by Bill Hussey
‘Normal. Normal, I suppose.’
‘He hasn’t had any money worries? Asked to borrow anything over his annuity? No? Who were his friends?’
‘I never met any friends.’
‘Any relationship problems? You don’t know. Did he have any stress from university work?’
‘I’ve no idea.’
‘This party he went to, where was it held?’
‘I couldn’t say.’
‘It says here you were unable to give our constable a photograph for the Police National Computer entry,’ Dawn said. ‘We would take care of it, Mrs Malahyde. You’d get it back.’
‘That’s beside the point. I don’t have one.’
‘Are you saying you don’t have a single photograph of Simon that we could take away with us?’
‘I’m telling you I don’t have any photographs of Simon.’
Anne responded to their stares with a simple shrug. The movement, sharp and sudden, almost startled Dawn. It was as if an alabaster statue had come to life.
‘Seems you have quite a cool relationship,’ Jack said.
‘I don’t like Simon,’ she exhaled.
‘Mrs Malahyde, you’ve asked for CID involvement in your son’s case. We don’t usually investigate such disappearances unless there are unusual features. Now, you’ve reported that there’s some new information suggesting Simon might be in danger. We want to help but …’
‘I don’t have any new information. A friend suggested I tell you that, to get the case taken seriously. If Simon has been … hurt by somebody, I want that person caught. Punished … To do penance … I’ve told you what I know. Yes, I want to find Simon, but you’re the detectives, so detect.’ Anne stubbed out her cigarette against the window frame and threw the butt into the courtyard.
‘All right …’ Jack sighed. ‘You told the constable that your son may have gone down to a workshop he has set up in the woods. That he often worked down there during the night? I’d like to take a look at it while Sergeant Howard goes over his room.’
‘Fine. Follow the path to the right of the house and you’ll come to it.’
Anne fished a key from her pocket and held it out.
‘He likes happy families, doesn’t he?’ Anne said, as Jack left the room. She retied her headscarf and smoothed out the crinkles that sat around the crown. ‘Must’ve had a happy childhood, I guess. All balloons and lollypops.’
Dawn said nothing. She thought Anne Malahyde’s observation was probably well wide of the mark.
Jack strode down the path and into the wood. He was glad of the excuse to put some distance between himself and Anne Malahyde. Something about the woman unnerved him. Perhaps it was her cool façade and the sense of resentment that brewed just below the surface. Quickening his pace, he could not shake the sound of her voice echoing in his head.
I don’t like Simon …
It began to slip into tones that he had not heard in over twenty years. These, in turn, shaped words that came to him often in the long nights.
I’m afraid for my son … My son frightens me … What have you done, Jack? Stop them. Please God, make him stop them …
He refused to remember. Instead, he recalled the aftermath. Breathless hospital conversations. Corridors spilling over with family he had never seen before. Aunties and uncles crawling out of the woodwork, hearing the dinner bell of tragedy and coming to feed. And, in the waiting room, the unresponsive arm of his father as he tried to snuggle close. His father’s eyes staring down. Eyes that tried to comfort, but could not help accusing. The doctor’s voice:
‘I’m sorry, Mr Trent, your wife was dead on arrival. Are you sure there were no signs?’
His father, a rational man, could not blame his son for doing something that was impossible, inconceivable. It was obvious, after all, what the ‘signs’ had been. If only she had listened and gone to a doctor sooner. Those superstitious ideas she had started having about their son. That Jack was dangerous. That he had been changed by his accident. That something unnatural was living inside him … Every now and then, however, young Jack Trent had caught a look of curiosity cast in his direction. After all, his father was only human, and even the most logical men sometimes lie awake at night and wonder if impossible things can be true.
Jack walked a little way into the forest and rested his back against an oak. Flashes of white came through the trees and dazzled him. Through shifting leaves, he saw the sun-baked whitewash of the house. Higher up, he caught glimpses of the grey breeze blocks that filled the windows of the suspended wing. The job had been sloppily done, he thought, and wondered at its purpose. He wiped needle heads of sweat from his brow and levered himself upright. As he did so, his palm brushed against the tree. He turned and looked at the trunk. With his forefinger, he traced a knotted valley in the bark. His heart skipped. He snapped his hand back.
These are the trees. No.
The trees from the vision. A coincidence.
The trees from the clearing. Can’t be. Please, God …
The trees from the dreaming ….
He closed his fist into a tight ball. The teeth of the key cut into his palm. Pain brought him back. He stepped onto the path, his mind repeating the fading chant. Wind groaned through the forest, wagged the branches and bristled the sedge. Jack shook himself. It was his mind playing tricks. Had to be. He walked on.
The path ended at the door of the workshop. It was a sizeable tin-roofed shed with a stove chimney and a window curtained with coarse sacking. Jack scraped his shoes before he entered, leaving furrows of mud and the membranes of dead leaves on the step.
The key rasped in the lock. A smell of oil-based paint and sawdust mingled pleasantly in his nostrils. Dust billowed from the centre table. Catching the light, the motes danced in swirls and halos. A vice was clamped to the table but otherwise the surface was clear. Along the back wall, rows of tools hung off custom-made hooks: several types of saw, a file of hammers ascending in size, a pickaxe, a garden fork, a small scythe, a chainsaw. Each piece of equipment was well maintained and everything had its place. On the shelves, brushes without a flake of paint and pencils with sharpened points sat in jam jars. Bottles of white spirit, tins of emulsion and cans of weed killer were all neatly labelled and arranged.
Only a tangle of rope strewn beneath the window seemed out of place. The man who had built those tool racks and sat rubbing turpentine through those brushes was not the type to throw things into corners. Jack crossed the room and pulled back the sack curtain. He picked up the rope and fingered the frayed ends. A bright, sympathetic pain tore through him. The image of a child, its eyes wide, its mouth thick with blood, flashed into his mind. It was screaming, repeating a word over and over, but the scene unravelled in silence. A scene of pain, of dreadful torment.
A sound drew him back to the workshop: a yawn of wood that came from the far end of the cabin. Sunlight from the window set filaments dancing before Jack’s eyes. He caught a sudden movement beyond the glare. Breathing. Creaking footfalls. Eyes which drew the darkness. Knowing that what he now saw was not inside his head, Jack gripped the rope. The thing from his dreams, its face shining like sun-bleached bone, blocked the doorway.
Jack …
His name sighed across stunted teeth. Then the creature closed the door and stepped forward to meet him.
Four
Father Garret stared through veins of smoke. From an unhappy coincidence of lines in the patterned wallpaper, he began to draw out the likeness of a face. He pinched the tip of his cigarette between forefinger and thumb and knocked back a tumbler of scotch, his eyes never leaving the wall. The face was defining. Light and shade sharpened the rudimentary features. It stretched out from the paper. A perfect child’s face, smiling and innocent … Garret’s glass toppled and see-sawed on the desk as he recoiled from the trilling phone. His eyes snapped back to the wall. The face was gone.
Let it ring, he thought, I’ll just pretend I wasn’t here … But He would know.
Garret picked up the receiver. A warm, old-time radio voice crackled down the line. In his mind’s eye, Garret saw the reptilian sway of the head. Saw the bloodless lips purring cruel words. He was asked if he understood and managed to draw enough saliva to answer, ‘Uh-huh.’ The line went dead. Plans had changed, it seemed.
To wallow in the absurdity of it all, he phoned the operator and reported that he had just received a nuisance call.
‘You must be mistaken, sir. No call has been made to this number since yesterday. Is there anything else I can help you with?’
‘Not unless you’re versed in stitching reality back together …? I guess not. Good day.’
Asher Brody. There was still a chance to tell Brody everything. It wasn’t too late: the boy was still alive. Mutilated, scarred both inside and out, but still alive. Yes, Brody would help him. He fumbled with the receiver. It slipped through his grasp and pirouetted an inch above the floor, suspended by its wire. Shame and the urge to survive stopped him retrieving it. He looked up at the wall again and wondered what Man wouldn’t do to survive.
There had been more blood last night. Groaning into consciousness, he had run his tongue through a big pool of it. He had picked reality from dreams and realised that the blood was real, soaking his head like some perverse baptism. He scuttled off the bed, took the red-flecked sheets with him. In the bathroom, he scrubbed his face until his skin cracked. Then the feverishness subsided and he had stared into the mirror.
‘Who would have thought the old man to have so much blood in him?’
Hysterical laughter made his body ache until he reached the study, where he had calmed himself with scotch and cigarettes.
The phone rang again. Garret bolted upright, tipping his chair over as he went. He moved to the far end of the room. Pressed his back against the wall. The ringing stopped. His own voice frightened him.
‘This is Christopher Garret. I’m either dead or otherwise engaged. Remember Coleridge’s advice on epigram, and make yours a dwarfish whole, its body brevity and wit its soul.’
The beep cut in.
‘This is Sergeant Dawn Howard, Father. I wonder if you’re available for a short interview this afternoon. My colleague and I will be round at one, if that’s convenient?’
There was a clatter and click. His thoughts turned to the cellar. Did he have enough morphine? Time to think, time to think …
He turned his face to the wall and traced the shape of the crucifix that used to hang there. The pressure in his head began to build … The face grew again from the wallpaper. It watched him. He was always being watched. Especially when he did bad things. The child in the wall whispered. Garrett laid his ear close to the raised felt and heard:
As I lay me down to sleep
I pray the Lord my soul to keep
And if this priest kills me, well,
I pray the bastard burns in Hell.
A trickle warmed Garret’s lips. He took out a brown-mottled handkerchief and wiped his nose. The face receded back into the paper.
These attacks were becoming more frequent. Sometime soon he was bound to have an episode in public. At the altar? Hearing confession? Holding mass? His tongue might then be freed and he would tell them his bitterest blasphemies, his darkest secret. Jesus, but the cancer was hungry: stalking inside him; using his body against him; making him piss and shit and bleed. But soon it would be over. Soon the promise would be honoured. Then he would be whole and could keep his soul safe from judgement.
He had to focus. The police were coming to question the last person to see Simon Malahyde. He went to the cabinet that reached across the back wall. He took out the Madonna figurine, stripped to a smooth nudity through years of handling, his good Bible and breviary, his rosary, vestments and soutane. Lastly, the crucifix complete with suffering martyr. After a moment’s contemplation, he replaced the cross on the wall.
It was time to go to the cellar. To subdue the child. When the police had gone, Garret would have to go back downstairs and whittle away a little more of his soul. Afterwards, he would come back up into the house. Yet he sensed that a time was coming when he might never leave the cellar again.
Five
Dawn was forced to admit that, having pored over his belongings for nearly an hour, she still had little insight into who Simon Malahyde was. Toys that Jamie would love, a Scalextric set, action figures, the latest PS2 games, were set alongside CDs of seventies rock gods and a harlequinade of dolls housed in a miniature theatre. Then there were the books: the leather bound volume of Dr John Dee’s Liber Logaeth, or Book of Enoch, ‘offering the perfect truth of God through the language of angels’; the woodwork manuals and local history pamphlets; and the beautiful clockwork model of the solar system. Dawn gave Pluto a nudge, setting the orrery in motion, and wondered about the personality behind this varied collection of possessions.
‘Dawn?’
‘Look at this place,’ she began, turning towards Jack. ‘Jesus, what’s wrong?’
His face was expressionless and livid, like a Pierrot mask.
‘Nothing. I … I’m fine.’ He glanced over the room. ‘Kinda strange, all this.’
She stared at him for a moment. ‘Yeah, well, ‘kinda strange’ is your speciality, not mine, so what do you make of it?’
A dumb look of hurt lengthened his face. Flustered, she said, ‘Anyway, I can’t figure it. I can just about believe that a seventeen-year-old boy might keep toys from his childhood stuffed at the back of a wardrobe, but some of this stuff’s brand new. And these books: De Lamiis Liber, ‘Book on Witches’ by Johann Weyer, taken from the original 1577 text. Strange bedtime reading, don’t you think? You know, you really don’t look well. I’ve got an aspirin …’
‘I said I’m fine.’
‘Okay … Look, I’ve just phoned Christopher Garret. Told him we’d be coming over.’
The tip of a branch knocked against the bedroom window. Jack crossed the room and placed his palm against the glass, masking the tapping finger. His gaze fixed on the slowing solar system.
‘So, are we going to turn this back to uniform?’ Dawn asked. ‘If she was lying about new information?’
‘No, it’s pretty quiet for us at the moment. It’ll probably be a short job; we’ll see it through … if you don’t mind?’
‘No. We can’t avoid working together again, I suppose …’
‘So, what did you think about mommie dearest’s little outburst?’ Jack asked.
‘The whole wanting to see someone punished thing? Well, people never imagine that family members go missing of their own accord. If they did, it might mean looking close to home for the cause. It’s easier on the conscience to think they’ve been taken. But that stuff about punishment or … What was the word she used?’
‘Penance.’
‘Sounds religious, don’t you think? That was strange.’
‘Have you found any notes? Letters? Does he have a computer?’
‘No computer, no notes. I’ve been through all the drawers. No keepsakes, no photographs. Nothing with any scent of him on it, if you know what I mean.’
‘Yes,’ Jack said, ‘there is no scent.’
He placed a finger in Pluto’s path, causing the planets to come to an abrupt standstill. The kinetically powered sun pulsed a dull orange and died.
Anne Malahyde was left with assurances that the detectives would be in touch soon. They reached the gate and Jack opened the padlock with a key Anne had given them. The rasp and clang of the batwing arms reverberated through the trees. The car doors slamming were like two gunshots in the stillness. Dawn knew that something was troubling him. She had not seen him this distracted and upset since their last night together.
‘You sure you’re feeling okay?’
‘Where does Christopher Garret live?’ he asked.
Mulch and fern fronds slid from the windscreen as he turned the car in the drive.
During the last days of her holiday, she had imagined this exact
scenario. Thrown together on some case, her defences would falter. Despite her best efforts to hate him, she would find that she still cared. It was all panning out just as she had feared. Why the hell hadn’t she refused point blank to partner him? Stupid question. You can’t give the bastards an excuse to question your professionalism if you’re a woman in this game. Sure, things were getting better, but prejudice in the force was like herpes. It took a bit of self-examination to find it, then it could be treated, but it was surprising how often the problem flared up again.
Yet that wasn’t the only reason why she wanted in on this case. She liked things to make sense. Jack Trent, and the way she still felt about him, made no sense whatsoever. During the two months they had dated, she hadn’t examined the Tortured Man of Mystery act with any real detachment. There was a chance, here and now, to strip away that act. She was certain to find that, as was the case with most single men, only loneliness and low-key desperation lived behind the façade. It would then be easy to dismiss him from her thoughts.
There was just one problem with all that. Deep down, she didn’t believe that it was an act. She looked at him now and wondered how this clumsy man-child, in the space of nine short weeks, had managed to burrow his way under her skin. As a rule, she was always drawn to men who were like her: forthright, clear about what they wanted and how they would get it. She would never have believed that someone like Jack Trent could hold any fascination for her.
Start at the beginning, her case analysis training told her. Sift cause and effect.
She’d transferred from Hounslow three months ago. It sounded corny, and if she’d read such a thing in a book she would never believe it, but Jack Trent had been the first person she met at the station. Fate, karma, kismet, it just went to show that God could do the Hollywood romantic set-up thing pretty well. Now, if only He could nail the endings. Entering the reception area, she had seen Jack trying to persuade the coffee machine to give him coffee. His negotiations weren’t going well, and she had asked directions to DCI Jarski’s office.