by Clare Carson
*
She arrived back in Vauxhall, locked the van, crossed the road. A poster on the boards of a long-empty shopfront caught her eye. Kennington Park funfair, a picture of a big wheel and a stall with a striped awning, coloured lights. She took a sharp breath, tasted sweetness at the back of her throat, conjured up a face, steel eyes, crescent-moon scar. The candy man. Her vision went fuzzy, her head heavy. She screwed her eyes tight, blocked it out, told herself she was fine. Opened her eyes, checked her watch – ten forty-five, pushed the front door, saw the red light blinking. Message. Her stomach knew it wasn’t Luke. Was it the whistler? Or Liz again, assuaging her guilt for being a crap mother by phoning her to talk about Milton and Greek cuisine. Well, she could piss off. Sam ignored the light, ambled into the kitchen to make a cup of coffee, proper Turkish coffee this time. Turkish coffee – everything led her back to Luke. She brewed the muddy sludge, knocked it back, walked along the hall, heading for the stairs, intending to retreat to her room and the solace of a good book. The answering machine winked at her aggressively as she passed. She paused. Could it be Harry? She pressed the button. The cassette inside the machine whirred, spinning back to the correct part of the tape. It crackled and sighed, as if somebody were breathing heavily into the phone, and then somebody spoke. Not Harry. Nor Liz. It was Dave.
‘Sam.’ His voice wavered. There was something ghostly about his tone that startled her, filled her with a sudden dread. He paused. Then his disembodied voice again. ‘Sam. Are you there? Are you back yet?’ Another heavy pause. ‘Listen, call me when you get in, will you? I need a quick word with you.’ Heavy breathing. And then a sad, ‘Ta-ra.’
What was that about? She dialled his number. She heard it ringing at the other end, waited for him to pick up. Ring. Ring. And then his answering machine cut in. Dave’s voice again, asking her to leave a message after the tone. She put the receiver down. He was probably in the toilet. He spent an immeasurable amount of time in the toilet. Men and toilets. Oh fuck, what was happening? She would give him five minutes. She took a deep breath, walked halfway down the hall then stopped; she could hear a noise upstairs, an odd, soft rattle. She climbed the stairs, hugging the wall. A blast of air brushed her cheek, as if somebody had rushed past. She froze. Counted to sixty in her head. Nothing. Continued up the stairs. Stopped, listened. The sound was coming from the back bedroom, Dave’s room. She paused, hand on the door, pushed. The room was empty. Periodic table blu-tacked to the wall. Science textbooks neatly lined on the shelf. Silence. Then a buzz, coming from his built-in cupboard. She threw open the door; the familiar smell of mildew radiated from Dave’s box of journal articles and a dozy wasp zapped past her face. The top paper was skew-whiff, its corners resting across the edges of the box. Distribution of caesium 137 between abiotic and biotic components of aquatic ecosystems. By Simon Burns. She bent down to square it up, then spotted the article underneath. Microalgae and aquatic plants that can eliminate radioactive caesium from the aquatic environment. By Richard Avery. Strange. B before A. The top article was out of place. Dave was fairly obsessive about ordering his information, journal articles always alphabetical. Had somebody been rummaging in his papers?
She decided to leave the pile as she had found it, returned downstairs, dialled Dave’s number. He didn’t pick up. Come on. Come on. The answering machine clicked in again. She put the phone down. What was he doing? She sat on the stairs. Agitated. Flipped her wrist and checked the time, watched the second hand do its round, once, twice – she dialled again, ringing, ringing. She would have to leave him a message. The answering machine clicked in. She put the phone down, on edge, didn’t want to leave her voice, her name, on his tape. What if somebody else was there, in the house, listening? She shook, filled with a sudden fear that Dave might have disappeared, like Luke. She was being paranoid, she told herself. Then she went through his strange reactions, his edginess the evening before when she wanted to talk about the power station, his digs about Luke. Harry’s question – Does the name Dave Daley mean anything to you? Yes, it did mean something to her, Dave Daley meant a lot to her, but now she was beginning to fear that she didn’t have quite such a straightforward relationship with him as she thought she had. Listen, there’s something else... Dave... She had to contain the doubts. It would all turn out to be nothing. Dave had nipped to the shop to buy a pint of milk and he would call her when he got back and start talking about something trivial. The breeding habits of spoonbills. She was being paranoid, as usual.
She retreated to her room, under the bedcovers with a book. Somewhere in the distance a police siren wailed. Traffic hummed. A train clunked across the railway arches en route to Waterloo. A neighbour’s radio twittered. She pretended not to be listening for the phone. Who was she trying to kid? She levered herself out of bed, teetered at the top of the stairs. The hairs on her arms bristled, an icy breeze on the back of her neck. She clutched the banister as she traipsed down, crossed the hall, reached for the phone and dialled Dave’s number. No reply. Somebody was playing mind-games with her, disappearing the men she cared about, one by one. She shut her eyes briefly, pushed back the dark void.
She forced herself to eat; a half moon of dry pitta wiped around the remains of an out-of-date pot of hummus. The only near-edibles left in the fridge. She called Dave. He failed to pick up. She played the message he had left again. Now the spaces between his words were obvious: breaths, silences, tightness in his voice, panic. He was trying to convey calm control, but she could hear the fear. She had to do something. She had to help him. She walked back into the kitchen, brewed some more muddy coffee in her battered saucepan, poured it into a thermos, located a packet of Garibaldi biscuits in the back of a cupboard, checked the back door was locked, picked up her battered boombox from the front room and a handful of cassettes. She passed the phone and it rang. She jumped for it. Dave. It wasn’t. Her hand froze, the whistle playing in her ear and then the voice. ‘You are in danger.’ Clunk of receiver. It didn’t sound like Harry. Perhaps he was muting his Welsh accent in case there was a listener on the line. Or perhaps Harry had instructed somebody else to leave her a warning? You are in danger. God, how did a message like that help? It only made her more anxious. She couldn’t call Harry right now anyway, she had to go. She double locked the front door, dumped her supplies in the back of the van, rested the boombox on the passenger seat, fiddled with the key in the ignition. The van chugged as the engine revved; usually comforting, now the familiar noise merely reminded her of the miles she had to travel, alone, you are in danger rattling around her brain.
Slow going east through the blackened terraces of London. The cruddy, never rebuilt bomb holes between the houses filled with discarded domestic appliances. North through Essex. Decaying factories and empty warehouses. She left the road at the same junction she had taken this morning, pulled into the same service station to top up the tank. This was proving expensive if nothing else. She used the toilet, grabbed a cup of weak coffee and sat at the same bench she had occupied eight hours previously. Her earlier presence was almost visible, a faint glimmer sitting at the bench eating a cheese sandwich. Her eyes wandered the sky, clouds hanging over the flat wheat fields, ratcheting up the humidity of the late afternoon. She ought to keep moving, face whatever was waiting for her in Skell. She drained the last of the coffee, scrunched the polystyrene cup in her hand, tossed it into the litter bin, wasps orbiting like Jupiter’s moons around the overflowing debris. She turned and caught sight of an old army Land Rover parked in front of the petrol station shop. Odd, it looked exactly like the one she had seen earlier this morning, bashed front left wing. She strolled across the forecourt, stared into the petrol station shop window at the AA Road Maps of Great Britain display, and observed the Land Rover’s reflection in the plate glass. Empty. She read the inverse number plate. C783 LLB. Was that a London registration? She made a mental note of the number, strolled back to the van, turned the ignition and pulled away.
The further into N
orfolk she drove, the darker the sky became. She reached Thetford Forest, plunged into the gloom of overreaching trees. She shivered, too cold for June, reached over to the boombox with one hand, pressed play. Joy Division. ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’. The sudden clatter of the raindrops almost drowned the music. She slowed, thirty, twenty-five miles an hour. Better not to go any faster in this weather, the wipers couldn’t cope with the deluge, her view was obscured, only the blur of oncoming headlights visible through the sheets of rain. A nutter in a silver Mercedes sped past, sprayed water in its wake, disappeared in the blear. She glanced in the rearview mirror, hard to see much through the back windscreen. Was that a flash of green? A Land Rover. She almost jammed her foot on the brake, nearly swerved on the wet road, regained control, concentrated on her driving, emerged from the forest, out into the open air. She checked behind her again; the car hogging her bumper was a white Peugeot, no Land Rover in sight. Her paranoia. She put her foot on the accelerator, nearly at Skell.
The final stretch, hemmed in by hawthorn, caught behind a line of horses, steaming flanks, riders swathed in black raingear, heads down, faces shadowed inside their hoods. The riders peeled right at the junction beyond the bridge. She forked left, drove past the village green, the Butcher’s Arms, the church. Two panda cars had parked precariously on the verge along the side of the road heading to the sea. Her stomach lurched. The right turn, the one that ran behind the village with access to the lokes, was cordoned off. Three coppers were standing in front of the lane, arms folded, repelling any inquisitive passers-by. Shit. Her brain raced. She drove on, swerved into the old harbour road, past a gaggle of people huddled by the post office, swerved left into the driveway that led down to the old windmill, parked in the gravel forecourt. Handbrake on. Sat back in the seat for a moment, trying to control the anxieties, think clearly. She leaned over to the glove compartment, rummaged inside, pulled out a pakol, an Afghan rebel’s hat, the one Luke had bought her as a present from Kensington Market. The rough felt comforted her hand. She pulled the hat on, rolled the brim over her head, its rim scratching her skin, glanced at herself in the mirror. She looked stupid, but it might help keep her dry. Catching her reflection, some instinct made her tuck her sandy hair inside the hat. Disguise herself. She pulled the hat’s rim further down over her brow to keep the hair in place. A lump formed in her throat. Her mind was numb, on the verge of tears, the fear in Dave’s voice eating into her mind.
She splashed through the puddled path under the arch by the side of the customs house. The toad croaked at her as she passed, as if it recognized her from the previous evening. A familiar. The loke opposite, the entrance to the path that ran along the side of Dave’s house, was forlornly draped with dripping yellow incident tape. Two rain-caped cops guarded that one as well. Jesus. She momentarily considered asking them what was going on, telling them she had a friend who lived up there and she wanted to find out if he was all right. Better not, she decided. Best remain invisible until she had a clearer sense of the landscape. Her gut was cramping now. Anxious. Shivery. Tired. Something had happened to Dave. Had he been kidnapped? Killed? She pictured the ghostly face in the window at Bane House, the figure walking away, the flash of the torch in the dark, and she suspected now she hadn’t been imagining things, there was somebody there, watching them, tracking them. Whatever had happened to Dave, it was connected to Luke’s disappearance, she was sure. And in the pit of her stomach, she knew it was connected to her. Luke was right, she was an undercover cop’s daughter, she had been on the radar all along, she was like a flashing beacon of dots and dashes spelling watch me, watch my friends, track us. She had inverted the bellarmine. She had tipped the heart with its three pins and the bitter withy bark. No wonder all the people closest to her were disappearing.
She crossed the road, headed away from the coppers guarding the loke, tagged on to the bedraggled crowd – fifteen people or so, heaving, shifting, people jostling for space on the tiny corner of pavement bordering the road. Something of a mad carnival atmosphere; an incident in Skell, of all places, where nothing ever happened. She searched faces – women in Barbours, cagoules, headscarves, greying men in dark windcheaters, a younger man with a camera, local hack perhaps. Dave was absent. People were gabbling. She clutched at sentences, phrases, words. Who would have thought? Not here. Kept himself to himself. Nice lad. What a shame. Smart too. Field station. Always thought there was something odd about him. Not quite right in the head. What do you expect? Irish.
Sam edged her way into the huddle, searching for solid information, caught the eye of a middle-aged woman, damp peroxide bob falling out from the hood of her tan raincoat and a shoulder plumping stance that suggested she was enjoying the disturbance. Eager to tell everybody how much she knew. The woman smiled at Sam in a commanding way, and elbowed over. Sam found herself bustled into a twosome, apart from the mass.
‘I stopped off to pick up some milk from the shop on my way home,’ Sam said. She nodded in the direction of the corner shop, which she had fortunately remembered was situated around the bend in the road. ‘I usually park up the back there, but it was blocked off.’
The woman nodded, savoured her moment, not ready to impart her information too easily.
‘What’s going on?’ Sam asked.
The woman inclined her head, smiled triumphantly. ‘Suicide.’
A surge of relief: Suicide? Phew. Not Dave then. That wasn’t what she had been worried about with Dave. Murder. Kidnap, possibly. Suicide, no. Dave wouldn’t have committed suicide. Not like his mother. He had told Sam as much himself, last night when they talked about it. Not suicide. Not the periodic repetition. Not Dave.
‘Up at the Professor’s house,’ the woman continued.
Sam tumbled down the bank, into the ditch, free fall, blood throbbing in her ears as she descended, brain misted up, no oxygen, unable to breathe. Drowning. The woman’s voice was coming from far, far away, up above her, a gaping circle of coral lipsticked mouth talking, talking, talking as she sank down in the black marshy waters.
‘Nasty,’ the mouth said. ‘Marge found him.’
Marge. The name tugged Sam upwards. A detail. Cling on to it, don’t let go. Find the air. Oxygen. Listen to the details, they could save your life. Marge. Her head bobbed up, broke the surface. She gasped.
‘Who is Marge?’
‘The Professor’s cleaner.’
Of course, Dave had mentioned her.
‘She cleans my house too,’ the coral-rimmed mouth added hastily, in case there was any doubt about the nature of her relationship to the char.
‘Marge found him this morning. In the kitchen. There was blood everywhere.’
Sam nodded, her mind screamed no. Not Dave’s blood. Please no.
‘Of course, Marge had to go to the station and provide a statement.’
Yes of course, Marge would have to do that.
‘She called me, though. After she had called the police and before they arrived. She needed somebody to talk to.’
Sam nodded again.
‘They can’t find any of his relatives,’ the woman continued.
No, they wouldn’t be able to because Dave’s father moved to the States after his mother drowned herself. His family splintered. Shattered. His brothers no longer spoke, no longer communicated with our kid Dave. Sam was one of his closest friends. Was. And now he was dead. She didn’t care what he was involved in, what he had done, why he had done it. She wanted to have a laugh with him. She wanted to hear him say something condescending about her tendency to paranoia in his irritating Brummie accent. Above all, above everything else, she wanted him to be alive. Too late.
‘The Professor’s going to have to come back and identify the body. If he’s recognizable.’
‘How did he...’
‘Gun.’
Gun? She managed to swallow her shriek. Where would Dave have found a gun? She pulled her sodden coat around her, the damp cloth sticking to her already drenched jeans.
> ‘Did the gun belong to the Professor then?’
The woman’s eyes narrowed. ‘No. The Professor didn’t keep a gun.’
‘I thought he might have been a hunter.’
‘Good god no. Not the Prof. It was the lad’s own gun. In the mouth.’ The woman pointed two fingers into her gaping coral hole, hooked her thumb into a trigger. Then she smiled, thought she was being funny in some way. Jesus, the woman was mad, a seething Aga owner, fuelled by an ever burning fire of contempt. Sam wanted to kick her, wanted to cry. Poor bloody Dave. It couldn’t be true. Even if he did find a gun, why would he do it now?
‘Unrequited love,’ the blonde bob continued.
‘Oh. How do you know that?’
‘He left a note. Marge saw it. This girl from London.’
Sam spluttered, raised her hand to her face, wiped away the drips to cover her reaction.
‘He shot himself because of a girl from London?’
The woman nodded. Sam turned away, staring mad-eyed down the road for something, somebody, anything that might save her. There was nothing. Salty water rivulets poured down her face, dripped into her mouth. Surely Dave hadn’t done himself in because of her. Maybe Jess was right, perhaps he did have a bit of a thing about her, but not that much of a thing. In her head, she replayed the message he had left on her answering machine; the barely suppressed fear. Fear of what? Himself? Fear he couldn’t stop the periodic repetition. Like his mother, only shot, not drowned. Or was there something else going on with Dave? Sam turned back to face the woman, arms folded defiantly.
‘Long yellow hair according to Marge. She found a couple of them in the bathroom this morning. The hairs.’
Sam’s eyes must have bulged.
‘Is something the matter?’
Sam shook her head. Christ. Long yellow hairs. She was glad she had tucked her rat tails into the hat.