by Peter Laws
Wally visibly stiffened. He stepped out onto the landing and closed the door. A familiar gingery odour wafted out with him. The guy stretched his neck and Matt heard it click. ‘Actually, my girlfriend’s sleeping right now. Do you mind if we talk out here?’
‘Look. I can smell the cannabis—’
‘It’s medicinal!’ Wally blurted out, panicked. His eyes shot back up the corridor. Then he said in a whisper, ‘It’s medicinal alright? I’ve got MS.’
‘Is that right?’
‘Well. Suspected.’
‘Calm down. That’s not why I’m here. What’s your name?’
‘Rob,’ he frowned. ‘Rob Bennett.’
‘I want to know about a previous tenant of this flat. How long have you lived here for?’
It took a moment but eventually Rob started to relax, leaning back on the wall. ‘Three years.’
‘And do you know who lived in the flat before you?’
‘Some Chinese guy. Student I think. I remember his name because it made me laugh. Ding Dong or something like that. That is quite funny, don’t you think?’
Matt nodded. There was no denying it.
‘Anyway Ding Dong wasn’t here long,’ he laughed again.
‘Actually I’m curious about another man who lived here, up until about four years ago. Would you have any idea—’
‘That’s a year before I got here. The turnover in this place is crazy. It’s like a conveyor belt. I’m one of the long-termers, me. But next door was an old lady who lived here since forever. Edna. She might have known something but she died like, last Christmas. Shame. She made me a cake once. A lovely, normal cake.’
‘Did she ever talk about past tenants? She ever mention a man called Christopher Kelly?’
‘That rings a vague bell, actually.’
‘Or a woman called Lydia. Lydia Kelly?’
Rob’s mouth fell open.
‘You recognise that name?’
He nodded. ‘Edna definitely told us about her.’
Maybe it was the low-rent fluorescents but the guy’s face looked suddenly pale.
‘What do you know about her?’
He puckered his lips, like he was about to kiss the air. ‘Only that she slit her wrists in my bath.’
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
A sleeping cat lay stretched across the hallway.
‘That’s Justin. You can step right over him.’ Rob led Matt down the hall and started to call out, ‘Anna? Anna?’
The living room door creaked open and a young woman, clearly stoned, opened the door, her head tilted against the frame. She was wearing a Superman t-shirt and a tiny pair of 70s-style shorts. Bright yellow, with a rainbow trim.
‘Hey, hey,’ she said, looking Matt up and down and beaming. ‘Whose the fitty?’
‘He’s a policeman,’ Rob said.
Her stunning smile dropped instantly.
‘Don’t panic. He’s here about our ghost.’
‘Actually …’ Matt held up his hand. ‘I’m not a policeman. I’m a university professor.’
Rob looked confused but Anna’s eyes flashed excitement. ‘What, like you mean you investigate the … the supernatural and stuff?’
‘That’s one way of putting it. Yes.’
‘Niiiiiiice.’ Anna was nodding. ‘So you know about Lydia?’
‘A little bit. But I have some questions.’
‘Do we still have that newspaper clipping?’ Rob said, clicking his fingers. ‘That Edna gave us?’
‘Yes!’ Anna clapped her hands together. ‘I’ll need to hunt it out. Ohmygod this is cool.’ She raced into the other room and started pulling drawers open.
Rob piped up, ‘Can I just point out that I don’t believe in this stuff? But she does.’
‘You should believe it,’ she called through. ‘Because it’s true. We’ve got all the classic signs, Professor. Place feels cold sometimes. The bedside lamps flicker on and off in the middle of the night. And there’re puddles of water in the bathroom. Unexplained. I’ve seen enough episodes of Most Haunted to know there’s something up. We get orbs whenever we take—’
‘Don’t be daft,’ Rob said with a dismissive swish of his hand. ‘I used to keep telling her it was all down to crap heating and plumbing.’
‘But?’ Matt said, sensing there was more.
‘Well, then Edna gave us this article. Spooked us a bit. Now Anna reckons the place must be haunted.’ He turned to her. ‘But it isn’t.’
‘Can I see the bathroom?’ Matt said.
Rob pushed his elbow against the door he’d been standing against. ‘Voila.’ It creaked open and he stepped aside to let Matt in. ‘Don’t you need equipment or something? A little box with flashing lights?’
‘That won’t be necessary.’
It was a bathroom. No more, no less. A small one at that, with grimy-looking tiles and black specks of mould in the corners. The toilet had a pile of old Empire magazines stacked right next to it. They were damp and curling, either from shower spray or wayward urine. Probably both.
‘That might explain your unexpected puddles,’ Matt said, pointing to the sealant where the bath touched the wall. It was brown and peeling away. Then he knelt by the bath, unsure of what he was looking for. There were no broken tiles like Tabitha’s house.
‘Is this the same actual bath?’ Matt asked. ‘Sometimes after a suicide the council changes it.’
‘That’s what Edna reckoned.’ Rob pushed his glasses back up his nose. ‘I’m a bit more cynical. I bet they just squirted a bit of Mr Muscle on it and that was that.’
Matt stood back up and glanced around the tiny bathroom, at the rusted mirror over the sink where years ago Chris and his young wife Lydia probably brushed their teeth and squeezed their spots. And the toilet, where they would have taught Ben how to poo the big-boy way.
Anna stood in the open door, waving the newspaper clipping like it was a flag. She looked more stoned than ever. ‘Found it.’ But before handing it over she looked at it, then seemed to shiver with an obvious sense of thrill. ‘I just love spooky stuff. I swear death makes you feel … alive. Don’t you reckon?’
‘You’ve got problems,’ Rob said.
Matt reached out for the paper but she clutched it tight to her chest. ‘I’ll read it to you. Then I’ll give it.’
Matt sighed. ‘What’s the date on it?’
She looked down. ‘December 2002.’
The month when Chris stopped coming to college.
Anna cleared her throat as Matt sat on the side of the bath. The plastic panel groaned a little but it felt sturdy enough.
‘Here we go … local woman commits suicide.’ Anna had assumed a weird sort of telephone voice. ‘Lydia Kelly, thirty-two, committed suicide by cutting her wrists in the bath in Kellaway Rise, Hemel Hempstead. Her husband, Chris Kelly, twenty-seven, said she was close to death when he found her, early on Sunday evening.’ Anna trailed off. ‘Are you getting creeped out yet?’
‘Give me the paper, please,’ Matt said.
She stuck out her tongue. ‘… Chris Kelly, twenty-seven, said she was close to death when he found her early on Sunday evening. He had returned home with local church caretaker Seth Cardle but despite their best—’
Matt looked up, ‘What did you just say?’
‘Ooooo,’ she smiled. ‘You’re feeling the vibes, aren’t you?’
‘Read that last bit again. The name.’
‘He had returned home with local church caretaker, Seth Cardle … What, do you know him or something?’
Matt let out a long heavy breath. ‘Keep reading.’
‘Despite their best efforts, neither could save her. Kelly said that his wife of seven years passed away peacefully in his arms, “her eyes filled with heaven”.’ Anna stopped reading to look at her boyfriend. She had a slightly goofy but earnest look of affection for him, as though there were a tragic romance to it all. ‘The final verdict: self-inflicted death, brought on by massive loss of blood … that’s it.’
> ‘Give me the paper,’ he said.
She handed it over, reluctantly, like it was a cherished photograph of someone she loved.
He read it over to check what she said was right. It was.
‘I’ll need to hang onto this, but you’ll get it back,’ Matt said. ‘And thank you. You’ve been very helpful.’
‘Hang on,’ Anna said. ‘Aren’t you going to exorcise the spirits or something? I might get a kick out of this stuff but I still don’t want some creepy dead lady watching me take a piss.’
‘Sorry. Call a priest.’
At that point, Justin the cat wandered in, which somehow shut everybody up. He slinked himself against Matt’s legs. They all watched him spring up onto the bath and then jump down inside it.
‘Get out of there, Justin!’ Rob shouted, as the cat lay on its back, paws in the air like it was being petted. The purring seemed very loud.
‘Whoah. Look at him. Maybe Lydia’s stroking him.’ Anna’s tone was utterly serious.
‘Don’t be stupid,’ Rob said.
‘Eerie though … isn’t it?’ She pointed at where the cat was now writhing on its back. ‘They say that animals know these things. Maybe he knows someone topped themselves. Right here.’
‘You know,’ Rob said quietly, ‘my granddad used to tell me that suicides go to hell.’
Anna gave him an odd look. ‘That’s harsh.’
‘They all do,’ Matt whispered, suddenly realising he’d said it out loud.
Anna frowned and pulled her head back a little, as if she’d decided that she didn’t like Matt any more. ‘You actually believe that?’
‘I don’t,’ Matt said, ‘but I know someone who does.’ He pictured Chris ranting at him that morning in the crematorium, paranoid about the eternal fate of Isabel Dawson at the bottom of the falls.
And that desperate shout, Suicides go to hell! They all do!
For a moment they just watched the purring cat squirming against the bathtub. But Matt wasn’t really seeing a cat at all. It was a woman called Lydia who was no fan of Christianity, arching her back in the throes of a self-inflicted death.
So the article said she was close to dying when they found her. He considered that and wondered if Chris and Seth had sat on the edge of the bath, the toilet or the floor when it happened. And how would their belief systems have coped, he wondered, as they watched his wife wheeze and bleed and slide herself down the long red road to hell?
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
Rob may have been stoned, but he turned out to be right about the turnover here.
Matt knocked on every door on that floor and all of the tenants were fairly fresh arrivals. None of them lived here when Chris and Lydia Kelly were in the building. He even tried the floor above and below, just in case, but after his knuckles started to hurt he decided to give up. Without anyone else to help, he certainly didn’t plan on knocking on all 144 flats in this block. He’d go to the next stage in the plan, such as it was.
He headed back down to the car and typed the word ‘library’ into the satnav. He found the place in seconds. Before moving off he sent Worthington and Larry a quick text message, asking them to check with Hemel police to confirm whether someone called Lydia Kelly had killed herself in that flat. Maybe the files mentioned details that the papers didn’t.
He also asked them to pull out the records for Seth Cardle. Matt had no idea that Chris and the old man had such a long and dramatic history.
The library was just off the main high street near the courthouse, so he swung the car into the parking bay, leapt out directly into a puddle and hurried across. The rain was furious. Big sheets of it flung against him and rattled his jacket. In the eleven seconds it took him to run from the car to the library entrance, he might as well have run directly through Cooper’s Force.
He shook a hand through his hair as he stepped inside the library where a plump older lady stood behind the counter. She looked at him with the sort of disgusted pity reserved for beaten-up pensioners or three-legged kittens. ‘Well aren’t you a mess. It’s the proverbial drowned rat.’
‘It’s insane out there,’ he laughed.
She held a bent arthritic-looking finger up. ‘Noise? Hello? It’s a library.’
‘Oops, sorry.’ He unzipped his jacket, now thick and heavy.
She set some books onto a trolley as he approached the counter.
Her badge said Maggie Baines. She really reminded him of an old art teacher he once had, with her huge golden hoops dangling from ears that poked out under a swoop of shipping-rope thick grey pigtails. Except his art teacher had been a lovely walking cuddle, who said his bloated papier-mâché model of Big Ben was ‘charming’. Even while the rest of the class were pissing themselves laughing at how the clock face was slowly sliding off.
Maggie, however, looked so furious with the world she appeared to have been recently hit by a shovel. She had a black t-shirt with a garish, airbrushed wolf’s head and a Red Indian’s face blended into starlight. It was a truly horrible design. She raised a suspicious bushy eyebrow just before he spoke, which made her large, golden-framed glasses rise up. She could tell that he wasn’t looking for books.
‘Do you keep any local newspaper records here?’ he said.
‘Of course we do. They’re digitised on the computer.’
‘Excellent. Then I’d like to look through some newspapers from around 2002. Do they stretch back that far?’
‘Young man, we stretch back to 1801 and well before that.’
‘Cool. So can you show me to the computers, please?’
She tapped her glasses down her nose and looked over the frame. ‘May I finish putting these books on the shelf first? Or would twelve extra seconds irreparably ruin your life?’
Matt wanted to say quite possibly, but he bowed and said, ‘Sorry. Go ahead.’
A depressed-looking young guy with a beard (but weirdly no moustache) walked past, pushing a book trolley. Maggie caught sight of him and narrowed her eyes. She leant over the counter and whispered in his direction, ‘Are you on death row, Ryan?’ Then she pointed at her own face and the forced, unpleasant smile she was trying to assemble there. A forced grimace the likes of which the Queen did after her Christmas Day speech.
Ryan sighed, and gave a bitter smile back.
‘That’s better,’ she tutted and turned back to Matt. ‘Come on, then.’
She led him to a room with two computers in it. Vintage maps and photos of old Hemel hung on the walls. ‘If we don’t have what you need on the system, then I can request the microfilm. That takes a few weeks, though. Or you could try contacting the papers themselves, but I wouldn’t hold your breath.’
‘Got it.’
A Dell computer monitor sat chained to a desk. She clicked the silver button in the corner and the light on it turned from blue to green. ‘You’ll be able to search the system with keywords, or by date.’
He sank into the blue operator’s chair. ‘This is really helpful …’ He looked down at her badge ‘… Maggie.’
Using her name was supposed to make him look friendly but she looked down at her chest, like he’d just read her private diary. ‘Printer’s over there if you need a hard copy. Twenty pence per side.’ She raised a finger. ‘Per side, not per page.’
‘I reckon I can manage that sort of price.’
‘Would you like tea?’ she said.
He was shocked, ‘Wow. I’d love some.’
‘Pound.’ She headed out of the door and over to the little room opposite. She clicked a kettle on and dumped some Jammy Dodgers out onto a plate. He heard them clink. She grabbed one and ate it herself in two gulps.
Rain rumbled hard against the window. It poured fast down the glass, making huge arches of water, while the gutter outside rattled and shook. He thought of Hobbs Hill and the falls. And for a moment he saw the faceless ghoul from the bottom of the waterfall this morning. Isabel Dawson, falling from the clouds like every other raindrop. He turned back to the scr
een. The cursor blinked, awaiting his command, then he typed in the name Christopher Kelly.
Within seconds he was looking straight into the man’s eyes.
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
The name Chris Kelly brought up two different references. One from the year 2000 and the other from 2002.
The first article was the one with a photograph on page 17 of the Hemel Hempstead Gazette. The headline had the sort of excessive alliteration that was typical of bored local journalists: Believer Busted for Busking. He checked the date. It was the issue leading up to Halloween of that year.
Matt read it through. Just a story about a young man called Christopher Kelly who was playing Christian songs on his guitar – all day long (their italics) – outside Boots the Chemist in Hemel Town Centre. He hadn’t applied for the correct licence so he’d been moved along by the police. Apparently he kicked up a stink about freedom of speech and the demonic dangers of All Hallows’ Eve but he quickly shut up when the officers threatened to arrest him. There really wasn’t much to the story but Matt had hit print anyway. He noted the date. It was a year before Chris would have started Bible college. Fighting the demonic realm, even back then.
The other was the same report of Lydia’s suicide that Anna had read to him back at the flat. The whole grim tale of Chris and Seth finding her dying in the bath. Frantically ringing for an ambulance. He printed that out too, as a backup. He scrolled through for a few minutes but it soon became clear that there were no more references to Chris Kelly in the database.
So Matt tapped in the name Seth Cardle. Three new items came up and he clicked eagerly on every one, sipping his scalding-hot tea as he scrolled through them.
The most recent one was about a farm that Seth had helped manage just outside of Bovingdon, not very far from Hemel itself. Apparently Seth ran hands-on farming workshops for underprivileged kids, the whole, ‘stick a cow-teat in a kid’s hand instead of a gun and they’ll appreciate life’ type of thing.
The article also mentioned that Seth was the caretaker of a small Christian chapel in Hemel Hempstead in his spare time. But it went on to say (and this was the point of the story) he was moving on to a village in Oxfordshire, called – drum roll – Hobbs Hill, where he planned to ‘expand his farming business with the acquisition of a new holding’. There were no plans for any more youth work.