* * *
Dickie watched the killer disappear. At his side, Henderson patted his back in an awkward, avuncular manner.
“It’s over.”
“Yeah, we solved the case.” Sara was glowing, and not just because her career had received a massive boost. “Didn’t we, Hun”
“Did we ever, gorgeous.” Guy swept her up in a kiss.
“Rule number four,” Dickie barked.
The couple looked puzzled.
“He means: Get a fucking room,” Henderson supplied.
The couple blushed.
“Will Ally be OK testifying?” Henderson asked, serious now.
“After beating the shit out of that little prick, what do you think?”
“Yeah, she’s like her mum, got hidden depths.”
Dickie was glad Rachael was doing well, would even entertain her getting in touch with Ally, if that’s what Ally wanted, but Henderson was wrong. Ally was nothing like Rachael – there was nothing hidden about her.
He entered the courtroom, took his seat and stared at the killer. He wondered who Christina Palmer took after, and what else lay hidden beneath her innocent, childish facade.
~~~~~~~~
About the author
Cathy Cole lives in Northern Ireland, with her husband and two sons, and a dog who thinks he’s her third son. She loves writing – both short stories and novels – and is currently hard at work on her next novel.
No Privacy
Kirsty Ferry
Vanessa pushed her hands deep into her pockets and ducked her head into the biting wind. It was the thirty-first of October, and the chill of Halloween was seeping into the atmosphere. It was easy to imagine ghosts and witches, vampires and demons clawing at the veil that divided the living from the dead. The footpaths were deserted here and the street lamps gave off a sickly, sodium glow. Orange light pooled into the glossy black of the rain-soaked pavements, bleeding into the gutters and staining the edges of the scrubby bushes on the grassed over verges she passed. Jagged, wire fences towered above her, and here and there the shells of disused factories loomed up out of the shadows.
Vanessa walked alone looking neither left nor right. She was used to this area. She knew she just had to hurry through this estate and at the end of it, where the trunk road into the town met the lane she took to go home, she could relax.
Her home lay up the muddy lane, an end cottage in a row of three. Built for railway workers sometime within the last century, it was a shabby little place with one bedroom upstairs and a general purpose room downstairs. The bathroom was a crude extension to the house, leaning in from the yard, keyed into the old, blackened brickwork. The bathroom smelled of damp and the shower head rattled twice a day when the goods train hurtled past. The other cottages were derelict and nobody had any reason to come near them.
It was not so long ago that someone was murdered in the lane. The detectives who came out to see Vanessa suggested that she took extra care coming home at night and maybe spent a few nights away if she was worried. Vanessa had shaken her head and said, really, she was fine. One of the detectives had pressed a card into her hand anyway and told her to call him immediately, should she have any concerns. She thanked him and when he had left, she threw the card into the waste paper bin. Vanessa hurried down through the industrial estate, remembering the murdered man in the lane. She shuddered. He was so close to her house – things could have turned out very differently. When she reached the end of the road that led up her lane, she relaxed. The lane was deserted – a black tunnel beneath the trees. Branches reached across the space above her and intertwined themselves. In summer, walking home, she was dappled with green and golden light; in winter, the branches formed a stark, skeletal maze which let starlight and moonlight drip through their wizened fingers. Vanessa paused, and felt around in her pocket for her door key. This was part of her routine. She needed to have the key in her hand, ready to push into the lock and hear the welcoming click as the door creaked open. Swollen with dampness and hanging on old, rusting hinges, the door opened straight into the downstairs room, and once it was closed behind her, she knew she was safe.
Vanessa felt around for the key and could not find it. She wanted to close her fingers around the cold metal, her own private talisman. She dug deeper and deeper, pushing bitten fingernails into the lining of her pockets, pulling at loose threads and eventually her forefinger slipped into a hole which gaped open at the hem of her coat, just big enough for her key to fall through.
She swore and turned on her heels. She began to retrace her steps along the road, back towards the artificial lights. She peered at the ground as she walked, hoping to see a sliver of metal; but she saw no key nestling in the gutter or balanced on the grid of a drain.
She squeezed through a gap in a wire mesh fence, which led onto an old car park. Burnt out vehicles used to be dumped here before the police barricaded the entrance. Vanessa knew how to wriggle past the mesh, and often walked through this car park. Other people had followed her tracks and the metal was now gnarled and twisted, sticking out ready to bite into your flesh as you pressed past it. Vanessa had already been in this area once tonight.
She stood in the concrete square and rummaged in her drawstring bag. She took a tiny pen-light out of it, and swept the beam in a golden arc across the wet ground. A glint caught her eye, and she knelt down to investigate further. It was a ring pull, lying in a dark, sticky puddle. She frowned and scanned further afield with her torch. There was what looked like a heap of old clothing nearby, and Vanessa shone her torch over towards it. Nothing. She sighed, and dropped the torch into her bag, tugging the strings closed. She took one last look at the car park, and gave a cursory glance to the heap of clothing. She headed back towards the gap in the fence.
Vanessa was just about to squeeze back out onto the street, when she heard the soft thud of footsteps echoing through the night. A figure was coming towards her. A large, bulky shape: a man. She stopped dead in her tracks. The footsteps grew louder and more hurried. Vanessa’s heart began to thump loudly and she could hear it banging against her chest. The man came closer and she ducked behind the wall, out of his line of sight. She was thankful that the fog was rolling in; it wrapped its grey arms around her and hid her. She waited until the footsteps died away and she slipped out from behind the wall.
She followed him, the soft, leather soles of her boots making no noise. Gradually, she began to catch up with him. She opened her bag, and fumbled around in it. Maybe the key was in there after all. The man stopped. He began reaching inside his coat pocket and brought out something small and rectangular – a mobile phone. He turned around, holding the phone to his ear and Vanessa pulled her hand out of her bag. She kept walking. The man started to walk in the direction he’d come from, back towards her.
Vanessa put her head down and hurried past him, not looking at him. The fog was perfect Halloween weather. Everyone wore masks and disguises at that time of year. The fog was Vanessa’s disguise. She felt a little violated, seeing the man down here in what she deemed as ‘her’ estate. The only people that generally used this short cut were drunks or tramps – people of no consequence. Maybe a stranger would wander through, a stranger lost on the outskirts of the city and unsure of where they were. Occasionally, someone would stray down here that had the fond idea of redevelopment. They would stand on the path or in the middle of the road and look around, like this man had done. They would inexplicably shiver, and decide not to bother; the place had a strange atmosphere. Then they would turn and go, as this man had also done.
* * *
A few days before that, as rain had battered the window of his office, the detective who had pressed his card into Vanessa’s hand looked through his case files. He fingered the file regarding the murder in the lane. He remembered the girl who had called in the murder.
“There’s a dead man in the lane outside my house,” she had said. Her voice was stilted and overly polite, as if she was unused to s
peaking to people.
“Let me take some details,” Detective Inspector Harrison had said, pulling a pad of paper towards him and flipping it to a clean page. “First of all, what’s your name?”
There was a beat, then a defensive,
“Why?”
Harrison stared at the telephone.
“Because it would help me to know who I’m talking to. So I can take the details.”
“Can’t I just give you my address?” she had said. “Then you can just come and take him away.”
“It doesn’t work like that,” Harrison said patiently. In his mind, he was thinking “another crackpot.” Out loud, he repeated, “Your name, please?”
“Vanessa.”
“Thank you. And your surname?”
“You don’t need that. I live at 1 Railway Cottages. Please come and take him away. He’s starting to rot.”
The phone went dead. Harrison held it as the dial tone hummed in his ear. Starting to rot? For Chrissake, how long had the guy been there? he wondered.
* * *
The team were there within the hour. As the girl had said, the body had started to decompose and the October storms had flayed the clothing on his body so the tattered rags waved in the air like so many banners. Or so many ragged fingers, depending on how you looked at it.
“Your guess, Tony?” Harrison said, standing beside the pathologist. Tony looked up at him.
“At least a week,” he said screwing his face up in disgust. “It’s in plain sight. How come she never reported it earlier?” Harrison shrugged, and pushed his hands deeper into his pockets.
“Any ID on the body?” Harrison asked.
“None. Wallet’s gone. Nothing else on him. Just his keys.”
Harrison nodded.
“Thanks, Tony,” he said.
* * *
Crime Scene Investigators spent hours digging around the woods and the lane with no success. Whoever had done this had covered their tracks pretty well. Harrison noticed the girl watching them through the windows of her cottage. He beckoned to his partner, Detective Constable Rogers, then walked away from the crime scene and knocked on the front door. The girl cracked open the door and peered at the detective through the gap. Her gaze slid over his shoulder, taking in Rogers as well.
“May we come in?” Harrison asked. The girl paused for a moment then opened the door fully. Harrison stepped into the sparsely furnished cottage and Rogers squeezed in behind him. The men seemed to fill the room. Vanessa stared at them out of wide, cornflower blue eyes and Rogers smiled at her encouragingly. Harrison didn’t waste any time on pleasantries.
“Why did you wait so long to report the body?” he asked her.
“I don’t know. I don’t think I realised he was dead. You sometimes get tramps and drunks around here – and the kids mess on near Halloween and leave all sorts lying around. Last year there was a chicken spiked on the fencepost over there. Dead cats and stuff. Roadkill. And they set fireworks off across in the woods for Guy Fawkes. I hate this time of year. I thought it was a pile of old clothes. Or a guy or something they’d left out to put on a bonfire. There was a mannequin hanging by a noose on my tree a while ago. I guess I just thought…” Then she burst into tears. “That poor man, that poor, poor man. What happened to him? If I’d heard anything… I could have stopped it…” Rogers apparently felt sorry for the girl.
“Don’t worry, if you’d heard anything and gone out, you could have been the one lying there, not him,” he said.
This brought fresh tears into the blue eyes and Vanessa sobbed and sobbed until the two detectives realised they would get nothing more out of her that night.
* * *
On Halloween night itself, the night she had lost her key, Vanessa reached the end of her street and broke into a run. She pounded up the lane, past her house and, flicking on her pen-light, scrambled through the broken door of the cottage on the far end of the row. She scraped her leg on the rough bricks that were stacked haphazardly in what used to be the hallway and tossed a plank of wood out of the way. She climbed over to the old fireplace and dislodged more bricks. She felt around inside the flue for her spare key. She poked her fingers into a hole and curled them around a shiny, new one. She pulled the key out and began to replace the bricks. She had realised it was a good hiding place quite some time ago. Very useful for her spare keys.
Vanessa heard a noise from the back room – a scraping and a thud as the old wooden door was pushed aside. She paused and listened. She heard a footstep. She dropped her key into her pocket and stared at the gap where the door should be. She flashed her light briefly towards the back of the room and she made out a black mass, a shadow of some description, moving towards the door. She backed away towards the hallway, and slipped out the front, her heart beating fast. She hoped whatever it was hadn’t realised she was there. She had been truthful when she told the detectives she didn’t like this time of year. Too many people gravitated to the woods and railway behind her house. There was supposed to be the ghost of a man who had hanged himself in the exact same cottage she had just left. His distraught girlfriend had allegedly thrown herself in front of a passing train when she discovered the body. Would-be ghost hunters loved Vanessa’s street and Halloween was an exciting time of year for them. But Vanessa hated the disruption to her routine.
Vanessa slid the new key into her lock, and after the door had clicked shut, the figure in the derelict house came out of the shadows. Moonlight trickled through the old rafters, silhouetting the figure bent over the stack of bricks. Then it moved into the old living room, where it stood next to the fireplace.
* * *
The next day, All Saints Day, Vanessa was awoken by a knocking on her door. Her first reaction was annoyance. Nobody ever came down here. She blatantly ignored the knocks on the door at this time of year when groups of ghost hunters came to ask her for information and kids yelled “Trick or Treat!” through her letterbox, banging it again and again whilst whooping with laughter. The kids would run away across the railway tracks and she would be left simmering with anger, wishing Halloween was over and she could be left in peace once more.
Vanessa disregarded the knocking that morning as being more of the same. Then it became more persistent. A voice called through the letterbox,
“Open the door. This is the police.” Vanessa’s stomach flipped. “How dare they?” she hissed to the empty room and stormed down the stairs. “I never asked them to come back.”
“Go away!” she shouted through the door at the person who was waiting outside. “This is private property.”
“Come on Vanessa. Open up. Or would you prefer it if I called you Elizabeth Davies?” the voice answered.
“No!” Vanessa shrieked. She grabbed the closest thing to hand: a carving knife, which she raised in the air as she wrenched the door open.
Harrison was too quick for her. His hand flew out and he grabbed her wrist, smashing it off the door frame until she dropped the knife. He twisted her arm until she sank to her knees sobbing.
“Elizabeth Davies. You are under arrest for the murder of Joe Brooks and Alan Watson…” He continued to read Vanessa her rights as he charged her for murder.
* * *
Vanessa howled and sobbed and denied it. But Harrison knew better. It seemed that this abandoned industrial estate was Vanessa’s own private hunting ground – her own space. Nobody came to check the car parks or industrial tanks buried deep in the earth. Security guards had long since stopped patrolling the area; CCTV was non-existent. Joe Brooks had apparently been taking a shortcut across the railway into the woods. If he’d stayed in the estate, then he might well have survived that night. He must never have seen the flash of silver that had taken his life.
After he was dead, or maybe even as she stabbed him, Vanessa must have lost her key – the key they had found next to the body. It was identical to the spare keys hidden behind the fireplace in the derelict cottage. Forensic analysis had confirmed that bl
ood found on the bricks by the entrance to the old cottage and on the jagged wire fence near the car park belonged to Vanessa. The drawstring bag and knife had been safely hidden behind a loose brick in the fireplace of the dilapidated house; Harrison had found them as he had investigated the looser, cleaner bricks in the abandoned cottage the previous night. He had received a phone call from Rogers before that, as Rogers wandered through the estate trying to retrace the steps of Joe Brooks when he found the body of Alan Watson.
When the team had reached it, they’d found another door key, caught in the folds of the coat. The man had been stabbed – the same pattern as the body in the lane. Again, the door key had matched the one found on Joe Brooks.
* * *
Harrison had remembered Elizabeth’s eyes more than anything. He was a rookie at the time, working on a murder case. The murder had taken place in an alleyway behind an old hotel, and Harrison had been haunted by a picture of the suspect for years. She had been a homeless girl, apparently sleeping in a corner of the abandoned foyer. Cornflower blue and innocent, those eyes had taken in everyone on the case, just as they had taken in Rogers. So Elizabeth Davies had escaped that time. But Vanessa, or Elizabeth, or whatever she chose to call herself now, wouldn’t escape this time. Inspector Harrison would make sure of that.
~~~~~~~~
About the author
Kirsty Ferry won the English Heritage/Belsay Hall National Creative Writing Competition in 2009 and has had short stories and articles published in magazines such as People’s Friend, Ghost Voices, Vintage Script and The Weekly News. Short stories also appear in various anthologies including Bridge House’s Devils, Demons and Werewolves and Voices of Angels, The Best of Cafe Lit 2011, Whitby Abbey Pure Inspiration and Wyvern Publications Mertales and Fangtales. 'Kirsty is also the author of the YA paranormal novel The Memory of Snow, now available on Amazon.
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