by Adam Croft
I walk over to her slowly, but don’t sit down. I stand a good fifteen feet or so away from her, keeping my distance.
‘Ghosts exist, Daniel. As you can see. Ghosts will always come back to haunt you.’
‘You’re dead,’ I say, eventually.
She smiles with one corner of her mouth. ‘In many ways. If you mean physically, then no.’
‘But you’re dead. I saw you. You were dead.’
‘Did you? Did you really?’ she says, taking a cigarette from her pocket and lighting it. She takes a huge drag and holds on to it before raising her chin and releasing the smoke into the barn. She does it with such ease, such grace, anyone would think she was a regular smoker. ‘Or did you just see me lying on the floor, panic and run off like you always do?’
‘No. You were dead. I felt your pulse.’ I can’t understand how this has happened.
‘You felt the pulse on my wrists, Daniel. Because even by your own admission you’re too feckless to find the pulse in the neck. Tennis balls under the armpits and squeeze. Oldest trick in the book. But then that’s your specialist subject, isn’t it? Always being one step behind everyone else.’
My head’s spinning. ‘Why?’ I ask. It’s all I can think to say.
She laughs. ‘Seriously? Why? Are you actually asking me that?’ I can see a flash of anger in her eyes. ‘Do you have any idea how I’ve been treated throughout my life? By men? Every man I’ve ever met has thought he can just use me for his own satisfaction. And it’s not just me, either. You had a wife at home, Daniel. The perfect, happy life. And you threw that all away for a few moments of pleasure. With someone you thought would give you an easy ride. No worries, no responsibilities. Well let me tell you this, Daniel. There are always responsibilities. Even if you don’t see them straight away. The moment you first took me up to your hotel room, you committed. You just didn’t know what to.’
‘This doesn’t make any sense,’ I say. ‘I haven’t done anything wrong.’
Jess laughs. ‘And that’s exactly your problem. You never think you’ve done anything wrong. It’s always just down to the way the world works out, isn’t it? It’s always due to circumstance, to bad luck. You make your own luck in this world. And yours has run out.’
She takes another huge drag on the cigarette, which is now nearly burnt down. As I look at the glowing orb at the end of the cigarette, a thought ignites in my mind. I lift my hands slightly and place them on my hips, standing like a PE teacher at the side of a sports field. When I see her glance down at the floor, I manipulate my thumb and push it inside my jeans pocket, flicking the switch across on the dictaphone. I hope to God it’s the switch that starts it recording. I’ve only used it once, so I can’t be certain, but it’s all I’ve got.
‘How did you get here?’ I ask her.
‘There are such things as planes, Daniel.’
‘But you couldn’t get on a plane. You’re wanted across Europe.’
‘No, Jessica Walsh is wanted across Europe. If I’d used the British passport with Jessica Walsh in it, I’d be pretty stupid, wouldn’t I?’
‘You have two passports?’ I ask.
‘No, I have one. My French one. My parents were French. The British one isn’t real, Daniel.’ She says this in such a patronising manner, as if she’s telling a thirty-year-old man that Santa Claus isn’t real. ‘That’s where Claude comes in handy occasionally.’
‘Claude? How do you mean?’
She shakes her head and looks up to the rafters of the barn. Her look is condescending, pitiful. ‘He helps me. He always has. He understands me. Listen, he’s got contacts. That’s all you need to know.’
‘You can’t just rock up to an airport with a fake passport and expect it to work. They do scans and checks and all sorts of things,’ I say.
‘Don’t be so naive, Daniel. There are ways and means,’ she replies.
My mind jumps straight to some very weird places. ‘But how did you get a job in the hotel without all the paperwork?’ It’s the first thing that comes to mind, as if my brain is completely blanking out the more obvious questions and reverting to the simple, straightforward, rules-based stuff. Because, right now, all of the rules have gone out of the window. In a world where a person can come back from the dead, I need to root myself in facts and logic.
‘You’re very sweet. Do you really think I can’t get what I want without bending the rules a little? Really? After the past few days?’
I suppose she’s got a point.
‘How did you find me?’ I ask.
She laughs again. ‘I tracked you using the iPhone. I knew you wouldn’t use it, but I also knew you wouldn’t get rid of it. There’s an app called Find My Friends. Sweet, isn’t it? I saw you’d gone to Bratislava, so I went there, too. Why Bratislava, by the way?’
I can’t answer that, so I just shrug.
‘How odd. I had a lot of fun tracking you around, anyway. That’s the beauty of technology – I never needed to keep you in sight, so you never saw me, either. I knew where you were at any time. When I tracked you through Bratislava and saw that you had started heading north, I had a pretty good idea where you were going. While you were doing twelve hours on the road, I had a two-hour flight from Bratislava to Charleroi. Much nicer. Food wasn’t bad, either.’
‘Where’s Claude?’ I ask. I can’t see she would have harmed him, but I suddenly remember the TV blaring out and the lack of response from inside the farmhouse.
‘Inside the house,’ Jess replies. ‘Yes, he’s alive, and yes, he knows I’m here. I also asked him not to answer the door tonight and told him I’d be gone by morning. That’s the good thing about Claude. He’s trustworthy. And he trusts me. Strange what men do, isn’t it?’
Then the thought, the realisation, hits my mind like a bullet. My brain’s finally made the connection, having dismissed it completely back at the caravan when I saw Jess lying on the floor, seemingly dead. ‘You killed Lisa.’
Jess smiles. It’s a funny smile, almost as if she’s proud of me for having finally worked it out. She looks like a piano teacher who’s just seen her youngest, poorest student finally manage to play ‘Chopsticks’ without fucking it up.
‘Why?’ I ask.
‘I’ve told you why, Daniel,’ she says, bending over and stubbing another cigarette out on the dirty floor. ‘Because you’re a serial abandoner. Because men like you deserve to be punished.’
‘You wanted me as much as I wanted you,’ I say, feeling almost like a fifteen-year-old schoolboy who’s just been dumped by his girlfriend.
Jess shrugs. ‘Call me a good actress. Call it whatever you like.’
There are tears forming in my eyes. I don’t want to ask the question, but I know I need to. I need my own personal closure, and I need it for the dictaphone. ‘How?’
She looks me in the eye. ‘You want to know?’ I nod slowly. ‘You were in the bathroom one afternoon. After we’d . . . I got Lisa’s number from your phone. I’d seen you tap the pin number in a couple of times, so it wasn’t difficult. Early that afternoon, I called her. I told her I was working at the hotel where you were staying and that there’d been an incident and you’d asked her to come down. I knew it’d only take her just over an hour or so, and I knew what time you tended to go down for dinner. That’s the problem when you make me part of your dirty little routine, Daniel. Why did you think I was so keen for you to get down to the restaurant?’
I blink rapidly. It’s all starting to make sense.
‘You left your phone in the room, as you always do. So while you were in the restaurant I sent a message to Lisa asking her to come up to your room. Then I deleted the sent message. I’m guessing you don’t want to know the details of the next bit.’
I shake my head.
‘Good. I’m not some sort of psychopath who gets kicks out of telling everyone how they killed someone. Let’s just call it a means to an end, shall we? And before you ask, no, I felt nothing. Yes, she was just a pawn in the gam
e. Get over it.’
I somehow get the feeling that killing Lisa affected Jess more than she thinks it did. There’s emotion creeping into her voice.
‘So you killed her because I cheated on her?’ I ask. ‘How does that make sense?’
‘No. I killed her because you deserved to know what a lying, deceitful little shit you are. Because men like you hurt women. Because you need to lose the things you love before you even realise you loved them. It’s all about power with men like you, isn’t it? Power over women. Well I think we can safely say we turned that one on its head, don’t you?’
Jess walks over to the large doors at the front of the barn and pushes them completely shut, before fastening the huge padlock across the two hasps. She’s locked us in. She flicks a switch to turn on a small light up in the rafters, which gives off a soft orange glow.
‘Do you think you’re going to get away with this?’ I ask, watching her as she moves behind some bales of hay.
‘Define “getting away with it”,’ she calls. A few moments later, she appears back in view with a jerrycan in her arms. I know she’s capable of doing some pretty extreme things. She has the same look on her face that she had before she stormed out of the caravan and savagely beat that dog. The look of determination, as if the red mist has descended and nothing on earth will stop her from doing what she’s about to do.
‘Jess, this is silly. Can we just talk about—’
‘Talk?’ she says, smiling. ‘What do you think we’ve just been doing, Daniel? We’ve just been talking. What more do you want to know?’ There’s a couple of seconds of silence. I can’t say anything. ‘There we are. The time for talking is over, Daniel.’ She unscrews the cap of the jerrycan and begins sloshing the liquid around the barn. It smells strong, the stench of petrol filling my nostrils as I fight for a clean breath.
‘Jess, stop. You don’t know what you’re doing,’ I say, moving towards her.
She throws the jerrycan to the ground, the petrol still gulping and glugging out of the neck of the can as she puts a hand out in front of her to stop me. With the other, she dips into her pocket and pulls out a lighter. It’s a cheap plastic one – not one she can just throw to the ground at any moment, which provides me some small semblance of relief.
That relief doesn’t last long, though. Before I can even process what she’s doing, Jess has knelt down next to a bale of hay, flicked the lighter on, and the blue flame has caught the dry grass, turning it a bright, glowing orange.
64
The dry hay starts to fill the barn with smoke incredibly quickly. It’s a deep, insipid grey with a touch of green. It almost mesmerises me for a few moments. I can’t believe how fast the whole place has taken light. There’s a thick black fog being provided by the burning petrol, too, and I’m disorientated. I haven’t moved, but I still don’t know for sure which way I’m facing. The smoke seeps into my lungs, tickling at my throat and making my chest flutter and heave.
The barn is lit up bright, but I still can’t see anything. My eyes burn, and I blink rapidly as I try to wash the smoke from them. The heat starts to affect them, too, and I feel myself pulling my eyes closed to protect them. The whole barn moves and shimmers in a haze of heat, the waves of smoke hitting me every couple of seconds as I flit between trying to stop the pain and fighting to keep my eyes open, fighting to see where I am.
I can’t see Jess, either. I don’t know whether she’s somehow got herself an escape route or whether she intends to go up in flames with me and the barn. Either way, she seemed very confident and sure of herself. She knew exactly what she was going to do. She will have planned this long ago. And poor old trusting Claude is sat in the farmhouse, completely oblivious to what she’s doing. By the time he works it out, it’ll be too late. The barn will have burned to the ground, and he won’t be able to do a thing about it. There won’t be anything he can do by now anyway. The whole place is alight and the flames are growing by the second.
I stagger around, trying to keep heading in a straight line. The only problem is I have no idea if I’m succeeding or not. I can’t see a thing. I figure that if I can reach one of the walls, I can feel along for the barn doors, one of the two sets, and somehow kick them in. I don’t know how I think I’m going to do that, but it’s the only hope I’ve got. Walking in a straight line is far more difficult than it sounds, though. I have no sense of direction, and my mind is filling with fear and panic as my lungs fill with acrid smoke.
I want to take a deep breath and yell, scream and shout at the top of my lungs in the hope that someone, someone out here in this vast French wilderness, will somehow hear me. I know there’s no chance of that happening, but it’s completely irrelevant as I’m barely able to breathe, let alone take in a lungful of air.
The darkness builds and I can scarcely see the flames for the smoke. It billows and rolls as the fire crackles. I hear a sound like a gunshot, the sound of part of the roof giving way overhead, and I instinctively cover my head with my arms as I hear it come crashing to the ground not far from me.
I remember something I read in a book once, and I drop to my knees, crawling around on the floor, trying to gulp down the remaining oxygen that sinks to the ground during a fire. The air down here is cooler, a draught rushes across my face as I slug at the air, trying to force it down into my lungs, replacing the thick black smoke I’ve inhaled. It’s not helping me much, as I’m moving more slowly, the fire slowly engulfing the entire barn. I look up into the heat haze and see the flames licking around the rooftop, just as another piece of wood cracks and lands a few feet away from me, a hole appearing in the roof as the flames soar upwards, reaching towards their freedom.
Crawling forwards, trying to regain some sort of traction and keep heading in a direction – any direction – I cough and splutter as the smoke and ash fill my lungs.
I see stars in front of my eyes and feel my chest burning, heaving with the lack of oxygen. There’s a ringing in my ears, and my limbs start to feel numb, heavy. I feel the heat burning at the surfaces of my eyes as I put my head down on the dirty floor and let the smoke envelop me.
65
I’m jolted back to reality by the convulsions of my body and the cracking of two of my ribs, my lungs burning as though they’ve been filled with acid. I cough; a deep, throaty cough which rattles and lingers as I spit blackened saliva onto the ground beside me.
I try to focus my eyes, but they sting as I fight to stop blinking, my eyes reacting to having been severely irritated by the smoke. As I roll my head from side to side, through the milky film I can see the vague outline of a big man with a big moustache.
‘Claude,’ I rasp, my throat immediately feeling as though it’s lined with rusty nails.
‘You are okay,’ he says, placing a hand on my shoulder. ‘The ambulance is on its way.’
‘But Jess,’ I say, forcing the sounds out through the pain.
‘It is okay. Do not speak,’ Claude replies. As I get used to my tear-stained vision, I can start to see the look on his face. It looks pained, emotional. But I don’t know him enough to know what this means. I can only assume it means that Jess didn’t make it out of the barn.
Behind me, I can hear the barn crackling as the sounds begin to permeate my consciousness, and I roll my head sideways to look at it. The flames are lapping out through gaps in the wooden cladding, which they’ve pushed wider apart, reaching up to the freedom of the skies. What’s left of the barn is completely blackened, much of the roof caved in as the exposed rafters begin to peek through into the night sky, lit up by the orange glow of the flames. Unless Jess managed to escape before I got out – and I’m fairly sure she didn’t – I can’t see any way that anyone could have survived this.
I’m not sure how that makes me feel. My first instinct is sadness, sorrow and regret. That doesn’t last for long, though, as I begin to come to terms with the fact that Jess killed Lisa and then tried to kill me. I knew from the beginning that she was disturbed somehow
, but I’d always managed to view her as the victim. Perhaps she still is, in some way. Perhaps she’s the victim of her own disturbed mind.
A thought, a realisation, bursts into my mind like a lightning bolt. I hear myself gasp and I snap my head round as quickly as it’ll turn – which isn’t very quickly at all – to look at Claude.
‘Jess’s parents. The fire. The holiday home,’ I say. I can see by the look in his eyes that he doesn’t need any more explanation to know what I’m talking about.
He looks up at his barn, the flames licking around it, and swallows, a tear falling from his eye.
‘She did that, too, didn’t she?’ I whisper, forcing Claude to admit the truth.
He nods, silently, closing his eyes and bowing his head.
‘She told me it was you,’ I say, bending the truth slightly.
He looks at me, no sign of emotion on his face. He doesn’t seem surprised in the slightest. ‘I tried to help her. I protected her. I always tried to protect her. What she did not know is that I was protecting her from herself.’
‘From herself?’ I ask. They’re the only two words my mouth can form, the bitter smoke constricting my throat and making my voice rasp. I have a million questions for him, and I can see that he knows that.
‘Sometimes . . . sometimes I think Jessica is toxic,’ he says, looking deep into my eyes, a seriousness burning through the painful sorrow etched on his face. His English is even better than I realised. I wonder if he was holding back on that before so I wouldn’t ask him more questions.
‘What do you mean, toxic?’ I ask.
Claude is silent for a few moments. ‘Do you ever believe that people are born bad?’
I find myself shaking my head. ‘You can’t just write it off as being born bad. There has to be a reason. There has to be. There’s a reason for everything.’
‘She would have told you herself she was evil,’ Claude says. ‘Her parents. Her stepfather. He—’