For Rye

by Gavin Gardiner

  ‘And the note you mentioned left by the body,’ said Renata, picking a nail, ‘the one with the rhyme from Quentin’s book.’

  ‘Like I said,’ Hector said under his breath, ‘it’s tricky.’

  The chair creaked as he stood and stepped to the window, the kitchen tiles sticky under his shoes.

  Despite his retirement, Hector O’Connell was still dressed for the part – that is, his usual part of oddly-dressed detective. His ill-fitting faded blue waistcoat and shirt buttoned up to the neck – no tie – clung to his hefty mass and made his considerable stomach look like a shrink-wrapped slab of meat. And yet here, under the tattered navy raincoat and apparent disregard for the state of his attire, was a man who moved with the pace of someone who didn’t know how to rush, but was always on time. Unhurried and precise, eyes constantly darting from detail to detail, the detective still lived. The pocket watch danced in his unsteady hand.

  ‘There’s more,’ he rasped between coughs. He turned from the window. ‘Miss Wakefield, have you heard of nitrate film?’ She shook her head. ‘Movies used to be shot on stock made from a compound called nitrocellulose. The stuff was lethal, highly flammable. The lighting of a cigarette on the other side of the room was said to be enough to ignite it. Picture houses regularly went up in flames.’ He sunk back into the chair opposite Renata. ‘Anyway, this nitrocellulose was eventually replaced with stock made from a less flammable compound called cellulose triacetate, which had fewer self-oxidizing—’ He clocked her blank expression and cut the lecture short. ‘Easy to get caught up in the details of a case. Apologies.’

  ‘No, you’ve obviously…done your homework. But if you’re saying you think the explosion was caused by this material, then why would the truck be filled with flammable film in the first place? Sorry, what’s the theory here? It was placed deliberately?’

  ‘First off, I know the explosion was caused by nitrate film.’ He swiped at a moth. ‘Fragments of the wreckage have been analysed. Nitrocellulose ignition was the cause of the explosion.’

  ‘Analysed already? It was only yesterday.’

  ‘I wasn’t unpopular with everybody in the force,’ Hector said. ‘I still have connections in forensics. I’ve been told there was a massive payload of the stuff in that truck.’ He leant back. ‘Miss Wakefield, do you know the name Sandie Rye?’

  ‘Quentin’s ex-wife?’

  ‘No, his teenage daughter. Upcoming actress. Starred in several of his films but made the news when Mr Rye let slip to a journalist he’d had a Colt .45 stuck in her mouth for a scene – loaded. I could tell how much he loves his daughter, she seems to be his world, but he related several such decisions he’s made during filming in order to…well, that’s where he lost me. Something about ‘truth’, about wanting to introduce true danger to the production.’ He cleared his throat. ‘The important part is that Mr Rye himself had the nitrate film loaded onto that truck. It’s meant to produce a better image or something, but his real reason for shooting with it was to bring this ‘true danger’ to the film, just like with the Colt. Turns out he’s used the stock before. Rustled the feathers of his company’s lawyers in the process, too. The question is how, and why, it ignited.’

  ‘Insurance scam? Ignite it deliberately and claim the loss?’ she suggested. Part of her was enjoying this.

  ‘Compared to the kind of cash he makes from his films? Unlikely. Besides, no insurance company would pay out over that kind of flammable material. The truck was effectively loaded with explosives.’

  ‘Coincidence then,’ Renata offered. ‘The film was unstable, ready to explode, and it did. Just like it was bound to.’

  ‘Safety procedures were in place,’ countered Hector. ‘A company like Mr Rye’s has so many regulations to follow. No, I’ve been told all procedures were adhered to and the stock was secured to a high degree inside that truck.’

  ‘Then…how?’

  Hector reached into his jacket and pulled out what looked like a meteor fragment, charred black and melted in on itself. Hanging from its base was a severed red wire.

  She looked blankly at Hector.

  ‘It’s the receiving end of a detonator, Miss Wakefield.’

  ‘How long does it take to get an old man his pills?’ Thomas demanded. She hurried through and held the glass of water to her father’s lips as he struggled the Dexlatine down his tight airway, all the while tapping and scraping that finger at manic, irregular intervals on the arm of the chair.

  It was late. Hector had left shortly after returning the charred detonator component to his pocket. She hadn’t known what to say. Did someone want Quentin dead? Maybe they’d hit the wrong truck. Did Quentin want someone dead, or was this a publicity stunt taken too far? Maybe someone had it in for Rye Productions. Maybe the town had it in for Rye Productions. Could these honest townsfolk really have that kind of terrorism in them? They sure as hell didn’t want him around, but they didn’t seem capable of blowing a truck sky-high. Regardless, Hector’s efforts all came back to the identification of Sylvia Wakefield’s killer. He’d even taken early retirement in the pursuit of his cause. Despite the abandoning of his badge, Hector O’Connell was, in Renata’s eyes, as much a detective as he’d ever been in their short time together, and she’d let him know:

  ‘Goodnight, Detective,’ she’d said before closing the front door. His smile warmed her.

  The night was dark, and it was getting darker – just like her future. What savings she had left wouldn’t last forever, and it was only a matter of time before the debt collection vultures caught wind of her absconding to Millbury Peak. It was a persistent myth that your work on the shelves of bookstores meant boundless riches, particularly when these bookstores were mostly, in fact, train station and airport newsagents. The Quentin C. Rye display had happened to share the same roof as her skinny paperbacks, but that was all they shared. No, her remaining funds wouldn’t last long. More imperatively, she worried that her will to serve under the tyrant that was her father might expire even sooner. Her terror of Thomas Wakefield had never dissipated in all these years, but she was now equally terrified of abandoning him. He was a monster, a dying monster, but he was also her father. She frowned at the tedium of it, the cliché. Unconditional love: you didn’t get a say in it. Biological and unstoppable, there was a circuit in her mind programming her to save this wretched creature from dying alone. Her mother, she’d had the strength to stay all those years – probably solely for Renata – and so she would find the strength too.

  Had it not been for that damned promise, the rope may well have had its way by now.

  It waited patiently on her person wherever she went, a curled up serpent in her satchel offering solace; another promise, this one to herself. Once she’d arranged a babysitter for her dear old dad she could find a beam strong enough to snap her neck, nice and clean. The key to this sweet finality lay with her infernal brother, Noah. And all the while a cloak of craziness lay over Millbury Peak. A detonator?

  The evening smiled on Thomas Wakefield, granting him a nap in the festering armchair even without the administration of his medication. Regardless, Renata still gave him his dose when he awoke. She wasn’t taking any chances. The Dexlatine wrapped its invisible arms around Thomas’s restless nervous system, tightening its grip on his trembling muscles.

  He was calm. It was time.

  ‘Father,’ she began, chewing her lip, ‘I know you don’t want to discuss it, but I need to know how to get in touch with Noah. It’s been great spending time with you—’ she cleared her throat, choking on the lie ‘—but I have responsibilities, things I need to do.’

  Snap, she thought. Nice and clean.

  ‘He’s not coming back,’ Thomas said. ‘If he was, he’d have been at his mother’s funeral. He’s gone.’ A bony, liver-spotted hand, apparently still outside the influence of the medication, shot out and grabbed Renata’s wrist. He pulled her in.

  ‘Father,’ she gasped, ‘you’re hurting me.’


  His blank eyes ceased their idle rolling and locked onto her. ‘You,’ he breathed. She stared. He wrenched her closer. ‘It should have been you.’

  Pain flashed in her brain. She shook it off and yanked her arm, Thomas’s quivering grip slipping down her wrist. His unseeing glare burrowed into her eyes.

  He smiled.

  ‘You and I, we’re the same, girl. The curse that’s ravaged me is coming for you, for your mind. I feel it in your flesh.’

  ‘Father, I—’

  The breath fell from her as he jerked her closer still, their faces now inches apart. Her eyes flicked to her mother’s orange fabric scissors on the couch.

  ‘My child, this family is forsaken. The flames finally came for your mother, and death is stripping the life from me…’ His leathery smile widened. ‘…as it will strip the life from you.’

  He nodded at the monstrosity above the fireplace.

  ‘A flood is due, girl. Our Lord has a wave reserved for the Wakefields.’ His empty eyes bloated. ‘It’s coming, child. The flood is coming. But for now He shall settle for the souls of our blasphemous clan. We have brought this upon ourselves. This family, cowardly and sinful, has authored its own demise.’

  A tear crawled from his eye.

  ‘But my beloved Noah,’ he continued fanatically, his trembling hand still locked around her wrist, ‘that wave was not meant for him. It was he who was to carry this family’s name from damnation. He’s gone, you foolish girl. GONE. So silence that flapping tongue. Swallow those devil-sewn words.’

  Soon the woman will run from her raving father like a scolded child. The words will replay endlessly in her mind – he’s gone he’s gone he’s gone – as the darkness pulls her upstairs to the room at the end of the hall.

  ‘The evils of this world are more terrible than you know, insolent whore.’ His eyes levelled beyond her, blindly fixed upon a distance unknowable, as if gazing into a hell endured long ago. The finger of his other hand tapped maniacally. ‘I have seen things you could not comprehend. I give you my word, the inferno is impending. Its flames shall be that of waves, while deep within your godless core death shall sow its wild oats…’

  She’ll pry open the door to that room, the door upon which laughing cartoon bears and elephants still spell out the name after so many years:

  NOAH

  ‘…the hand of Hell is coming, child…’

  The door will creak open to reveal the untouched, unspoilt bedroom of a seven-year-old boy.

  ‘…the hand of death. And this hand, I assure you, trembles not.’

  7

  She doesn’t want to put her foot through his skull, but she knows she has to.

  Father was strangely calm during the five days Samson went missing. The dog had been let out into the back garden and never came back. As per her mother’s instructions, the girl had ran into the surrounding fields calling the mongrel’s name, rustling a noisy bag of chicken strips in the hope he’d come bounding through the maize and barley. But Samson hadn’t heeded her calls, and the mutt hadn’t turned up back at the house for two days short of a week. By that time, the dog seemed to have gone through hell and back, hobbling up to the house on a fractured leg and leaving a dotted trail of blood from his lacerated side. It turned out these injuries were the least of his worries; the real issue lay in the infected, swollen eyelid that refused to open which, Mr Milton the vet told them, had likely been torn on some rusty barbed wire while he was missing. It was (possibly) treatable, so long as they understood Samson would have to endure many months or even years of agony during his recovery. The laceration would need stitches and the leg would never properly set, meaning the dog would struggle even just to walk for the rest of his painful life.

  ‘We’ll have a think,’ Father had told Mr Milton following the he-may-be-better-off-put-to-sleep conversation. The vet had to inform Mr Wakefield, in a somewhat perplexed tone, that no, he couldn’t just ‘take Samson home and see how he gets on’ – the dog would have to undergo surgery immediately, before embarking on a long, harrowing recovery. Mr Wakefield had resolved to take Samson elsewhere in response to Mr Milton’s ‘antagonising tone’. The little girl had watched the vet plead with her father to let him put the dog out of his misery, passionately appealing that no animal deserves to suffer the pain that would dominate the rest of Samson’s life.

  In the end, Father had not taken Samson ‘elsewhere’. The animal had ended up right back in the same old dog basket at home. He wouldn’t move, he wouldn’t eat, and the girl never even saw him properly sleep. His existence became one of shivering and whimpering.

  ‘Why won’t he let Mr Milton help Samson?’ she’d asked Mother.

  ‘Oh, I’m sure your father knows best, my love.’

  Usually that was good enough for her. Usually it had to be.

  Not this time.

  And so, once the opportunity had presented itself, the little girl had carried the hound through the fields in her slender arms, grunting at his weight.

  Her little brother or sister (Oh, let it be a sister!) was finally ready to come into this world, and so Mother had struggled out to the car whilst Father loaded the pre-packed suitcases and told the girl she was to stay in the house until he returned from the hospital. Mother had called back over her shoulder that she would telephone Mr O’Connell, their policeman friend, to come and watch her. Her father had turned to the girl as Mother made her way outside. He shook his head. ‘You’re on your own,’ he’d said quietly. ‘No one’s coming. Don’t go outside. There’s food in the fridge.’

  The car had started after a few failed attempts and trundled down the track towards town. For the first time, she’d been left on her own with the whole house to herself, utter solitude with her thoughts and her books. It should have been a blessing, but she couldn’t enjoy it. Not with Samson suffering in his basket.

  ‘You don’t want to be here, do you, boy?’ she’d whispered to him, then looked at the tag hanging from his collar – the same tag, collar, and name to be swapped from Samson to Samson year after year. The girl had assumed everyone did that with their dogs. She didn’t assume, however, that every little girl felt the same twang of jealousy she felt from the way her father looked at the dog. No, that was just her. Was love really in such short supply that all he could afford to give were the looks of adoration he gave the mongrel? And what kind of love wilted away the moment the object of his affection showed signs of reaching its expiration? She’d even overheard Father enquiring with a local breeder, one Sunday morning after service, as to whether he could assist him in locating a ‘replacement’.

  Replacement.

  The girl had looked into the creature’s wretched eyes, wondering whether that was all family came down to. What about this new brother or sister? Were they a replacement? If he could be so cold about endlessly replacing the dogs he loved so much, why couldn’t he be so cold about replacing a daughter he barely looked at?

  ‘No, you don’t want to be here at all,’ she’d spoken into Samson’s pitiful face. ‘Let’s get you out of here.’

  And so here she is, in a woodland clearing some half hour’s walk past the church and through the fields. With the firs, pines, and cedars towering on all sides, rippling in the breeze, the crippled dog lies on some flattened undergrowth with the girl standing over him, foot poised.

  She doesn’t want to put her foot through his skull, but she knows she has to.

  It’s not the jealousy, she keeps telling herself. This isn’t about the jealousy. It’s about putting Samson out of his misery, since she’s the only one besides Mr Milton who seems to care what happens to him. It doesn’t matter how much trouble she gets in, or what Father will do. She’ll tell him Samson escaped again when she let him out into the back garden. Actually, she won’t bother. She’ll be punished no matter what she says. And besides, the thing can barely walk, let alone ‘escape’. No, she’ll do it and face whatever she’s made to face. One quick stomp (he probably won’t even fe
el it) and the pain will be over. She’ll have saved a living creature a torturous existence.

  It isn’t about the jealousy.

  The sun casts distorted shadows of criss-crossing branches and foliage from the forest ceiling. The girl looks around the clearing, spotting a squirrel dashing up a tree, then a magpie hopping from a fallen trunk. The tapestry of sound is soothing. Tweeting and rustling, chirping and stirring, distant squawking, and the gentle afternoon breeze flowing amongst the flora: it all moves through her with a calming influence. She lowers her gaze to the quivering creature beneath her poised foot.

  Samson’s one good eye looks up at her.

  One…

  Two…

  Three…

  The mongrel sighs, then lowers his head to the moss.

  Nope, not happening. The girl admits defeat and eventually heaves the thing back to the house, cursing herself for thinking she’d ever be able to follow through with such a deed. Samson’s suffering will just have to continue. It’s because she’s just a little girl – a sweet, innocent little girl. That’s why she couldn’t do it, not because of the terrible vision in the moments before she lowered her foot in resignation, the vision of her father’s twitching fist.

  Little girls aren’t meant to cave in skulls, that’s all.

  Having returned to the back garden, the girl lowers Samson to the grass and closes the gate. She steps up to the back door which leads into the kitchen and slots the key into the lock, shaking her head at the thought of having lost an entire afternoon of reading. She opens the door, thinking about how many chapters of Doctor Zhivago she could have torn through in the time it had taken to—