‘OK,’ said George. ‘I wished I’d never heard of bloody Sylvia Tredwin, let’s get that straight. I never asked for any of this.’
‘Sometimes that’s the case, George. Things happen of their own accord, don’t they?’
George didn’t appreciate the barbed question, and the man’s manner and aftershave were getting irksome. He wanted to get this over and done with.
‘It all began for me in that summer of 2013,’ he said falteringly, his mind peeling back five years. ‘Unusually hot, even for the time of year. I was tired. I hated driving. And I wasn’t looking forward to seeing Petheram again…’
He found himself getting hot and bothered just thinking about it.
3
A Dismal Old Place
Driving long distances, he surmised, forces the mind to concentrate. Not on the business of keeping to the road ahead as you’d think, but sometimes on the strangest of things. At least, it did with his. He didn’t like driving. He found it a bore at the best of times. But anything longer than fifty miles and he’d start to go mad with the act of staring out of the windscreen at another person’s bumper. Motorways were both a boon and a bane. Sure, they got you to where you wanted to be faster, which no one more than he appreciated (except this country’s motorways were all clogging up faster than a couch potato’s arteries). But man, did they have to be such long threads of excruciating boredom?
Which is why, after he’d listened to the hum of his car’s wheels on a variety of surfaces for a few hours – black, reddish-brown, tan, grey – and tried to work out what different notes they played; after he’d counted the inordinate number of BMW’s and Audis that all but flashed him two fingers as they thundered past him in the outside lane doing far, far more than the speed limit, and wished them all caught and fined; after he’d cursed the stupidity of lorry drivers for always pulling out in front of him to overtake, always on a hill, and always with no hope of their laboured hulks overtaking anything in ages and slowing him right down; after he’d felt himself nodding off at the wheel and coming round with a start, he decided to keep his mind active by counting the number of murders he’d committed that year.
Nine, he thought. Or was that ten?
He counted again, slowly so as not to miss any of them. Yes, it was definitely nine this year. So how did that compare to last year?
Ten minutes later he decided last year had been a bumper crop, even by his standards, because he had twenty murders under his belt.
In all fairness, this year was only half done with so it really didn’t count, not till the end of December. But still, nine murders in six months...
If anything, though, the variety of ways he’d carried out the murders were far more imaginative in the last six months than in any of the previous years. They had to be, to stop him getting bored, to keep things fresh, to keep his mind alive and ticking over - a woman choked on a rolled-up newspaper; a man being plunged into an iron furnace; a man having a red-hot poker pushed up the backside; a woman drowned in motor oil.
‘You’re sick’, his wife used to tell him. ‘You’re sick in the head’.
‘It’s a business’, he told her. ‘That’s all it is. I’m in the business of killing people.’
‘Why can’t you write half-decent stuff like other writers? You know, literature, stories about people who have real things happen to them. Stories with depth and emotion.’
‘Real things? Like going to the supermarket, vacuuming the rug, defrosting the fridge, that kind of real?’
‘Now you’re being facetious.’
‘Real things won’t sell,’ he argued. ‘And we need the money so we can maintain this lifestyle, remember?’
‘Lifestyle?’ she burst. ‘We haven’t had a holiday in four years! Look at this blasted house. It’s falling apart. Oh, I forgot, you can’t, because your head is so far up your own arse, your mind so focussed on churning out that shit you call writing that you can’t see the real world. We have no money, for all you like to brag off about how successful an author you are. We have no goddamned money! Get yourself a proper job!’
‘You want more money, then go out and get more money!’ he fired back.
She did. She got a better job, divorced him and married her new manager. They sold the house, and he got enough after paying off the remaining mortgage on their shared property to buy a cramped, one-bedroom flat in a not particularly nice part of the neighbourhood. So he finally got to be the archetypal lonely writer, abandoned by his woman and bruised by love, sitting in his cramped garret penning novels that nobody read in great numbers, awaiting his big break. And in truth it felt like shit.
George Lee guessed he deserved it. He deserved everything.
She was right, of course. He wrote dross. He knew it, reputable publishers knew it. The equivalent of the Penny Dreadfuls back in Victorian times. Lurid murders and mysteries that sold cheap and took hardly any brainpower or time to churn out. His publisher – the only one willing to take him on – was noted chiefly for its hard-porn magazines, but had decided to take a punt on the crime genre, and a punt on George Lee – or Cameron Slade, his pseudonym, indeed a character in his own right now, a character he had grown to hate more than he currently hated George Lee. At least Slade’s books sold. OK, maybe only in paperback and online, not a lot, but enough to cover his fragile sensibilities with the reassuring, though all-too-thin, veneer that he was a real, established writer and genuinely earning a crust from it.
When had it all gone downhill? He used to have ambitions. He used to have such high expectations of himself. So much so he was considered a snob where books were concerned. For a long time he only read Booker winners and the prize’s shortlist, and in his own way tried to emulate them by producing sure winners of his own. While others dreamt of winning the lottery he regularly dreamt of his book being discussed by intellectuals in a TV studio and hailed as being the work that finally supplants Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children as the new Booker’s Booker.
As it transpired, his huge tomes detailing the lonely lives of sad people who drank a lot, took drugs, or were recovering from both, who spent the greater time beating themselves up over things, trying to get relationships off the ground and failing just as the books ended, were a miserable failure.
Now he had become one of those characters. He drank too much, lived alone, found it difficult to relate to any other woman other than his ex-wife, and beat himself up over where things had gone so catastrophically wrong.
One night, as he sat at his laptop trying to generate enough enthusiasm to finish his latest offering, a lager on his right, a Big Mac on his left, he decided enough was enough. He needed a complete change of direction. Not just his writing but his life. It was a mess. The whole damn thing was a mess and he’d grown so bitter with it. His sourness had lost him his few remaining friends. He didn’t even have anyone to confide in as to how shit things had got for him.
He took the row of paperback books by Cameron Slade and threw them into the recycling bin.
And for the first time in years his insides lit up with the intense glow of bold determination.
But deciding on a change and making it happen were two different things. In truth nothing much happened to alter the course of his life for months after his lame Road-to-Damascus revelation. Cameron Slade paid the bills, after all. He couldn’t simply kill him off as easily as he could one of his imaginary cardboard characters. Cameron Slade had to return to keep the books coming. As George Lee cranked up the laptop he could almost hear the bastard crowing in his victory, Like Napoleon coming back from exile to have one last go at world domination. Swine.
It turned out the unexpected death of his father would be the laxative to his constipated existence.
George Lee came off the M5 and swung around the busy roundabout at Taunton, taking the long drag that is the A358 towards Chard and its environs. He sighed, frustrated, as he came up behind a tractor pulling a trailer, and, with a long line of traffic headed in the o
pposite direction for Taunton and no opportunity to overtake, he had no option but to slow to a crawl and stare at the muck-covered thing and watch as great clods of earth and cow shit were flung into the air from the tractor’s caked tyres.
He hated the country. He was a city guy through and through. He might have been born in deepest, darkest Somerset, but he sure as hell didn’t feel any strong urge to return. He couldn’t wait to escape the claustrophobic life of his parents and that stuffy little village they called home, stuck out in the middle of nowhere, with no chance of going anywhere. The furthest his mum and dad had gone was Bristol, some fifty miles or so away. Fifty fucking miles! Jesus! And that was because they were forced out of the village in order to attend a wedding. They talked about going up North. North! They would die if they had to go as far as, say, Sheffield or something, because beyond Bristol there be dragons…
George Lee shook his head. He was finding himself getting heated up just thinking about them and their smothering duvet of a world. Calm yourself down, he told himself. You’re pushing forty now; they shouldn’t be getting to you after all this time. You’re not a kid anymore. Stop letting it bother you.
His mum was bound to mention the divorce. Bound to say it in such a way that she blamed him. Now there was no way in the immediate future he’d ever produce grandchildren…
Halfway between the towns of Chard and Crewkerne he came across the familiar turning, the long arm of the white-painted iron signpost pointing to Petheram, the village credited with being the birthplace of George Lee, and which, in his now fading dreams would one day display a blue plaque informing busloads of tourists exactly where and when. Not that he was particularly proud of it, and when he went north to university, eventually finding work and a wife there, he had tried to scrub his past away, as if none of it had ever happened, in the same way he guessed Thomas Hardy did his best to create a false version of his humble beginnings by first failing to mention it and secondly by burning much of the evidence.
There was only one thing worse than being considered a hick from the sticks, and that was being considered a hick from Petheram. The village was the butt of the meanest in-bred jokes. The kids at school bullied him relentlessly, and he got into more childhood scrapes than enough over whether he slept with his sister or not.
So Petheram had to go. He’d even taken elocution lessons to smooth out his southwest accent, with some success, but it crept back when he was drunk, angry or upset. Like Cameron Slade, there are some things that are just too difficult to eradicate. Indestructible, like they’re some kind of social cockroaches, he thought.
The road snaked downwards, cutting through countryside heavy with lush green, the high hedgerows filled with swaying blooms of lacy cow parsley and the pink paint-like splashes of red campion. All so familiar. The road narrowed till it was barely wide enough to take one car, passing-places carved into the hedges every now and again, but barely adequate. Visitors would be forgiven for thinking that nothing was at the end of this road but empty fields and sprawling woodland, but after a couple of miles, and entering a long tunnel of trees that he swore was far gloomier than he remembered, he emerged into sunlight again, driving past the first couple of ancient-looking cottages that marked the village boundary, and into the village of Petheram itself.
Maybe it was just the long journey south. Maybe he was simply tired, or getting himself all worked up over having to come back to the place of his birth, but his stomach contracted and an icy feeling of dread crept up through him, which caused him to shiver in spite of the heat of the June sun. He blamed the air conditioning, but when he went to adjust it he realised it wasn’t on.
‘You damn fool,’ he chastised himself, shrugging away the sensation. ‘Just get in, get out, and get this entire thing over and done with,’ he said.
But the creeping anxiety did not go away. It seemed to intensify as he came to a T-junction, hitting what constituted the main road that ran through Petheram. Almost directly opposite him was the White Hart pub. He remembered taking his first drink there, at the invitation of his father. A traditional spit-and-sawdust kind of joint, at least it had been back then. It’s insides a webbing of black wooden beams and dank shadows that the sun never penetrated. A dismal old place, he recalled. Or maybe that was just a reflection of his mood at the time. It looked like it had undergone a facelift in recent times, the thatch replaced, the windows painted up nice and neat, a new sign over the door.
But the feelings of unease didn’t disappear with this deliberate attempt to submerge them. As he pulled out onto the road he wondered why he had the irrational urge to turn back.
He was so deep in thought that he didn’t initially see the car bearing down on him from his right. George Lee covered his face with his arm just as the red Ford Escort, its wheels screeching on tarmac as the brakes were hastily applied, hammered into his car, the driver’s door crumpling inwards with a painful rending of metal.
4
An Indescribable urge
‘You moron!’ he screamed, the two words forming a convenient conduit for his mounting, and now exploding, tension.
George Lee tried to open his crushed door, but it was so badly damaged it wouldn’t budge. He eased himself awkwardly over to the passenger door, catching his thigh on the gear stick, and all but fell out onto the road, his legs weak with the shock, his heart racing like he’d run a marathon. He stood there with his head clasped in both hands, staring down at the crumpled wing and bonnet, the massively indented door.
‘I’m sorry! I’m sorry!’ piped an alarmed voice.
‘You bloody moron!’ Lee repeated, at the moment too worked up to think of anything else to say.
The young man looked terrified, his shoulders hunched, trying to shrink himself down to nothing. ‘Can you fix it?’ he said hopelessly.
‘Fix it? It’s a bloody right-off!’ Lee thundered. His face went from marble-pale to plum-puce, and the young man backed off as if facing someone on the brink of murder. Real murder. ‘Oh, Jesus!’ Lee said. ‘I’ve only just finished paying off the loan for this thing and you right it off, you blind-arsed bastard!’
The young man’s eyes looked like they were filling with tears. ‘I’ve only just passed my test. This is my first car… Dad’s gonna kill me. It was a seventeenth birthday present.’
Steaming water dripped from the Escort’s busted radiator. Its nose was a mess, and its bonnet bent upwards into a peak.
‘Well you ain’t going to see eighteen, you idiot,’ growled Lee.
‘Are you OK? Is anyone hurt?’ said a grey-haired man. He was rushing from the White Hart, his face a mask of concern. Two other men joined him, and a woman. ‘Steve,’ he said to the youth, ‘that your new car?’
The young man nodded and finally a tear rushed down his cheek, which he wiped away, embarrassed. ‘Dad’s gonna kill me,’ he said.
‘Christ, that’s a mess,’ said the man. ‘He glanced at Lee. ‘Hey, are you Jeff Lee’s boy? George?’
George Lee nodded dumbly, his nerves settling. He looked himself over to make sure there was no damage done. It had been one hell of a bang. ‘Yeah, that’s me.’
‘Sorry to hear about your dad,’ the man said. ‘He held out his hand to shake. ‘Christian Phelps, landlord at the White Hart. Remember me?’
Frowning, Lee took his hand. It was warm and wet, refusing to let go. ‘Yeah, I remember you. One of dad’s friends. You used to have a farm…’ Then he let go the man’s hand and shook his head. ‘What about my bloody car? Look at the thing. You should have been watching where you were going, you idiot,’ he said to the young man, scowling. ‘I hope you’ve got insurance, because you’re gonna get stung for this,’ he added.
The young man shrank away, his puppy eyes looking up from a downcast, colourless face. ‘My insurance already costs me near-on a thousand a year. I can’t afford any more…’
Phelps stroked his chin, scrutinising the scene. ‘Technically, you’re at fault, George, pulling out
before the road was clear…’
‘Like hell I’m at fault!’ Lee bellowed. ‘He was speeding!’
‘Guess we’ll have to leave it to the insurance companies, eh?’ said Phelps. ‘At least no one was hurt. Got to look on the bright side. Why not come inside, have a drink, the pair of you, exchange phone numbers, car details, that kind of thing?’
‘I don’t want any fucking drink!’ Lee burst animatedly. Then thought better of it. ‘Thanks for the offer, Mr Phelps, but I don’t drink anymore.’
The way he said it, Phelps guessed it might have been a problem at some time.
‘You on your way to your dad’s house?’ Phelps asked.
Lee nodded, putting his hands in his pockets to stop them flapping around hopelessly. ‘Yeah, funeral and all that. Sort things out for my mother.’
‘Your sister’s already here,’ he said.
‘Great,’ said Lee dispassionately.
‘Look, I’ve got the number of Cowper’s garage – your Uncle Gary. He’ll come and sort this out for you.’ He addressed the young man. ‘Don’t look so down, Steve,’ he said, ‘it’s a little dent, that’s all, nothing that Cowper’s can’t put right.’ He looked at Lee’s car and gave a fatal shrug. ‘Yours, I just don’t know…’ He put an arm around Steve’s shoulders. ‘You got one of those camera-phone-things, son?’ The dazed young man nodded. ‘Better take some pics then, just in case you need them for the insurance.’
Lee exchanged insurance details with the young man, who took photos of the scene. He eventually wandered away, disconsolate.
‘I’ve rung Cowper and he’ll be along to pick up the cars till you sort things out. Do you want a lift to your dad’s house?’ said Phelps.
Lee shook his head. He went to the boot and retrieved his case. ‘Thanks, but I’ll walk.’
FLINDER'S FIELD (a murder mystery and psychological thriller) Page 2