The Four Last Things

by Taylor, Andrew

  ‘Nothing. I haven’t phoned the police. I promise. I just want Lucy to go home so I tried to phone her mother but she wasn’t in.’

  Angel hit him on the collarbone with the hatchet. He heard the bone snap. He heard himself scream, too. Then she hit him again, this time on the side of the head. He fell against the jamb of the doorway and slid slowly to the ground.

  He wanted to turn to Lucy and say, ‘It’s OK. Your daddy’s coming.’

  Angel lifted the hatchet once more. Warm liquid trickled down Eddie’s left cheek. There was a great deal of pain, which swamped the headache completely. Men were shouting in his mind. Were they cheering or condemning him? He heard cracking and rustling, the sounds of fire devouring wood. He burned. Angel was no longer beautiful, but an old, foul woman, a witch, an avenging fury. The blade was descending. There was blood now on the silver edge.

  Two men were running towards Angel. It was all just a dream. When you had a fever, you had terrible dreams. A man was screaming and screaming. Eddie wished the man would stop. The sound might frighten Lucy. She had been frightened enough already.

  A thunderbolt hit him. The force drove his body deep into the ground, into a lake of fire with flames streaking across the surface. There was a bubbling sound. He could not breathe. Someone hung a piece of red gauze across his eyes.

  Finally, the flames died, the sun went down, and the grown-ups switched off the light.

  13

  ‘This is the day whose memory hath onely power to make us honest in the dark, and to be vertuous without a witness.’

  Religio Medici, I, 47

  ‘Do you think Michael’s already there?’ Sally asked. ‘Oh God, I hope he is.’

  Oliver turned into Bishop’s Road. He was driving far too fast and the Citroën tilted dangerously towards the near side. ‘Could be. Depends on the traffic.’

  Michael had used the mobile to call Inkerman Street. He had phoned just after Sally and Oliver returned from Hampstead Heath; Oliver had taken the call. Michael had been in Ladbroke Grove with David and Bishop Hudson when the kidnapper phoned, because Maxham had sent him away with a flea in his ear.

  ‘But Michael hasn’t got a car,’ Sally wailed.

  ‘Hudson lent them his.’ As Oliver drove, his eyes flicked from side to side of the road. ‘It must be here. There’s nowhere else.’

  He swung the wheel round and the Citroën cut across the stream of oncoming traffic. A horn squealed. The car surged into the little alley. Sally registered the frightened face of a woman they had nearly knocked down. The woman’s shopping bag lay on the pavement, disgorging tins and packets.

  The car rocked and jolted in and out of ruts and potholes. Sally saw a school on the corner, its playground empty. Next came high brick walls on either side. The alley curved round a corner. Oliver braked hard.

  Immediately in front of them was a small, white car, parked at an angle across the alley, the driver’s door hanging open. Beyond the car was a pair of high metal gates between tall brick posts.

  Oliver pulled up alongside the other vehicle. Sally leapt out, pushing her door so vigorously that it collided with the open door of the white car. She noticed in passing that the keys were still in the car’s ignition, and that on the back seat there was a black umbrella and a copy of the Church Times. She broke into a run.

  ‘Where’s Maxham?’ said Oliver behind her. ‘He should have got the local boys here by now.’

  There was still a notice on one of the gateposts.

  JW & TB CARVER & Co LTD.

  RAILWAY ENGINEERING

  ALL VISITORS MUST REPORT TO THE OFFICE

  She raised the latch of the wicket gate. It swung outwards.

  ‘Sally – let me go first.’

  Ignoring him, she stepped through the opening into the wilderness beyond. Even in winter, the predominant colour was green. The remains of the buildings were barely visible. For the time being, nature had the upper hand.

  ‘It’s huge,’ Oliver said behind her. ‘We’d better try shouting.’

  ‘No.’ Sally pointed to the ground. There were footprints in the mud leading away from the gates on a course roughly parallel with the fence to the right. ‘They’re fresh.’

  ‘Padlock’s smashed. From the inside.’

  Sally was studying the mud. ‘There’s such a jumble here.’ Her voice rose. ‘I can’t tell if any of them belongs to a child.’

  Oliver joined her. ‘Looks like three people. One in trainers.’ He pointed. Then his finger moved. ‘Trainers go both ways, to and from the gate. Another pair of shoes with smooth soles. Size eight or nine.’

  ‘David’s? That one’s Michael’s, I think.’ She too pointed, at a single footprint from a moulded sole, as crisp and unblemished as a plaster cast. ‘See? So maybe the trainers belong to the man who phoned Michael.’

  ‘He said it might have been a woman.’ Oliver straightened up. ‘Or a man trying to pitch his voice high. They’re small enough for a woman’s.’

  As they talked, they were moving, casting about, trying to find more footprints. They kept their voices low, almost at the level of a whisper.

  ‘Here.’ Oliver set off at a run.

  Sally followed. She stumbled several times, and once she fell, bruising her shoulder against an abandoned oil drum. She was praying, too, if you could call the word ‘please’, repeated over and over again, a prayer.

  They crossed a patch of open ground. For a moment Sally could see ahead. She glimpsed a high wall and beyond it grey blocks of flats, faced with weather-mottled concrete. A woman was standing on one of the balconies and Sally clearly saw binoculars in her hand. A ghoul. The woman was looking at something below her at a point roughly midway on a line between herself and Sally. Then the wall, the flats and the woman were gone.

  Sally plunged after Oliver into a thicket of brambles and saplings. Thorns tore at her clothes, her hands and her face. Oliver tripped over a fallen branch and fell head first into a clump of nettles. He swore. Sally overtook him and struggled out of the embrace of the thicket.

  She found herself on what once might have been a path. Crumbling concrete was visible among the mud and the puddles; so too were more footprints, including those of the trainers. In the distance was a small brick building, almost roofless. Sally ran towards it. She was almost there when she heard Michael’s voice say, ‘Drop it, please. Drop it on the ground.’

  She put on a final rush of speed and burst round the corner of the building. Her first impression was of a bright, vivid redness.

  Michael and David were five yards away. They did not look at Sally. Their eyes were on the woman in the doorway.

  For an instant Sally thought that it was Miss Oliphant, the woman who had cursed Sally and later killed herself; whom Sally had last seen on her deathbed.

  But only for an instant. Then a form of reality took over, and that was even worse because this woman was so clearly a part of a recognizable world. Like Miss Oliphant, this woman wore a long raincoat and a black beret, but there were few other similarities. Sally had never seen her before. She was tall and slender, with long, pale hair. Her face was pinched, the skin glowing with angry red blotches, the teeth and the eyes unnaturally prominent. In her hand she carried a sort of axe with a tall blade which at the end curved into a hook.

  Around the woman was a pool of blood. There was so much of it. Pints and pints and pints. It had sprayed over the wall of the shed, the jamb of the doorway and the long skirt and arms of the woman’s raincoat. Those were not blotches on her face, but splashes of blood.

  Sally had not known there could be so much blood in this world, let alone in one person. Frozen with shock, she stared at the scene in front of her. It took her a moment to realize that a man was lying on his back in the pool.

  He was at the woman’s feet, one arm almost touching her left shoe, his legs across the threshold of the doorway and his body along the base of the wall. Sally’s eyes travelled up the body. The man’s head no longer fitted on
his shoulders.

  The blood had come from the side of his neck. It was still flowing, but only just: pumping out sluggishly over the ground. Carotid artery, Sally thought automatically. Far too late to do anything. Not that she really cared about the man on the ground or the woman in the doorway or even Michael and David.

  ‘Where’s Lucy?’

  The woman, who had been staring as if fascinated at Michael and David, glanced at her.

  ‘Sssh,’ the woman whispered. ‘She mustn’t see.’ She waved the hatchet in the direction of the body. ‘It would inflict terrible psychological damage. With a child that age, the scar would remain for life. Surely you know that?’

  ‘If you put down the hatchet,’ Michael suggested, sounding unbelievably calm and relaxed, ‘we could cover it with my coat.’

  Oliver stumbled round the corner of the shed. Sally put a hand on his arm.

  ‘I had to kill him,’ the woman said. ‘He was going to kill the little girl, you know. It was the only way to stop him. He’s done terrible things to little girls in the past. Terrible,’ she repeated, in a slower, deeper voice like a clock running down, ‘terrible, terrible.’

  ‘How do you know?’ Michael asked.

  ‘I rent a room in his house.’ The voice was middle class, rather musical. ‘His name’s Edward Grace. I’ve been there for five or six years. But until today I hadn’t the faintest idea what he was up to.’

  Sally knew that the woman was lying, that she was talking not to convince them but to gain time. ‘May I see Lucy now?’

  The head of the hatchet swung in Sally’s direction. ‘In a moment.’ Her eyes slid down to what lay at her feet. ‘The pervert – do you think he’s dead yet?’

  The blood was no longer flowing.

  ‘Almost certainly,’ Michael said. ‘And if he isn’t, he soon will be. Now – if you put the hatchet on the ground –’

  ‘You.’ The woman pointed the hatchet at David Byfield. ‘You can see her if you want. Come here.’

  For the first time Sally looked at David. His face was extraordinarily pale.

  ‘Yes,’ the woman said to him in a flat voice. ‘I want you to see her.’

  He looked steadily at her but did not move. The pair of them reminded Sally of wrestlers studying each other in the few seconds before the fight began. And when the bell rang, the false stillness would vanish and everything would change.

  God does not change. But we do.

  The words came from nowhere. Time once again was paralysed. The silence was total. As time could not move, all time was present. This is where it began, Sally thought, with Miss Oliphant in St George’s; and in the beginning was this end.

  She saw David’s face and saw behind it to the pain and the guilt beyond. Why all that guilt? What had he done to deserve it? She saw the woman’s face and saw that it was almost a mirror image of David’s, except that there was no guilt within her, only pain streaked with anger, and more pain beyond, dark, dense, impacted like a seam of coal.

  ‘Your will be done,’ Sally said, or thought she said. ‘Not mine.’

  As if the words were a signal, time began to flow once more.

  ‘Mummy.’

  The tableau broke into pieces. Lucy was standing at the far corner of the shed, on the woman’s right. In her hand she held three minuscule playing cards.

  ‘Lucy,’ the woman snapped, ‘did you climb through the window?’

  Lucy stared open-mouthed at the stern face.

  ‘I thought I told you to stay inside. Naughty girls have to be smacked.’

  Sally thought: Lucy mustn’t see that man on the ground. The desperate importance of that overrode everything else: all the blood and that horrible body – it wasn’t something for a child to see.

  She flung herself at Lucy. Somehow she found the time to hope that the woman herself would be a barrier between Lucy’s eyes and that terrible, ghastly mess on the ground.

  She was aware, too, of a flurry of movement behind her. Oliver, Michael and David were converging on the woman in the doorway of the shed.

  The woman lifted the axe and swung it towards Sally. There was all the time in the world to notice the lazy arc of the blade. The shortest route to Lucy would take Sally within a yard of the woman, well within her reach. The need to be with Lucy was more important than the need to avoid a blow.

  The hatchet slammed into Sally’s left arm halfway between the shoulder and the elbow. She gasped, but as a moving target she missed the worst of the force of the blow. She swept her daughter into her arms. Lucy cried out as the air was driven out of her.

  Sally threw her round the corner of the shed. Lucy lay on her back, her arms and legs wide, in a pose that mimicked the dead man’s. Sally flung herself on top of her daughter.

  ‘It’s all right. It’s all right. I’m here now.’ Sally burst into tears. Between sobs the words continued to stagger out of her mouth as though by their own volition. ‘It’s all right, darling, it’s all right. Mummy’s here. It’s all right …’

  Lucy lay very still and said nothing. One of the playing cards, a Two of Hearts, had fallen beside her head. People were shouting and crying, but they did not matter. Lucy smelled different from before, impregnated with the aromas of strange people and places. For an instant Sally was on the edge of despair: perhaps all this had been in vain; perhaps she had saved not Lucy but some other child.

  After a while, the shouting and the screaming stopped. For a few seconds the world was quiet. The tears ran down Sally’s face and splashed on to the shorn, dark hair.

  At last Lucy stirred. She looked up at her mother and said, ‘Mummy. I can do magic.’

  EPILOGUE

  ‘There are wonders in true affection: it is a body of Enigma’s, mysteries and riddles …’

  Religio Medici, II, 6

  The chapel was little more than a room full of chairs with a crucifix on the far wall. The Reverend David Byfield lowered himself slowly on to one of the red, plastic seats. The chaplain sat down nearby, angling her chair so she was at right angles to him.

  ‘There’s no change.’ She touched the pectoral cross she wore. ‘She spends most of her free time either praying or reading the Bible.’

  ‘How does she behave with the others?’

  ‘She has as little to do with them as possible. It’s not that she’s rude or difficult about it. She simply ignores them. Some of them call her “Lady Muck”. But not to her face.’

  ‘I suppose the question is whether the repentance is sincere.’

  ‘It’s very difficult to tell, Father.’ The chaplain was meticulously courteous. ‘The psychiatrist isn’t convinced. As you know, there’s a history of manipulation, and he feels that this may be one more example of it.’

  ‘He’s probably right.’ David stared at his hands, knotted together on his lap, the fingers like a tangle of roots. ‘But we have to bear in mind the possibility that she means it.’

  ‘Of course. Another point that concerns him is that she still won’t use her own name. She insists on being called Angel. By everyone.’

  The silence between them lengthened. It was restful, not uncomfortable. David thought that the woman was probably praying. She was in her fifties, he guessed, short and stout, swathed in shapeless clothes. Before ordination, she had run one of the larger children’s charities.

  At length, he stirred and asked the question he had wanted to ask on previous visits. ‘Does she ever mention me?’

  ‘Not that I know. She mentions no one from the past. It’s as if her life began when she came here.’ The woman leant forward. ‘Would you like us to pray?’

  ‘No.’ David looked up. ‘Don’t think me rude. Perhaps after I’ve seen her.’

  The chaplain nodded.

  After a moment, David said, ‘Sally tells me that you and she were ordinands together at Westcott House.’

  ‘Yes, though I didn’t know her well. How is she? And the rest of the family?’

  ‘Things have calmed down a
little.’

  ‘And Lucy?’

  ‘It will take time. She’s changed.’

  ‘We can pray for healing, but not to turn the clock back.’

  ‘Just so.’ David shrugged. ‘When Lucy prays at night, she wants to pray for the man Grace. She adds him to the list, along with Mummy and Daddy.’ He paused. ‘And Father Christmas.’

  ‘Why does she pray for him?’

  ‘She liked him. He gave her a conjuring set and some sort of cuddly toy. She’s still got them. She’s very attached to them.’

  ‘It must be hard for Sally and Michael to accept.’

  ‘That and the uncertainty. No one really knows what was happening in that house. No one knows how it’s going to end. Michael’s leaving the police. Did you know?’

  She nodded.

  ‘It’s his own choice.’ He knew he must sound defensive and was mildly surprised to discover that he did not care. ‘There’s no question of his being forced to resign.’

  ‘What’s he going to do?’

  ‘He hasn’t made up his mind. Sally’s still on leave. But they can’t go on like this for ever. They’re in limbo.’

  ‘At least they have Lucy.’

  David was tempted to pass on the news he had heard the previous evening: that Sally was pregnant. But it wasn’t his news, and in any case, it was a long step between conception and birth. For a few moments neither of them spoke.

  ‘It’s almost time,’ the chaplain said at last.

  David followed her out of the chapel and along a corridor that seemed to stretch for miles. The place smelled like a school. Summer sunlight streamed through high windows. The security was omnipresent, though unobtrusive. The chaplain led him to the interview room they had used before. She conferred with the warder on duty.

  The warder stared blankly at David. ‘You can see her now.’

  Angel was sitting at the table, examining her hands, which lay palms downwards on the metal surface. She looked up as David came in. He thought she might have put on weight. She wore no make-up. Her face was pink and unlined.