by Will Carver
So I don’t touch the priests.
Because I don’t want them to touch the kids.
Some things should not be released. Some things are too evil.
Father Salis was safe.
But that does not mean that he was good.
TASTE BUDS
RD and his wife noticed it straight away.
They did know her. They had known her for many a year.
That was the reason she called them. She trusted them. She could rely on their discretion. She didn’t want the town to know about her condition. Ordinarily Mrs Beaufort would want to keep this kind of information back so as not to have the townsfolk worry about her. That is how she would have felt on day one, before the shot reverberated down to Rock-a-Buy and dumped the elderly matriarch on her muscleless, wrinkled arse. By day three, her reasons for keeping her condition a secret were all her own.
‘Exhaustion,’ she bleated when the gentle bear shape of RD approached Mrs Beaufort’s bedside, his dumpling of a wife tottering a few slow steps behind him.
L i e s.
‘You had us all worried there for a second. Didn’t she?’ RD looked around at his wife, bringing her into the conversation. She was a quiet woman. Just got on with things. Hardly spoke a word and never a word out of turn. Her hair a curly, greying blonde cut, as so many woman of a certain age tend to have, to a length that never passed her bottom lip. It made her face appear rounder. Fatter. To RD, though, it was a cute face. A loveable face. He adored that dumpy, little Marcel Marceau. As he often said, she was the only woman who could fill his heart and his stomach.
ALL YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT RD’S WIFE
She has phenomenal taste buds.
She cares.
She listens.
She is still good.
She sidled up to the hospital bed, resting her large buttocks against the metal frame, and took Mrs Beaufort’s right hand and held it between both of her own. The hand was cold but RD’s wife did not react. She looked her friend in the eyes and simply nodded. No words, but enough movement to say that she cared and would be there to help in any way she could.
‘Nothing to worry about, honestly,’ Mrs Beaufort lied. ‘I’ve been overdoing it in the shop, that’s all. The doctor said I need to slow down a little, maybe get some help in there. I’m not sixty-five any more.’ She smiled an amiable smile and her friends reacted in the way they were supposed to, but RD felt the cloud hanging over all of them. What was happening to their town?
‘We can help you out in the shop until you get back on your feet.’
‘I am on my feet, thank you very much R—’ She seemed insulted and would have addressed RD with his full name had he not interrupted her.
‘Yes, yes, of course. What I meant to say was that we are here for whatever you need. To make things easier. If the hospital is telling you to slow down, we can be there so that you don’t lose any speed overall. You know?’ He exhaled heavily as though the sentence had been a race.
Who are you? he thought. And what have you done with Mrs Beaufort.
I am Evil.
And I have come to destroy your town.
Inside, Mrs Beaufort was screaming at herself not to act like this. She knew what she wanted to say but, sometimes, the words that came out were not as she had formulated them in her mind. There was no physiological damage from her attack – a small bruise to the hip, but she had been cushioned by the fastidiously sorted piles of clothing – but psychologically, it had taken a toll.
And I was toying with her.
SOMETHING YOU
SHOULD KNOW
I enjoy this part.
She could hear herself. Bleating on. How her sudden, though apparently stable, angina was a shocking reminder of her passing years. A real thunderbolt. She had always remained active and never truly felt her foot sinking gradually into the Hinton Hollow graveyard, the plot of earth that had been reserved next to her husband. He had joked, when alive, that she should be buried with him. Put her coffin in the same hole. Have her on top. You know I’ve always liked it that way, he’d say. Jed Beaufort had been the only one who could get away with talking that way in front of his wife. A fleeting memory of Jed that I quickly extinguished.
I had her in my grasp.
‘It’s all changed now he’s come back to town, don’t you think?’
‘Who? The Pace kid?’ RD still thought of him as a kid because that is how most of the town remembered him. His wife shook her head in the background and screwed up her face slightly in disagreement that he was in any way to blame for what was going on in Hinton Hollow.
‘Who else?’ She didn’t want to say these things. She had always liked Pace. She remembered the reasons he had left Hinton Hollow in the first instance. She understood the weight of his burden. It was the reason he had been welcomed back – though she had no idea why he had to return so hastily.
‘I think it’s an unfortunate coincidence that he returned the day that he did. Perhaps we are lucky that he’s back to deal with what happened to the Brady boy. He’s probably more experienced than Inspector Anderson in these matters. But that isn’t something you need to be thinking about now. Let’s just get you home.’ He stretched out one of his shovel-like hands and his wife withdrew hers from Mrs Beaufort instinctively. Obediently.
She swung her legs around to the side of the bed and allowed RD to help lower her feet to the floor safely.
Then she shocked the big man.
Gripping both of his arms with her cold, white hands, she dug her nails slightly into his forearms – she wanted to hold him by the shoulders but he was too tall for that.
Stupidly, I let go of her for a moment while I admired RD’s wife. I liked her.
‘Something is wrong in our town, RD. Something is there that should not be. We have lived here all our lives, each one of us. There are dark days ahead and it will be up to us to ensure this does not last.’
RD did not move, he was rooted to the grey, flecked linoleum. The pain he should have been feeling did not even register, he was so drawn into Mrs Beaufort’s intent gaze.
‘We are the custodians of Hinton Hollow and we cannot let it be destroyed.’
I watched the futility.
She had felt weak in her shop, though she tried to be strong for Katy Childs and her new baby. But there was an internal struggle with the darkness now for Mrs Beaufort. It had temporarily debilitated her. But it was a weakness that she would not let anyone else witness. She had been around too long. Seen too much. There was more than enough that I could use against her.
She could never beat me.
‘Are you with me on this?’
There was a pause. Several beats passed as RD peered down into the eyes of his elderly friend, he could see that she was serious. Her eyes were coated with a moisture that promised to form a tear if he did not answer her soon.
‘We’re with you,’ he finally replied. ‘Of course we’re with you.’ And he pulled his arms away, unsure in his mind. The woman he had walked in to at the hospital was not the same person he was looking at now. That was the real Mrs Beaufort.
She was fighting.
‘Right. Let’s go home.’ Mrs Beaufort led the way. RD’s wife grabbed his hand and they followed her out of the ward. Each of them stepping back into my shadow.
TOO YOUNG. TOO BROKEN.
And then there was the really bad weather.
Rachel Hadley walked against a breeze that was picking up into something far more ferocious. It pressed her clothes tightly against the front of her body as she leant against it for balance. Her thin skirt gripping her slim thighs and hugging a perfect mound in between. It would be obvious to anyone watching that she was not wearing any underwear.
But nobody was watching.
Nobody but me.
Stanhope Road was empty now the school rush had ended. Parents were either holed up in the safety of their homes or they had made that dauntingly speedy dash to the office from the school. Rachel ha
d returned home after dropping both her children at school – Aaron was seven, Jess was ten – and had just enough time to say goodbye to her husband before he left for work.
Nathan Hadley owned and ran Hadley’s Hair. Not the most imaginative name, but it was all his. He cut people’s hair. Men’s hair. He was a barber. If you really wanted to piss him off, you just had to call him a hairdresser.
This aggravated him for two reasons.
One: he used to cut women’s hair, too. Nothing fancy. Nothing too stylish. There wasn’t much call for an asymmetric bob in Hinton Hollow. Then Olive Keys grew up. He trained her and she set up her own small place once his wisdom had been imparted. He was left with the short back and sides.
Two: he was not a butch man, far from effeminate, but not macho in the slightest. And he cut hair for a living. And he took care of his body. And his own hair always looked immaculate – but he was a hairdresser, it was free advertising. And he was just so nice. So people assumed he was gay.
He wasn’t.
Small-town mentality.
Hinton Hollow was unchanged.
Still, he started going by the name Nate rather than Nathan because he thought it added some credibility to his sexuality. The problem was that too many people had latched on to the cliché and, over time, it had become a thing.
Rachel had waited twenty minutes for her husband to be gone. She had warned him about the weather and he had grabbed a scarf from one of the hooks in the hallway. He kissed her on the cheek. Like a friend. Because that is what they had become.
The Hadleys were friends. Friends who argued. A lot, these days. Mrs Beaufort knew it, she could smell discontent. She knew you had an itch before you even scratched at it. But the rest of Hinton Hollow saw the Hadleys as normal. Average. Sure, the men would talk behind his back and suggest he was homosexual; it looked like narrow-mindedness but it was their own insecurities because most of the women in town knew that he wasn’t gay – not that he’d step out on Rachel. Still, they all went to Olive when their roots needed touching up.
Nathan ‘Nate’ Hadley was snipping away at a head of white hair when his wife pulled the door closed behind her and felt that first gust hit her thighs, it felt fresh, especially without her underwear.
Her hair was not as short down there as it usually was. It was still well landscaped, but she’d been deliberately creating a tuft since Nathan had suggested it might be nice to take it all off.
‘What is this sudden fascination with men to make grown women look like little fucking girls?’ she’d asked him. Or boys, she’d said to herself. A joke at her husband’s expense. Another argument. But they were still friends. And they still fucked. Why wouldn’t they? The sex was great. It had always been great.
That day in Hinton Hollow’s darkest week, Rachel Hadley had a fuck it, we’re all going to hell, anyway attitude. She wasn’t sure why she chose that day to leave the house. She didn’t really understand her decision to abandon her underwear at home, the wind was picking up all the time and the clouds were moving in from all directions, suggesting rain.
She turned right at the end of her street, bringing her back on to Stanhope Road. Then she turned right again. Away from the school where her two children were happily looking through books and sticking shapes to a piece of coloured paper.
Away from Hadley’s Hair.
Towards Roylake, which shared the road with Hinton Hollow.
Away from the darkness.
But it was too late. I had already touched her before Charles Ablett got the opportunity to lay a single finger on her.
PEOPLE RARELY LEAVE
Selling houses in Hinton Hollow is not a good business to be in. You have to wait until somebody moves out, but people rarely leave. Your best bet is that somebody dies, then you have an opportunity to bring in an outsider. Add a splash of colour to the community. There were rental properties but they were on the peripheries of town and used only as business crash pads – executives who did not mingle with the town’s people.
I have no time for these people.
Their life decisions mean that they feel the alluring caress of immorality on a daily basis.
IT IS NOT INTERESTING TO MESS WITH A BANKER OR POLITICIAN
Because they always end up jumping out of a window.
Still, Ablett and Ablett was the agent of choice for property in the area. They were responsible for allowing anyone new into Hinton Hollow. They’d found Inspector Anderson’s place over on Shelley Avenue sixteen years ago when Inspector Frazer had passed on. Their main business, though, was in Twaincroft Hill, where the price tags on properties were much higher, and the houses in Roylake were their run-rate business. Lots of turnover. Growing young families. A solid rental scene. That was the easy stuff.
The Ablett brothers found The Hollow strenuous. Burdensome. It was complicated enough that houses rarely came onto the market but there seemed to be some unwritten deal in place where every prospective client had to go through Mrs Beaufort’s vetting procedure. But it was the challenge they relished. None more so than the youngest brother, Charles. If he could get his hands on anything in that peaceful insular town, it was considered a major scalp.
Two months before their dark week, Charles Ablett had valued the Hadleys’ home. It was purely an exercise for Nathan Hadley, who wanted to know whether they had made any money on their investment since they’d owned it. Hollow houses rarely lost their worth; even in times of economic struggle, he was expecting a sizeable figure.
Charles had placed a higher value on Mr Hadley’s wife and had made it his business to let her know this over the proceeding weeks – bumping into her while stocking up on groceries, queueing behind her at RD’s Diner, he’d even gone for a trim at Hadley’s Hair.
So, on that Wednesday, as the wind picked up, blowing four tiles from the roof of the Church of the Good Shepherd and a chair blew across the playground of Stanhope C of E School, smashing one of the windows of the greenhouse, Charles Ablett was opening the front door of his Roylake home – in a towel, his hair still wet from the shower – to find Rachel Hadley combing her fingers through windswept locks.
‘Mr Ablett, I’ve come to discuss my valuation.’ She smiled.
To him, this was the most prime piece of real estate that Hinton Hollow had to offer.
IN THE WAKE
It wasn’t the sweating as much as the tears.
Owen Brady was alone. For the first time that week, there was nobody else to think about. Nobody to support. Nobody to be strong for. He’d cried so much that he’d made himself thirsty. Not because of the heightened emotion endured over the previous days and his incredible streak of bad luck; it was down to his memories. Fond remembrance of times when his two sons were together.
He thought about the day they had told Michael there was a baby living in his mother’s tummy. He hadn’t really understood. He was only two years old. But over the following months he had started to take an interest. When is my brother going to come and see me? he’d ask. And when Jacob did finally arrive – six days past the due date – he wasn’t jealous, he just loved him. Even when Jacob was newborn, when his hair was thin and there wasn’t very much of it, Michael would lie next to him on the living-room rug and rub his head softly, messing up his hair. It was a two-year-old’s way of saying that he loved his brother and would protect him.
Owen Brady thought of this moment and every other moment that his living son had ruffled his dead son’s hair. And he cried. And cried.
It wasn’t until Detective Sergeant Pace walked into the room that he had to even give a thought to his dead cunt of a wife, who he missed so desperately.
JUST A MOMENT
It is a small story. But I learned so much.
AN IMPORTANT LESSON FROM THAT WEEK IN HINTON HOLLOW
Change does not happen gradually. It is instant.
When somebody hates their job but does not leave for five years because the timing isn’t right or they have to sort themselves fina
ncially or they need to find another job first, those five years leading up to resignation were not a part of the change. You can’t count that time in the process.
It is five years of stagnancy, then a decision. And that choice then affects a change.
It happens in a moment.
I look at how quickly one person can fall in love with another. You know straight away. I’ve seen it. Attraction is there and it changes you in that second.
If you receive bad news, you can be instantly devastated.
I look at these mothers, the Wallaces, the Bradys and the other families, and it is clear how crucial decisions can be because the wrong one can alter your world.
So can the right one.
First the choice, then the change.
And here’s one more thing, a person who is kind all the time can do something evil, simply by changing the state of their mind.
DISQUIET PRICKLING
‘Wakey wakey,’ Pace said as he entered the holding cells.
Owen Brady was lying on his back. He swung his legs around to the side and sat up.
‘I am awake.’ His throat was hoarse from the hours of weeping reminiscence. ‘I’ve been awake all night.’
‘Good,’ Pace remarked, not looking directly at Owen Brady, he was fishing around for keys in his pocket.
‘Good?’
‘Well, a man in your situation, having been through what you have in the last couple of days, I would have felt a little uneasy if you’d had a perfect night of rest. Though, God knows, you’re probably exhausted.’
‘There is no God, detective. If there is, he’s a sick son of a bitch.’
‘I’ll be sure to pass on your sentiments to Father Salis.’