by Adam Nevill
The man she had spoken to, at the third local building firm she had called, came back to the phone. ‘Today, you say? Garage, yeah?’
‘Yes, today.’
‘We can get someone round to look at it Friday. But we can’t start ’til next week earliest.’
‘No. It has to be today. Do you know anyone else who can do this for me?’
‘You can try Wellings.’
‘Already tried … Tools! If you can tell me what tools I will need, then I will buy them. Hire them. Do it myself.’
‘I wouldn’t recommend that, miss. Garage floor, you say? Well, most of ’em need chipping drills. Jackhammer too. Cus the concrete will be thick, see. Plus you might have wires running underneath the cement. Pipes you don’t want to break either. You’ll need to find that out first, then cut a section round ’em with a breaking chisel in a rotary hammer. Whole floor will need a saw, grinder too. It’s a big job, love. There’s only the lad and me here, and we both gotta get up Shaldon way.’
A cold disappointment seemed to press her weight harder and further into the surface of the counter. The idea of demolishing the garage floor suddenly seemed ludicrous after this sudden intrusion of technical information, this insertion of reality into her frantic, irrational thoughts. She swallowed the despair that wanted to surge into her mouth; the prickly frustration that electrified her fingers, made her want to scratch her face and tug her own hair. She was so thwarted she wanted to hurt herself.
‘Sorry, love. Nothing we can do today. But if you give me the address, I’ll get the lad to come up Friday.’
‘No. Not Friday. I’ll give you two grand each, today. If you can get here today and smash that floor out, I’ll give you two grand each. Just the floor. Today. The floor, that’s all.’ Right down, right down deep.
There was a long silence at the other end of the phone, which she accounted for as the time required for the builder to decide on her mental health. ‘Something was lost in there, you say? In the garage floor when it was laid?’
‘That’s right.’
‘Jewellery or something like that?’
‘Not exactly, but something that needs to be found. And fast. Today, while it’s still light. Will I see you later, Mr Finney?’
‘I suppose I could shift things around a bit. If it’s that important.’
‘Matter of life and death. That’s how I see it.’
‘There’ll have to be a deposit.’
‘I’ll pay you up front. Right now with a credit card. Or today in cash if the bank authorizes that amount. I’m good for it.’
‘Cash is better for this kind of job.’
EIGHTY-NINE
Josh remained quiet. He sat at the kitchen counter, staring into the coffee cup between his hands. Amber could see him through the window from where she stood beside the dusty, gritty paving stones on the driveway, where the pile of rubble had built up throughout the day: a mound of broken concrete, gravel, sand, crushed rock, wooden boards, wire mesh from the vapour barrier, disconnected PVC pipes and severed wires that had been drilled, hammered, chiselled, and cut from the floor of her garage. The builders had kindly taken most of the debris with them.
Before the remains of a perfectly good floor had been shipped off, she had raked through the rubble as it built up from noon until seven p.m. Even wheeled the barrow from the excavation to empty it onto the drive. In between making endless cups of tea for the two men who dug out her garage two foot deep, and then as far into the soil as was safe before subsidence became an issue, she had sorted through and sifted the rubble until her fingers bled. Picked up each grey or discoloured stone to make sure it was not bone – a metatarsal or finger joint encased in cement – while the ache in her head had gradually grown to match, and then exceed, the pain in her lower back from being stooped over for hours. She had cuts on her knees from crawling around in the wreckage while checking all the white bits she could find to make sure they were not premolars.
Occasionally, her frantic antics were watched by the workmen. Jeff Finney, the older man she had spoken to on the phone, and whom she had paid, had often caught the younger man staring at Amber while she scrabbled about on all fours, and sometimes attacked the larger chunks of concrete to break them apart with a hammer they had loaned to her. And when the builder noticed his young assistant gawping at the crazy, dirty girl, with cement dust wiped through the sweat on her face, he would whistle quietly and nod his head at the ground to draw his lad’s attention back to the job in hand.
Unable to watch the destruction of her garage, Josh had gone back to the caravan site to meet the police. Then returned to the farmhouse and sat in the garden with a newspaper, or more often than not, staring across the maize field beyond her garden. Amber guessed he had been thinking of what to do with her now that she had gone crazy – or crazier.
The sun was sinking. The security lights on the front of the house illuminated the front drive for as long as Amber remained there, like a flood-lit fool. She moved slowly to her car and sat down with her back resting against the side and looked at the paving between her feet.
She didn’t hear him approach, but Josh came and sat down next to her. His knee joints cracked. For a long time he never said anything, just tapped the back of her hand with the base of a cold glass bottle. Beer, and probably the best beer she had ever drunk; half a bottle of chilled, fizzing, hoppy loveliness taken in a long draught that slipped down her throat and made her burp. ‘Excuse me,’ she said, as an afterthought.
Josh smiled. Then sipped from his own bottle.
Amber gazed at the house. ‘I’ll have to get a bag together. Find us a hotel.’
Josh turned his head to look at her but never spoke.
‘I can’t stay here.’
‘This a temporary measure?’
Amber shook her head. ‘Permanent.’
‘Once the garage has been put back together, you’ll get a good price. Far more than you paid for it. Sell it to a rock star.’
‘No one can live here. Not any more.’
‘You are kidding, right?’
‘Can’t risk it.’
They sat in silence for another ten minutes and finished their drinks.
Josh swallowed a mouthful of beer. ‘No body. No box.’
Amber shrugged. She didn’t even know how Fergal might have planted the relics, the trophies. She’d assumed they were inside the curtained wooden box, that it was some kind of shrine she was unable to imagine in too much detail because it upset her so much. But as the rubble mounted up and the soil revealed itself to be harmless, she’d begun to think that he might have scattered the hair and bones like seeds, for some hellish crop to germinate later, fertilized by her own presence inside the house; scattered bits of dead women, and her boyfriend’s missing teeth, all through the house’s foundations or inside wall cavities. It was possible. She didn’t know for certain, but if her hunch was correct about the trophies carrying the presences of their former owners to the farmhouse, the entire house could be contaminated.
Or perhaps the remains were out there, in the fields. Or under the driveway. Or buried beneath the garden; hadn’t she dreamed of an excavation? They could be anywhere. She could spend a lifetime digging, but she did not have a lifetime. She had little idea of what was coming next, coming for her, but she doubted she would last more than a couple of nights at the farmhouse. Too much more of this and her mind would go out with a flash anyway, like a wet circuit. And if she were wrong about how the influence reanimated, and it all started again someplace new …
She looked up at her beautiful home. The whole thing would have to come down. Amber felt her head swim at the thought of it, then thought she might throw up; she had drunk the beer too fast on an empty stomach.
Josh got to his feet and went and stood at the lip of the driveway, looked down into the foundations of the garage. ‘The builders who poured the concrete. They would have seen the box.’
Under the strong overhead light, the
scene reminded her of the garden in Edgehill Road, revealed under the portable police lights as detectives sifted through every inch of soil looking for more evidence, more bodies.
‘How much soil came out?’ Josh asked without turning his head.
‘Loads. As much as they dared. A few feet down. Any more would have created subsidence.’
Josh nodded his head, whistled. He said, ‘four grand’ under his breath, but Amber still heard him. He picked up a length of copper pipe the builders had left behind, and even dismantled carefully so she could reuse it.
‘I’m going to get a shower, mate.’
Josh nodded. ‘Right.’
‘Then I’ll call a place in town. Pack a bag. Find us somewhere to stay. I’ll spring for dinner.’
Josh stared into the garage, but didn’t answer.
NINETY
Amber was never sure what happened first, because everything was so unexpected and seemed to happen at once.
She was standing with her face thrust into the shower’s hot cascade, to blast away the cement dust and sweat from her skin and hair. And only while under the vigorous beating of the hot water did she notice the brief dimming of the white electric light inside the wet room. At first she assumed the spotlights in the granite walled room had flickered.
A swift glance over her shoulder convinced Amber there was nothing wrong with the ceiling lights, because they were bright enough to briefly outline the silhouette of the second occupant inside the wet room.
Without making a sound, whoever had just stepped into the room had curled the steam behind them into a slipstream, like the tail of a large serpent. So the dimming had been caused by the passing of a shape, or a person, into the shower; a swift entrance that had interfered with the light that fell into the space from the bathroom proper. And the realization she was no longer alone in the confines of the stall nearly shut her heart down.
The dark walls of the wet room were obscured by clouds of steam; the far wall behind the shower head that housed the black marble toilet was invisible. What part of her mind that panic left available was filled with the image of poor Kelly Hughes’s polythene-draped, near weightless bones being carefully raised from the darkness of the bathroom floor of 82 Edgehill Road.
Amber turned around and crossed both arms over her breasts. Hot water continued to batter her head and shoulders, and now dispersed an aerosol of water over her face. Within the swirls and billows of steam that filled the narrow rectangle, she thought, and then was certain, and then relieved that she had been mistaken, but then dreadfully certain again, that she could see a shape. A silhouette stood no more than four feet in front of her, in line with the door she would need to escape through.
‘Josh,’ she whispered. She hoped it was Josh, despite the terrible discomfort his presence would create in the unlikely event that he had intruded upon her shower.
The figure vanished, or seemed to melt in a torrent of vapour, and then the tatty outline of a head remerged from out of the steam. What she thought, or imagined, was a pair of large spectacle lenses glinted. And even in this place of cleanliness, of fresh water, a space redolent with the scents of gels, lotions and shampoos, she was struck by the hot odour of the thing that had come into the wet room, which was not Josh.
The dimming of the light, the suggestion of the male presence inside the dark, steamy room, and the distant calling of her name from below, which she only realized later was Josh calling for her attention downstairs, all transpired within a few seconds.
And then Amber was coughing to clear her sinuses of the fungal stench of unclean male flesh that polluted the steam and billowed about her face. It was as if the decomposing clothes of a long unwashed vagrant had just been scissored from pallid flesh in a hot, unventilated room: cattle hormone-harsh, the sulphur of swine, the vinegar of vomit, before the first gust was penetrated by the sharper bite of the halitosis of blackened gums. Under such an assault against decency, Amber’s stomach convulsed and she bent over to spit sour beer suds from her mouth as she stumbled for the entrance of the room.
She regained consciousness lying on her back.
The floor tiles were cold against her shoulders and buttocks, the shower water smacked her face and blinded her. A moment was needed for her eyes to right themselves. The impact against the side of her head had made it appear as if her vision had been knocked out of her head, to remain in the air once her body dropped to the sodden tiles.
The mists parted and curled up like waves as something thrust through the steam. A hand clutched one of her thighs with a grip so cold it made her scream. She tried to roll over, but a second contact, and one chilled enough to convince the flesh of her knee it was being burned, kept her down by pushing her legs apart.
She screamed. Screamed and swiped the air above her body. Cut her nails through warm steam, made vapour and air writhe and surge and dance about her frantic hands that swatted the nothingness above her opened thighs.
‘Amber!’
Josh ran into the bathroom beyond the shower room. His booted feet thumped and slid on the tiles. Above her, in the thick white veil, she saw his silhouette appear in the doorway of the wet room, then thrust through and into the steam. ‘God, Amber. Here, let me get you up.’
He paused when he saw her glistening nakedness. ‘Christ’s sake,’ he muttered. ‘Sorry. Didn’t know. You slip, kid?’
She couldn’t speak, and even though the wet room was hotter than a greenhouse for tropical plants, the muscles of her legs and arms shook and jumped as if she had been placed inside a walk-in refrigerator.
Back on her feet, out of the wet room and inside the bathroom, with a towel covering her front, she fell against Josh and sobbed into his shirt.
Out of awkwardness, shock, or just an intuition that she was in no shape to explain why she had been lying on the floor, screaming and thrashing her arms in the air, with her legs thrust open, Josh remained silent until her sobs subsided.
‘He was in there.’ She swallowed. ‘Bennet. In there.’ She pointed at the wet room, peeled herself off Josh’s wet front, rearranged the towel and moved to the door of the bathroom. ‘He’s here. That pig. That stinking pig. That rapist!’
She screamed so loudly, Josh flinched and winced before quickly moving to her. He caught her wrists and lifted her out of the bathroom by her tensed forearms. ‘Amber! Amber! Kid! Listen to me.’
‘That pig! That bitch!’
‘Amber! I found something.’
‘That bastard…’
‘I found something. I think I found our man.’
Amber stared into where she thought Josh’s eyes might be; his glasses were opaque with steam. She swallowed and from a throat that hurt she whispered, ‘Here?’
Josh nodded, then turned his head to look at the steaming doorway of the bathroom. ‘We’ll need a spade.’
NINETY-ONE
‘That all you’ve got?’ Josh looked at the implement Amber held out to him. The price tag was still fixed to the handle. ‘A trowel?’
‘I never bloody thought I’d be doing more than potting plants here.’
‘We’ll have to wait until tomorrow. Get the right tools to get that earth up. Maybe get the police in on this.’
‘No. Now. It has to be done now. We’re so close.’ Amber turned her attention back to the copper pipe that still stood upright in one corner of the earthen floor; the portion of soil that Josh had hacked and dug at with an offcut of wood while she showered.
If they found him down there; if they found anything down there connected to the house in Birmingham, she would burn it herself. She would not allow such artefacts to curse or contaminate another place, or continue to project their influence at her. That was something she would not risk. Whatever was brought up would be summarily destroyed, with or without Josh’s blessing. This was not a matter for the police. They’d had their chance.
The entire surface of the soil floor bore the scars of Josh’s recent prospecting. He had moved systema
tically, one square foot at a time, and pushed the hollow copper pipe as deeply into the soil as he could, before the earth became too dense, or the end of the pipe impacted against a broad stone or hard object beneath the surface. After each insertion into the ground, he had withdrawn the pipe and placed the wet end beneath his nose, and sniffed. He had shown her how it was done; how buried bodies in waste ground, in woods and grassy fields, used to be found by policemen. He had told her this was how they found the children under the moors.
He also told Amber that though he did not initially believe her about Fergal being buried under her garage, he could see that she believed her own theory, and passionately enough to spend four thousand pounds to have two builders smash it up that very day. Josh conceded that his theories about Fergal Donegal were not adding up either. So he’d had a hunch: if someone was to bury something incriminating beneath the ground of an unprotected building site at night, while the workmen were not present, they would have needed to hide their evidence shortly before the cement was poured, otherwise the builders would have seen a foreign object in the foundations when they came in to work. Such an implant would also need to be inserted far enough beneath the earth, and artfully too, to deter an investigation into broken ground.
Fergal was in Devon, he knew that, and had most likely broken into the building site ahead of her relocation to the farmhouse: entered a site only four people, including him, knew about in connection to its future resident. As much as anything else, Josh had confided to Amber that he wanted to know what ‘that bastard was doing in here’.
‘I’m not going to ask you to sniff the end of that pipe, kid. But trust me, there’s something dead down there,’ Josh had said, and nodded at where he had dug at a corner like a dog after a buried bone. ‘I’ve scraped as much of the dirt off a small portion as I could, and I found polythene. Something wrapped in plastic. Something rotten. And it’s too big to be a cat.’