The Truth

by Peter James

  There was another silence before Kate spoke again. ‘He was found by a girlfriend last night. She’d been worried because she hadn’t heard from him, and she had a key so she went round there.’

  This was why he hadn’t been returning her calls. Susan felt sick, desperately sick. ‘And? What had happened? Was it a heart attack?’

  ‘They haven’t had the post-mortem yet but the police said it looked like booze.’

  ‘Booze?’

  ‘It sounds like he choked on his own vomit in a stupor. He’d been dead for some time, at least a couple of days.’

  Susan stared at the floor. The power tool whined above her head again. She was thinking of Fergus, sitting here in the kitchen, so alive, so real, and her brain was churning. Sure, he enjoyed his drink – she remembered the entire bottle of champagne he had downed at lunch just before Christmas – but he’d never struck her as a hard-hitting boozer. Yet she’d never really known him outside work.

  ‘I can’t believe this, Kate. I can’t believe he’s – dead. Tell me it’s – it’s not –’

  ‘I’m really sorry, he seemed like a nice guy.’

  He was more than a nice guy, Susan thought, but she said nothing. She didn’t want to talk any more, not right now, she wanted some quiet around her, some space, she wanted just the privacy of her thoughts.

  He’d been dead for some time, at least a couple of days.

  Monday afternoon, he’d come round to see her. Now it was Thursday morning. How soon after had he drunk himself into a stupor? And why?

  ‘Kate, what – did they say – about funeral arrangements?’

  ‘I didn’t ask them,’ Kate said. ‘Has he got a family?’

  Susan remembered him at lunch in December, talking about Christmas, and joking about not wanting to spend it with his family in Ireland – ancestor worshipping, – he’d called it. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘In Ireland, and his ex-wife is in the States. I’ll try to find out the arrangements. I guess there are people at Magellan Lowry who might like to go.’

  ‘Yes, I would imagine so.’

  She thanked Kate for letting her know and hung up. Then she stood up, walked across to the south-facing window and looked down at the garden through a stream of tears. There had been a heavy frost last night and some of it remained on the lawn, an arc that the sun hadn’t reached.

  She looked at the cherry tree, and she could hear Fergus’s voice as he sat in the kitchen, cradling his mug of tea, looking out of the window. Is that a cherry, that tree?

  Choked on his own vomit.

  Susan … I don’t know why I’m here, putting these crazy thoughts into your head, worrying you. I shouldn’t have come, it was wrong of me, I’m sorry, I don’t know why I’m doing it, why I’m telling you all this.

  Choked on his own vomit.

  So you think few of us ever fulfil our destiny, because we are not aware of it?

  You will, you will fulfil yours.

  Choked on his own vomit.

  She could not get that line, that image, that crude, ugly image out of her mind. It didn’t figure. Fergus was smart, he was not going to have choked to death on his own vomit like some poor derelict on a street corner, no, no way.

  This wasn’t right.

  Harvey Addison, who was a doctor, who must have understood about drugs, died of an overdose. Was that right?

  Was Zak Danziger’s death right?

  She heard a voice calling out, distracting her. ‘Yo? Yo, ‘lo, hello, Mrs Carter? ‘Lo?’

  It was coming from below her. Joe was standing in the hallway.

  ‘Ah, there you are!’ he said, as she came downstairs. ‘Sorry, I thought you was down here. I’ve found something weird up in the loft, and I mean, weird.’ He rolled his eyes and Susan wondered if he was stoned.

  ‘Oh, yes?’ She didn’t want to be distracted from her thoughts about Fergus. And Joe was a chatterbox. He was a fund of knowledge on Victorian houses, no question, and some of the things he’d told her yesterday were interesting but she didn’t want to talk to him now.

  ‘You all right?’ he asked, looking at her closer.

  ‘Fine.’ She nodded, and sniffed. ‘I just – had a bit of a shock, that’s all.’ Then she noticed it was past midday and she hadn’t offered him any elevenses. ‘Would you like something to drink?’

  ‘Murder a cup of tea. You sure you’re all right?’

  She nodded. ‘Thanks. A bereavement.’

  ‘Someone close?’

  ‘A good friend.’

  ‘I’m sorry – terrible thing, death, the big wipe-out. Wow.’ He raised his hands. ‘Got to make the most of life, you never know …’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘You never do.’

  As she put the kettle on, he changed the subject. ‘How long have you lived here, in this house?’

  ‘We moved in end of April, last year. Coming up to a year, I guess.’

  He hunched up on a chair and took the shortcake he was offered, gratefully. ‘I tell you, what you’ve got up there … phew!’ He pointed at the ceiling, then expelled air from his mouth in a low whistle.

  Choked on his own vomit.

  She tried to focus on the builder, but it was hard. ‘It’s worse than we thought, the roof?’ she asked.

  He nibbled the biscuit. ‘No, the roof’s fine, just a couple of tiles off and a bit of flashing that’s lifting, fix that no probs.’ He paused. ‘It’s what’s up there that’s blowing me away.’

  She looked at him darkly, her imagination clogged by images of Fergus Donleavy choking on his vomit. ‘What is up there?’

  ‘Well, if I thought it was yours, I’d keep me mouth shut.’ He finished his biscuit and Susan offered him another. ‘But it isn’t yours, you’re not the type.’

  The kettle boiled. Susan poured water into the mug and prodded the teabag with the spoon. ‘The type for what?’ He was beginning to irritate her. Why couldn’t he just come out with it and tell her straight?

  He popped half of the biscuit into his mouth and chewed. ‘The occult.’

  Susan knocked over the cup, then leapt back from the work surface as scalding tea poured on to the legs of her dungarees.

  Joe jumped to his feet and helped her mop up the mess.

  ‘Thank you,’ she said, when they were straight again. ‘What did you mean exactly, the occult?’

  ‘In the loft.’

  Frowning, she poured him a fresh cup. ‘The loft? I don’t think I’m quite on your bus.’ Shakily, she added milk, then handed him the mug. ‘Sugar?’

  ‘Three, please.’

  He spooned it in, and then he said, ‘Did you know the people who lived here before?’

  ‘No, they moved abroad. The husband got transferred by his company – we never met them.’

  Joe nodded. ‘I think you’d better come and take a look. You OK on a ladder?’

  ‘I’ll be fine.’

  He held the ladder for her as she climbed. When she reached the top and had to haul herself over the sharp edge she began to think this hadn’t been such a smart idea. Being careful not to put any weight on Bump, or to jar him, she hauled herself slowly and clumsily off the ladder, and crawled on her knees on to the first joist.

  Then she stood up, steadying herself on a rafter, getting her balance, frightened now of falling and harming the baby. Joe clambered up after her, then switched on a powerful torch. In the beam she saw a dead mouse in a trap; it looked as if it had been there a while. She remembered that John had caught a lot of mice last year; he must have forgotten to check recently, she thought, making a mental note to remind him.

  Perspiring heavily from the exertion, and apprehensive both of falling and of what she was going to see, she followed him, extra mindful of his instructions to tread only on the joists. They squeezed past the chimney breast and into the right-hand side of the dark roof space. It was here that Joe had been working, she could see the power tool; strips of roofing felt were hanging down and some had been removed completely. She notice
d also that an area of the loft insulation had been lifted.

  Joe pointed the beam of his torch up at a panel where the felt had been removed and Susan could see that something had been drawn or airbrushed there in black. As she neared it, she saw what it was. A pentagram.

  She could not believe her eyes. It was like a slap, a taunt, a sick joke. She swallowed, her throat dry and tight, and she was trembling as if an electrical current was running through her. The ink or the paint, or whatever it was, looked bright; it had been done recently.

  The beam moved to the next panel and there was another symbol she recognised: the looped-key shape of an ankh. Then another symbol, a hideous one that looked like a weather-vane with a skull on the top.

  Then Joe dropped the beam down to the space between the joists where he had lifted the insulation. She saw a reversed swastika. Then in another space she saw a goat’s head inside an inverted pentagram. And what surprised her, almost above everything, was that the detail in these drawings was quite incredible. These hadn’t been scrawled up here by children, they had been drawn with intense care and artistry.

  Her mind was flooded by Fergus Donleavy’s words, all the seemingly fantastic things he had told her about the occult connections and activities of Mr Sarotzini and Miles Van Rhoe, and now this incredible, eerie stuff here, in her house.

  It was as if there was a link – but there couldn’t be. This really had to be a coincidence.

  She shivered. Coincidence. She was doing it herself now, she was doing the thing she had always attacked in John and in others, she was trying to shrug off as a coincidence something that she didn’t want to face. And a voice in her head was telling her that this was wrong.

  The builder was looking at her. ‘So what do you make of this?’ he asked.

  ‘What do you make of it?’

  ‘Heavy. This is heavy. And you haven’t seen the best bit.’

  He knelt down, lifted away another section of the orange insulation, then shone his torch down onto a metal box, about four inches long and two inches wide, with wires running from it.

  ‘What’s that?’ she asked.

  ‘Something to do with your telephone system. I’m not sure what it does exactly – might be a ringing converter. Do you have a lot of phones in the house?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Probably what it is.’

  Susan remembered the man from Telecom who had been working up here. Christ, had he seen these symbols? What had he thought?

  And then something launched itself from her memory. The man in the dream, hallucination, whatever, that night in the clinic, that strange erotic hallucination when that man from Telecom had been making love to her.

  She looked down at the symbols again, then up, and she noticed more panels each time she looked. A lot of the symbols she didn’t recognise. Bump stirred inside her, restless suddenly. Are you picking up my anxiety?

  I’m having crazy thoughts. This man from Telecom. These symbols. The dream. Has to be a coincidence.

  A meaningless coincidence.

  Please let it be.

  ‘It’s not this gizmo,’ the builder said, as he carefully lifted away the metal box, revealing a small indent cut neatly beneath it. It was in the shape of a miniature grave, and lined with black velvet. ‘It’s this. This is what’s really blown me away.’

  Susan peered closely. Lying in the velvet was a slender object. Although it was shrivelled and leathery-looking, there was no mistaking what it was. A human finger.

  Susan’s scalp constricted and a slick of fear rode down her spine. The whole roof space seemed to be shrinking around her. She turned away in revulsion from the finger, then her eyes were drawn back to it. She wanted to touch it, to know that it was real and not something from a joke shop, but she was too frightened. It was real, no question, and it looked like a woman’s. Instead she glanced up and then around, stared at the meticulously painted occult symbols in each panel that had been concealed by the roofing felt.

  ‘How far along the roof do these go?’

  ‘Not very far,’ Joe said. ‘I’ve worked it out. They’re directly above just one room. The one you’re decorating with the little kiddie wallpaper.’

  Chapter Forty-nine

  Kündz watched Detective Sergeant Rice. The policeman was doing a thorough job, and this was only right.

  Susan had been deeply shaken by what her fool builder had shown her, and Kündz was angry at the man, Joe, for distressing her. He was aware that an unborn child can sense its mother’s stress, and this was so unnecessary, to upset the baby like this. But now the policeman, Detective Sergeant Rice, was standing in the living room in his uniform, and looked a picture of authority. His presence gave reassurance, his influence was calming; this was a policeman who was a credit to his force.

  Time was nearly up now. Mr Sarotzini had been informed by Mr Van Rhoe that this cyst inside Susan was badly twisted and its blood supply was cut off. This meant that it was about to start turning gangrenous.

  Kündz took the photograph of Casey from a drawer and studied it once more. A pretty girl: there was so much of Susan in her. It was too bad what he had to do, but it was Susan’s fault.

  Then he took from the same drawer a cigarette lighter, a gold Dunhill with the initials AW engraved on the lid. This was a nice lighter, beautifully made. It had such elegance that it made him wish he smoked: he could have enjoyed the pleasures of using such a lighter. He flicked open the lid and listened to the hiss of escaping gas, then closed it again. Yes, such engineering excellence. This was a lighter that was as beautifully constructed, in its own way, as his Mercedes car or his Rolex wristwatch or his Church shoes. Quality. The more he discovered about quality the more he admired it. There was beauty in quality and beauty was truth. The poet Keats had written that.

  The detective said to Susan and John, ‘Did you look in the loft when you bought the house?’

  John replied, ‘I just had a glance around. Actually, I thought there was something strange last time I went up there – something about the roofing felt – but I couldn’t work out what. Now I realise it’s been disturbed.’

  ‘But you don’t know when?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘The surveyor’s report didn’t say anything.’

  John showed him the survey, which made no mention of the markings.

  ‘Has anybody been up in this loft since you bought the house?’

  John and Susan looked at each other. ‘An engineer from Telecom,’ she said.

  ‘No one else?’

  ‘Other than the builder, I don’t think so, no,’ Susan said.

  ‘Maybe the rest of the body’s buried in the garden,’ John said, then immediately regretted his joke. The detective was looking at him too seriously.

  ‘We could dig it up for you, sir, if you like,’ he said.

  ‘No,’ Susan said, quickly. ‘No, I don’t want that.’

  Rice looked distastefully at the finger. ‘I’ll have Forensic check this out, see what we can find out about it.’

  ‘Presumably it has some occult ritual significance,’ John said. ‘Cut off someone during some rite.’

  ‘Or it might have been taken from a corpse in a graveyard – or a mortuary,’ the policeman countered. Then, folding it carefully in the velvet, he asked, ‘So, you don’t know anything about the people you bought this house from?

  ‘No,’ John answered.

  The detective nodded. ‘Might be worth making some enquiries, see if they can throw any light on this.’ Then he grimaced. ‘That’s the most likely scenario, that they were up to some occult practices.’

  ‘Great,’ John said. ‘Maybe we should have the place exorcised.’

  ‘If you believe in that sort of thing,’ the detective replied, dismissively. His radio crackled, then Kündz heard a staccato voice come from it, something indecipherable. Rice wrote his name and phone number on a sheet of paper, which he tore from his notepad. ‘If there’s anything else you think of, you c
an reach me on this number.’

  Then he left.

  Susan closed the front door, then rounded on John. Her voice was quiet at first, and rapidly got louder. ‘You knew about this. You’re in with them, aren’t you?’

  ‘In with who?’

  ‘This is the part of the deal you didn’t tell me about. Don’t lie to me John, don’t.’

  ‘Hon!’

  ‘Don’t lie to me.’

  John raised his arms in the air. ‘I’m not lying to you, hon. I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

  ‘Oh, yes, you know. This has been planned, hasn’t it? You’re giving my baby to Mr Sarotzini so that he can sacrifice it – he and Van Rhoe – and you’re in this with them.’

  John tried to put his arms around her, but she stepped back from him, pressed herself against the wall, and shouted, ‘Keep away from me!’

  John stayed where he was. ‘Hon, you got all this shit from Fergus Donleavy. I told you, from all the stuff he said, he must have had his wires crossed, and now he’s dead from a drinking binge. I think the poor bastard must have been flipping out – had a nervous breakdown or a brainstorm or something. I’m really shocked that he’s dead, I liked the guy a lot, but what he said to you on Monday, I mean, I’m sorry, but he’d lost it.’

  Susan stared at John coldly. ‘No, you’re wrong. Fergus tried to warn me about Mr Sarotzini and Van Rhoe, and now they’ve killed him. You’ll probably find they murdered Harvey Addison and your composer, Zak Danziger, as well.’

  John moved away from her in despair. ‘Come on! What did Harvey have to do with any of this?’

  ‘You explain it!’ she shouted at him. ‘You tell me how come all that freaky stuff is right above my baby’s bedroom! Tell me about that for a coincidence.’

  John went through into the kitchen and sat down on a chair. He put his head in his hands. Susan came to the doorway and stood there, white as a ghost. ‘Hon, you chose the bedroom,’ he said quietly. ‘You could have decorated any of the four spare rooms. You chose that one.’

  She said nothing for a moment, and then, ‘Why are you refusing to believe this? Or are you lying to me?’