Ragged Alice

by Gareth L. Powell

  The questions kept circling around in her head, snapping at one another’s heels. Whiskey fumes throbbed behind her eyes. The cat squirmed beneath her touch, its little animal soul glowing like a brazier.

  Her grandfather had adopted the creature after she left for London, and now she couldn’t remember its name.

  “I guess I’ll have to call you Fred,” she said, scratching the cat behind its ears. In return, Fred nuzzled her hand. He didn’t care what he was called; he just wanted a cwtch.

  As Pontyrhudd woke and shook itself, ready for another day, Holly found her thoughts drawn back to the night of her accident.

  She had been eighteen years old, celebrating her A level results with a group of friends from school. There had been twelve of them altogether. They’d built a fire in the woods and sat around it drinking strawberry wine and telling ghost stories. There were the usual tales of escaped maniacs and young couples terrorized by ghostly figures with hooks for hands. But then, as the night wore on and the wine went to their heads, one of the boys started telling the story of Ragged Alice.

  “It was on this very spot,” he said, before going on to relate the grisly fate that had befallen Holly’s mother. The story had become part of the mythic history of Pontyrhudd. Everyone had heard it, and doubtlessly a few even believed it.

  The kid telling the story poked the fire with a stick, sending up sparks.

  “To this day,” he said, “Ragged Alice wanders these woods with twigs in her eyes, blindly taking her vengeance on anyone foolhardy enough to venture in here alone. Especially—” His eyes lit on Holly and his face froze.

  “Oh shit,” he said, looking pale as realisation dawned.

  Holly clenched her fists. Everyone in the circle was looking at her. She felt her cheeks flush at the onslaught of their embarrassment and pity.

  “Shut up, Brendan,” she said. She scrambled to her feet. She just wanted to hide.

  “Holly, I’m sorry. I didn’t think.”

  “Oh, fuck off.”

  She turned and blundered out of the firelight, not caring where she was going, wanting simply to get away before she burst into tears. Brambles scratched her forearms. Branches raked her hair. Someone called after her, but she didn’t stop to see who it was.

  Why did it have to be my mother? Why did she have to be the one they tiptoed around? Even now, on the night her classmates celebrated their future, she still felt snared by the talons of the past.

  She came to the edge of the River Rhudd and stopped. The rust-coloured water bubbled and sang in the shadow of the trees. How easy it would be, she thought, to throw herself in and be borne away by the current.

  Behind her, her friends’ voices were asking her to come back, not to be silly. She ignored them. She was going to that London in a few weeks. She had her university place confirmed. The only way to break the chokehold of the past was to go there and never look back. To purposefully lose touch with everyone who currently knew her and never set foot in this godforsaken valley again.

  In London, she could start with a clean slate. She could build a new life, somewhere nobody knew her. No longer would she have to be the girl whose mother had died; freed of that restraint, she could simply be Holly Craig—and Holly Craig could be whoever the hell she wanted to be.

  A fat, buttery moon had risen over the trees. Its light danced on the river, and Holly smiled. She had made her decision. In a few weeks’ time, she would be gone. She would leave all this behind, and Pontyrhudd would slowly forget she’d ever existed. All her friendships would be over. The only person with whom she would stay in contact would be her grandfather, and even then only via a monthly letter.

  The night air smelled of mossy soil and warm bracken. It prickled against her skin. It was the arse-end of August and her arms were bare and open to the night. The stars she could see through the leaves overhead were hard, brittle little points of light that seemed to map the way to a new, happier tomorrow.

  “Make the most of me while I’m still here,” she told the flitting bats and softly whispering trees. “Because I’m never coming back.”

  Jet engines whined at the airbase. A shadow moved in the corner of her eye, and a voice spoke words she couldn’t interpret. She turned her head to follow the sound, but as she did so, she felt the riverbank give way beneath her heel. She cried out, but the impact of the water cut her short. The coldness stole her breath, and the current tumbled her over and over, until she couldn’t tell which way was up. Her fingers scrabbled for purchase. The water roared in her ears.

  This is it, she thought, fighting the urge to gag. I’m going to drown.

  The muck tasted rank and salty in her throat, like the water from an unclean fish tank. She gagged again, stomach muscles convulsing as her diaphragm went into spasm. Even though her eyes were shut, she could see sparks.

  Why was this happening?

  Weighed down by her sodden clothes, her legs felt as if they were pushing through treacle. The need to breathe was turning her inside out, and she knew she couldn’t hold on. She knew she was going to die.

  Just not yet.

  She clamped her jaw so hard she feared her teeth would splinter.

  Not yet . . .

  Her body tried to retch. Her limbs thrashed. Every pulse thumped like a drumbeat. And then, just as she was on the verge of giving up—of surrendering herself to the dreadful, choking darkness—her head hit a submerged rock, smacking her into unconsciousness and forever changing her life.

  She would have drowned had her friends not managed to pull her from the water and administer CPR until the ambulance crew arrived. As it was, the paramedics reckoned she’d spent ten minutes clinically dead, with no pulse or respiration. Even thinking about it now made the back of her neck prickle.

  * * *

  At first, Holly had sought a rational explanation for her newly acquired gift. She had read somewhere that sharks were able to sense the bioelectrical auras surrounding prey animals in seawater, and home in on them when the water became too dark or murky for sight alone to suffice. Marine biologists referred to this ability as “electroreception.” Could that explain her ability to see inside a person’s head? Was she simply visualising electrical impulses?

  On further investigation, she discovered that over millions of years, sharks had evolved special receptors that allowed them to sense other creatures—receptors the human body simply didn’t possess. Trawling the lower half of the internet, she came across claims by psychics and healers who said they were able to perceive multicoloured auras surrounding people, but as far as Holly could tell, their stories lacked a single shred of rigorous scientific proof.

  Proof was important to her. Even as a teenager, she possessed the kind of calm, analytical mind and thirst for understanding that would later help her excel as a detective. She had the same intuition and gut instincts as anyone else, she just felt unable to completely believe them until she had found solid, reliable evidence. She prized science and common sense above all else. So what scared her about the paranormal wasn’t the possibility that it might exist; it was the knowledge that confirmation of its existence might upend everything she held dear.

  Unable to find any other explanation, she soldiered on regardless. She saw psychiatrists and counselors, but no combination of therapy or medicine had been able to alleviate her condition. The only cures she had found were exhaustion and strong whiskey. So she worked hard and drank harder. And somehow, she staggered along from one day to the next. And slowly she learned to read the mottling she perceived around the lights in some people’s heads and correlate it to guilt for past deeds. Every person’s inner light burned at a different temperature. Some were as soft and steady as the glow of a paraffin lamp; others hard and bright as an exploding star. Those who felt bad about their transgressions carried their regret as stains on their soul. And gradually, Holly found she could interpret those smudges to the point where she sometimes knew when to press for a confession and when to release a susp
ect as innocent. She could often tell if a suspect had committed a crime simply by the accumulated stains smothering their internal radiance. She just didn’t like to think about the metaphysical implications of what she saw. As far as she was concerned, she merely had a talent for picking up on a person’s shame and remorse. And if she used the word soul to describe the light behind a person’s eyes, it was simply because she couldn’t think of a better shorthand.

  * * *

  Holly’s leg hurt too much to negotiate the steep hill that led down into the town, so she phoned Scott and he came to collect her.

  “I brought tea,” he said, handing her a polystyrene cup from one of the new cafés on the high street.

  “Oh my God, thank you.” She’d tried to make herself a cup earlier, but the milk in her grandfather’s fridge had been a couple of years past its sell-by date.

  Scott smiled at her reaction. He drove her down to the hotel, where she took up position on a chair in front of the whiteboard in the incident room.

  Nothing on the board had changed since yesterday. The arrows still pointed to Davies as the most likely suspect.

  “We’ve got the fingerprint comparison from the knife that killed Mike Owen,” Scott said, checking his laptop.

  “And?”

  “It wasn’t Davies.”

  Holly pried the plastic lid from her tea. “Who was it?”

  “We don’t know.”

  She blew the steam from the tea and took a cautious sip. “Maybe Davies had an accomplice.”

  “And that accomplice then turned on him?”

  “It’s a possibility.”

  Scott rubbed his chin. “You could be onto something there, guv.”

  “It’s a stab in the dark, but let’s see if we can put together a list of Davies’s associates. Anybody he might have hired to do his dirty work.”

  “I’ll get Potts and Jensen onto it.”

  “And call Amy Lao. I get the feeling she knows which of Pontyrhudd’s closets hold the most skeletons.”

  Scott’s mobile rang, and Holly waited while he took the call. When he had finished, he said, “I’ve got some bad news, guv.”

  Holly sighed. “Okay, let me have it.”

  Scott rubbed the tip of his nose. He shifted his weight from one foot to the other. “Autopsy results show Davies was killed half an hour after you were being run off the road.”

  Holly felt a hollow space open in her stomach. “Are you sure?”

  “I’m afraid so. If the person who rammed you was waiting in the Galleon car park, the chances are they’d been waiting there for some time. They couldn’t have known exactly when you were going to return. They must have gone straight back to Davies’ house.”

  “So if we’d have been later, Davies might still be alive?”

  “Yes, guv.”

  Holly put a hand to her leg. Her knee hurt and her calf muscles kept cramping with the effort of keeping her foot raised. “This just keeps getting better and better.”

  Scott walked over to the whiteboard. He picked up a green pen and drew a question mark, circled it, and stepped back.

  “Our new suspect,” he said. “The invisible bloody man.”

  16.

  LOW TIDE WAS THE only time it was possible to cross the causeway joining the northern headland to the lighthouse. As Amy Lao followed Mrs. Phillips towards the white tower, she could smell the black seaweed drying on the cobblestones. Crabs scuttled out of their way. The sea lapped at the edges of the footway.

  Mrs. Phillips had once been the lighthouse keeper’s sister, but her brother had retired when the installation had been converted to full automation, and had since died. Where once an operator had been needed to light the lamp each evening, now the whole thing ran with little more than a quarterly technician’s visit. Nevertheless, old Mrs. Phillips still came out here once a month to tend the window boxes on the empty, whitewashed cottage at the foot of the tower.

  The old woman had dressed for the job at hand, putting aside her habitual finery for a thick cardigan, a pair of baggy dungarees and a stout pair of Wellington boots. She had put up her hair and fastened it in place with a pair of knitting needles—an affectation that struck Lao as inappropriate given the recent murders and caused her to lightheartedly speculate whether Mrs. Phillips had been the killer all along and now intended those needles for the eyes of her next victim. Lao smiled to herself as she tried to picture the ninety-year-old overpowering the butcher’s hulking son.

  She pulled out a cigarette and lit it, sheltering the lighter flame with her free hand. Gulls jostled one another on the edge of the causeway. Wings flapped and beaks snapped.

  “Come along,” Mrs. Phillips called over her shoulder. “We haven’t long.” Once they made it across, they’d have two hours to complete their business before the turning tide re-covered the causeway. Lao hoped that would be enough. She’d agreed to accompany Mrs. Phillips this morning because she wanted to test a theory, however unlikely it might seem now she was actually here.

  At the end of the causeway, they climbed sea-slicked steps to the cottage, which was a single-storey stone building with thick walls and high windows designed to withstand spring tides and winter storms. From here, Lao could see no signs of forced entry, but she still tensed as Mrs. Phillips produced a key from her dungarees and unlocked the front door.

  Let’s see if I’m right . . .

  The heavy wooden door opened on salt-rusted hinges. Fresh air curled into the cottage’s only downstairs room, disturbing the curtains and white lace hem of the tablecloth. It blew dust from the picture rail and Lao felt herself relax. Nobody had been here in some time, and probably not since Mrs. Phillips’s last visit.

  The cottage consisted of a sitting room and hearth, a small bedroom, a scullery and a cramped bathroom. All were empty and showed no signs of having been disturbed. But in order to completely disprove her theory, Lao knew she’d have to check the tower as well. Although each building had its own separate entrance, they also shared a connecting door that would have allowed the keeper to access the tower even in the worst of weathers. This door wasn’t locked, and led into the base of the lighthouse proper.

  Lao found herself in a circular room. Oilskins and sou’westers dangled from hooks like the dried remains of flayed sea creatures. Coils of rope mouldered quietly in a wooden crate. A bucket of old shells sat beside the doormat. With a little curse, Lao crossed to the bottom of the spiral staircase and began to climb.

  Tiny windows had been sunk through the tower’s heavy walls so that every ten steps gifted her a blurred, pockmarked view of either the sea or the town. Was she looking out on the Atlantic Ocean or the Irish Sea? In the four years since she’d moved from Birmingham to Pontyrhudd, she’d never been entirely sure where the boundary lay. Having been schooled in Hong Kong, British geography had never been one of her strengths. She made a mental note to look up the answer when she got back to the office.

  She passed through the first storey, which had been done out as an office. Shipping charts covered the walls. A large, old-fashioned radio sat on the desk with its chunky knobs and dials. A larger window faced out into the bay, and a pair of dusty binoculars lay on the sill.

  Nothing out of the ordinary.

  She continued upwards but paused when Mrs. Phillips called up the stairs.

  “Are you up there, Amy, bach?”

  “Yes, Mrs. P.”

  “Well, what are you doing up there?” The old woman started climbing. Lao could hear her huffing and wheezing with the effort.

  “I’m just taking a look around.”

  “Well, why didn’t you say so?” The old woman appeared around the curve of the stairs. Her cheeks were flushed. “I could have given you the tour.”

  Lao smiled. She’d liked Mrs. Phillips ever since first meeting her three years ago, when she’d covered the local amateur dramatic society’s production of Noël Coward’s Blithe Spirit. Mrs. P had delivered a rousing and largely improvised performance
as Madame Arcati that wandered off script so frequently the other actors were left floundering in her wake.

  “I’m nearly done. Only one floor left.”

  “Then give me a second to catch my breath, and we’ll go up together. I’d like to show you the view.”

  * * *

  From the room that housed the lamp, Lao could see the centre of Pontyrhudd nestled in the mouth of the valley and its terraced residential streets stacked up against the hillsides. With a palpable air of pride, Mrs. Phillips pointed out the local landmarks: the chapel on the headland, the control tower of the airbase, the bingo hall, and the new supermarket that had opened on the outskirts of town. Lao nodded dutifully at each of them, while simultaneously looking around for evidence of occupation. But she could see no footprints in the dust, no discarded food wrappers or items of clothing to suggest anyone had been using this place as a bolthole.

  “Are you all right, bach?” Mrs. Phillips looked concerned.

  Lao shook herself. “I’m sorry, what were you saying?”

  “I was just pointing out the mayor’s house by there. But you looked about a million miles away for a second there.”

  “I was just thinking.”

  “That this would make a great hideout for our mysterious murderer?”

  Lao blinked in surprise. “How did you know?”

  “Because I know the way you think. The tide cuts this place off from the mainland for twenty hours a day, and nobody really comes here, save me; and I only come once a month.”

  “Why didn’t you say anything?”

  Mrs. Phillips’s eyes crinkled. “I knew we’d be all right, love. This is the lighthouse. Nothing bad happens here.”

  “How can you be so sure?”

  “My brother wouldn’t let any harm come to us. He’s good like that.”

  “Your brother?”

  “Alan, the lighthouse keeper.”

  “Isn’t he, you know . . . dead?”

  “Of course he is. But that doesn’t stop him keeping an eye on the place. It was his life, see?”