Sufferer's Song

by Savile, Steve

  “Oh, that's just great. Who the hell have I upset for all this to come down on me?”

  “Probably no one,” she assured him. “But life's a bitch and that's everything out in the open. It should save us a lot of time asking and dodging needless questions.”

  “Doesn't do you justice, Miss French,” Barney commented, passing the card back for her to slip in her wallet. “Now we’ve got the pleasantries aside, do you want to tell me what you know about what's happening around here?”

  “I’m not sure what I know, but what I am thinking is going to sound pretty strange.”

  “Try me.”

  “You read about the missing fellwalker?” Barney nodded. “The day before yesterday our news desk got a call claiming a positive sighting, so I was sent to follow it up. That was the morning after, when we called in the dead deer. Frank Rogan made the call, but he wasn't around come morning. He'd left his dinner half eaten. The television was on. The door open. I would have reported it yesterday but I just assumed he was already out and about on the farm somewhere and thought nothing of it. We did find a photograph though, and that was plenty interesting all by itself.”

  “I don’t suppose you have this photograph handy?”

  “Somewhere. I expect you've guessed who it's of already.”

  “Call me psychic but I have a feeling you are about to tell me it is the missing fellwalker?”

  “Right first time. With the magic of technology Jason, the guy out in the car, managed to tie it in with a place called Havendene.”

  “That health place where Frank does the gardens?”

  “One and the same. It would seem our missing lady made an unscheduled stopover sometime. Ah, here it is,” Kristy muttered, fishing the folded blow-up of the Polaroid out of her bag.

  There was a knock and Sam Ash stuck his head around the door.

  “Sorry to interrupt, but it’s bad news Barn. Anthony Mason just died.”

  “Oh, Jesus. . . Thanks Sam. Better start treating it as a murder enquiry as of now. Contact Hexham and bring in Newcastle. Start setting up an incident room over the road as soon as Charlie's cleared out enough space. Maps of the area and that sort of stuff, and bring in Lisker's old man. Start rounding up witnesses. Jim Beckett saw most of it. Have him point the way for now. Shit, I don't need any of this.”

  It was Sam, standing over Kristy's shoulder, who saw the Photostat first. “What the hell's going on, Barn?”

  “I wish to God I knew.”

  “Monk Sanders. . .” Sam said, tapping the blurred image of the man's face.

  “You know him?” Kristy wanted to know.

  “You could say that. He's the fella in the ambulance outside. Killed himself in the woods this morning. Bad crack, Barn.”

  “Jesus.”

  “That's about the size of it.”

  “Let me see that. . .”

  Kristy passed Doyle the photograph.

  “Christ almighty. . . I think we need to have a chat with who's who at Havendene because this thing stinks to high heaven.”

  “Mind if I tag along? I'd appreciate getting the news first hand on this one.”

  “Suit yourself, young lady. But I want you to fill me in on everything you know.”

  She did.

  * * * * *

  “Zee plot stinkens,” Jason mimicked, doing his very best to sound like Hercule Poirot. He still managed to come across as a stuffed up Inspector Cleuseau.

  The white squad car bobbed on the horizon, ducking beneath an approaching rise, Doyle obviously in a hurry to get to where he was going before any other nasty little surprises came looking to ruin his already miserable day.

  Kristy drove quietly, looking no further than the road ahead while she reached for the handle to take her from: RITUAL DEER MURDER to SUICIDE, DISAPPEARANCE and MURDER IN LOCAL VILLAGE. It was a bad, hot week. She wanted more facts. Some facts. Any facts. And maybe, just maybe, the next hour would offer up enough to go around.

  - 28 -

  Coming around one of the last bends in the Spine Road, Ben Shelton saw the familiar outline of Mike's service station ahead. He checked his watch, which had stopped just before one, and reckoned on it being around two-thirty, closer to three.

  The rusty old sign with the legend PETROL revolved part a ways around, catching on a jagged splinter of reddish metal, before swinging lazily back on itself. The husk of a clapped out Rover V8, wheels long since gone, stood bricked up by the roll-down door of the workshop, surrounded by a dozen empty steel drums.

  He slowed down and swung off the narrowing road, taking the gravel slipway to the garage's island of three pumps, one diesel, the others petrol. He rolled the Bug to a stop beside the last pump and killed the idling engine. The Estate Agents’ ‘FOR SALE’ sign was nailed to the whitewashed corner that lead round to the car wash. Beneath the clapboard sign Mike had painted the words: KRYPTON TUNING DONE HERE, taking the spelling from Superman's home planet. Ben smiled a wry little smile, half-remembering snippits from a handful of the many times he had tried to get his brother to correct the spelling.

  The door to the office was open, though no light shone within.

  Mike's dusty four-wheel pick-up was parked in front of the small shop-come-office window, blocking his view of inside.

  Pausing halfway across the forecourt, Ben glanced up at the row of first floor windows. A crow swept across his sight in a parabolic arc, diving for some roadside morsel. Something caused Ben's attention to shift to the window he knew opened onto what had been Holly's playroom. He couldn't be sure what he had seen, or whether indeed he had seen anything - or anyone - but he instinctively felt that he had seen a quick movement, almost furtive, as though someone watching from above had let the curtain drop and fall back into place. Only the playroom had no curtain to drop; it, like the other windows, was shuttered with slats of weathered timber. Only a sooty smear beneath the window frame, where the fire had taken hold and the painters hadn't thought to cover over, peeked through.

  Ben walked around the pick-up and into the office. The sign on the glass door was turned to show: CLOSED. He walked inside anyway, calling out his brother's name. He took a Pepsi from the standing cooler, popping the tab and swallowing deeply. The office was filled with a clutter of cardboard boxes and tea-chests.

  The clock on the wall above the till confirmed his second guess of two-thirty with its own estimate of two-forty.

  One of the walls held a rack of shadowy shapes that he knew to be car parts, spark plugs, fan belts, spare wiper blades, that sort of stuff, while another was lined by the counter and a long confectionary tray. The doorway through to the upstairs flat was behind the counter.

  Hearing the muffled sounds of footsteps above him, Ben called out again.

  Again, there was no answering shout from Mike.

  “Mike? It's me, Ben,” he called, ducking under the counter. The door through to the stairway was already open, the stockroom beyond in a darkness more complete than the office for the shutters drawn over its windows. The black and white chessboard linoleum stopped just before the door, giving way to bare boards. Some had been replaced after the fire, showing now like teeth in the stairway's gap-toothed grin.

  He walked quickly to the staircase and began to climb, the gloom swallowing him as he walked carefully up the flight of wooden stairs. Much of the upper flat had been emptied, becoming little more than a haunt for spiders, the odd family of bats and an occasional owl and there was that musty, closed up smell Ben knew well enough.

  He bridged the landing and went through to the lounge, the floorboards creaking theatrically as he crossed the room, threading his way through boxes of forgotten debris. Dust and cobwebs had reclaimed their territory here at least, but the unpacked items were still easily identifiable as nick-nacks running to just before Christmas of last year. Ben had spent most of the Christmas break cleaning and boxing away the contents of this room, and knew only too well the sad end to the stories each and every object had to tell.


  No sign of Mike, he back-tracked along the hallway, stopping before the closed door of Holly's playroom, unwilling to barge in on his brother's private grief.

  No light snaked under the foot of the door, though undeniable sounds of movement came from within.

  He opened the door.

  The air was filled with a thick, heavy silence, the sort of silence in which film directors put drowning men, mouthing words the audience cannot hear or understand. The room was dark and still and stiflingly warm. For a moment only, Ben found himself expecting to find Holly sat astride her rocking horse. Reaching out a hand, he flicked on the light switch, dispelling the unwanted illusion.

  Mike was sat in the centre of the floor, cross-legged, Holly's Christmas presents around him like a circle of plastic standing stones, wrapping paper torn and tossed aside. Ben recognized some of his niece's older toys as well; faceless dolls, their hair singed and shrivelled, faces burned away by the blistering heat of the conflagration, the doll's pram, the blind rocking horse, paint blistered and charred.

  Mike was putting together a wall of red and yellow Lego. Pieces of plastic lay scattered in a pool between his legs. A box of melted wax crayons had been opened, spilling around an empty bottle of Vermouth and four empty Brown Ale bottles.

  Though the room had been repainted in an attempt to take away the blackened memories of one cold December night, the contents left behind looked like survivors of some nuclear catastrophe, melted and burned in many cases beyond recognition.

  Slants of gradually reddening light made it through the uneven chinks in the window boards, casting diagonal bars of illumination across the floor.

  Ben stayed in the doorway.

  “I thought she might want to play,” he heard Mike whisper aloud, slowly turning. Tears filled his puffy eyes. “But she won't talk to me anymore. . .” He dropped the Lego, kicking out in frustration. The bottle of Vermouth went skittering across the wooden floor, its neck shattering against the wall. “Angel,” he called. 'Please come and play with daddy. . . Daddy's ever so lonely without you, and he has lots of new toys for you. . . See?” He looked at Ben, a faint mewling sound clogging in his throat. He swallowed. “Why won't she come and talk to me?” He almost screamed this last, clutching at the sides of his head painfully. 'WHY BEN? WHY?”

  Ben sank to his knees, wrapping his arms around his crying brother, soothing his shudders. “I don't know,” he said softly.

  “I loved her so much. . .”

  “I know.”

  “I'm so lonely,” Mike said, blinking away his tears. “I don't want to live like this. . . I don't want it anymore, Ben. I want to curl up and die.”

  “Please don't talk like that.”

  “I want to die, little brother. I want to die.”

  “Please don't,” Ben repeated, his voice thick with anguish. “We can beat this thing together. I know we can. I've got some money, we can start to clean this place up a bit, it won't look so bleak then, I promise.”

  “No,” Mike said simply.

  “I want to help.”

  “I know you do, but I don’t want to be helped, Ben. I hurt so much. I hurt everywhere. I'm coming apart.”

  “We can beat it,” Ben persisted, not knowing what else to do or say.

  “No, we can't. I don't want to play the game anymore. I give in. Happy now?”

  “Mike.”

  “Just leave me, please. . .”

  Ben hovered, uncertainly. “I'll see you back at the house, then?”

  “Please. . .”

  - 29 -

  “Pull up short of the gates will you?” Jason said, leaning back in his seat to stretch an aching shoulder. “I want to stretch my legs while you folks talk to the deadly doctor.”

  Kristy said nothing, but slowed, changing down.

  Thick undergrowth, trees bushes and wild marram crowded either side of the road, the few gaps in its almost subterranean clutch almost tenebrous in their gloom. The place had an eerie feeling of perpetual dusk about it that wasn't shifting with the hanging sun.

  The gates had to come soon, the high, old-stone wall, though it looked to have grown with the trees themselves as another natural part of the forest, could not go on forever. Twisted branches from trees on the right loomed over both road and wall, reaching down like gnarled fingers to snag unwary ramblers - or fell walkers, he added for his own benefit.

  The squad car disappeared through an opening in the near distance, the forest closing over it protectively thereafter.

  “Right here,” he told Kristy, unbuckling his harness. He was out before the car had fully finished rolling, skipping along in pace. “Quarter of an hour, back here, okay?”

  “I'll be here.”

  He didn't wait to watch her drive away. The wall was virtually smothered by shoots of organic life. “Strangest kind of Polyfilla I've ever seen,” he muttered to himself, testing his hold on a medium-thick branch that would give him enough height, hopefully, to snag the top of the twelve foot wall with more than just fingertips.

  He hauled himself up, feet running in the air as he made the lift. He had his chest on the strut, then his waist, and then he was struggling to twist around into the sitting position.

  Thankfully, the trees carried on at least part of the way into the grounds of Pilgrim's Hall. He could, however, see the top of the wall, No barbed wire and as far as he could tell, no broken glass to worry about. That didn't discount the possibility of an electronic warning system of some sort, but that was going to be a bridge he'd have to cross if and when he came to it. Right now, he had all the cover between the road and house any would-be intruder could ask for, and less than fifteen minutes to make it pay for him.

  The top of the wall was four feet higher than his perch, three feet further away, making it an easy enough stretch. He scrambled over the wall, lowering himself as far as his arms would allow, and then dropped the last four jarring feet to the floor. As an afterthought, he hoped to God there weren't any dogs.

  * * * * *

  The rusted iron gates, no less impregnable than the forest itself, were cranking back for Doyle's squad car when she finally caught up.

  As she knew they would, the letters worked into the wrought-iron arch above the gates declared: HAVENDENE.

  She slowed to a stop behind the policeman's car.

  Tall, weathered columns hinged the massive gates, decayed stone creatures mounted on both, their blank eyes glaring down at the cars, their lichen-frothing mouths wide with sharks teeth and soundless snarls. And there was the gates themselves, where the body of the deftly crafted pilgrim was being stretched into a painful star, corner to corner, hands and feet. Two hundred years in the latticework had more than adequately oxidized the unfortunate soul.

  The gateman took both sides back until they jammed against shallow banks, grating an arc through the uneven surface of shale, and then stood to one side as they drove on through. He closed the gates once more behind them. The trees carried on in a self contained forest as dense as any Kristy had been in before.

  “A regular little fortress,” she found herself thinking as she followed the squad car out of the trees. A good twenty acres of forest must have been felled at some time, for no other reason than to make way for the grounds, fountains and hedges.

  A second, less grand gateway, this one fenced in by tall hedgerows, opened on to the wide expanse of the croquet lawn. This one confirmed the building ahead as: HAVENDENE. A rolling slope of grass and then a placid blue lake stood off to the right, a sparsely wooded fringe and island pagoda framing it. But Kristy's attention was fairly dragged back to the building itself, an irregular hodge-podge of styles that were principally Tudor but eccentrically castellated and plastered in Roman cement, though they had apparently been added to over the years with little consideration for aesthetics.

  Pilgrim's Hall was nevertheless hugely impressive as it was.

  She drew the car to a halt down from the stone steps that climbed ten feet to th
e porch and the main door, trying to tally her recollection of the picture with the reality as it was before her.

  It was difficult. Rogan must have taken the photograph from over by the pagoda, which would explain her screwed up depth perception. She swivelled to look back over her shoulder at the second gate with its backward declaration: ENEDNEVAH, just as it was in the photograph.

  Brent Richards was standing on the steps, obviously waiting for them. He was as impeccably tailored as Kristy remembered him. He was the kind of skeletally thin man jokers generally called ‘Bones’ while laughing at their own hilarity. He wore conventional dark-rimmed glasses and shaved halfway up his ears. He began to descend the stairs, summoning a tight-lipped smile to join his empty look of professionalism.

  He met Doyle halfway, offering a hand in an economical gesture straight out of the medical How to Win Patients And influence people manual.

  Kristy wasn't impressed.

  * * * * *

  Jason hunkered down, trying to peer in every direction at once, his imagination turning the dark tree trunks caught out of the corner of his eye into loping dogs.

  He waited, listening; sure more than once he heard someone approaching.

  C'mon Kelso, get a grip, he thought, scolding himself for even thinking the low bushes nearby were anything like animals crouched in waiting.

  At the edge of the trees he stopped again, dropping as before into a low crouch. He scanned the low slopes that obscured much of the house's lower storeys, looking for any sign of movement, studying one spot for three heartbeats before moving on, his eyes going back to it on a second sweep to see if anything had altered.

  He ran the fifty yards to the crest of the slope in a low stumbling crouch that did little for his speed but, he hoped, kept his head beneath the line of sight. At the crest he dropped flat to his belly. The slope cut away sharply for twenty feet then less so for a further ten until it ran into the blue of the heat shimmering lake. Light slowly rolled across its surface, the ripples shifted by a mild breeze. The glare of the sun made it impossible for him to judge the depth of the water without going down to check it out close up.