Mitchell, D. M.

by crime The King of Terrors (a psychological thriller combining mystery

  Gareth avoided the funeral. He did not want to see the man’s wife and daughter. He’d met them on several occasions when they invited him into their home to share a meal and friendly company, particularly in his early days at the firm, a lonely country boy in the Big Smoke. He came to depend upon that selfless surrogate family support, not having any real family of his own. No, he did not want to see her, for he knew she must at least suspect, or had been told, of his part in things.

  He took the coward’s way out and feigned illness, sending through a large and exorbitantly expensive wreath in the forlorn hope that it would help expunge his guilt. Needless to say it did not. To make matters worse she sent over a small parcel to him at the office. It contained three silk ties of Fitzroy’s which he had admired and a Victorian copy of Shakespeare’s tragedies, a beautiful leather-bound tome he had openly lusted after on his considerable bookshelf. In a letter she included with the parcel she wrote that he had always said he should have them if anything should happen to him. Inside the book he’d written in pencil the words ‘Loyalty and love above all’. Gareth collapsed on seeing it and could do no more that day.

  He spent weeks going over the affair. Angry at first, mainly at Fitzroy for doing this to him. Then beating himself up for failing to read the man’s illness in his tired eyes or the frenzied tapping of his finger on his thigh, signs that were as plain as day after the fact and to which he had been totally blind before. And he got angry at the organisation too, for putting him in the position of executioner, and dismayed at the cruel attitude displayed by the crowd on the platform where he met his end, who saw his death as entertainment or inconvenience or both.

  Gareth re-evaluated his career, the so-called friendships that loosely cemented his life together and found them meaningless, shallow and contemptible. His girlfriend, initially very supportive of his black mood swings, eventually told him it was time to get his act together. It was all so depressing, she said, and he realised the pout he used to consider so attractive he now found childlike and repulsive.

  No one at the firm cared about Fitzroy’s death, which was never mentioned again after the funeral. He knew with certainty that if something similar happened to him it would matter not one jot. But also he knew he had become as cold and as heartless as the rest of them, and the city he once considered exciting and trembling with vibrancy and promise transformed in his mind to streets full of pitiable despair and cruelty that tapped into your life force to suck it out, and which spat you onto the paving stones when you were drained.

  His relationship with his girlfriend and his work continued to suffer. As he was considered a valuable commodity by the firm his superior suggested some well-earned leave and a counselling session or two at their expense; time out to flush this Fitzroy thing from his system so he could get on with his life. Get back up to speed, he said, a little frustrated.

  It wasn’t long before his manager’s patience and understanding, and that of his girlfriend, crumpled into impatience and incomprehension. Then, totally unplanned, as Gareth sat at his desk, staring hard at the telephone as if it were an alien life form, the pile of paper in his in-tray as something ominous and meaningless in equal measure, he came to a decision and went into his manager’s office and told him he was resigning with immediate effect.

  He didn’t hang around for a reply. He didn’t want to risk being talked out of it, even if the chances of that were slim. His decision was, perhaps, by this stage in the game mutually beneficial. In the end his never knowing gave him a modicum of satisfaction that he’d made a stance against the firm, in his own small and barely significant way. More likely, his throwing himself upon his career sword was a means of atonement for the cruel way he treated Fitzroy and his family, and the cowardice he felt he’d exhibited throughout.

  Whatever his motivation, Gareth was now without a job. Soon after he was without a girlfriend. She made it clear in no uncertain terms that he’d gone mad and said she could no longer live with the uncertainty he’d thrown at her. ‘You’re sick, do you know that, Gareth? You need your head looking at!’

  It did not bother him half as much as he used to think it would, being without her. He felt strangely free, uninhibited and terrified all at once.

  What he did possess was money set aside. Before he left the firm he sourced and secured a sizeable but comparatively inexpensive cottage in Wales, on the Pembrokeshire coast. Inexpensive compared to his London flat, that is, which he sold at a tidy profit thus enabling him, after first taking advantage of the housing slump to drive the price down still further, to buy the old cottage outright.

  He traded in the Mercedes for a 1970s Land Rover and bought a repair manual with the sincere intention of learning how to keep the ancient thing on the road, a manual which was destined never to be opened in anger with his ignorance of all things mechanical remaining just that. He packed up a few basic things and flogged the rest of his stuff on eBay or handed it in to the local charity shops. He was aware he was wiping away the remaining vestiges of the person he’d been and was determined to manufacture a new one to stand in his place. If only it were that simple, he thought gloomily. But for now it seemed like half a plan and he felt lighter with every bag of useless crap he took out of the flat.

  Deller’s End was a bluff old farmhouse, early nineteenth century in date, standing alone in the remaining few acres of land that hadn’t been sold off when the farm closed twenty years before. It stood but a quarter of a mile from the beautiful, majestic Pembrokeshire coast, an unspoilt stretch of low windswept heather, with steep, craggy cliffs that tumbled down to the sea many metres below where the waves could be heard booming endlessly, like the retorts of a battery of cannon at their base. The cottage’s address put it as part of a village which was in reality a handful of similar cottages sprinkled out far and wide in all directions, served by a single narrow road that was both exit and entrance. But in truth the cottage was too far removed to be a part of anything and that suited him fine. The cottage and he already had something in common. Gareth, too, felt too far removed to be part of anything. They were meant for each other. The last thing he needed was to be surrounded by people.

  The village had a solitary general store and post office that opened for business at unpredictably bizarre times following no plan that he could see; a hair dressers run from a small cottage that always had a closed sign hung in the door; and a small, generally empty pub run haphazardly by an affable pit-bull of a landlord. It was the nearest thing to urban for miles.

  He initially fretted the contrast between London and the middle of nowhere might be too great and that, like many a city dweller with sugary visions of moving to a country idyll, he’d soon be stir crazy and packing up his bags to head for the nearest Starbucks. But he needn’t have worried. He hadn’t realised how much he needed this until he experienced it.

  He had quite a bit of savings still, but given the work the old place needed doing to it, and that he didn’t have a job, it wouldn’t last long. So he decided to turn his hobby into a business. He had been interested in photography for a long while, and in the past had used some of his London gallery contacts to sell the odd-print or so. He built upon that, and, though it took time to get off the ground, with one website and the buttering up of a few people back in the Smoke he managed to get close to break-even. Close but no cigar. He even learnt how to throw a few pots, invested in a small kiln and before long he was a regular tree-hugger, all anoraks and five-day stubble. He lived cheap and simple, uncluttered by the demands of a world he felt ground you up and spat you out. OK, he thought, it wasn’t all sweetness and light. It was cold in winter, he always seemed to be hungry, and he never had the money up front to pay the Council Tax, going to the dentist was a luxury he couldn’t afford and he missed having a hot shower. Swings and roundabouts.

  The village store, when it opened for business as such, was run by two women. They were, by large, his only frequent human contact apart from the occasional visits from th
e postman. They were sisters, allegedly – the Cavendish sisters – both in their late fifties to early sixties and both as different in appearance from one another as it was possible to get. The most talkative, Patricia (never Pat) was tall, slender to the point of being alarmingly thin, with long dark hair still striping her mostly grey locks; she had a long nose to match, wide eyes like a frightened doe and a sour pout. Her sister, on the other hand, was small, overweight, a button nose and her voice was deeper; her general expression was one of permanent standoffishness and suspicion. The only thing they had in common was their sour pout. Gareth fancied they were ‘sisters’ after another fashion, a view shared by one or two locals he spoke to. One old farmer told him how he’d heard they’d called themselves after the banana, the Cavendish, as some kind of in-joke. They’d been here since 1966, apparently, and the old-fashioned, lacklustre store reflected their long tenure. They treated Gareth with mistrust for ages. In fairness, he thought, he must have looked like some backwoods hermit to them, even by comparison with other local backwoods hermits, and it took a long while for them to smile at him, at which turning point he felt partially accepted, or deemed harmless enough to encourage.

  Gareth Davies was alone, but he wasn’t lonely. Even on nights when the wind rattled something loose on his leaky old roof and the arthritic wood burner struggled to fight back the damp amid the cold of a Welsh winter, he did not miss the company of others. In the beginning he rather thought that he would, but it wasn’t to be so. He realised he had always been something of a loner; he did not make friends very easily, and there were few people with whom he forged a close emotional bond. Perhaps it was because he was adopted, he thought, and he was fearful of getting too close to anyone and then having to suffer separation. Who knows?

  He remembered he did not cry when his adoptive father died, and same too for his wife, his adoptive mother, following hot on his heels a year later. He was naturally sad, yes, but not enough for it to squeeze tears from him. It wasn’t their fault. They tried their best. He simply never forgave them for telling him the truth about his beginnings. It was like a razor to his heart when his mother sat him in front of her, a kid of about ten years old, his father telling them he had to go out to the garden and leaving her (rather cowardly, he felt, but who was he to talk?) to break the news they’d been dreading ever since they decided he must know. He was devastated. The words they must have agonised over for so long, for genuinely benign reasons, created a rift that would never heal till the day they died.

  He may or may not be a Welshman, though he called himself such. He could have been born in England, Ireland, Scotland, or even Moldavia for that matter. He was found stuffed into a toilet cubicle in Cardiff railway station, the only connection to his real mother being half an old silver coin crudely punched with a hole and threaded onto a cheap silver-plated chain. This had been wrapped in a piece of paper and stuffed into the blanket that covered him. The paper, once unfolded, appeared to be an old map of some constellation or other, crudely ripped from a book; on the flipside a biography of Beethoven. He used to look hard and long at it as a kid, trying to make sense of it, but realised it was meaningless, just an ordinary piece of paper cocooning some kind of useless costume jewellery. He could not work out anything of her from that. He was fooling himself for trying to read something into it all when in reality it was so much crap. He wanted to bin it, but he found he couldn’t bring himself to do it. So he tossed it to the back of a drawer and forgot about it.

  What kind of a mother could do that, he often wondered? Did he blight her life so much she had to dump him as soon as she could? Like rubbish? Not only could he never forgive his adoptive parents, he could never find it in him to forgive his real mother, whoever and wherever she was.

  He had no name, so he was given the provisional Christian name Edward, after the stationmaster, his adoptive parents supplied the surname and the Christian name, poor Edward being shunted to the middle. Gareth Edward Davies in full. They desperately wanted him to be fervently proud of his country, of his Welsh heritage, as indeed they were fiercely proud; a heritage and passion he shared until the day they told him of his origins, at which point all attachments were shattered like china on cold Welsh slate. How could he be proud of a lie? And therein, he supposed, lay the source of his feelings of social isolation. No man is an island, as they say, but he‘d put in place an impressively wide exclusion zone all the same.

  Had he really turned into such a cold, heartless man? He had plenty of time to mull this over, but in the end he gave up trying to figure it all out and simply got on with his new life at Deller’s End.

  He was not in desperate need of a companion. True, he admitted he missed female company, but only physically. He did not hanker after a soul mate. He was not on the immediate lookout for a Mrs Tree Hugger. He was happy being alone and he could not see any reason that this would change for a long time to come. Burned fingers, and all that.

  But he felt happier that he’d ended 2010 in a better place than he began it. So much had changed in the last twelve months. Here at least he felt safe, out of the way; almost, he thought, as if he could hide away from fate, that thing he never once believed in.

  But, he thought, he’d be the first to admit you can’t stop things happening to you if they want to happen. Things could find you even if you had your head down…

  * * * *

  Always a Pleasure

  Chelsea, London

  Spring, 2011

  To be truthful, he hadn’t expected it to be as successful as it appeared to be turning out. The gallery was full and there was quite a buzz to the place. A few pieces had already been sold, exchanged for not insignificant sums, and there was keen interest in others. He did what he was good at, floating around the room, plying more drinks on people, pausing to give a grand exposition on one of the pictures to an interested party, remembering and calling out first names, shaking hands, complimenting taste, laughing at banal humour, and selling like mad.

  Clive Foster, of Foster Specialist Art Galleries, Pimlico Road, Chelsea, loved the thrill of the chase, and the more challenging the quarry the greater the enjoyment. Gareth Davies was as yet relatively unknown as a photographer, but he was obviously proving very promising, he thought. His signed limited edition prints – largely landscape with occasional portraiture – were extremely accomplished and actually selling. When he said to Davies he’d include his work as a small part of an exhibition by an altogether more famous photographer, his expectations had been low. He did it because Davies, in his previous role, had managed to swing a rather good deal on the purchase of a central London gallery, and it was his way of returning a favour to an ex-realtor and struggling artist.

  But in spite of the success Gareth Davies was in short supply. He’d gone missing again. He made his excuses to a group of potential buyers and, with wine glass poised in hand, he threaded through the crowd of people to search out the missing photographer. He found him sitting quietly on the bottom of the stairs which led to the first-floor gallery space. He was staring into a half-downed glass.

  ‘Gareth,’ said Clive, ‘what on earth are you doing sitting here? I need you back there. Sell, sell, sell!’

  He smiled uncomfortably. ‘You know I hate crowds, Clive.’

  ‘But this isn’t a bad crowd, Gareth; this is a good crowd – they have money!’ And, a rare thing these days, they’re actually spending some! I must say I find myself pleasantly surprised. I know you’ve been shifting a few recently, but I hadn’t realised…’

  ‘Thanks for the vote of confidence.’

  ‘So are you intent on hiding yourself away the entire night?’

  ‘Most of it. You appear to be doing a good job on my behalf.’

  Clive sat on the step beside him. ‘Ever since you went all rural on us and deserted dear old London for that Godforsaken Deliverance country…’

  ‘Wales, Clive.’

  ‘Same thing – ever since you went all Country Mouse on us yo
u’ve become scared of your own shadow. I hope you’re not peeing into milk bottles and storing them; that’s always a bad sign for a recluse.’

  Gareth offered a friendly sneer. ‘That’s so amusing, Clive.’

  ‘It’s partly your exhibition, Gareth, but you’re largely conspicuous by your absence. It would do your cause – and mine, of course, let’s not forget that – a lot of good if you got your arse back in there and lay on some of that silken sales pitch of yours.’

  Gareth drank the remainder of his wine and grimaced. ‘I don’t do that sort of thing anymore,’ he said. ‘The things will have to sell without me. Though I do appreciate it, you know that, Clive.’

  ‘Sold quite a few pieces,’ he said. ‘It’s been a rather satisfying night. A particularly young and beautiful woman took a keen interest and snapped up a couple of prints. She asked if I could point you out as she couldn’t see you. Tell you what, Gareth, you’d be in with a chance there if you get back into the driving seat.’

  Gareth smiled warmly. ‘Thank you, Clive. I will be in shortly. Give me a few more minutes.’

  Clive rose, plonked his empty glass on a table and looked around for a waiter with a wine tray. ‘Please get over your panic attack soon; your reluctance goes right to the heart of my commission,’ he said, grinning.

  He was soon lost to the milling crowd, clearly in his element, thought Gareth. Once upon a time that would have been him, but things were very different now. He hated the fuss, albeit very necessary; hated being at the centre of attention. Even the drink failed to nullify his escalating anxiety. And as for the crowds of people, whilst financial manna to Clive, Gareth found them disturbing these days. All he could think about was Deller’s End and closing the door on the world.