Dead Man's Gift and Other Stories

by Simon Kernick

  And touched something. Something that felt very human.

  The shock made me jump forward and I swung round fast, looking straight into Charlie’s cold, staring eyes.

  He was skewered to the tree by two crossbow bolts. One had been fired through his chest – the entry point very similar to where the knife blade had been thrust into Louise the previous night. The other was jutting out of his throat. There was a lot of blood. Thin rivulets of it ran from both corners of his mouth in long lines, mixing with the thick drying stain that covered his throat and chest, and I immediately recalled what Crispin had said about Louise hardly bleeding at all because the knife thrust into the heart had killed her instantly. This was very different. The killer must have shot him in the throat first – probably at point-blank range – and let him choke on his own blood before finally finishing him off.

  I couldn’t help it. Instinctively I cried out, the sound far too loud in the natural quiet of the woods.

  Then, as I tore my gaze away from Charlie’s corpse, I saw him standing twenty yards away, the crossbow to his shoulder as he pointed it right at me in a marksman’s stance. The man who’d murdered my two friends.

  For a second I didn’t move. I don’t know if, in that moment in time, I’d resigned myself to my fate, but it was almost as if I was waiting for him to fire.

  But he didn’t. And that hesitation on his part was enough for me.

  I dived round the far side of the oak and temporarily out of sight just as a bolt flew through the air, reverberating as it hit a nearby tree. I was on my feet in an instant, tearing through a tangle of brambles, ignoring the pain as the thorns slashed at my face and body, staying low and trying not to keep to a straight line.

  I ate up the ground, the house taking shape now. I snatched a look over my shoulder. Saw him running too, the crossbow reloaded, a couple of trees back but keeping me in sight. I turned forward again, almost hit a tree, dodged it at the last second, stumbling on something but somehow managing to keep my balance.

  And then I was out of the wood and running across the front lawn. At the last second, I remembered that the front door would be locked and I darted down the path round to the back of the house, flinging open the side gate, which clattered shut behind me, praying that the door there would still be open.

  Panting, I reached it and yanked the handle.

  It was locked.

  There was no longer any point in trying to be quiet, so I hammered on the door, pushing my face against the glass. The back hallway was empty, but there had to be someone in there because we’d left the door open when we’d left barely half an hour ago.

  I kept hammering, the glass shaking from the blows, screaming for them to let me in. ‘Help me! Help me!’ But no one was in there. No one at all. Surely they couldn’t all be dead. But what if they were? What if I was the last one left alive on this godforsaken island with a killer who was hunting me down like a dog?

  Which was when I heard the side gate clattering again. He was here.

  Part Three

  After

  8

  I still had my knife and I knew that if I moved fast I’d just be in time to stab the crossbowman when he emerged round the corner into the back garden. But that’s the kind of thing that brave, decisive people – or those who aren’t afraid of death – do. I wasn’t one of those people. I was just a scared forty-something woman flung into the middle of a waking nightmare and the fear was crippling me.

  He was coming. Jesus, he was coming.

  And then I heard the back door being unlocked from the inside and saw Crispin’s face in the window.

  ‘Let me in! Now!’

  He released the final bolt and pulled the door open and I pushed past him to get inside. ‘Lock the door, for God’s sake!’ I yelled, stumbling against the washing machine but, as he went to lock it, a shadow appeared through the glass.

  I screamed.

  ‘Fuck, it’s Luke,’ said Crispin and let him in too, before flinging the bolts across and turning the key in the lock.

  Luke looked scared and relieved, which I’m sure was pretty much how I looked. I noticed he didn’t have his knife. Crispin’s was sitting on top of the washing machine – a long paring knife with a good, sharp blade – and he grabbed it now.

  ‘Did you see anyone behind you?’ I asked Luke. ‘I was being chased by the guy with the crossbow.’

  He shook his head. ‘No, I didn’t see him.’

  I wiped sweat from my brow and walked through the utility room and into the kitchen. The rain was coming down hard now and the back lawn looked forlorn and bedraggled, and thankfully empty. I pulled the curtains shut and switched on the light, before grabbing an empty glass from one of the cupboards and pouring myself a glass of water.

  The other two followed me in.

  ‘What happened to you and Marla?’ I asked Crispin.

  ‘We just ran, same as you guys, then doubled back through the woods.’

  ‘You managed to stick together, then.’ I was conscious of the note of accusation in my voice.

  He nodded, ignoring my tone. ‘Yeah, we did.’

  I pulled my pack of cigarettes and lighter from inside the sleeve of my hoodie and lit one, taking a long, much-needed drag. ‘Sorry, but under the circumstances, I’m not going to smoke outside.’

  Crispin gave me a half smile. ‘It’s fine. Have you got a spare one?’

  I lit one for him, ignoring Luke’s dirty look. ‘Is this place secure?’

  Crispin nodded slowly and once again I found myself surprised by how calm he was. ‘As secure as it was when we left, but it’s not impregnable. The good thing is there are four of us, and a crossbow’s not going to be much use to him in here.’

  ‘He’s got all the time in the world,’ said Marla, who’d appeared in the doorway. ‘He can pick us off one by one. I mean, it’s not as if we’re going anywhere, is it? Do you think it’s Charlie? It’s almost impossible to believe it could be him …’

  I took another drag on the cigarette, beginning to get my breath back. ‘It’s not Charlie.’

  ‘How do you know?’ demanded Marla. There was an accusing tone in her voice too.

  ‘Because I saw his corpse.’

  That shut everyone up.

  ‘It was pinned to a tree with crossbow bolts.’ I told them how I’d discovered it.

  Marla put a hand to her mouth. Crispin frowned deeply. Luke, though … he looked sceptical.

  I glared at him. ‘What? Don’t you believe me?’

  ‘Well, it’s funny that of all the places his body could have been hidden in that wood, you managed to find the exact tree.’

  ‘What the hell are you insinuating? That I’m making it up? Why the fuck would I do that? I saw him clear as day. He had a bolt through his throat and one through his chest. If you don’t believe me, we can go down there and take a look. It’s not very far away.’

  He didn’t say anything.

  ‘Come on,’ I said, shouting now. ‘Let’s go and have a look.’ I don’t think there was any way I’d have gone back out there, but I was genuinely furious at being treated this way, after everything I’d been through.

  ‘Okay, I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘It’s just it’s difficult to believe that Charlie’s dead too. I think I’d convinced myself that he was behind all this. You know, he had the opportunity to kill Louise. Somehow it’s easier to think of him being the killer.’

  ‘It must be the man I saw at the window last night,’ said Marla.

  I nodded. ‘It’s got to be Pat. Charlie was dressed when I found him, so he obviously went outside voluntarily. Maybe he went to meet Pat.’

  ‘That’s all well and good,’ said Crispin, ‘but Charlie said that Pat had left the island. So why would he go out to meet him if he didn’t know he was there?’

  I shrugged, trying to come up with a viable theory. ‘Maybe he went for a walk and ran into Pat. Pat threatened him with the crossbow, took him into the woods and shot him.’
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  ‘But what’s Pat’s motive?’

  ‘I don’t know. The note we found makes clear the motive’s revenge, and that must mean revenge for what happened to Rachel. Maybe Pat found out about what happened and decided to act.’

  ‘It’s a bit unlikely, isn’t it?’ said Crispin. Which, to be fair, it was.

  Marla shook her head dismissively. ‘I can’t see Charlie just going out for a morning stroll when he knew Louise had been murdered and didn’t think it was one of us who’d killed her. He’d have been too scared.’ She frowned. ‘There’s something else too. When I went to the toilet last night during dinner, I was sure the window was shut, and I’ve checked again and it definitely locks automatically if it shuts, so I don’t see how the killer could have got in.’

  ‘Why didn’t you say anything before?’ I asked.

  ‘Because I was still in shock, and at the time I wasn’t entirely sure, but now I’ve had time to think about it and I am.’

  Crispin sighed. ‘Which brings us back to the fact that it could be one of us who killed her. Except we know it can’t have been, because we all saw the man in black back in the woods.’

  The room fell silent as everyone tried to work out what was going on. If no one had broken in last night, then one of us must have killed Louise. Charlie had been the obvious suspect but now he was dead, so there had to be another killer.

  Luke eventually broke the silence. ‘It doesn’t really matter, does it? What matters is that we get the hell off this island.’

  ‘That’s a lot easier said than done,’ grunted Marla.

  ‘I don’t care. I’m going, even if I have to swim for it.’ But I noticed Luke was making no move to go.

  ‘Come on, Luke,’ said Crispin. ‘You’ve seen the sea out there. It’ll be impossible to swim it, and the water will be freezing. Even if you don’t drown you’ll die of hypothermia.’

  ‘Well, I’m not fucking staying here!’ He shouted the words and hit the wall so hard, the crockery on the dresser rattled. I remembered that he could be aggressive sometimes. Something of a hard guy, or at least he thought he was. He’d talked about going after Danny Corridge when Corridge had beaten up Charlie, but he’d never managed to put his words into actions, and looking at him now, Luke reminded me of a frightened and frustrated little boy.

  ‘We could set light to the house,’ I said. ‘Then climb up on the rocks. They’re bound to see the fire from the mainland.’

  ‘That’s a real last resort,’ said Crispin. ‘It’s very risky and we could end up being sitting ducks.’

  ‘Have you got any better ideas?’ said Luke. ‘Yes. Right now, let’s stay put. The place is pretty secure, and we’ve got food, so we can play a waiting game too. The only way the killer will be able to get us out is if he burns this place down, so let’s make sure we draw the curtains, seal off the letterboxes and wet some towels, so we’re ready for any eventuality.’

  Crispin’s coolness under pressure seemed to galvanize everyone. He was the leader now and everyone recognized that. His words should have made me feel better but, as I went through to the lounge to pull the curtains, my heart beating in my chest as I passed the spot where Louise had been murdered, I thought back to the horrors I’d witnessed that morning. Louise’s severed head with the note sticking out of her mouth; the man in black with his loaded crossbow, stalking me; Charlie’s ruined corpse pinned to a tree. But there was one thing that stuck in my mind above any other. Those six words the killer had written:

  LEAVING THE VERY WORST TILL LAST.

  He’d had me in his sights. He could have killed me earlier. Easily. But he hadn’t. He was leaving me alone. But that wasn’t what frightened me the most.

  What frightened me the most was how he knew I was the worst.

  9

  The rain rained and the day dragged.

  Crispin’s plan was for us to stay together downstairs and make sure that no one was left in a room on their own, but it didn’t quite work out like that. People got restless. They moved around. It’s impossible to relax when you’re trapped with individuals you haven’t seen for years in a house in the middle of nowhere, knowing that outside is someone who wants you dead for something you were involved in over two decades ago. Someone who, it seemed, was able to sneak into the house and murder Louise without her making a sound or making any effort to escape.

  At one point, I fell asleep on the sofa, out of pure exhaustion, and when I woke up I was alone in the room. I found Luke in the dining room, peering out through a gap in the curtains, a long kitchen knife in one hand. He turned my way when I came in but didn’t say anything, and I left him there.

  I looked for Marla and Crispin but I couldn’t find them anywhere downstairs. In the end, I felt a bit of a panic coming on and I stood at the foot of the stairs and called their names.

  They appeared a minute later, fully clothed, and Crispin told me they’d been watching over the wood from upstairs and apologized for disappearing like that. ‘You were fast asleep,’ he said. ‘And we didn’t want to make too much noise and disturb you.’

  ‘No problem,’ I said with a forced smile.

  But there was a problem. The fact was I was jealous. I didn’t like the way they were acting with each other. They were intimate. Close. It made me wonder how often they’d seen each other since uni and what their relationship was. In my paranoid state it also made me wonder if they had something to do with all this. Either one of them could have killed Louise. And by the same token, either or both of them could have led Charlie outside this morning and killed him, without Luke or me being any the wiser.

  Unfortunately, the theory fell apart the moment you took the man with the crossbow into consideration. But maybe the three of them were in it together? It was hard to believe, of course, especially as Crispin had once been my boyfriend, but then this whole situation was hard to believe, and that didn’t mean it wasn’t happening.

  ‘Have you searched the loft?’ I asked him.

  ‘I had a look up there earlier,’ he said. ‘Right now, this house is as secure as it’s ever going to be and there are no bad guys hiding anywhere.’

  But I wasn’t convinced. For much of the rest of the afternoon I explored the downstairs rooms, looking for hidden entrances, hidden passageways – anything that might explain how Louise and then Charlie had been killed. I tapped walls, lifted up paintings, ran my fingers along acres of skirting. But in the end, I found nothing.

  Eventually night fell and, to take our minds off things, Marla suggested we all cook dinner.

  ‘Sounds like a good idea to me,’ I said and followed her into the kitchen. We found a large joint of beef in the fridge as well as plenty of vegetables. I quickly located the potatoes and vegetable oil and we started preparing a roast. Crispin and Luke sat down at the kitchen table and cracked open a bottle of red, filling glasses for all of us. You wouldn’t call the mood convivial – not with two of our number dead – but it’s amazing how a bit of cooking can add a sense of normality to any situation.

  We got through the first bottle of wine in barely twenty minutes, and I located Charlie’s wine store and dug out a 2011 Fleurie. The alcohol was giving me a much-needed warm feeling. To be honest, I’d had a problem with alcohol in the past. I became too dependent on it in my twenties, managed to wean myself off it when I was pregnant with Lily, and then when I lost her I kind of went off the edge of a cliff and was a full-on drunk until finally my mother dragged me to rehab. Since then my relationship with booze had been calmer, and more off than on, but tonight I truly thirsted for its embrace, even though it was the last thing any of us needed.

  The Fleurie lasted longer than the first bottle, but it still wasn’t that long until we were on to number three.

  ‘Does anyone know where the gravy is?’ asked Marla.

  ‘In here,’ I said, pulling a tub of Bisto from one of the over-head cupboards.

  ‘You seem to know where a lot of things are, Karen,’ said Marla, and ther
e was no mistaking the suspicion in her voice. ‘I’ve been noticing it ever since we got here. You haven’t been here before, have you?’

  I laughed. ‘Of course not.’ But I didn’t look at her as I spoke and I could hear the lie in the words myself. It must have been the alcohol. It was making me lax. Everyone else could hear it too.

  ‘Karen,’ said Marla harshly. ‘You have been here before, haven’t you?’

  I turned to face her, preparing to lie again, but the intensity of her stare stopped me. Out of the corner of my eye I could see the other two staring at me too. I swallowed, paused.

  Marla’s dark eyes flashed with anger. ‘Tell the truth.’

  ‘All right, I have.’

  The three of them expressed various levels of shock and Marla demanded to know when, and why I hadn’t mentioned it before.

  ‘I had an affair with Charlie,’ I said reluctantly, pulling out my cigarettes and lighting one, knowing I couldn’t tell this story without a smoke. ‘It started at the funeral. For my daughter, Lily. Charlie attended. I wasn’t expecting him and, when he did turn up, it was the first time I’d seen him since we’d left uni. We had a quick chat back at the house afterwards. I was in a state of complete shock, just numb really, and Charlie said that if I ever needed to talk then I should call him. He gave me his business card.’ I sighed. ‘Things were going bad between Jeff and me at the time. They had been even before Lily passed, but they just got worse after that. I called Charlie a few weeks afterwards. He suggested we meet for lunch, so we did and we talked for hours. He was sympathetic and I really did literally cry on his shoulder. In hindsight I know he was just being predatory, but I was in a very fragile state and I guess I fell for it.’ I paused, took another drink of the wine. ‘The affair didn’t last long. No, that’s a lie. It probably lasted six months, but we didn’t see each other that often. Charlie let it be known that he wouldn’t be leaving his wife and, to be honest, I didn’t want him to. I don’t think I even knew what I was doing. I just wanted comfort, some kind of intimacy, however snatched and fake it was, and Charlie was just in the right place at the right time and, like all charmers, he knew which buttons to press. Eventually, though, I came to my senses and finished it. It was all very amicable. In fact he was pretty relieved and I didn’t see him again until last night, but yes, I came here with him once. I hated it then. And I hate it now.’