by Mosby, Steve
The first time I’d interviewed her, I’d thought that, despite the make-up, Karen Cooper was no actress. And I thought the same thing again now.
‘He was out the night Amanda Jarman was murdered?’
‘Yes.’ She nodded. ‘Not all night. But it was late, and he smelled of drink when he got in.’ She seemed suddenly brighter at that. ‘That was the reason I left the shop early that day. You asked me what we’d been arguing about? It was that. We didn’t have the money for him to be going out drinking, but he didn’t like me telling him what to do. You can’t imagine what Derek could be like.’
I nodded sympathetically.
‘So how come you didn’t call her?’
Karen Cooper was nodding back. Slowly, she stopped.
‘I’m sorry?’
‘Amanda Jarman,’ I said. ‘Because the thing is, we’ve looked through her phone records. She was due at work that morning, wasn’t she? Of course, she didn’t make it in. But you never called to find out why.’
‘I’m sure I did.’
‘Really? What did she say?’
‘I can’t remember.’ Karen shook her head. ‘Well, obviously she couldn’t have answered.’
‘No.’
‘Perhaps I’m mixing her up with someone else. I must be.’
I stared back at her, allowing any trace of friendliness to drain from my expression. To make it clear that she wasn’t going to be able to bluff her way past this, and that appearances didn’t count for much with me.
‘Let’s be honest here, Karen. Bit of a mistake, that, wasn’t it?’
‘I don’t know what you mean.’
But the temperature in the front room seemed to have dropped a few degrees, and there was a hardness to her voice now. While I still didn’t believe her, it was for a different reason. Rather than being a terrible actress, Karen Cooper was actually a pretty good one. It was just that now she was finding it hard to ad-lib.
I reached into my pocket and took out a small black book with a weathered metal clasp.
‘This is your diary.’ I undid the clasp, wondering if she’d had a chance to search for it yet and discover it was missing. ‘We found it when we were searching the house. You’ll forgive the intrusion, of course.’
I didn’t look at her as I flicked through the pages. Karen said nothing, but I could feel her gaze moving from me to the book and back.
‘It’s mostly trivia,’ I said. ‘Appointments here and there. Little notes about things too dull for us to bother deciphering. No offence. But then we saw this.’
I held it up and turned it around so that she could see the spread for this week.
‘On the day Amanda Jarman was murdered, you’ve drawn an asterisk in a circle.’
I could tell from her face that she wasn’t going to reply. I turned the diary around again, then leafed back.
‘And look – here’s Sally Vickers. Exact same thing. And then, hang on a second, here’s Julie Kennedy, with another little asterisk. And so on. All the victims. And the strange thing is that these symbols only ever appear on those dates.’ I looked up at her. ‘It’s almost like you were marking them for a reason, isn’t it, Karen? Like you knew something important had happened.’
Again, she just stared at me. On the surface, her expression was utterly blank, but I thought I could detect panic gathering below.
‘Why did you mark those dates?’
I let the silence pan out, giving her a chance, then smiled.
‘Do you know, I thought you might say it was because those were the dates when Derek stayed out all night. But you don’t think on your feet that quickly, do you, Karen? And of course, that would be ridiculous anyway. You read the papers. You must have put two and two together, assuming you didn’t already know.’
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’
‘Don’t get me wrong,’ I said. ‘It must have been difficult for you, working with all those beautiful young women every day, knowing it was them your husband wanted, not you. That he was disgusted by you. That he was a monster. I imagine you felt trapped too, in your own way.’
I leaned forward.
‘I wasn’t sure at first if it was just that some miserable little part of you was glad it was them he was hurting, not you. That would be horrible enough, wouldn’t it? But now I wonder if maybe, deep down where you won’t even admit it to yourself, you hated them as much as he did.’
And even though she just continued to stare at me, I could tell that I’d shaken her: that my words had hit home. She had known, all right – to some degree, at least. Of course, whether she was prepared to acknowledge it, even to herself, was another matter entirely.
‘That’s ridiculous,’ she said quietly. ‘And you can’t prove it.’
I looked at the diary for a few moments, then snapped it shut, placed it back in my pocket and stood up.
‘Not yet,’ I said. ‘But believe me, it’ll all come out eventually. It always does.’
As I walked back to the kitchen, I focused my attention on the air behind me, making sure she wasn’t going to attack me. It was almost disappointing that all I felt was her eyes following me to the door. I turned back to see her still staring at me. She was visibly trembling. Not because I’d caught her out, I didn’t think – she was right that we’d probably never be able to prove anything – but because she knew. Well, whatever the exact truth about her involvement, she was going to have to live with it. However much she tried to pretend otherwise, she would always know.
‘Sleep well, Karen.’
Back outside, Chris was waiting for me in the car. I slid into the passenger seat and tapped the dashboard.
‘Let’s go.’
‘She didn’t cop to it?’
‘Not out loud.’
He started the engine and sighed.
‘You’ve got to do everything yourself, haven’t you?’
‘No,’ I said as we set off. ‘Not everything.’
Forty-Nine
For Miriam, it was the waste ground. For Karen, it was a small black book.
So what was it for me?
I didn’t know any more.
When I arrived at the care home the following day, I was met by the same nurse who had shown me to John’s room the first time I visited. She must have noticed the damage to my face, but she didn’t mention it. Perhaps she recognised my name from the news, and knew what had happened to me, or maybe it was just that the quiet gravity of the situation made my appearance irrelevant.
‘Come quickly,’ she said.
I followed her, moving as fast as I could. Sweat was beading in my hairline, tickling down my back. We think you should come in as soon as you can. Following the phone call, I’d driven fast across the city, but I was sweating as though I’d run the distance instead, and it wasn’t the exertion that was causing my heart to pound.
‘He’s very comfortable,’ the nurse told me. ‘He’s not in any kind of pain. He’s really very peaceful.’
‘Will he be able to hear me?’
‘I don’t know. I would have thought so.’
As we approached his room, I thought of all the things I needed to tell him. Not about Derek and Karen Cooper, because there was no need to weigh him down with another investigation now. About Jemima, perhaps. But mostly about him and about me.
I followed the nurse into the room.
For a moment, I couldn’t see him, my view of the bed occluded by the doctor and another nurse, both standing beside it. The nurse who’d led me up here cleared her throat.
‘Zoe’s here.’
They turned around. It was the same doctor I’d seen before, and he nodded at me by way of greeting and moved aside. No doubt it was practical as much as anything, but I thought there was something nice about that consistency of care. The same face, always there.
I stepped across to the bed, unhooking my bag from over my shoulder, and sat down on the chair next to it.
Looking at John, I was sure he was al
ready gone. He was propped up at a forty-five-degree angle, with his hands above the covers on either side of his body. It didn’t seem possible, but he was even more emaciated than he’d been on my previous visit. His skin was entirely yellow. There was an odd sheen to it, as though he had been cast from wax, and he was painfully still, his eyes closed and his head tilted back. His mouth was open, with the lips sucked in and half covering his teeth.
‘John?’
I watched him for a moment, certain – he’s gone – but then realised that his chest was fluttering ever so slightly. I listened carefully, and heard thin breath, as distant as the weakest of breezes, the faintest of voices heard over a telephone line.
He was dying right now in front of me. I knew it, but it was impossible to make the thought land, though there would be time for that later on, along with the grief. Just then, all I felt was a tremendous and indescribable love for him. Many things can escalate, boil up, and culminate in one final explosion. It doesn’t always have to be hate.
I reached out and took his hand, wanting him to know I was here with him. His fingers flickered very gently against mine. I can never be sure, but I think he knew.
‘We’ll give you a couple of minutes,’ the doctor said, and then the three of them retreated from the room, closing the door behind them.
Keeping hold of his hand, I leaned closer to the bed.
‘John, there’s something I need to talk to you about. Something I should have said before now.’
I told him that what he’d said about the time after your life being the same as before wasn’t true at all. That it wouldn’t be the same after he was gone, because in the time he’d been alive, he had touched the world and changed it, and the impact of that would live on.
I told him that he had helped so many people, and that all of them were indebted to him for the way he’d shaped their lives, whether they had been able to acknowledge it before now or not. I told him he had been wrong – that I couldn’t have done it without him – and I thanked him for that. Then I told him that I loved him, and that I’d never really needed to wish that he’d been my father, because deep down where I wouldn’t admit it, that was how I’d always seen him.
Finally, I told him about Jemima. Not the details, but that I was going to do what I could to help her and her mother. It was too late in so many ways, but perhaps it would be something. I told him that he had been a good man, and that I was going to try to be more like him.
By the time I’d finished, his fingers had stopped fluttering and his chest was still. I leaned even closer and listened for the sound of his breathing, but it was no longer there. He was completely motionless. The difference now, even from just a few minutes earlier, was obvious. He’d gone.
I kissed him on his warm forehead, then went outside to join the medical staff in the corridor.
I have no idea if John heard me that day. I don’t know whether my words got through, and if he had at least a few seconds to hold them before they evaporated. And I suppose I never will. But that’s the thing, isn’t it? We can tell ourselves anything we like. Sometimes it matters when we pretend, or even when we lie to ourselves just to make our lives easier. But not always.
And so I’ll choose to believe that he did.
Acknowledgements
Huge thanks to my agent, Carolyn Whitaker, and to all the wonderful people at Orion, especially Genevieve Pegg, Laura Gerrard, Angela McMahon and Jane Selley, who helped to make this novel what it is. As always, extra special thanks go to Lynn and Zack for putting up with me while I was writing The Nightmare Place, and to whom it is dedicated with much love.
Also by Steve Mosby
The Third Person
The Cutting Crew
The 50/50 Killer
Cry For Help
Still Bleeding
Black Flowers
Dark Room
AN ORION BOOKS EBOOK
First published in Great Britain in 2014 by Orion Books
This ebook first published in 2014 by Orion Books
Copyright © Steve Mosby 2014
The moral right of Steve Mosby to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor to be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
All the characters in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead is purely coincidental.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN: 978 1 4091 4194 5
The Orion Publishing Group Ltd
Orion House
5 Upper Saint Martin’s Lane
London, WC2H 9EA
An Hachette UK Company
www.orionbooks.co.uk
Dedication
For Lynn and Zack
THE NIGHTMARE PLACE
Steve Mosby
Contents
Cover
Dedication
Title
Contents
Prologue
PART ONE
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
PART TWO
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
PART THREE
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Chapter Thirty-Four
Chapter Thirty-Five
Chapter Thirty-Six
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Chapter Forty
Chapter Forty-One
Chapter Forty-Two
Chapter Forty-Three
Chapter Forty-Four
Chapter Forty-Five
Chapter Forty-Six
PART FOUR
Chapter Forty-Seven
Chapter Forty-Eight
Chapter Forty-Nine
Acknowledgements
Also by Steve Mosby
Copyright
Prologue
For me, it’s the waste ground.
It’s a real place, and although I haven’t been there in years, I dream about it often. The nightmares first started in my mid-twenties, and continue, on and off, to the present day, always arriving during periods of stress. When I wake up afterwards, I feel grim and empty and bad, tangled in bed sheets damp with sweat. I can shower that away, of course, but the residue stays on my skin for hours, like a stain.
As in real life, it’s an expanse of open tarmac, perhaps a hundred metres square, the surface scattered with dust and rubble, nails, bolts, broken glass. There used to be a factory here, a long time ago, and remnants of it remain. There are ridged steps of brick in places, while in others the land has been gouged out. It’s as though the factory was not demolished so much as blown sideways by an enormous blast of pressure, and that its foun
dations gripped the land so hard that some were left behind, while others ripped out scoops of ground to drag away with them.
Old wire-mesh fences run down either side, the metal thin and rusted. On the far side, across from me, there is a small embankment. A footpath leads over it, worn into the hump of grass by the trudge of countless feet. Without walking across, I know what’s at the other end of that path, beyond the thickets of trees: the school I used to go to. And without turning around, I know that the Thornton estate is behind me, a malevolent presence pressing at my back.
It’s a real place, and even though I haven’t been there in years, I know it well. As a child, I walked across it so many times that the sight is as worn into my memory as the path on the embankment.
But I’ve never seen it like this.
In my recurring nightmare, the sky is an impossible aquamarine colour, a strange mixture of blue and green that reminds me of being underwater. The colour permeates the air all the way to ground level, as though the whole scene is a construction at the bottom of an illuminated fish tank. Above me, the clouds are vibrant and bright, moving far too quickly across the sky, and there is a rush to the air, as though a wind is blowing. But I can’t feel it. Nothing moves but the clouds.
And that includes the figure.
It is standing in the centre of the waste ground, and is always the same: grey and colourless and wraithlike. I can’t tell if it’s a man or a woman, because it’s ragged at the edges, as though it has been frozen in the act of moving very quickly towards me. For now, it seems to just hang in the air.
The sensation is of being out of time. This is what the world looks and feels like when it has been paused.