by Mark Edwards
‘Hmm. I remember Andrew Jade well. I wasn’t the head of department then, just a mere tutor, but if I had been head there’s no way I would have allowed the sort of thing he got up to.’ He lowered his voice conspiratorially. ‘We had a few trendies here in the eighties – I’m sure you can imagine the sort – and all sorts of garbage was tolerated.’ He shook his head.
‘So Jade was a bit of a maverick, was he?’
‘Yes. There were a few of them. Andrew Jade was one of a small number of students who saw university as a place not to study but to take drugs and develop bizarre belief systems.’
‘Surely that’s not rare?’
‘No. But he was part of a group that I can only describe as fanatical. They had their own society which operated outside the Student Union and university guidelines. They wanted to impose their beliefs on everybody else.’
He paused, like I wasn’t going to believe what he had to say.
‘Don’t tell me,’ I said. ‘Aliens.’
He breathed with relief. ‘Is he still into all that nonsense?’
I nodded. I was quite enjoying playing the part of a private detective.
‘In that case, your client definitely needs to know about Jade’s past. Goodness me. He and his cronies got up to some very strange things, like campaigning for the abolition of negative images of extraterrestrials. They wanted the English department to get rid of all its copies of War of the Worlds. They went into Brighton and marched up and down outside a cinema that was showing some silly film in which aliens invaded earth. At first we treated it as a bit of a joke. But then they started to cause trouble on the course.’
‘In what way?’
‘They said that the geography degree was – how did they put it? Terracentric.’
‘You mean Earth-centric?’
He nodded. ‘Remember, this was back in the days when political correctness was at its most rampant. The days of Baa Baa Green Sheep. He and this girlfriend of his, Samantha something, started to accuse the lecturers and tutors of teaching falsehood, denying the impact of aliens on Earth’s geography. For example, they said the Grand Canyon was created by a spacecraft crashing in to the Earth. A great tragedy, they called it. They told us that most of our theories about the formation of the continents were wrong.’
I was immediately reminded of reports I’d read about Christian groups who denied Darwin’s theory of evolution.
Richardson went on. ‘They picked on other students, told them they were blind puppets, caused a lot of bad feeling. A lot of the students really hated them. Jade got beaten up once, got a couple of ribs cracked. I can’t say I felt much sympathy for him. Most of us, staff and students, wanted him and his girlfriend off the course. But the Union got involved, along with all the do-gooders and free speech merchants, and we had to let them stay.’
‘And what happened after that?’
He shrugged. ‘Nothing of note. Jade carried on being a nuisance, continued his studies, left us with a third, I believe. That was the last I heard of him. And thankfully, that was the last we heard of terracentrism.’
I thanked him, reassuring him again that this wouldn’t get back to Andrew, and left. Before I went, he remembered the name of Andrew’s girlfriend. Samantha O’Connell. I wondered where she was now. Was she worth tracking down? The thing was, I vaguely recognised her name, but couldn’t remember where from.
When I got home, Simon was slumped on the sofa drinking a can of lager.
‘What’s up?’ I asked.
‘Oh. Nothing. Just been getting grief from Susan. Plus I can’t get Fraser Howard’s face out of my head. The way his head was smashed—’
I held up a hand. ‘Please.’
‘It’s weird. Being the person who heard his last words. I just sort of gawped at him. My face was the last thing he ever saw.’
I shook my head. ‘Poor bastard.’
I noticed that Simon had cleaned up. He had even tidied the bookshelves and cleared a space for Marie’s ufology books, which had previously been piled up beneath the desk. As I glanced along the spines a name jumped out at me.
Samantha O’Connell.
So that was where I knew Andrew’s ex-girlfriend’s name from.
I took one from the shelf and looked at the picture on the dust jacket. Platinum-blonde hair, gold-framed glasses, a striking face.
I held the book and wondered. While I was thinking, Simon said, ‘Guess who else I spoke to today.’
I waited.
‘Mrs Howard.’
‘Fraser’s widow? What about?’
‘Well, I wanted to offer my condolences, of course. And ask if she wanted to be interviewed for the paper.’
‘You’re unbelievable.’
‘Whoa, hold up. I wasn’t doing it for me. You want to talk to her, don’t you? Well, the interview’s all set up. You’re going to pretend to be me.’
14
I dreamt that the phone was ringing.
I turned onto my front and hugged the top that Marie used to wear around the house, held it tightly, buried my face in its softness, imagined it was her flesh. I opened my mouth and imagined I was kissing her. I saw myself above her, saw the smile on her lips as her thighs parted and I embraced her, entered her.
And the phone rang.
I woke up with an erection and a sense of loss. I reached out and switched on the bedside lamp, screwing my eyes shut against the sudden brightness. When I opened them I saw a long strand of pale red hair beneath my fingers.
It was all I had left of her.
I sat up in bed and looked at my watch. Three a.m. Again. I was wide awake and knew I wouldn’t be able to get back to sleep so I lit a cigarette. My no-smoking-in-the-bedroom rule had been broken a week ago, and now cigarette butts were piled high in an ashtray beside the lamp.
A flash of dream came back to me, making me suck hard on my cigarette.
I put on my dressing gown and padded downstairs into the hall, picked up the phone and dialled 1471.
‘You were called today at oh-two-fifty-eight hours. The caller withheld their number.’
I dropped the receiver like it was hot. It hadn’t been a dream. The phone really had been ringing.
Was Marie somewhere out there, sitting by another phone, fingers hovering over the numbers, wanting to contact me? I sat and waited, staring at the phone like a lovesick teenager. I was convinced it had been Marie. Who else would ring at that time, withholding their number? Marie had wanted to talk to me, but after one attempt she had given up. Why? Had she changed her mind?
Had someone stopped her?
I woke up lying on the hall carpet, Calico dabbing my twitching eye.
The Howards’ house was in a village just outside Hastings called Pett Level, the kind of place one can pass through without noticing its existence: a pub, a general store, a smattering of houses and cottages, a field full of donkeys and a beach.
The house was in an unmade road. I parked my car beside a shallow stream and pushed open a gate that creaked alarmingly and no doubt served as an early warning system.
Gloria Howard opened the door before I had a chance to ring the bell.
‘Who are you?’ she wanted to know.
‘Mrs Howard. I’m . . . Simon? From the Herald?’
She was about fifty-eight, a large woman with the ruined skin of a lifelong smoker. She held on to the door handle as if she was afraid that if she let go she would float away into space. She narrowed her eyes. ‘How do I know you’re not lying? That you’re not one of that lot? One of his lot? Have you got ID?’
Great. I was going to have to revert to plan B.
‘Who do you mean by “his lot”?’ I asked softly.
‘Andrew Jade. That little . . . He ruined our lives.’
I looked her in the eye. ‘Gloria. I’m not really Simon from the Herald, although he did send me.’ I spoke quickly before she could slam the door. ‘Andrew Jade might have ruined my life too. I need to talk to you about him.’
She sta
red at me.
‘Please. Or we could talk out here?’
Maybe she decided there was something trustworthy about me. Or perhaps she was desperate for someone to talk to. She said, ‘All right. You can come in. For five minutes.’
A large golden retriever greeted me in the living room, pressing its wet nose into the palm of my hand. I sat on the sofa and looked around while Gloria made tea in the kitchen. An enormous television dominated one corner of the room; pictures of children and grandchildren lined every surface.
‘Everything started going wrong that night Fraser saw the flying saucer,’ she said, lighting a cigarette and coughing.
‘Was he always interested in that kind of stuff?’ I asked.
‘No! Fraser never believed in anything he hadn’t seen with his own eyes. He always used to say that – show me and then I’ll believe it. He never believed in God, or UFOs or ghosts or anything like that. We used to have great arguments about it because I’m a Christian. I always tried to get Fraser to come to church with me, especially when we were first married, but he refused. He’s a rationalist; puts his faith in science. He said that there was no scientific proof that God existed. And he applied that rule to everything. That’s why seeing the UFO shook him so badly.’
‘Do you mind if I ask something? Had he been drinking that night?’
She shook her head. ‘That was the first thing I asked him. After all, he does like a drink, but he and Barry would never drink on duty. It was afterwards, after they’d seen the lights, that they had a drink, to calm their nerves.’
‘I understand.’
Her dog rested its head on her knees and she petted it. ‘He had to take time off work because he was so shocked. He kept saying to me, “I saw it, I actually saw it,’’ over and over.’ She took a puff on her cigarette. ‘It really shook him, to think that there are things that can’t be easily explained. He didn’t accept that it was a plane or reflected lights or anything except a UFO.’
I nodded. ‘He said the same to me, when I met him.’
‘He said that he knew he was seeing something beyond scientific knowledge. It frightened him. But then, I’m pretty certain he would have dealt with it, that it would have all blown over if Andrew Jade hadn’t contacted him and stirred things up.’
‘Jade got to him and filled his head with ideas,’ Gloria continued. ‘Convinced him that what he had seen was a spacecraft from another galaxy, from some sort of space coalition. I forget what they called it . . .’
‘The Chorus?’
‘That’s it. He told him that the Earth was visited every day by extraterrestrials who were preparing to make contact with humanity. He started coming round here a lot,’ she said. ‘He brought Fraser books and videos. He wanted Fraser to join this special group he said he was putting together.’
‘A group?’
‘Yes. Actually, I think he called it a cell.’
She reached for her cigarettes. I gave her one of mine.
‘It frightened me,’ she said, lighting up. ‘I’ve had friends who have been converted by the Jehovah’s Witnesses. It changed them. You see this light come on in their eyes. You remember those maniacs who murdered that soldier in London? Fanatics. They had that look. The same thing happened to Fraser. He talked about aliens and spaceships and all this mumbo-jumbo all the time. And the way he spoke about Andrew Jade? It was like he was some kind of guru. A messiah. Andrew this, Andrew that, he knows the truth. Then it got really nutty.’
I shifted to the edge of my seat.
‘Andrew told my husband that when the glorious day came, he would be allowed to join them. It was like listening to one of my former friends talking about the Rapture. Fraser said that if I believed too then maybe I would also be one of the chosen. Otherwise I’d be left behind.’
‘Chosen by the Chorus?’
She sighed. ‘I don’t know. It was all nonsense to me. Annoying nonsense. I didn’t even try to understand it.’
Just like me with Marie.
‘It felt to me like Fraser was being used. I don’t know in what way. Maybe they wanted him as a lookout. They knew that if he saw any more lights in the sky he would go straight to them. I don’t know. And then a young woman phoned us and gave us the news that Andrew Jade had been killed!’
‘What did she sound like?’ I asked eagerly.
‘I can’t remember. A young woman, that’s all I recall. She asked for Fraser so I passed the phone over. All the colour drained from his face and he walked out of the room into the garden. I followed him and when the call ended he was crying. It was the first time I had seen him cry in years. Years.’
She went on.
‘After that, he changed. It was as if something came unhinged inside him. I know he tried to get hold of some of the other members of Andrew’s crazy group, but he couldn’t even find out when the funeral was taking place. It was horrible, Richard. He kept bursting into tears. It was like he had lost his son. I was so worried. I got the doctor out to see him and he said Fraser was suffering from grief-induced shock. He asked me how well Fraser had known Andrew. He implied that they had been lovers. Homosexuals!’
She was crying now, tears running down cracked cheeks.
‘I told him to get out of my house. No way was my husband gay. I’d know, wouldn’t I? But in a way it would have been easier – at least then I could understand it. But aliens . . . He sat around the house all day reading his UFO books. He barely spoke to me. He started going out at night, to the pub, I thought. The night he died – I thought he must have gone to the pub and hooked up with some floozy.’
She threw her arms around her dog’s neck and wept. I didn’t know what to do. I put a hand on her shoulder.
And I thought about Andrew, about the portrait of him that was building up. How could I have been so wrong about him? My first impression of him was that he was a nut, but a harmless one. I was jealous of his closeness to Marie, but not wildly so. I was angered by the way he had spoken to the woman who had visited my house – the woman who’d had a miscarriage.
But I had not realised the truth. The picture I had of him now was of someone with power. Gloria said he was charismatic and persuasive. He had sold pornographic images to an internet ‘entrepreneur’. He had formed a group at university whose sole purpose was to cause trouble. He was able to convert people to his belief system. And his death had sent shock waves through people’s lives: Marie’s, Cherry Nova’s, Fraser’s, Gloria’s. Mine. And who else? Were there others out there that I hadn’t come across yet, others who were in Andrew’s thrall? There must be.
But how could I find them? And would they lead me to Marie?
She promised me.
Marie must have made some kind of promise to Fraser after telling him about Andrew’s death. But what was that promise? Why had it led him to break into my house?
It was clear Gloria Howard didn’t know anything else. I sat with her for a while, consoling her. Then I left her in her empty house. I hadn’t told her that I was partly responsible for her husband’s death, that I had chased him to the rocks. I couldn’t bear to think about it. I would deal with the guilt later.
The house was empty when I got home, except for Calico, who was still glued to the windowsill, pining for his lost mistress.
I had to wait a couple of days before my second meeting with Gary Kennedy. I only had one other possible lead to follow: Samantha O’Connell. The author.
I picked up Marie’s copy of The Masterplan and checked the acknowledgements page. I wondered if there might be a mention of Andrew, a sign that they’d stayed in touch since leaving university, but there were just a number of names that I didn’t recognise.
The book did, however, give me her website address and her Twitter name. Both told me she was doing a book signing at Nelson’s Books in Charing Cross. It was the next day.
TODAY: BOOK SIGNING BY UFO EXPERT AND BESTSELLING AUTHOR SAMANTHA O’CONNELL
I glanced at the sign as I approached th
e book shop – and found myself face-to-face with Kevin.
His eyes widened with fear. The last time I saw him he had been lying on the floor of his flat, my thumbprints on his windpipe. I opened my mouth to apologise, to try to make peace, but he turned tail and ran off down the street, splashing through a deep puddle, ignoring my call of ‘Wait!’
Shrugging, I went inside. A girl with long pink hair smiled at me from behind a counter where expensive greetings cards stood on a rack beside the till. The shop specialised in ‘mind, body and spirit’ titles, as well as books about the paranormal, drug culture, vegetarian cookery and left-of-centre politics. I wasn’t sure exactly how ufology fitted in with all this. Did believing in UFOs go along with an interest in macrobiotic food and the Alexander technique? I doubted it, but the people who frequented this bookshop all had one thing in common: they were looking for answers, and didn’t believe they would find those answers in mainstream culture.
Samantha O’Connell sat behind a table at the back of the shop, a pile of books beside her, a queue of five people in front, each of whom was granted a quick chat, a word of encouragement and a personal inscription to go with their purchase of her latest book.
She wasn’t as attractive in real life as she was on her dust jacket, but she had a presence born of confidence. There was a profound intelligence in her eyes, and when she spoke she was animated, her whole face moving to accentuate her words: eyebrows arching, smile broadening, eyes widening. She entranced people, and her fans didn’t want to leave their place at the table after she’d signed their copy of her book.
I took my place in the queue and awaited my turn. I wondered what Kevin had been doing here. Probably just a fan.
Samantha looked up at me. She had eyes like Marie: frosted blue. Hypnotic. She opened the copy of the book I’d just bought and asked who to make it out to.
‘Can you sign it to a friend of mine? It’s a present.’
‘Of course. What’s his name?’ she asked.
I leaned a little closer. ‘Andrew. Andrew Jade.’
Her pen skidded across the paper.