’
‘Are! Are…’
She worked out that Mother and her visitor had arrived at the top of the stairs because the words stopped and there was a silence punctuated by a sucking noise, and sighing. The kissing game. They all liked to play it.
The ball of sickness in her stomach tightened and swelled.
What was it? she asked herself. What was it with these men, man after man after man visiting her mother?
She heard her mother’s bedroom door close and, behind it, the swish of curtains closing.
Her head hurt. The pain swelled. And it rocketed through her nervous system to the parts of her brain where compulsion ruled.
For the first time in her dark life, without making a decision, she found herself opening her bedroom door.
Walking down the corridor towards her mother’s bedroom, she saw with dread that her baby brother’s bedroom door was open. She looked inside but he was not in his bed. His absence went through her like horrid fire and she felt like her brain was frying in the dreadful heat.
Where are you?
Panic invaded her.
Where are you, baby brother?
Please be anywhere, her voice echoed in her head. But please don’t be in there, behind that closed door of hers. Please.
She crept towards her mother’s bedroom door, drawn by mounting terror for the little one.
Behind the door, she heard the poet’s voice.
‘Er, what’s this?’ he asked.
‘Ignore it,’ replied her mother. ‘If you don’t like it, get out now!’
There was a silence.
‘Don’t you want me?’
‘I’m staying,’ he replied.
She got on to her knees and looked through the keyhole, saw flashes of the poet and her mother as they took their clothes off, lunging at each other as they did so, fumbling with their hands and kissing with their mouths.
‘Tell me again,’ said her mother. ‘Tell me what you said on the telephone. How beautiful am I?’
‘You’re beyond beautiful.’
‘Do you think any man could resist me?’
‘No man could resist you.’
He sucked at her breast like a baby should.
Where are you, my brother?
She could see her mother’s lower legs and feet, lying down on the bed, and then the man’s legs and feet, his toes to her ankles.
A noise came from the space around the bottom of the bed, a sniffling that was drowned out as Mother and her visitor started making noises like animals fighting to the death.
‘What can you see when you look into my eyes?’ asked her mother.
His legs were moving up and down, his toes clamped on to the mattress.
‘I can see the ocean, clear blue water sparkling in early morning light.’
‘What do you see when you look at my face. Look at me. Open your eyes and look at me!’
‘I can see the most beautiful sunset.’
‘What about my body?’
‘Your breasts like… like those of a… a teenage goddess. You’ve got the figure of an angel and legs like Venus de Milo.’
‘That’s right, that’s exactly what I’m like.’
She opened the door a fraction and gained a wider view of what was going on.
The man was bouncing up and down on her mother, whose legs were wrapped around his backside, a tight knot to seal him to her.
‘I’m the best you’ve ever had, right?’ said her mother.
‘I’ll never get better. You’re the best, you’re the best, you’re the best!’
She opened the door some more and saw that her mother was looking into the huge mirror on the wall to the right of the bed. Her eyes were locked into her reflection as if they were glued to the image on the glass that entranced her.
‘I am gorgeous, I am beautiful, I am…’
It was as if their bodies seized up in the same pattern of moments. They cried out together as if they were both utterly lost and completely in pain.
She opened the door wider and saw that her baby brother was at the bottom of the bed, standing and watching in the silence that constantly defined him. In his mouth was a dummy and he watched his mother and her visitor without any emotion, and she guessed he’d seen and heard everything, more, much more than she had seen.
The man rolled off her mother and lay on his back beside her.
Her mother stared at her face in the mirror, her long blonde hair fanning out across the pillow.
‘And, so,’ said her mother to her own reflection. ‘Off she floats to nowhere.’
He reached out towards her breasts but she threw his hand away.
‘Get out!’ It was the voice her mother used when she was boiling with rage, usually during and after the shouting matches she had with her father.
Her brother fell to his hands and knees and crawled around the corner of the bed towards the door. She urged him forward with both hands and her mouth, which opened and closed, opened and closed as she urged…
Come on, come on, come on, and away…
‘And take your juvenile poetry shit with you.’
‘What did I do wrong?’ asked the young poet, the rising of unshed tears in his question.
Silence, the kind that bit down hard into the deepest place where sorrow reigned with a rod of jagged ice.
She reached out and swooped up her baby brother.
‘What did you do wrong?’
Her mother sounded like she was going to explode.
She ran down the landing with him in her arms, urging him hush, hush, hush…
‘Ask yourself a different question.’
She ran to her room, clutched him to herself as if their lives depended on it.
‘What did you do right, arsehole?’
Day Three
Friday, 3rd December 2021
Monophobia
Fear of being alone
53
0.05 am
Francesca Christie’s mother pulled back the curtains in her living room and looked out on to the street, her anxiety peaking as she tried her daughter’s mobile for the twelfth time since eleven o’clock, to hear the same frustrating automated message.
Sorry, the person you’re calling is currently unavailable. Try again later.
‘We have an agreement, set in stone. You said you’d be back by eleven, half past at the latest…’ Margaret Christie talked to the framed picture of her daughter on the wall. ‘Why have you turned your phone off? Whenever you go out or I go out, we keep the phone on at all times in case of an emergency or a problem. This just isn’t you.’
With a balloon of sickness inflating in her stomach, she marched into the hall and took the address book from the drawer beneath the landline phone.
She flicked to the B page and looked for Bryony�
�s phone number but it wasn’t there. She remembered the book was ordered alphabetically according to surname but, in that moment, she couldn’t remember Bryony’s family name even though she’d known Francesca’s best friend since she was eleven years of age.
Going to the front door, she opened it and walked quickly on to the pavement, looked down the road and hoped she’d see Francesca’s car turning the corner and heading home. There was no sign of any traffic.
Marsh! Through the blinding fog of panic, it came to her. Bryony Marsh…
Closing the front door after herself and turning to the M page of the address book, she dialled her number. The phone rang out and she imagined the alarm in the house at a phone call coming in after midnight.
‘Come on. Pick up! Pick up!’
‘Hello!’
‘Bryony, it’s me, Margaret, Francesca’s mum.’
‘Hi…’
‘She’s been with you this evening?’
‘Er, yeah, yeah…’
‘Is she there with you now?’
‘No, she left.’
‘When?’
‘An hour ago.’
‘She’s not home.’
‘Isn’t she?’
Another voice drifted into play, and she recognised Bryony’s mother’s voice joining the tense exchange.
‘What’s going on, Bryony?’
‘It’s – it’s Margaret… I’ll deal with it, OK?’
‘Put me on speakerphone please, Bryony. Hello, Cheryl, can you hear me?’
‘What’s up? Why are you calling this late at night?’
‘I’m sorry but Francesca’s been at yours this evening and isn’t home yet.’
Silence.
‘Hello, Bryony, Cheryl, are you still there?’
‘I’m sorry,’ said Bryony’s mother. ‘There’s been some sort of confusion here. Clearly. Francesca hasn’t been here this evening. She hasn’t been here for at least a fortnight.’
‘Then I’m afraid Bryony’s been lying to me.’
‘What?’ Bryony’s mother sounded like she’d been stung by a wasp.
‘OK, OK, OK,’ said Bryony. ‘She asked me to cover for her. I’m sorry for lying to you, but Francesca asked me to. She’s gone out on a date. I’m not sure if it’s someone from the internet but she’s been doing online dating sites. She said it was a blind date… shit! Oh my God…’
There was an ugly silence before Margaret asked, ‘Bryony, what do you know about the man Francesca’s been out with?’
‘Nothing. She wanted to keep quiet about the date. She asked me to cover her tracks. I’m sorry.’
Francesca’s mother replaced the receiver as the balloon within her swelled by the moment and threatened to swamp her vital organs.
She picked up her car keys and hurried from the house.
54
0.10 am
Savage pain woke her up; a deep throbbing pressure down in the stem of her brain. She felt something cold, metallic and heavy on her stomach and she knew that she was naked. She opened her eyes and found she was in a bare room doused in flickering red light.
Red. Black. Red. Black.
Everything flashed through her head in a heartbeat, and she was filled with horror at what she could remember and terrorised by what may have been when she was unconscious.
She reached a hand towards the space between her legs but was held back by the chain that bound her.
Francesca shuffled up the bed a little, took a series of deep breaths and analysed her entire body. There was no pain or sensation in her vagina or anus. She touched herself to double-check but there was no sign of invasion.
She closed her eyes and took a series of deep breaths, retraced the steps of a living nightmare, felt the point of a blade against her throat, a weapon that wasn’t there in the cell but the sharpness felt like it had left an indelible stamp on her skin.
‘Owwww!’ She mouthed the cry, not wanting to attract attention to herself, and recalling the force and speed of the first blow that had overwhelmed her as she tried to get into her car.
She thought she’d driven in silence but her useless words came back to her.
‘Let me go. Please. Let me just pull up by the pavement. You can have my car. You can have my bag and purse. I won’t tell the police, I promise. I won’t tell anyone.’
As she drove past the empty industrial units of Sefton Street to her left and the crowded bars overlooking the river to her right, she had willed someone to rescue her from her new-found hell. No one did.
Francesca looked into the rear-view mirror, saw the glinting of The Ghoul’s eyes, sensed the joyous smile as they danced in the dark and drank in her desperation.
The police car. Jericho Lane. Alone and powerless with The Ghoul.
There was the absolute darkness of the boot of The Ghoul’s car, the tasteless drug that knocked her out and after that, nothing.
‘Jesus, where am I?’ she whispered, the flickering red light above her head invading her eyes and disorientating her ragged senses.
A dot of light appeared in the darkness within her, a dot of light that grew a little bigger with each breath she took. And she knew as it expanded that it was recent memory, before she was plunged into the nightmare of the moment she was living in.
She closed her eyes and saw a window that was familiar to her and a patchy, fractured view on to Allerton Road with the sound of a police helicopter overhead, flying in her direction. There was a desk. The door to the office closed for privacy. She was nervous in Norma Maguire’s office, she was always nervous around Norma.
She sat opposite Norma, who handed her a card file. She opened it and saw a record of her excursions on to Pebbles On The Beach. She closed the cover.
Words were exchanged and Norma was acting mysteriously. She wheeled herself around so that she could look out of the window.
‘I’m careful,’ she had said to Norma.
Words poured from Norma’s mouth.
‘I suppose the woman whose body was washed up in Warrington in the summer would have said she was careful too… you look puzzled. You didn’t hear about it?’
‘No.’
‘He scalped her and took the skin from her face. According to the police, she met him on an internet dating site.’
The helicopter blades chopped the air, a stolen car screamed in a trail of chaos.
‘I heard a report on Radio Merseyside this morning on my way in to work. There’s another body been found closer to home. Otterspool Promenade.’
She opened her eyes, heard footsteps above her head and two voices, arguing, their words indistinct, their mutual tone furious.
Somewhere else in the building above, a televison was playing.
The full weight of Norma Maguire’s warning hit her.
She touched her face and hair.
A scream built up inside Francesca Christie. She pressed her face into the stinking, wet mattress and screamed until all she had left in her was the air she needed to breathe.
55
0.21 am
Clay picked her car keys from her bag and, with heavy legs, headed for the door of the incident room, hoping that within the next hour she would be showered and asleep at her husband’s side.
She reached the door and the landline phone on her desk rang out.
Clay stopped. Should I? Or shouldn’t I? The temptation to ignore the ringing phone was immense but its insistence was enough to drag her back to her desk.
She picked up the receiver.
‘Eve, I’m so glad that I’ve caught you.’ It was Sergeant Harris, the custody sergeant. ‘I’ve got a woman in reception, she’s asking for you. She knows you’re the SIO on the Otterspool Promenade case.’ He raised his voice to normal volume. ‘Mrs Christie wants to report her daughter as missing.’
‘Has she been on an internet date?’
‘Yes, she has.’
‘Take her to Interview Suite 1, I’ll be down immediately.’
Minutes later,
in Interview Suite 1, Clay took two chairs from behind the desk and placed them facing each other.
‘Sit down, please, Mrs Christie.’
The woman opposite Clay looked like all the blood had been drained from her veins.
‘Tell me what’s been going on?’ said Clay.
‘As I understand it, my daughter, Francesca, went out tonight on a date with a man she met on the internet, a man she’s never met before in real life. I didn’t know that she was visiting internet dating sites, and she lied to me about where she was going. She told me she was visiting her best friend. I learned from Bryony that Francesca had actually gone on a date. That’s about all I know. Her phone’s been turned off. She never turns her phone off. She’s got work in the morning. She never gets in later than eleven when she’s got work the next day.’
‘Where does Francesca work, Mrs Christie?’
‘Maguire Holdings on Allerton Road.’
Mrs Christie’s eyes were red and her face was a knot of intense anxiety.
‘Do you have a picture of her, Mrs Christie?’ Clay leaned in a little closer as Mrs Christie opened her shoulder bag and took out her iPhone. ‘The most recent one if possible, please.’
Mrs Christie swiped through the images on her phone. ‘This is the most recent one.’
Clay looked at the picture of Francesca Christie – blonde, slim, attractive, mid twenties – and shuddered inside.
‘Send all the pictures you have of her to me, Mrs Christie.’ Clay handed her a contact card. ‘Do you have her address book?’
‘It’s the family address book.’ Mrs Christie handed it to Clay.
‘She may have gone visiting someone on the way home.’
‘She wouldn’t just do that. It’s out of character.’
‘In my experience, Mrs Christie, most people do things that are out of character at some or several points in their lives. We have to go through a process of elimination here. Does she have a laptop?’ Mrs Christie nodded. ‘We need to look at it.’
‘I thought you might ask.’ She produced a laptop from the bag.
‘The pictures, please, Mrs Christie.’