Eli offered Hal another photo. “Here we’re on the boat to Cherbourg. It was a holiday to us, no one in our unit had left England before and here we were heading to a hero’s welcome in France. The Germans hadn’t yet crossed the border, and most of us thought they never would.” In the photo, Hal’s father lay out on the deck of the transport, dozing in the sun. Hal stared at the picture, unable to fully understand it. He saw his dad, but he didn’t recognise him, he looked so at peace. Ill-fitting, overlapping visions of his father—the man he knew and this man he saw—butted in his mind, raising a curling discomfort within him.
“We’re not in this photo,” Eli continued, unaware of the turmoil. “This is the camp we were kept in. This was taken after the war, but you can see our bunk hut—”
Hal knew of the camp, but only through overheard half-started stories and unfinished sentences. Eli was pointing out details in the photo and talking, but Hal wasn’t hearing him anymore. He stared at the photo, his eyes running along the huts, the fences, the fields, trying to picture the three years his dad was held there. Trying to picture the things that turned him from the young man dozing in the sun to the man Hal had known.
“Your father refused to take this,” Eli was talking to Hal, something clasped in his hand. “He wouldn’t even look at it. I went to the major after I heard and promised to hold onto it for him, to give it to him when he was ready. Now, I can at least give it to you.”
Eli opened his hand to reveal a silver cross in his palm, a medal. At the end of each of the arms of the cross were little crowns, and in the centre were the letters GRI. Fixed to the top of the cross was a white-and-purple ribbon that draped over the back of Eli’s hand. Hal took the medal from Eli, feeling the cold weight of it in his fingers.
“He was given that for what he did—”
All Hal’s life, the war had been a cloud over his family, darkening his dad’s mood, upsetting his mum. It could cause weeks of tension in their home. Dad would shout at them, or ignore them, or leave without explanation. He’d come home days later, or they would have to go to the police station to get him after he had been picked up for trespassing. It had driven his parents to move to the country, where his mum hoped the peace would help calm his father’s mind.
“—run the seven miles to the next camp and straight into—”
The move had left them isolated and friendless. And after years of it—all of Hal’s life—he still did that to himself. As he stared at the medal in his hands, Hal grew angrier and angrier. The war had stolen his father from him, and now Eli was trying to tell him stories about it?
“—saved fifteen men—”
“Shut up!”
Eli fell silent, stunned.
Hal’s whole body was tense, his hands in tight fists. The walls of his new room felt suffocatingly close. He had to get out. He wrenched the door open and ran through the living room and out the front door, his mum’s confused shouts fading behind him as he fled from the flat. He threw himself down the three flights of stairs at the end of the hallway and out into the courtyard, and kept running until his lungs burned.
Panting for air, Hal came to a stop. His cheeks were wet with tears—he hadn’t noticed he’d been crying. As he caught his breath, he became aware of a pain in his hand and looked down at the white and purple ribbon trailing from his closed fist. He’d been gripping the medal so tight it had left deep welts. Sick of the sight of it, he threw it away as far as he could.
As his heart slowed and the adrenaline drained from his body, Hal turned on the spot, taking in his surroundings. All around him were blocks of identical concrete flats, lined with identical windows, and identical concrete lattices. Everything was uniform: four floors high, an interior staircase every four flats, heavy-looking doors opening into the courtyard at regular intervals. Nothing but concrete in every direction except the sky above.
Hal was lost. All these flats looked the same and he had no idea which was his. A chill prickled the back of his neck.
An odd noise cut through his anxious thoughts. There it was again: a click, followed by a grinding noise. He looked around for the source of the sound; it seemed to come from the block of flats to his left.
There it was again. He looked up and saw a flash of movement on the fourth-floor balcony.
Hal dashed to the stairwell of the block and took the stairs two at a time, hearing someone coming down from the floors above, fast. He collided with the figure on the second-floor landing, knocking them to the ground: a boy, thirteen maybe, no older than Hal. As he scrambled to get up, Hal pinned him to the floor, both his hands on the boy’s shoulders and a knee on his chest. The boy’s hands went to a camera hanging from his neck, covering it protectively.
“Why were you taking photos of me?” Hal spat.
The boy looked nervous, tightening his grip on his camera.
“I wasn’t—I mean,” the boy started, his voice cracking, “I was waiting to take pictures of the Rag and Bone Man when you came sprinting into the courtyard. I didn’t mean—I just photograph things I find interesting.”
Hal eased back, letting go of the boy’s sweater, and got to his feet. “What’s your name?”
“Shahid,” the boy said.
“Do you know how to get to Jackson House?”
ON THE WAY back to Hal’s block, Shahid pointed out details of the estate, calling out the names of the houses as they passed them: Savile, Thoresby, York, Moynihan, Lupton. Each block looked the same to Hal, but to Shahid they were unique. Moynihan House, he said, was full of empty flats that, if you knew the trick, you could break into without anyone knowing. Over the summer different gangs of children would take over a flat and build a base—“Though you want to mind yourself, there’s a man on the ground floor who I swear watches us from behind his curtains,” he said, pointing to a window. He told Hal to avoid York House because that’s where the rougher families lived—he’d been beaten up by the Hayes brothers who lived on the first floor and didn’t want repeat the experience. As they approached Lupton House, where Shahid lived with his mum and dad, Hal recognised Eli’s van still parked outside of Jackson House. He grabbed Shahid’s sleeve—“Let’s keep going. Can you show me the rest of the estate?”
Shahid was happy to show someone around; Hal got the impression he didn’t have many friends. Whenever they passed other children playing on the estate he’d look at the ground, trying to avoid their attention.
The Quarry Hill estate was like a great concrete fist in the centre of Leeds. Surrounded by main roads on all sides and ringed by an unbroken sweep of flats, the estate was its own island. Within the perimeter, along with more housing blocks, was everything the 3,000 strong community would need: greengrocers, a bakery, a wash house, even two restaurants and a chippy. There were 13 different houses in all, Shahid told Hal, each named after a different figure in Leeds’ history. Lupton House, for instance, was named after a well-to-do family who’d owned a lot of the city’s wool industry. Hal’s House, he learned, was named after William Jackson, a Leeds politician who became a baron.
Shahid pointed out where the foundations for a community hall were laid but never built on, and where the shell of a building that was supposed to become a swimming pool was erected but never completed; “They made the boiler room for it, though,” the boy said, pointing out a slug of a building off to one side of the unfinished pool, away from any of the houses. “They burn all the estate’s waste to heat the boiler. It smells awful around here in winter.” Shahid pulled Hal’s arm, leading him towards one of the housing blocks. “I’m going to show you a secret you can’t show to anyone.”
Shahid went into Moynihan House and motioned Hal to be quiet. The two boys went up to the top floor and along the rows of doors to No. 52, where Shahid showed Hal how the lock could be jimmied open. Inside and with the door shut, Shahid broke the silence, saying, “I found this a few months ago. A lot of the flats here have never been lived in since the building opened in the ’30s.”
The layout was the same as the flat Hal had moved into that morning. The walls were stained with damp, mould creeping across the carpet in the living room. The air was thick with an acrid smell. “Mice, I think,” Shahid said, seeing Hal’s nose wrinkle.
“What I really wanted to show you was this,” he continued, going through to the bathroom and opening the window wide. “You have to trust me, this is worth it.” He climbed out onto the sill and began to climb. Hal watched through the window as Shahid’s legs kicked for a moment and then rose out of view.
Hal rushed to the window and put his head out to look up. Nothing. Just the edge of the roof above. Then Shahid poked his head over the edge. “Come on! You can get your foot on the drainpipe and use the window frame to climb up.”
Hal started climbing before his nerves got the better of him, and Shahid helped pull him onto the roof. They lay on the concrete roof, panting and looking up at the bright sky.
“No one else comes up here,” Shahid said, getting up with his arms outstretched, free from the eyes that watched from behind closed curtains. “With a rope, we could make a harness and pull up chairs and a basket with food. This could be our den over the summer.”
Hal pictured what it could look like, as Shahid walked to the edge of the roof, saying, “You can see over the whole of Quarry Hill from here, too.” He pointed out the pool and the other landmarks he’d shown Hal earlier. “See that pipe there.” He indicated a large, concrete-ringed opening on the far side of the playing fields. “That goes into a stream you can follow all the way to Meanwood. Last month the beck was full of frogspawn. It was grim, but if you go now, there are hundreds of little hopping frogs.”
The boys spent all the afternoon on the roof, throwing stones at each other, pulling up loose concrete slabs and building towers, all the while talking about themselves. Shahid told Hal how his parents had moved to Leeds from Pakistan in the ’40s. His uncle had come over first and started a corner shop. His father did the books for him and other Pakistani businesses—“It’s not easy for us to get an English accountant”—he has an older sister at university and a brother living in Pakistan.
Shahid’s mum worked as a housekeeper in a number of the flats around Quarry Hill. He’d overhear her and his father talking gossip some nights when they thought he was asleep in bed. “There’s one story they still talk about now, though it happened years ago.” Drawing closer to Hal, he began to talk in a whisper “In 1953, in that flat over there, No. 26”—he pointed to a flat in York House—“there was a murder. A woman called Sarah Williams lived there, mum used to clean for her. One morning mum went to clean and found the door open. She found Sarah in the living room, a great wound in her belly. She says she’d been stabbed so deep there was a hole in the back of the armchair. They caught the man who did it two days later—Simon Calvin. He was her boyfriend, my mum says. They’d had an argument and he attacked her, the police say.”
Hal stared at the flat. It looked no different from those next to it, no sign of its grisly past. “No one’s lived there since. It’s sat empty for fourteen years. Mum still talks it through with dad. She’s not sure Simon’s guilty. She says the two were so lovely together.”
“Who does she think it was?”
Shahid scanned the estate from their perch. “Him,” Shahid said. He gripped Hal’s shoulder and led him to the low wall surrounding the roof. “See that man in the coat?”
Hal’s eyes followed Shahid’s pointing finger. The man was tall, over six foot, and walked with a stoop. Despite the heat, he wore a heavy wax coat over a thick woollen jumper. Gloves covered his hands and black wellington boots went up to his thighs. He wore his collar up and a flat cap; Hal couldn’t get a look at his face from their high vantage point. He pushed a two-wheeled cart in front of him with some half-filled sacks heaped in it.
“That’s the Rag and Bone Man,” Shahid said. “He goes around the estate taking away people’s old clothes and waste metal. He can get money for them at the scrap yards. Here, use my camera, see if you can’t get a look at his face.”
Hal put his eye to the viewfinder and twisted the lens to get a closer look at the man. He couldn’t work out quite what he was seeing—the angle was bad and the flat cap obscured his view—but the man’s face looked lifeless and frozen in place. His complexion, too, was off; it looked painted on, like a china doll. With a jerk the man turned and stared straight at Hal, his gaze seemed to pierce straight through the lens. Hal fell back away from the wall.
“He saw me!”
“No, he didn’t,” Shahid said.
“He looked right at me.”
“Didn’t you see?” Shahid said. “He can’t see you, he doesn’t have a face.”
Then it clicked for Hal, what he had been looking at. The man wore a china mask, the kind people who had come back from the war disfigured by shrapnel wore.
“It felt like he looked right at me,” Hal insisted.
“Did you at least get a picture? I’ve been trying to get a good picture of him since I got the camera for my birthday.”
“Your mum thinks he killed the woman at No. 26?”
“Look, no one knows who he is, really. He’s been hanging around the estate for years, I don’t even know if he lives here. My mum’s sure he has something to do with it, though. See, he doesn’t just collect scrap, some of the women on the estate pay him to tell their futures. Don’t look at me like that. People say he knows how to read tea leaves. Anyway, it doesn’t matter if I believe them, Ms Williams did, my mum says. He was round her flat every week, sometimes more, telling her what he could see.”
“That’s crazy.”
“I’ve not told you all of it yet. No one on the estate talks about, it but it’s no secret: her old flat, it’s haunted.”
“Bollocks.”
“Honest. Everyone knows it. Ever since she was murdered, there have been nights when her ghost can be heard weeping inside the flat. No one’s lived in the place since. It’s never sold. The flats next door have been empty for years, too. The families moved out after the murder and no one’s moved in.”
2
THE CEILING LOOKED like a rotten pudding, the plaster soft and cream-coloured. Bloated with moisture. The edges browned, rivulets of copper-coloured water running down the walls to a peeling checkerboard lino floor.
Hal turned from the ugly scene and rose from the bathtub. First testing the wet floor with his bare feet, he stood, letting the hems of his pyjama trousers touch the damp lino. He could hear confused muffled sounds in the flat and walked to the door, opening it to the living room.
Mould dusted the beige furniture like moss on a country wall. The walls wept with great brown streaks of damp. The rot didn’t bother the figures in the room, nor did Hal’s presence.
Sat in the mouldy chair was Sarah Williams, tea cup and saucer in one hand, the other gripping the chair’s arm. Looming over her was a creature in a wax coat. Hal watched as it leant down and bit into her throat, the chair tilting back from the weight and violence of the attack.
HAL’S EYES SNAPPED awake, woken by a sharp pain—he’d bitten his tongue in his sleep. The panic slowly ebbed from him as he swallowed down the metallic taste of blood. His copy of Dracula lay open on his chest.
Lying in his bed, turning over his dream and the man he saw earlier that day, Hal gave up on sleep and quietly got out of bed. He put on his dad’s jacket over his pyjamas and left the flat, descending the stairs to the courtyard below. Outside it was cold and dark, the only light from the lamppost in the courtyard. He heard nothing in the night, the sounds of the city blocked by the wall of flats.
Keeping to the edge of the courtyard, he walked to Moynihan house, praying not to be heard. The block was an imposing sight in the dark; looking up, he couldn’t see where the building ended and the sky began. Pressing firmly against the door to the stairwell until it slowly opened, he slipped inside and closed it quietly behind him.
The lamppost outside gave enoug
h light for him to make out the impression of the bottom step, but as he climbed to the first floor the stairwell became pitch black and he had to duck onto all fours to feel for the stairs as he ascended. Reaching the landing, Hal felt for the door into the hallway. His hands found a light switch, but didn’t dare press it.
Working from the memory of the identical hallway in Jackson House, Hal crept down the hall, the fingers of this right hand lightly tracing the wall, feeling for the doorframes and counting them out in his head. When he reached No. 26 he hesitated, feeling silly for having believed Shahid’s ghost story. Still, he had to know.
He pressed his ear to the door.
The blood drained from him as he heard the sounds of weeping through the thin plywood. It was muffled, but he could hear the sharp intakes of breath and trickles of high-pitched moaning. He kept his ear to the door, hooked by the sound’s familiarity—he’d heard the same from his mum’s room in the months after his dad’s death. He hadn’t seen her cry since she found his body; in front of him, she always tried to stay collected, busy, and pragmatic. He had tried to do the same.
A sound within the room brought Hal back to himself. The weeping had stopped. He heard heavy footsteps approaching the door. There wasn’t time to get to the stairs, so Hal stepped back, pressing himself against the door of the flat opposite, making himself as small as he could and holding his breath. Hal heard the door of No. 26 swing inwards. He stood fixed in place, fearing that even the sound of his beating heart would betray him. The door clicked shut as whoever it was left the flat and Hal listened to their footsteps walking away, down the corridor towards the stairwell. Only when he heard the door to the stairs close did he let out his breath.
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