Weirdo

by Cathi Unsworth

  * * *

  The tourists had come up off the beach now for their teas, the few remaining stragglers taking down their windbreaks and packing up their picnic things. A mother and two toddlers still paddled on the shoreline in the distance, the sea glimmering like diamonds.

  “That look beautiful tonight, don’t it?” said Darren.

  “Yeah,” said Corrine, looking at the two little children and feeling a pang, knowing that she had never paddled in the sea with her mum, wondering if she would ever have a daughter of her own to share this novel experience with.

  “Are you going to have kids?” she heard herself asking. “You and Debbie, I mean?”

  Darren hadn’t really considered this possibility. “I s’pose so,” he said. “One day.”

  “D’you think you’ll move away, like what Alex is?” The possibility dawned on Corrine for the first time, and with it a new sense of fear, of everything she had known slipping away, everybody moving away, leaving her here on her own.

  “Well,” Darren seemed to sense what was going on in her head, “I’d like to go to art college in London if I could. But that’s years away.”

  “I s’pose,” said Corrine doubtfully.

  “Well, you don’t have to stay here, do you?” he said. “Not if you don’t want to. Think about it. You qualify as a hairdresser and you could go anywhere too.”

  It was another idea that hadn’t occurred to her. A smile replaced her frown. “Yeah,” she said. “You’re right. I could, couldn’t I? God, Darren, I am going to say sorry to Lizzy first thing tomorrow. I’m really glad I bumped into you. You’re a lifesaver.”

  They were drawing level with Sam’s nan’s house now. Corrine shuddered, remembering the night of the little dog, feeling the windows of the villa like glassy eyes upon her.

  “Let’s walk across the dunes,” she suggested, jumping down off the sea wall, out of sight.

  “Hold up!” Darren levered himself down more carefully, not wanting to get sand all over himself. They were very nearly at the pillbox now. “Here, Corrine,” he said, catching up with her. A mischievous smile played over his lips. “Something I meant to ask you.”

  “Oh yeah?” Corrine turned her head to look at him. “What?”

  Darren laughed, a blush coming into his cheeks. “Debs’ll kill me,” he said.

  “What?” said Corrine, not knowing whether to smile back or not, wondering if he was going to start taking the piss now.

  “Well,” he said, “if you don’t mind me asking – what were you doing up a tree in the graveyard that night?”

  Corrine stopped still in her tracks, on top of the dune in front of the pillbox. Remembered the voice coming out of the window across the road from the graveyard, just at the moment Noj had begun to cast the spell. Saw in her head Debbie pulling him away, pushing the window down. The hairs stood up on the back of her neck.

  “No,” she said, her pupils widening.

  “Sorry,” said Darren, “I knew I shouldn’t have asked.” He patted her on the shoulder, clearly embarrassed. “Look,” he said. “Forget I asked. Now you stay here and I’ll go get the book back for you. Now I’ve got something to make up to you.”

  “No,” Corrine repeated, the vision she had had in the pillbox coming back to her – red, black, white. Blood, hair, skin. The flash of a blade, slicing through flesh … Like the blade of grass Sam had used on her, the black magic she had summoned to blend their blood together, calling her sister, entwining their destinies forever … In a sudden flash of premonition, Corrine realised what everything meant. The spell had rebounded on her, she and the person who had broken the silence around the incantation. She knew what was going to happen if Darren went inside the pillbox …

  She tried to move to stop him, but it was like her limbs had frozen as the appalling destiny was revealed to her.

  “Don’t go in there,” she croaked. “It’s all right, really, Darren. I’ll get it back another way. Let’s just go.”

  “Don’t be daft,” said Darren. “That’s no bother. She can’t hurt me, can she?”

  She put her hand out, grabbed his sleeve. “Please, Darren. Don’t go!”

  But Darren just laughed, shook her fingers away. “It’s all right Corrine, honest.”

  “But …”

  Corrine stood there powerless, caught in the rays of the evening sun, as Darren walked on, down the side of the dune, spraying up sand as his momentum increased by the steepness of the slope. Watching him go …

  * * *

  “Aieeeeeeeeeeee!” the piercing scream brought her back to her senses.

  Corrine ran down the dune, fear powering her footsteps, ran down the dune and into the dim shade of the pillbox, where her legs moved faster than her eyes and she found she couldn’t stop, found herself tripping over his legs and falling with a tremendous thud over the top of Darren.

  “Oh my God!” she screamed, heels of her hands skidding over concrete and sand, fear abnegating pain. Darren didn’t move as she landed across him. Trying to right herself, she found her right hand had come into contact with something hot, wet and sticky. Something coming out of the back of Darren’s head.

  “Oh my God!” she started to lash out with her legs, desperate to untangle herself.

  “Aieeeeeeeeeeee!” the scream came from behind her now. The sound of it was terrifying enough to propel Corrine up and away, send her scuttling into a corner.

  Silhouetted against the sunlight streaming through the entrance to the pillbox, Samantha stood, her legs apart, her arms swaying slightly from the huge chunk of concrete she was holding above her head. Her eyes flashed as she took in the scenario unfolding in front of her.

  “Sam!” Corrine’s voice came out like a strangled wail. “Sam, you’ve fuckin’ killed him!”

  “Him?” Samantha looked down at Darren and then back at Corrine, her face twitching madly. She dropped the concrete.

  “Corrine? What …?” She stood over the splayed body, regarding the contours of arms and legs with a quizzical expression. “Darren?” she said, kneeling down beside him.

  She touched the back of his head and brought her fingers up to her lips.

  “Darren,” she repeated, looking back up at Corrine with a smile of such radiance it seemed to Corrine that she was glowing, a perverse angel of death. “But that’s perfect, Corrine. That’ll hurt her even more than if it had been you.”

  “H-hurt h-h-her?” Corrine stammered.

  “Your precious Debbie, of course. She ruined everything for me – and now I’ve ruined everything for her!” Samantha shrieked with laughter and reached forward, rolled Darren over onto his back with such ease he might have been a rag doll.

  Corrine could see his face now, the expression of shock caught in his wide blue eyes. His arms flopped sideways helplessly, so pale and skinny and unyielding. She crawled further towards the wall, screaming inside but unable to make any sound come out of her.

  Sam knelt beside him, cocking her head at different angles. She started to rummage in her pocket, drawing out a packet of John Player Specials and a lighter she had stolen from home. She took out a cigarette, lit up and inhaled deeply. Her hands didn’t shake, Corrine realised, as she began to shudder uncontrollably herself.

  Sam lifted one of Darren’s arms, took the cigarette from her mouth and touched his skin with it.

  “Don’t!” Corrine croaked. She tried to shut her eyes but they wouldn’t obey her. Tried to put her hands over her eyes instead, but they slid back down her face, leaving smears of his blood in their wake.

  Sam tried again, putting the end of the cigarette a little further up his arm. She frowned, took another puff and repeated the gesture. Kept repeating it, over and over, until she broke the cigarette in half.

  “For fuck’s sake,” she said. Corrine saw a string of saliva drool out of Sam’s mouth. “I’ll start again,” she said, in a tone half-pitched between boredom and rage.

  This time, she put the end of the cigarette d
own on Darren’s forehead.

  Corrine opened her mouth again, but it was useless. She could say nothing, hear nothing but her own blood pounding through her veins. But she could still smell all right, and the stench of scorched flesh that entered her nostrils sent another shaking fit coursing through her body.

  Sam dotted the cigarette all over Darren’s face. “Not so pretty now, are you?” she said, throwing the butt down. “Not that you ever were all that much.” She looked over at Corrine. “But still, I can do better than that.”

  Corrine must have shut her eyes for a second without realising it. For the next thing she realised there was something silvery in Sam’s hands. A kitchen knife. She raised it up and plunged it down into the centre of Darren’s stomach. There was a sickening crunch as the blade went in, an even worse sound as she drew it out. “Oh yes,” Sam said, looking up at Corrine with a hideous smile of desire. “That’s better. This is for Debbie!” She raised the blade again.

  Corrine stopped shaking as rapidly as she had begun. She felt the familiar sensation of numbness overtaking her, as Sam lifted the blade.

  “Debbie Carver,” Sam said, her voice getting lower, more guttural. “Debbie Carver, Carver, Carver, carve her up!” She thrust the blade up and down, up and down, the tearing and sucking sounds of rendered flesh filling the old pillbox with a nightmare cacophony. Again and again and again she stabbed, rocking and gulping, her own body twitching now, her thighs bucking up and down. She didn’t stop until she was hoarse and breathless, foam flecking the sides of her mouth.

  Then she lifted her hands one by one, clenching and unclenching her fingers, moving the knife from one hand to another, staring transfixed at the patterns of blood. Finally, she looked up.

  Corrine, pushed up against the wall, stared back at her, mouth open and eyes wide, blood smeared all over her face. Staring between Samantha’s thighs, to where Darren now resembled the contents of a butcher’s board, although the expression on his face remained curiously unchanged.

  Samantha stood up, weaving unsteadily from side to side. She looked at the knife in her hand, frowned, and threw it over at Corrine. It hit the wall and clattered down beside her. Then Samantha took the cigarettes and the lighter back out of her pocket and dropped them where she stood. She walked backwards, stumbling as she went, until she was at the entrance of the pillbox.

  Outside, she blinked in the sunlight, looked down at herself, at her hands, at her legs.

  Then she began to run.

  * * *

  Edna was in her kitchen, working dough in a Pyrex bowl. She needed to have something to do with her hands, some familiar ritual to comfort and divert her from the terrible thoughts that were circling through her mind.

  From the phone call from Wayne that had come early this morning, telling her of the granddaughter that she would now never get to see, never get to hold in her arms. Of the other that was roaming somewhere out in the streets, somewhere where even Eric’s best police contacts had not been able to find her. From the atonement with Amanda that she would now never get the chance to make. To all the pain and suffering her weakness, her stubborn refusal to see what was right in front of her, had caused her daughter, her granddaughters and herself.

  And the empty dog basket in the corner of the room.

  A middle-aged woman forcing herself to stand upright in her kitchen, the highlights in her rigidly styled hair catching the golden light of the slowly setting sun, her hands kneading and kneading away at the dough, worries working through her fingers, her fingers that already ached to the point where she wanted to scream.

  The banging on the back door almost made her jump out of her skin.

  Sammy’s face pressed against the glass, filthy with dirt and something else, something of a darker hue. Her eyes two enormous saucers filled with an absolute void of expression. For a second, Edna thought she was seeing a creature from a nightmare – a troll, a boggit or a witch, with a raggedy mane of upstanding hair. For a second, something deep within her told her not to let the thing over her threshold, to pick up a crucifix and send it far away. Then a more powerful emotion took hold of her, an emotion stronger than fear and stronger than reason. A grandmother’s love.

  Edna ran towards Sammy, turned the key in the lock and pushed down on the handle, stepping backwards as the door opened and her granddaughter fell into her arms, sobbing and saying over and over: “Nana, Nana, Nana.”

  * * *

  Edna got Sammy bathed and into bed before she rang Eric. She sponged and scrubbed her granddaughter clean as new, washing away all the dirt and everything else down the plughole, wrapping her in her biggest, fluffiest pink towel, and singing to her the songs of her childhood as she dried her hair at her dressing table.

  Sammy was meek and compliant, slipping into one of Edna’s nighties and snuggling down in her bed, in the room that Edna had kept in pristine order for her. Almost as soon as her head hit the pillow, Sammy’s eyelids drooped and her breathing slowed into a slumber.

  Edna crept back down to the kitchen with Sammy’s clothes over her arm, loaded up the washing machine and set it to boil wash. Stared through the glass for some time at the cycle spinning around.

  When she eventually picked up the phone to call Eric, she found that she didn’t know quite what to say. “Sammy’s here,” she started with, “she’s safely asleep upstairs.”

  “Thank God,” said Eric, drawing out a long breath. “Do you know where she’s been? What she’s been up to?”

  “No,” said Edna. “But I think she’s had some kind of a shock. She’s acting very strangely.”

  “Do she know,” said Eric, “about Mandy?”

  “I don’t think so,” Edna’s fingers worried up and down the telephone cord. “I didn’t like to say, she seemed so …” But she couldn’t find the right word to express what she was thinking.

  “No, you’re probably right,” Eric spared her the anguish of articulation. “Best to let her sleep. I’ll tell Len to call off the dogs. Maybe we can get it out of her in the morning.”

  “Are you coming home?” Edna’s voice wobbled as she said it.

  On the other end of the line, Eric put down the glass of Scotch that was halfway to his lips. On the other side of the windows, the tourists whirled and flew through the neon-lit wonderland, whooping with fear and delight as they traversed the wooden hills and the painted jets, the spinning, glittering wheels. On the desk in front of him, Amanda held the infant Samantha, a radiant smile on her face.

  “I’ll see you in ten minutes,” he said.

  37

  The Price

  March 2003

  Standing by the front doors of Ernemouth nick, Jason Blackburn watched the squad car come to a halt in front of the steps. His mouth was completely dry. Since Smollet had left him to deal with all this alone, he had tried calling Rivett several times. But the old sweat had left his mobile switched to voicemail and, without his guidance, Blackburn felt as if he had entered a parallel universe. A world where everything he was used to just got turned upside down and none of the usual rules applied.

  Blackburn had experienced much in the way of strangeness during his long career in the force. But nothing to top the sight that met his eyes now. Arthur Bowles, the Deputy Chief Constable of Norwich Police, escorting his old comrade, DS Andrew Kidd up the steps towards him. Bowles looked straight ahead, his face a stern mask. Kidd, dressed entirely in black with a woolly hat pulled down over his eyes like some kind of terrorist, looked down at the ground, his wrists handcuffed in front of him, blood congealing around deep scratch marks on his cheeks.

  * * *

  Francesca felt a flicker of fear return as the lift doors closed behind them. There was barely room for the pair of them in there, and it was difficult to hide her discomfort. She tried to disguise it with humour. “He liked to live like a king did he, your mate Eric?” she said. “A red carpet, a private lift to his office?” The image of her parents flashed back to the forefront of her mind.


  “As befitted his status,” said Rivett.

  “And what were you to him?” she asked. “Some kind of courtier?”

  The door opened on a circular room, windows all around it. Rivett stepped out first, turned on the lights.

  “Every king need ’em,” he said. “You need brains to maintain power. The one thing that money can’t buy.”

  As she followed Rivett into the room, it came back to Francesca what she had overheard her Dad saying about Eric Hoyle. “With that for a grandfather,” he had said, “I s’pose it’s no wonder there’s something wrong with the girl.” It was one of his pupils he was telling her mother about. But he had stopped when he realised she was standing by the door, listening to what he was saying.

  “Take a seat, Miss Ryman,” said Rivett.

  There was a big film producer’s desk in the middle of the room, with a leather chair behind it, facing in the direction of the sea. Another similar but smaller one opposite. As she trod across the white, shagpile carpet towards it, Francesca noted that the desk was bare of any ornament, save a big, round, smoked-glass ashtray, a matching table lighter and an old-fashioned black telephone with a ring-shaped dial. Rivett plonked himself down in the larger of the chairs, reached in his pocket for his cigars.

  “They’ve kept it the way it was, then,” said Francesca, watching him light up. “Whoever owns it now.”

  Rivett exhaled smoke. “That’s right,” he said. “They have. Not much longer to wait now,” he consulted his gold wristwatch. “I reckon he’ll call any minute. Sure I can’t get you a drink? They keep a well-stocked bar up here, so I’m told.”

  “Whose courtier are you now, Mr Rivett?” asked Francesca.

  Rivett looked down at the phone and back across at her. “The new boss,” he said, “has got a lot in common with the old boss. As you can see, appearances mattered to Eric. Mattered too much, in the end.”

  Rivett put his cigar down in the ashtray, tendrils of smoke curling up Francesca’s nose as he took a small key from his trouser pocket and unlocked the drawer in front of him. Took from it a thick A4 envelope and dropped it down on the desk between them.