"I'm not sure this is a good idea," Alex began but by then the door was open and Johnny was on his way inside. Alex followed him, like a moth drawn to his flame. Following even though he knew sometimes the moths get burned.
The bare bulb in the kitchen shared the ceiling with cobwebs and dust. Half-washed crockery piled up in the sink and along the drainer. Someone's breakfast festered on the bench. The mugs and plates were a mismatch of patterns. Underwear and jeans were draped over the radiators. Against one wall a tall cupboard stood open, its only contents were the gas and electricity meters. Both of the seals had been broken and the meters reset. On the kitchen table an open carton of butter had a knife buried in its yellow heart.
Irrationally, Alex started to hear the peal of a bell – a phone or a plague-walker ringing out its final call for the damned to be thrown out in the street. "We're fucked," he said to himself. The phone wasn't ringing and there was no deathly figure patrolling the streets. "What are we doing here?"
"Sleeping bags. If we're gonna be sleeping rough we need the bags or we'll freeze our tits off mate. Pick up some food from the pantry; I'll meet you outside, okay?" Whilst Johnny went upstairs for the bags Alex got down on his hands and knees and started rummaging through the contents of the pantry, stuffing unbranded tins, packets of soup and other goodies into a carrier bag. Then he stole the tin opener and a box of matches.
"Fuck," he heard Johnny mutter.
Then another voice. "Barney's been looking for you, lad. Reckons you're in some big shit but I told him I ain't seen you in days. You wanna tell me what it's all about?"
"You look like shit."
"All them police sirens your doing lad?"
"Nah, course not. The pigs are just making a stink over nothing, that's all."
"That right?"
"That's what I said. Christ, you stink. You know that?"
"Where are you gonna go?"
"Just gonna lay low for a couple of days. If anyone asks you ain't seen us, right?"
"Suit yourself." Johnny's old man muttered.
Johnny came down the stairs carrying two sleeping bags and a purple rucksack. He threw the sack to Alex. "Hey, don't look so glum. We're having fun, right?"
"Yeah," Alex mumbled, emptying the contents of the carrier bag into the rucksack.
"Just like the old days. Nothing changes much does it?"
Alex thought about the trash filling the backyard, the syringe wrappers and the fruit rinds. Some things changed all right.
"No, I don't suppose it does," he lied.
Johnny grinned that grin of his. "Come on, we've got a secret hideout to reclaim."
– 23 –
Daniel Tanner wished the world had listened to Chicken Licken. When the radio began with another one of those mindlessly cheerful pop songs it definitely felt as if the sky was falling down.
Groaning, he rolled over and stabbed the snooze button, buying a few more minutes of catchy-chorus free sleep.
Katie was stretched out beside him, her face burrowed into a pocket of warmth between pillow and duvet. He smiled softly. This was his guilty pleasure, looking at his wife asleep, wondering just what he’d done to deserve this porcelain miracle walked fresh into his life. Heart-shaped face, oceanic eyes, a swan’s neck and long slim legs. She shifted slightly, lips parting in a gentle sigh.
“Love you,” he whispered.
“Me too,” she mumbled without opening her eyes.
Ellen, their youngest, stood in the doorway with Comfortable Dog draped over one arm. His baleful button-face looked sadder than usual with a finger-length of stuffing leaking out through his torn ear. Ellen’s hair was red like her mother’s. She rubbed at her eyes with a scrunched up fist.
“What is it, sweetie?” Daniel asked.
“Thir-steee…” Ellen croaked. The sight of her thin almost boyish body of ribs, elbows and knees pulled at his heart. She looked so innocent and vulnerable it hurt. She was so small and fragile he didn’t think he could stand to watch her grow up and away from him, fall in love and leave him behind. Time enough for that, he told himself. “Get yourself washed and I’ll be down to sort out breakfast in a minute, okay?”
“’Kay. But it’s got to be museli and stuff, ‘member?” she said solemnly, closing the door on her way out.
“What was all that about?” Katie asked around a yawn.
“She saw a film about Bosnia at school so now she’s saving her normal food to send over for the children out there.”
“Sweet kid.”
“Yeah, just like her mum.”
“Why thank you kind sir.”
“Better get up, I suppose.”
“And spoil the moment?”
“Lying here thinking about it won’t make it go away.”
“I know…but still.”
Daniel got up, stretched the ache of sleep out of his spine and slipped into his loose robe. He opened the window. The warm morning breeze ruffled through his hair. It looked like another beautiful morning outside. The sky was clear and pale and blue. Not a single cloud up there. He could hear the hum and buzz of insects and the birdsong so full of joy for the morning. A butterfly dipped past the window, flitting along with the snap of the breeze.
Behind him he heard Katie padding out of the room and down the hall, the bathroom door close and the toilet flush. Habits. Taps splashed water against the basin and then knocking on Beth’s door, trying to raise the dead.
“Mornin’ daddy,” Sarah called on her way down to the kitchen. His girls. He didn’t see much of himself in any of their growing personalities. He didn’t know if that made him happy or sad. A bit of both, really.
Breakfast was scrambled eggs and black pepper, fried bread, tomatoes and two medallions of bacon washed down with thick black coffee, European style. Daniel didn’t hurry down for it. The morning was too beautiful to spoil so willingly.
Through the floor he could hear the girls fighting again, same as every other morning. One teasing another – their voices were muffled and distorted but it was easy enough to get the gist of what was going on. Sarah was teasing Ellen with the greasy strips of bacon. He could all but see the older girl taking a bite out of the meat and then mouthing a big fat yummy face.
Daniel turned away from the window with its garden full of snapdragons and blue bells, and went downstairs.
At the table, Ellen was stirring her milk-drowned museli without much enthusiasm. Across the table Sarah was lip-smacking her way through a mouthful of bacon and egg. Beth, on the other hand, was quiet. Brooding over something. Probably that damned Slater boy. Sometime soon Daniel was going to have to sit down with young Mr. Slater and have a serious man-to-man chat about the dos-and-don’ts of dating one of his daughters.
“Hi, dad.”
“Hey, honey.”
“You going to be sacking anyone today?” Sarah, like Ellen, was small, pale-skinned and delicate but she shared his dark hair.
“Sarah!”
“Come on, mum. I was only asking.”
“No honey, I’m not going to be sacking anyone today. I leave that sort of stuff to the boss.”
“Shame,” Sarah said thoughtfully. “So, what are you going to be doing then?”
“A bit of this, bit of that, you know.”
“Daddy’s going to be making toilet paper, stupid.” Ellen chimed happily.
“All right you two, that’s more than enough.”
“Well, she’s so stupid sometimes.”
“Ellen Tanner!”
“Okay, who wants to hear a joke,” Daniel cut in, heading them off at the pass.
“Oh God, one of dad’s jokes.”
“Better be good, else you’ll have to pay a fine.”
“Trust me,” Daniel said in his most serious voice. “I make toilet paper for a living. How can I be anything but funny? A pound says you laugh.”
“Okay.” Sarah said sceptically.
“Right. What’s green and goes up and down?”
�
��Come on dad, that’s so ancient.”
“Like me, huh?”
Ellen laughed and tried to hide it behind her hand.
“A gooseberry in a lift.”
“Dad!”
“Okay, okay…”
“Can we pick up Annie?” It was the first thing Beth had said all morning.
“Sure, sweetheart.” Daniel said, just glad to hear her say something. This blue funk she’d slipped into over the last few days was really beginning to worry him. Still, it was all about taking baby steps, wasn’t it? A few words here, a few there, and gradually she’d find a way back to being herself.
“Can we walk to school through the woods?” Ellen piped up.
“No way, young lady.” Katie scotched the idea.
“But-“
“No buts. If you go to Annie’s you walk back to school along the main road. Promise?”
“Okay…” Ellen conceded grudgingly.
“I mean it.”
– 24 –
Daniel Tanner’s old green Subaru grubbed through Westbrooke’s country lanes like a snail. The woods bordering Dipton Walk were thick, the trees outnumbering the houses fifty-to-one. They passed a telephone box at the junction. One of the panes of glass had been broken and lay in fragments. Amid the shards a blackbird pecked away at a small furry carcass. The bird hopped back as the car passed.
In the backseat Ellen hummed a nonsense tune.
Beth gazed out of the window, her thoughts a million miles away whilst Sarah was reading a teeny-bopper magazine.
Daniel slipped a cd into the stereo. Declan Shea’s piano solo was mating with Clarence Clemens’ saxophone.
Beth lost herself in the thick creamy puffballs of smoke that billowed out of the paper mill's twin chimneys, letting her thoughts swell into one vast lumpy sheet of candyfloss in the sky. It was one way of losing herself. She needed that. Needed to be lost because every time she found herself she found Alex and their baby as well. Everything was changing too quickly. She needed an anchor to cling on to. Someone to talk to.
Along the street, house windows were cataracted with ice-white reflections of the sun. The shadows cast by the houses, the trees, hedges and lampposts were stark and spiky and edged like razorblades in comparison.
Beth watched the people as they walked along the pavements alive with summer colours. A girl Ellen’s age stopped to watch a grey squirrel leap from bough to bough in a towering sycamore her delighted face turned golden brown by the sun. She envied the girl her innocence. One day she’d wake up and everything would be fucked up because of a boy. It always happened. It was a fact of life that they forgot to teach you at school.
They parked outside Annie Lockewood’s house. Ellen was out of the car and skipping up the path before Beth had unclipped her seatbelt. She swatted at one of the pink helicopters of blossom drifting lazily to the grass and then she was ringing the doorbell.
Jenny Lockewood opened the door in her bathrobe. Day-in-day-out Jenny helped Maggie Carlise keep track of things in her second-hand bookstore. Beth loved that place with its old books and their yellow edges. There were so many worlds in there where she could hide herself away and not think about Alex Slater. With her expensively streaked hair and manicured fingernails Jenny looked anything but bookish. A silver ankh hung down between her breasts, its tail obscured by the gown.
“Beth’s here,” she called over her shoulder, hands fluttering like wings always flapping on the neurotic side of flustered.
“Can I leave them with you?” Daniel called from the front seat.
“Course you can,” she called back as Sarah and Ellen disappeared inside. Beth closed the car door and leaned in to give Daniel a goodbye kiss.
“You know you can talk to me when you’re ready, love.”
“I know, dad,” she said softly.
Annie was in the kitchen brewing a pot of coffee. Paganini’s Grand Sonata in A rolled over them in a tumble of bright music. Annie, a full head taller than Beth, had her sleeves rolled up and hands in the sink, washing out a pair of coffee mugs.
“Do you have something a little bleaker?” Beth asked her friend, pulling up a chair. “I’m in a positively Wagnerian mood right now.”
“Oh, you little heartbreaker, spill,” Annie joked, drying her hands off.
“I told Alex he’s going to be a father, biologically at least.”
– ANNIE’S FALL –
They talked, best friend to best friend. Talked in a way that Beth could never talk with her parents. She unloaded. Every pain, every fear, every hurt and doubt, and Annie listened and said nothing. No judgements.
"And now you feel like a bitch, am I right?"
"Yeah, I guess. I mean he didn't deserve that."
"Worried he's going to hate you?"
"Worried I've ruined his life."
"Ah, hell, he'll get over you."
They were cutting down the same forested slope that they had been cutting down for the last six years. Kicking up the same mulched leaves and crunching the same deadfall. It was routine. Familiar. Safe. Sarah and Ellen ran ahead, giggling and laughing, the threat of being the 'Hairy Princess' making them run even faster between the trees.
"Do you love him?" Annie pressed.
"No," Beth admitted.
"So what's the problem?" Annie said, ducking under a dragging branch. One of her shoes fetched up against something hard and despite her pinwheeling arms she went tumbling. A bramble raked across her cheek, thorns drawing blood. "Shit!" she cried, much to Ellen's horror and Sarah's obvious amusement. Overhead, a jay scolded her.
Beth helped her up. "Nice going."
Annie rubbed her cheek and saw blood on her palm and fingers. She looked around to see what had tripped her. An outcropping of tree roots clawed like crone's fingers in the brown mud. Witches fingers clutching at the last breath of life as it suffocated away.
"You okay?"
"Yeah." She touched her cheek again, feeling out the extent of the damage.
Three inches of root had clawed its way out of the tightly packed earth. Annie walked up to it and kicked it. If not for that last shoulder-shrug of arrogance they might have made it to school none-the-wiser, but she couldn't resist. In the trees the sunlight fell unevenly, straining through the sieve of summer leaves and dotting the floor like the scatter of golden coins. For a second she saw nothing but the dark tree shapes and the slivers of daylight. Then her eyes began to focus. Found something. In one patch of light the golden coins jigged fitfully over a hanging thing.
School and summer, boyfriends and babies, seemed a million miles away all of a sudden.
Annie stumbled forward a step, her legs dragging her towards the hanging shape even as she recognised it for what it was. She felt her insides heave and her knees give way. Annie fell onto her knees, retching.
The body of a man, stripped naked and crawling with black flies dangled from a bough not twenty feet to the left of the tripping root, spinning slowly in the air.
She screamed.
Part Two
Littletown Dreams
- 25 -
Doyle wasn't prepared to admit it, not yet, but faced with the milky-white corpse turning hypnotically against the noose and last night's set-to in The Railway House something was definitely happening in Westbrooke and the only thing he could think of doing was sliding way down under the covers and hoping whatever it was it would pass by with the night.
Facts were facts though: Eddie McMahon was in hospital with a fractured skull and Brian 'Butch' Miller – the leather jacketed slave of Satan – with multiple stab wounds, and now the hanged man.
"Anyone we know?" Sam Ash wanted to know.
Doyle caught sight of a bright flare of light through the trees. Had he been inclined to read Sam's thoughts Doyle would have applauded their analytical ratcheting as they clicked down through the mental cogs but he was lost in thoughts of his own. The men were quiet in the presence of this unnamed death. It wasn't the flawless silence of
graveyards, or even the antiseptic silence of the mortuary – they were voids that sucked up sounds. This was merely a solemn hush; a respect for the nameless deceased coupled with uncertainty. How did it happen? Why?
Elspeth Packer, one of Hexham's three Scene of Crime Officers, was busy snapping photographs with her compact Nikon. Charlie Adams sucked smoke from his roll-up, warming his lungs as he combed the grove for the missing suicide note. Doyle didn't expect the constable to find one.
"I honestly don't know. He looks vaguely familiar but he's not a local. It's hard to tell, you know."
Doyle checked his watch, angling it towards one of the chinks of light. Not for the first time that morning he told himself there had to be better ways of making a living.
Elspeth finished with shooting the ligature around the corpse's bruised neck and the bough's taut knot and turned her Nikon on the neatly folded and stacked clothes sat on the mound of heaped earth beside the slowly spinning cadaver's feet.
Doyle had seen enough to know the world wouldn't stop spinning until they cut the dead man down.
"Okay boys, that's me done," Elspeth called. "You want to cut him down while you wait for the Doc? Or are you going to leave him hanging?"
Doyle stubbed out his own cigarette on the carapace encrusted log he'd made into a stool. "Hanging. You finished with the clothes, too?"
"Yep."
"Great. Charlie, look for his wallet. You never know, we might get lucky and give this fella a name."
"Right-o, Sarge."
Doyle turned his attention back to the petite forensics girl. Her dress was simple, slim fitting faded jeans, white trainers dusted with dirt and a loose cotton blouse. Her cornflower blonde hair was cinched back in a fox-like tail that accentuated the flat planes of her cheeks and the narrowness of her chin. She swapped the compact Nikon for a wide-angled Ricoh fitted with an infinity lens and fired off some general scene shots. Occasionally she homed in on some individual point of reference, narrowing the focus as if seeking out some sharper definition beyond the magnification of the camera's lens. Details, Doyle knew, it was all about details. Seeing the flaws where her ears had been pierced in the dim and distant past, the old policeman smiled to himself. Details.
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