Cold Skies: A Psychological Thriller

by Zoe Drake

  “Gareth?” called a voice. “Gareth, are you in there?”

  He tightened his grip on the knife.

  “Gareth, it’s me, Colin. From the paper. Nigel said that you might need to talk to somebody. Could you let me in, please?”

  There was a pause, and then the doorbell rang. Gareth eased from his crouch into kneeling on the tiles under the table, knife at the ready, waiting for the voice.

  “Gareth, why don’t you come down to the office and talk to us? We’d like to know what you have to say. There’s talk about getting into one of the nationals, as well. Come on Gareth, you can talk to us. Can you give me a call tomorrow morning? Or tonight on my mobile, yeah? Think about it, Gareth.”

  Oh you clever bastards, he thought. Now you sound just like Colin. But you can’t get inside my house, can you? No, you can’t. Not like the girl. So you’re not as clever as you think you are.

  Gareth eased himself into a sitting position to relieve the cramp in his knees, the top of his head bumping softly against the wood of the table. He needed to go to the toilet, but that wasn’t important. The most important thing was to keep breathing. To remind himself he was still alive.

  From where he sat, his range of vision stretched across the kitchen tiles to the lower half of the back door. The underside of the table hid him from view, and protected him from any faces that might appear at the kitchen window.

  Don’t let me see their faces again. I can’t stand it. All squashed together like in a rugby scrum, cold dead faces under their stupid black hats. They might be there right now, staring through the window, trying to get into the house, but they can’t get in, not like the girl. And they can’t see me. Not under the table.

  He seemed to fall into a fitful sleep, but he couldn’t be sure. He closed his eyes, opened his eyes, and then the sun had gone and it was all shadow, apart from a thin bar of light beneath the back door.

  He was sure there was nobody in the house with him, but there were sounds. Squawking, mechanical voices, like a TV in the house next door heard through the walls. He also heard clicks, beeps and whistles, short bursts of music.

  Then a strident beeping, which he recognized as a telephone answering machine. And that voice… it was his! Intrigued by the novelty of listening to this person, this person so brisk and cocky, Gareth strained to hear every word he said.

  So that’s it. So there I am, and that’s what I sound like.

  He settled back into a watchful pose, forgetting that another voice was supposed to follow his. When the other voice finally came, Gareth tried to stand up so violently he cracked his head on the table and almost knocked it over.

  “Hey, Gareth! It’s Doug Bennings here, I’m at the airport. Wassup, my friend?”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  Friday, February 9th

  Any police officer could be an imposing presence if one walked into your life, but the specimen who confronted Gareth in front of the B & B seemed even more imposing in the pale dawn light. He was broader and taller than Gareth, and the WPC beside him looked like she would have had no problems in a street brawl.

  “Yes sir, can I help you?” the male officer said crisply.

  “I’m staying here,” said Gareth, producing his room key.

  The policeman took the room key and examined it. “So you’ve just come back from… where exactly have you been, sir?”

  “Out on an assignment. Night photography. I’m a professional photographer.” Gareth rubbed his hands together for warmth. “Has something happened?”

  The policeman glanced at the WPC and then handed the key over. “There’s been an attempted burglary here, sir.”

  Gareth stared at him in shock. “What?” he said finally.

  “One of the other guests raised the alarm, and the proprietors called us.”

  The WPC joined in. “Do you have any valuables in your room, sir?” Her hair seemed to have completely disappeared into her checkered hat, leaving a pale, blobbish face, bland in the early dawn light.

  “Yes, I do,” said Gareth firmly.

  Eventually getting through the doors, Gareth was then greeted by the landlady, who gave him a dubious look when she said, “Oh. It’s you, Mr. Manning.”

  “What’s happened?” he asked.

  “Someone tried to break into one of our guests’ rooms. They didn’t get in, but Mr. Beamiss – the guest – woke up in the middle of it. He’s a bit upset, and the police and my husband are with him right now.”

  “I see. I’d better go upstairs and, er…”

  “Yes, of course.”

  Gareth loped up the stairs two at a time, and stalked down the corridor to his room. Sliding the key into the lock, he imagined what he would see in a few seconds time. A room ransacked? Stripped bare?

  “Ow.” He let go of the handle and glared at it, shaking his hand. Static. Did nothing around here work properly? He flexed his fingers to get rid of the smarting sensation, and pushed open the door with unnecessary force.

  Nothing looked disturbed.

  Everything was as he had left it, including the scrap paper on the desk.

  Nevertheless, he started to go through all his belongings methodically, every item that he’d brought with him.

  As the room was quiet, Gareth could hear sounds around him in other parts of the building. From above, muffled by wood and plaster and carpets, came voices. The police interview. That was the only thing that could be happening at this time of the morning; in the room above, Mr. Beamiss – the unlucky guest – was talking to the police and the landlord.

  Satisfied that no burglar had entered his room, Gareth sat down on the bed. Things are getting a bit out of hand, he thought. Too much excitement, as Dad would say. Gareth’s routine had been well and truly thrown out of the window, so anyone would be out of sorts in this situation. But there was something else bothering him; and it wasn’t trapped inside his skull with his thoughts for company. It was something external, in the B & B, coming into the room…

  The voice.

  The sounds from the room upstairs, seeping down through the ceiling.

  Although he couldn’t distinguish any words, he could tell there was mainly one person doing the talking, but talking was not the word for it. It sounded more like – ranting.

  He listened to the ups and downs of the voice, when it went quiet, and when it rose to almost a roar of anger or panic.

  There was a word for that kind of voice: distraught. Gareth’s room hadn’t been broken into, but whoever was upstairs must have had a really rough time.

  The camera bag was safe, however; he’d taken it to the barn with him every night.

  The barn…

  Picking up the bag again, he swiftly left the room and locked the door behind him.

  Outside, it was approaching daylight, with the crisp, rosy tang of morning flooding the sky. Gareth got into his car, checked his watch, and dialed Bennings’s B&B number on his mobile.

  “Hello? I’m sorry to bother you this early, but could you put me through to Dr. Bennings in his room, please? Thank you.”

  Gareth powered up the car and rolled it out of the guesthouse car park. The police officers didn’t try to stop him.

  “Doug? This is Gareth. Were you asleep? Oh, good. Yeah, I haven’t been to bed yet, either. Listen, you’re not going to believe this, but my hotel’s been broken into. Yeah, that’s right. No, nothing of mine’s been taken. I didn’t really leave anything in that room, but it made me think – what about the barn? If someone saw us come down here… if they know that we’re carrying a lot of expensive equipment… yeah, exactly, so I’m going back to the barn to make sure the stuff’s okay. What? Oh, will you? Great. See you there.”

  The barn stood forlorn and exposed in the early February sunlight. Gareth felt a little exasperated at being back so soon, but when he checked the lock, it felt secure and untampered with.

  When Bennings showed up, it was with Littlewood�
��s gang in tow. Gareth had hoped to sort this out with only the two of them – but this affects everybody, he thought, so c’est la vie. They unlocked the shed, and went through the contents thoroughly within fifteen minutes.

  “Everything’s here.”

  “Nothing’s been stolen.”

  “Or broken.”

  Standing outside once more, they greeted the full arrival of the morning with a chorus of yawns and smoke from a couple of cigarettes.

  “I got you out here for nothing, I’m afraid,” Gareth said.

  “Hey, you did the right thing, man. It’s good to be careful,” Bennings said cheerfully.

  “Are you insured?”

  “Of course, but I don’t think the university is going to like me too much if I lose the equipment they bought. Man, I don’t want this place broken into.”

  “I don’t think Mr. Winslow does, either,” Littlewood said with a curious mutter, pointing across the field. “He doesn’t look very happy.”

  Gareth shielded his eyes against the glare of the winter sun and saw the farmer standing outside his home. He was staring back at them.

  “You don’t think he’s been burgled?” Gareth asked.

  “We’d better find out,” Bennings said worriedly.

  They started to walk down the path towards the farmhouse. As they approached, the farmer turned and walked around the back, out of sight.

  When they reached the house and turned the corner, they saw Winslow standing with his back to them, in front of the stable where the horses were kept at night.

  “Mr. Winslow,” Gareth called, “is anything wrong? We heard there was an attempted burglary in the village, so we thought we’d check the… oh.”

  The stable door was open, and Winslow was staring at something inside with his head down. As Gareth peered in, he saw that one of the box stall’s swinging doors was open. In the shadows, a bulky, shadowy shape on the hay-strewn concrete floor resolved itself into a horse.

  The body of a horse. A roan gelding.

  A body that wasn’t moving.

  “Oh Mr. Winslow,” said Bennings, “I’m so sorry…”

  “How did it happen?” asked Littlewood.

  “When I got up this morning,” Winslow said slowly, refusing to look at them, “she was like this. No injuries I can tell – nothing. She was just like this.”

  He turned, shot them a bitter glance from under his flat cap, and started to walk back to the house.

  Gareth looked at Bennings, who returned his helpless look and shrugged.

  “Where’s he going?” Littlewood asked in an incongruous whisper.

  “Huh?” Gareth said, looking over at Winslow’s receding figure. “He’s gone to call the vet. Or maybe the police…”

  “Right,” Littlewood said, a new tone of decisiveness in his voice. He turned to the students. “I think this is the best chance we’ll get to examine the body.”

  “What?” Gareth and Bennings shouted at once.

  “Leave it,” declared Bennings, “don’t touch anything until the vet gets here.”

  “It’s none of our business,” warned Gareth.

  “We’re only going to take a quick look,” Littlewood said briskly, flashing them a sly smile. To the students he said, “Do you remember the Rio Arriba case?”

  There were swift nods of comprehension.

  “Right. Let’s get to work. Gareth, can you run back and fetch one of the cameras?”

  Gareth stared at Littlewood in bewilderment, and the only thing he could think of saying was, “Why?”

  “To take photos of anything we find. Dr. Bennings, can you go back in the house and keep Mr. Winslow busy?”

  Bennings and Gareth looked at each other. The American shook his head angrily, but stalked off in the direction of the farmhouse.

  When Gareth returned with the camera a few moments later, Winslow and his family were still inside the house. Gareth stood at the door of the stable and watched Littlewood and the students standing around the body of the horse, notebooks at the ready. Andy was squatting down on the box stall floor, taking a closer look.

  “No signs of blood on the hide or on the floor,” he was saying.

  “No footprints in the sawdust anywhere near the corpse,” reported a student called Claude, standing in the stall doorway.

  “Gareth.” Littlewood turned to him, a beaming smile on his face. “Could you come around here and take a shot of this?”

  The photographer eased past Claude and sullenly edged into the box stall, the unmoving animal body in front of him, and the smells and restless sounds of the other horses making him even more nervous. What if Winslow comes back right now? he thought.

  Littlewood shuffled closer, his shoes scuffing on the hay and sawdust, and he explained in a low voice what to point the lens at.

  “Over there… on the abdomen.” He took out a chewed-up pencil from his jacket pocket and squatted down by the body. He held the pencil against the wound to show scale as Gareth photographed it. He produced his Dictaphone, clicked it on, and started talking. “Two marks, possibly puncture wounds. Also what looks like a scratch, or an incision… about one inch long, with slight discoloring around the wound.”

  “Will you explain to me what’s going on?” Gareth hissed through gritted teeth, as he adjusted the focus and snapped the shutter.

  “In a minute. Now, come outside. Please.” Littlewood walked out of the stall and the main stable, looking around him in every direction. Gareth reluctantly followed him, flicking glances at the farmhouse across the path.

  “Over there.” Littlewood pointed to a patch of ground inside the paddock, close to the wooden gate. He walked over, swung the gate open, and marched across the grass.

  “Brian!” Gareth hissed in disbelief.

  Littlewood turned in a circle, staring at the ground around him, eyes behind his glasses flicking back and forth in concentration.

  “There!” he yelled suddenly, pointing in front of him. “Down there, look! On the grass. I’ll stand here, so you can include my foot for perspective. Six dents in the ground, roughly circular in diameter, about two inches wide. Around them, the grass looks flattened.”

  “Who do you think you are,” Gareth muttered, as he put the camera to his eye once more. “The bloody narrator?”

  In between shots, Andy shuffled over and squatted to peer at the marks. Gareth was startled to see that from somewhere, he’d produced clear rubber gloves like a surgeon’s, and he started picking something out of the grass with a pair of eyebrow tweezers. “There’s a whitish deposit left around the marks,” he reported. “It’s like charcoal. It reminds me of binchotan, the special Japanese variety of white charcoal.” He carefully dropped the grains of white ash into a plastic Ziploc bag in his other hand.

  “Will you be needing me anymore?” Gareth said tensely.

  “I think that’s it,” Littlewood said brightly. “Thanks so much. I don’t know when we’ll get a chance like this again!”

  “Never, I hope,” Gareth muttered through gritted teeth. Time to leave this bunch of nutters and see what Doug’s doing, he thought. Stomping over to the farmhouse, he let himself in through the back door. One of Winslow’s sons ushered him to a room at the front of the building.

  The sitting room was dark and quiet, with several armchairs and sofas arranged around an old-fashioned TV set and a dark brown rug in front of it. The room was filled with the smell that Gareth always associated with old age pensioners and grandfather clocks. Winslow sat in a red and brown tub armchair, his expression sour. To his left, facing Gareth, was seated Dr. Bennings, with a suitably serious look on his face.

  “The vet’s been called,” Bennings said. “He won’t be long,”

  “I want you to know that we’re very sorry for… what’s happened,” Gareth began lamely. “If there’s anything we can do…”

  Winslow lifted a hand and waved at something behind Gareth. “Take a
look in that cabinet, and tell me what you see.”

  Gareth did as he was told, and found himself looking at a disturbingly large collection of porcelain horses… shire horses, Clydesdales, Gypsy cobs, and other breeds that he didn’t know the name of.

  “I’ve always had a horse, ever since I was a lad,” Winslow said. “Just like me Pap.”

  “I see,” Gareth murmured in sympathy.

  “Do you?” Winslow leaned forward, his voice sharp. “Do you see? Coz I’ll tell you what I’ve seen, bor. I’ve seen a lot of my horses die. Some had accidents, some died of old age. I’ve seen me Pap shoot a horse once, when the animal broke its leg.”

  Winslow lifted his pipe from an ashtray on the table next to him. “When I found Yallery this morning, I noticed the tracks of his hooves a few yards away from where he were lying. I know what they were. They were dig-in, push-off tracks, they were. The tracks of a horse that were trying to run away from summat, but couldn’t get out the stable.”

  “Mr. Winslow, I’d like to hear your honest opinion,” said Dr. Bennings. “Do you think we had something to do with your horse’s death?”

  “I think Yallery saw summat that scared him good, and he were trying to get away from it,” Winslow said in a low, measured tone, as he lit his pipe. “No, I don’t think it were you he were scared of.”

  He leaned forward, pointing his fuming pipe at first Bennings, then Gareth.

  “But I reckon you and your college folk oughtta be able to find out what it were. So you do that, bor. You do that for us, and we’re square.”

  Leaving the farmhouse, Gareth accompanied Bennings, and they noticed that their group of fellow UFO hunters had moved out of the paddock, but were still looking carefully at the grass around the gate.

  “Old Winslow seemed to be pretty fair about it,” Gareth commented.

  “Yeah, that was good of him,” Bennings said with a large sigh of relief. “But the strange thing is that before you came in, he told me that nothing woke him up last night. Nobody in the house heard the animals making any sound at all. Whatever happened to Yallery… it didn’t bother the rest of the horses.”