Swimmer

by Graham Masterton

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Recent Titles by Graham Masterton available from Severn House

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  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

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Recent Titles by Graham Masterton available from Severn House

  The Sissy Sawyer Series

  TOUCHY AND FEELY

  THE PAINTED MAN

  THE RED HOTEL

  The Jim Rook Series

  ROOK

  THE TERROR

  TOOTH AND CLAW

  SNOWMAN

  SWIMMER

  DARKROOM

  DEMON’S DOOR

  GARDEN OF EVIL

  Anthologies

  FACES OF FEAR

  FEELINGS OF FEAR

  FORTNIGHT OF FEAR

  FLIGHTS OF FEAR

  FESTIVAL OF FEAR

  Novels

  BASILISK

  BLIND PANIC

  CHAOS THEORY

  COMMUNITY

  DESCENDANT

  DOORKEEPERS

  EDGEWISE

  FIRE SPIRIT

  GENIUS

  GHOST MUSIC

  HIDDEN WORLD

  HOLY TERROR

  HOUSE OF BONES

  MANITOU BLOOD

  THE NINTH NIGHTMARE

  PETRIFIED

  UNSPEAKABLE

  SWIMMER

  Graham Masterton

  First published in Great Britain and the USA 2001 by

  SEVERN HOUSE PUBLISHERS LTD of

  9-15 High Street, Sutton, Surrey, England SM1 1DF

  eBook edition first published in 2013 by Severn House Digital

  an imprint of Severn House Publishers Limited

  Copyright © 2001 by Graham Masterton.

  The right of Graham Masterton to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs & Patents Act 1988.

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

  Masterton, Graham author.

  The swimmer. -- (Jim Rook series)

  1. Rook, Jim (Fictitious character)--Fiction. 2. Physics--

  Fiction. 3. Horror tales.

  I. Title II. Series

  823.9′2-dc23

  ISBN-13: 978-0-7278-5697-5 (cased)

  ISBN-13: 978-1-4483-0114-0 (ePub)

  Except where actual historical events and characters are being described for the storyline of this novel, all situations in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to living persons is purely coincidental.

  This ebook produced by

  Palimpsest Book Production Limited,

  Falkirk, Stirlingshire, Scotland.

  For the International Friends of Tibbles

  Vince Fahey, T.C., Bruce Thomas and Gary Johnson

  One

  ‘Mikey, honey! Don’t splash!’ she called, as she tilted her wide-brimmed straw hat on to her head and eased herself down on the sun lounger. Mike, as usual, took no notice whatsoever and continued to chase his younger sister around the pool. ‘Mike! If you go on splashing you’ll be out of that pool so darn fast!’

  ‘He’s wetting my hair!’ Tracey protested. ‘Mom, he’s wetting my hair!’

  ‘All right, young man, out of there!’ she said, putting down her John Grisham novel and standing up. But at that moment she heard her mobile phone warbling ‘The Bells of St Mary’s’ from inside the house. ‘That’s your father – you wait until I tell him what you’ve been doing!’

  She hurried across the hot red-brick patio and into the sunroom. Mike was still splashing and Tracey was still screaming. Mike had always been a handful, ever since he was old enough to crawl around the room and pull tablecloths down on to the floor, along with framed photographs, vases of flowers and lamps. Now he was nine he was even worse, and Jennie found him almost impossible to control.

  She found her phone under one of the floral cushions in the living-room.

  ‘Doug, is that you?’

  ‘Hi, sweetheart. I just wanted to let you know that this financial forecasting meeting is going on a whole lot longer than we expected. I’ll probably grab a bite to eat with George and Sandos, and I’ll see you later.’

  Tracey was screaming even more loudly than ever. ‘Mommy! Mommy! Come quick! Mommy, come quick!’

  Jennie cupped her hand over the phone and shouted, ‘Mike! You’re going to be in such trouble when I get back out there!’

  ‘What’s that?’ asked Doug. ‘Mike playing up again?’

  ‘Well, what do you expect when you’re never home, and even when you are you always spoil him so much?’

  ‘Oh, come on, Jennie, I’m working my fingers to the bone. How do you think we can afford a pool and two automobiles and a skiing vacation every winter?’

  ‘Mommy! Mommy! You have to come quick! It’s Mike!’

  ‘I have to go,’ said Jennie. ‘The kids are raising three kinds of hell out there.’

  ‘Listen … before you go, can you make sure you get my tan suit out of the cleaners? And can you call Jeff Adamson down at Ventura Pools and see what’s happened to that new filter he was going to fit?’

  ‘Okay, okay. What time do you think you’re going to be back?’

  ‘I don’t know. There’s a possibility that I may have to stay over.’

  ‘Oh yes? What’s her name?’

  ‘What do you mean? Whose name?’

  ‘The possibility that you have to stay over.’

  ‘Oh, don’t start that again. I may be a workaholic but I’m a faithful workaholic.’

  ‘Mommy! Mommy! Mommy!’

  ‘For goodness’ sake!’ Jennie snapped. ‘I’m on the phone to Daddy!’

  ‘Well, it sounds like you’d better go, anyhow,’ said Doug. ‘Listen, I’ll call you after we’ve eaten and let you know what’s happening, okay?’

  Jennie walked out through the sunroom. It was so dazzlingly bright outside that she wasn’t sure what she was looking at. The bushes on the left-hand side of the swimming-pool area abruptly shook, as if somebody had walked through them, although there was nobody there. The surface of the pool itself glittered and sparkled, and it was only when she came out of the sunroom that she saw Tracey right up to her neck in the water, her wet hair plastered over her face like a shining brass mask.

  ‘What’s happened?’ Jennie screamed at her. ‘Where’s Mike?’

  Tracey pushed back her hair. She was wide-eyed with panic. ‘Mommy, I couldn’t save him, he went right under.’

  With a sick jolt of dread, Jennie ran to the edge of the pool. She couldn’t see Mike at first, but then she caught sight of a pale shape right at the bottom of the deep end. ‘Tracey!’ she screamed. ‘Call 911! Tell them to send an ambulance, fast!’

  Without hesitating, she took a deep breath and dived into the water, her straw hat flying off her head. She plunged under the surface and swam down toward Mike with such power that she felt her shoulder muscles cracking. She had never been a good underwater swimmer, but now she managed to reach Mike with only four or five strokes, and seize his arm. He turned, in an idle swirling motion, and rolled over so that he was staring at her. His eyes were wide and he had an extraordinary expression on his face, as if he were smirking at her.

  Jennie swam up toward the surface, dragging him after her. She came splashing out of the sh
allow end of the pool holding him in her arms, his legs swinging, his head hanging back. She laid him on the side of the pool, and immediately started to give him mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. God, he couldn’t be dead. She hadn’t been talking on the phone for more than a couple of minutes. How could he have drowned so quickly?

  ‘Come on, Mike,’ she begged him. ‘Come on, Mike, you have to breathe. Come on, darling, you have to breathe!’

  Tracey came out of the house. ‘Is he drowned?’ she asked in a high, fearful voice.

  ‘Did you call the ambulance?’ asked Jennie.

  ‘The lady said they were coming real quick.’

  Jennie blew desperately into Mikey’s mouth. His lips were so cold, he felt as if he had been dead for hours. As she blew, the tears streamed down her cheeks and dripped on to his face. ‘Breathe, darling, you have to breathe!’

  It seemed like for ever before she heard the siren warbling in the street outside. Mikey’s eyes were still open and unblinking, and he lolled from side to side as she tried to force the water out of his lungs. It still looked as if he were smirking, and she couldn’t believe that he was dead. She almost expected him to jump up and start skipping around the pool, laughing at her.

  Two paramedics came hurrying across the yard. One of them, a short Hispanic woman with thick black curly hair, gently helped Jennie on to her feet while the other one knelt down beside Mike and checked his vital signs.

  ‘He’s going to be all right, isn’t he?’ asked Jennie, knowing that he wasn’t, knowing that he was already dead, but praying that two trained paramedics could work a miracle over him. After all, they did it on ER, didn’t they? And she’d seen so many news reports of kids who’d been drowned and then brought back to life. In Canada, that busload of kids who went through the ice.

  ‘Why don’t you come inside?’ the paramedic asked her, taking her arm. ‘Come and sit down.’

  ‘That’s my son,’ Jennie protested. ‘That’s my only son!’

  The other paramedic stood up, and came toward her with the saddest expression she had ever seen. ‘I’m so sorry,’ he said. ‘There was nothing more we could do.’

  Jennie twisted her arm free and walked toward Mikey’s body on legs that seemed to have no more strength than dry sticks. She knelt slowly down beside him and cradled his head in her lap, a southern Californian pietà. On the ridge of the house, four or five quail clustered, and for once they were silent, as if they sensed the dreadful tragedy of what had happened.

  And Jennie sensed something, too. A coldness, as if a cloud had passed over the sun. It wasn’t just shock. It wasn’t just grief. It was something more than these – as if something deeply malevolent had passed through the yard. She looked toward the bushes that she had seen shaking as she came out of the house. There was nobody there, and if there had been she would have easily seen them, because the bushes were so sparsely planted. But as she peered toward them she saw that – in the shadow of the orange tree – there were six or seven wet footprints on the bricks. Adult-sized footprints.

  The paramedic came out of the house rolling a trolley. He lowered it next to Mike and said, ‘Let’s make him more comfortable, shall we?’

  Jennie nodded, and lifted Mike on to the sheet. ‘Don’t cover his face,’ she said. ‘Not yet, anyhow.’ She glanced inside the house and saw that the woman paramedic was taking care of Tracey, and that her neighbor Blanche had just come into the living-room, looking tearful and distressed.

  She left Mike and walked around the pool until she came to the footprints. There was no question about it: they were grown-up footprints; and in the shaded corner of the patio they were still wet, although the sun had already dried any others that might have been leading up to them.

  Blanche came out, her mouth puckered with grief, and put her arms around her. Now, however, Jennie felt strangely calm. She found herself pressing her cheek against Blanche’s dry, sun-bleached hair without any emotion, and burying her chin in Blanche’s sleeveless seersucker top. She didn’t need sympathy. She needed revenge. Somebody had been here. Somebody had entered their yard and killed her son. She wanted to know who it was. She was determined to know who it was.

  Lieutenant Harris circled the pool area, frowning at the pool as if he expected another body to come floating to the surface. He was short and broad-shouldered, built like an over-packed flight bag, with a wayward plume of reddish hair and a bright red scar on his chin. If Columbo had been real, he would have looked like Lieutenant Harris. But unlike Columbo, Lieutenant Harris had no intuitive ideas about who might have killed Mike.

  ‘You saw the bushes move?’

  ‘That’s right. I came running out of the house and the bushes were moving.’

  ‘Like what? Like the wind was blowing them?’

  ‘There wasn’t any wind.’

  ‘But there could have been a gust. Come on, this is almost Santa Ana season.’

  ‘There wasn’t any wind.’

  Lieutenant Harris walked over to the oleanders and shaded his eyes to look between them. ‘A person couldn’t hide here, right?’

  ‘No, not really.’

  ‘So if somebody was here, the chances are that you would have seen them, right?’

  ‘I couldn’t have missed them. But there were all of these footprints.’

  Lieutenant Harris circled around, peering at the bricks. ‘Well, sure, if you say so. But they’re gone now, right? They’ve all dried up. They were circumstantial evidence at best; and now we don’t even have that.’

  Jennie said, ‘You don’t really believe me, do you?’

  Lieutenant Harris took a crumpled restaurant napkin out of his pocket and dabbed at his forehead with it. The day was so hot that it was almost deafening.

  ‘What can I say? Your son drowned and I’m really sorry. But there’s no prima facie evidence here that anybody else was involved. Those footprints … well, they could have been yours, right?’

  ‘I never went over to that side of the pool.’

  ‘Well, you don’t recall going over to that side of the pool. But, you know … when you’re in shock, your memory can be pretty deceptive …’

  ‘Lieutenant, I never went over to that side of the pool. But there were footprints there. Grown-up-sized footprints. Somebody came into this yard and pushed Mike under the water and I’m sure of it.’

  Lieutenant Harris covered his mouth with his hand for a moment, and looked down reflectively into the pool. Then he said, ‘I talked to Tracey, as you know.’

  ‘Sure. Tracey always tells the truth.’

  ‘Well, this time Tracey said that she didn’t see anybody else in the yard, except for herself and Mike. She agreed that you were gone for only a matter of minutes. Two, maybe three at the most. But Mike went under and she couldn’t do anything to save him. It’s a tragedy that happens here in Los Angeles every day of the week. You have a pool, you have children, there’s always a risk that they’re going to drown. But what do you do? Have no pools? Or never have children?’

  ‘Mike could swim like a little fish. He never would’ve drowned.’

  ‘Well, let me tell you, I’m sorrier for what happened here than words can express. But I think this was a tragic accident, and we’re just going to have to accept it as that. I’ll leave it to the coroner, of course. It’s his decision. But I don’t seriously think that we’re looking for anybody else.’ He paused, and his rumpled brow was glistening with perspiration. ‘If you or your husband want to talk to anybody, Mrs Oppenheimer, we can put you in touch with specialist counselors.’

  ‘No,’ said Jennie. ‘I think I know who I need to talk to.’

  Jim was trying to fit a four-foot statue of Hanuman, the Nepalese ape-god, into a cardboard box measuring three feet by ten inches. Hanuman had six arms and six legs and the strained, anguished expression of a chronic constipation sufferer. After twenty minutes of struggling to pack him, Jim’s expression was almost the same. He was being watched from the back of the couch by his c
at, Tibbles Two, who repeatedly closed her eyes as if she were too exasperated to watch his efforts to achieve the impossible, or she couldn’t understand why anybody would want to keep a four-foot statue of Hanuman in the first place.

  ‘Hanuman is lucky, okay?’ Jim snapped at her. ‘And since I’ve had about as much luck as Wily Coyote lately, I feel the need to take him along.’

  Tibbles Two said nothing, but closed her eyes completely and pretended that she was asleep. Jim was still slightly afraid of her. Since she had appeared in his life, and attached herself to him, he had increasingly felt that she was looking after him, instead of the other way around. He opened the cans of 9 Lives, that was for sure; but it was Tibbles Two who seemed to control his spiritual destiny.

  Whenever she looked at him with those agate-yellow eyes he felt that she was waiting for him to take another step into the unknown – waiting for him to follow her to places that she had been but he never had. The unknown zone.

  But he was packing up now to take up a new posting with the Department of Education in Washington, D.C., and Tibbles Two would have to remain in this apartment block in Venice with his friend and self-appointed super, Mervyn Brookfeller. He knew that Mervyn woud take almost unnatural care of her: Mervyn took almost unnatural care of everybody and everything. Although he wasn’t paid for it, he hoovered the hallways, he dug coffee spoons out of jammed Insinkerators, and he ran errands to Ralph’s for the older residents. Jim had even stood at a half-open doorway once and watched Mervyn feeding old Mrs Kaufman with Cream of Wheat, doggedly and patiently, like a caring parent with a small child. Mrs Kaufman was wearing an old green flannel bathrobe and Mervyn was wearing a spangled emerald T-shirt and white stretch tights. It had almost been enough to bring tears to Jim’s eyes.

  At last Jim admitted defeat and pulled Hanuman and all of his grinning ape-attendants out of the split-open cardboard box. ‘You’d think they’d make their religious figures a standard size, for God’s sake.’

  Tibbles Two turned her head away.

  At that moment, Jim’s mobile phone rang, and he climbed over the couch and a stack of boxes to find it. Sometimes he really enjoyed TT’s company, but most of the time he found her exasperating. She ate, she slept, she stared at him, but she never answered the phone and she never brought him a beer out of the icebox.