For Rye

by Gavin Gardiner

  ‘I don’t believe it,’ she said, fingers curled, nails gouging the palms of each hand. Blood crept from her fists. ‘None of it.’

  ‘You don’t need to. I’ve already broken one of your rules. What was it…?’ He flicked through the black notebook. ‘Ah, here. “Don’t tell them the story, let them discover it.” Well, I’ve told you enough. It’s time for you to discover the rest for yourself.’ He reached under the bed and pulled out the red spade, then placed it ceremonially on the nightstand. ‘Don’t believe me, please. I beg you, don’t take my word for it. Discover the truth for yourself.’ He looked at the spade. ‘Funny,’ he said, ‘that your mother should be buried so close to such a little unmarked stone.’

  The door swung open.

  ‘What is this, cigarette smoke?’ barked the bulldog of a nurse as she grabbed the Marlboro from Quentin’s mouth. Renata cringed as the woman threw the smoking stub into that sparkling sink in the corner. ‘This is a hospital, sir,’ she said as she climbed a chair and began fiddling with the ceiling-mounted disc. ‘Bloody smoke alarms don’t even work. Right, get out of here. Go on, or I’ll call security.’

  Quentin winked at Renata as he dropped the nine-volt Duracell into the bin. He went to the door.

  ‘Discover the truth for yourself.’ His eyes flicked to the spade. ‘It all comes back to the truth.’

  17

  ‘Wake up.’

  The cold air stung as her mind struggled into consciousness. The voice growled again.

  ‘Miss Wakefield?’

  The hospital bed felt hard, like stone.

  ‘It’s okay, it’s just me.’

  She struggled to sit up. The figure that knelt by her side began coughing. She desperately tried to focus on the shape’s outline, marked by the sun pouring through a tall window. She strained against the glaring light, finally realising where she was.

  The clock tower.

  She felt the hospital gown under her duffle coat and the dull ache in her feet, then remembered her barefoot trudge along the Millbury Peak backroads and across the fields. Funny, all these years fantasising about being back in hospital only to end up escaping one. But what were those jaundiced eyes and that tatty raincoat doing here? What was he doing in her clock tower?

  ‘Detective O’Connell,’ she said, rubbing the drip wound on the back of her hand.

  ‘I told you, Miss Wakefield. It’s Hector to you.’

  Her joints ached from the stone. The chill bit into her face. Light filled the room. Her eyes fell on a shrivelled makeshift bouquet of lichens, dandelions, and daisies sitting by the window. Dread suddenly flooded in.

  Quentin.

  ‘I was worried about you, Miss Wakefield. No one’s heard from you in days. I couldn’t even get hold of Mr Rye. His crew’s packed up shop and left town. Ran out of money people are saying. I ended up checking with the hospital in case anything had happened to you. They said you were there two days until you just…’ He paused. ‘You must be wondering how I knew to look for you here.’ He took a breath to calm himself, then reached for a thermal flask and poured Renata a cup of hot tea. His hands were still unsteady, sweat still beaded his forehead; alcohol withdrawal hadn’t finished running its course. ‘Like I said, I’ve known your family since you were a girl. I’m a detective, Miss Wakefield. I piece things together. Little signs popped up here and there over the years until eventually your special hiding place became obvious to me.’ He handed her the steaming cup. ‘I kept it to myself, of course. Didn’t tell a soul.’ He smiled. ‘Especially not you. Wouldn’t have wanted you knowing your secret hideout wasn’t so secret.’

  Quentin was responsible for everything he claimed to have done, he had to be, but could she really have…killed Noah? Or was it another one of his games? The detective’s words glowed with as much warmth as ever, but her eyes were now open to their undercurrent of deceit. This man knew exactly where Noah was. Quentin hadn’t lied about that.

  ‘Now, Miss Wakefield, you must tell me what happened to you. Why were you in—’

  ‘What do you know of my brother?’ she interrupted.

  The man suddenly became an art lover, Renata the exhibit. He scrutinised her, his yellowed eyes drinking in anything her straight face betrayed. She stared back, screaming inside. You KNOW. Whatever happened to Noah, whether or not Quentin’s telling the truth, you KNOW.

  ‘I told you, I’ll arrange for the care of your father. You don’t need to stay any longer. Millbury Peak isn’t good for you, it’s—’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Miss Wakefield,’ he began, ‘the detonator recovered from the site of the truck explosion, it’s been analysed further. Firstly, I’ve been told a device such as this had to have been paired with a relatively low powered explosive, not of a high enough amplitude to cause such a blast.’

  You KNOW.

  Out came the toothpick.

  ‘Secondly, the detonator’s broadcasting capability was meagre. The explosive couldn’t have been detonated from further away than the convoy itself.’

  Whatever happened to Noah, you KNOW.

  ‘These facts point to the person responsible for the explosion not only knowing there was an explosive substance in the truck to augment the strength of the blast, but also that they must have been nearby.’

  ‘I thought you were retired, Detective,’ said Renata. ‘Wasn’t that grand gesture in aid of finding my mother’s killer?’

  His tooth-picking intensified.

  ‘There’s a connection between Sylvia’s death and the explosion, Miss Wakefield. I can feel it.’

  ‘Quentin,’ she began, forcing calm into her words, ‘you’re sure he’s not responsible?’ She curled her toes until they hurt.

  ‘He’s no more responsible for the truck or your mother’s death than I am for his god-awful books. Quentin’s a good man.’

  Why can’t you see him for what he is? WHY? The old fool was as blind as her father. She, too, had been blind. But stopping criminals wasn’t meant to be her damned job. Her toes cracked. ‘You still haven’t answered my question.’ She locked eyes with Hector. ‘What do you know of my brother?’

  Hector winced as the pick pierced gum. ‘I know nothing, Miss Wakefield. I’m sorry, but I have to go.’ She clenched her teeth behind pressed lips. He made for the door, then stopped. He popped the broken spring release of his pocket watch cover with the toothpick, then stood staring at its face for a moment. ‘Promise me one thing: think about what I said, about leaving. This town, it has nothing for you.’ He looked at her hospital gown. ‘Whatever happened to you should be warning enough. You have a life, a career. All you’ll find here is pain. I don’t want that for you.’ There was no deception in his pleas for her to leave. In those tainted eyes she saw clear desperation. ‘Leave Millbury Peak.’

  Detective O’Connell’s heavy footsteps faded down the spiral staircase. She lifted one of the upturned crates. The red spade Quentin had left on her hospital bedside table lay underneath. It was clean, obviously new. He must have bought as close a replica to the real thing as he could. How could he know so much? What was his endgame?

  She looked out of the narrow window in the stone.

  The mist was beginning to clear.

  18

  Her breath became clouds of icy condensation as she entered the house. The air was rancid, as if drawn from the lungs of roadkill. Renata closed the front door against lashing rain.

  A dense mustiness hung over the living room. Cold, white moonlight emanated from the windows. The wasted form of her cassocked father awaited her in the armchair, the epicentre of the room’s stenches. The bouquet of smells was its own creature, the sum of its parts beyond dissection. Urine, faeces, vomit: these may all have played a part on the vile stage of the elderly vicar’s abandonment, yet this repugnant collaboration defied definition. The room, too, had become a beast in its own right; Thomas’s gaunt form sat nestled in its bosom, these two monsters’ disparate grotesqueries finally as one. The walls of
mould and rotting floorboards were as much the flesh of Thomas Wakefield as the unidentified brown soup running out from under his cassock and down his leg was the house’s lifeblood.

  She folded her arms against the shape under her duffle coat, keeping it in place against the hospital gown.

  It weighed heavy, so heavy.

  ‘Good evening, Renata,’ he spoke from the shadows, vapour lurching from his lips into the stagnant air. ‘Nice of you to join me.’

  Stepping over the wheezing shape of Samson by Thomas’s feet, she went to the long-dead fireplace and began throwing scrunched up newspaper and kindling into the grate. She reached for a matchbox upon the mantelpiece, but found it to be empty. She remembered the lighter still in her pocket.

  One truth: ours. Thank you, Quentin.

  Lightning flashed as pain scorched her brain.

  she loved him would have done anything for him she—

  The lightning subsided.

  ‘You seem to spend your life leaving, girl.’

  Her father’s voice registered but made no impact. His mutterings were meant to be loaded with the weight of a sledgehammer, every word a planetary event. Now, nothing.

  Love: ripped from her. Life: a lie. Truth: denied. And Noah, could she really have…? She was the tool of a psychopath who was fuelling her unhinging, nothing more than the means for the completion of his grand work. Now, as every truth of her life crumbled, as the farce of her existence became clear, Thomas’s words lost their weight and floated like ash from the grate.

  ‘Answer when your father addresses you.’

  The dried softwood birthed flame. Renata clicked the lighter shut as she stared into the dancing fire, a burning ballet of infinite permutations. She added more logs. The weight under her coat grew.

  ‘You must be cold,’ she said into the flames. The fire recoiled as if the lost weight of her father’s words was reborn in her own. The crackling of the firewood filled the silence. ‘Where’s Ramsay?’ she asked. She could feel Thomas’s fragility behind her, that frail frame ready to shatter.

  ‘Where’s Ramsay?’ his voice echoed mockingly, followed by a snort. ‘Where’s Sylvia? Where’s Renata? What does it matter? I told you, girl, this family is forsaken.’ His voice steadied. ‘Soon, the Lord shall pluck me from this cursed darkness and cast me into the void with all the—’

  ‘And Noah? Are you ready to speak of him, Father?’

  ‘The boy!’ spat Thomas. ‘Again with the boy! Let me tell you all you need to know about him. He left, as you did. But while you were scribbling pornographic sacrilege, he was unable to be with us. He was taken from us, he—’

  ‘Tell me who took him,’ Renata said, struggling to her feet. The unbearable weight under her coat continued to grow.

  ‘Taken from us, as the waters of the flood took the mistakes of the Almighty, that beautiful deluge. Except the boy wasn’t a mistake. No, child. You were the mistake.’

  She stood over him, her shadow engulfing his lank form.

  ‘You were never meant to be,’ he growled. She unfastened her duffle as he spoke and reached for the weight. ‘It is evident to me in my final days—’

  She pulled out the spade. Lightning lit her pale blue gown. Slowly she raised the red steel over her head.

  ‘—that it was the seed of Satan that grew inside your mother, the spoils of which yielded none other than you, an unclean—’ He paused to swallow, doing nothing to appease the tiny pendulums of saliva swinging from his lips. Dried, rust-tinted spittle hung tight to his underbite, quivering maniacally as he continued. ‘—The Whore of Babylon reborn, infecting by way of the page—’

  A whimper came from the floor as she stepped on Samson. She looked down at the dog.

  ‘—and there came one of the seven angels which had the seven vials, and talked with me, saying unto me, Come hither; I will show unto thee the judgment of the great whore that sitteth upon many waters—’

  Its half-closed eyes looked up at her with dull concern as the spade remained poised above in her shaking hands. This mongrel specimen, this Samson and every Samson before it, had earned more looks of adoration from her father than she could ever have dreamt of receiving. Where was her love? Where was her look of adoration? She met its gaze, foot still on its leg, steel frozen in mid-air. The spade begged to be driven into the raving skeleton of Thomas Wakefield. She fought it, forcing her attention to the creature below. She pressed her foot harder into its leg. The grey mutt moaned, quivering in chorus with the demented old man.

  ‘—and I saw the woman drunken with the blood of the saints—’

  Brittle dog-bone cracked.

  ‘—and with the blood of the martyrs—’

  She fought the spade’s pull as sweat ran from her hands and down her wrists. She battled the will of the steel, elemental and unrelenting, struggling to keep it from driving down into her father. She focussed her attention on the moaning Samson, moving her foot up the canine’s body to its head. She grimaced as every muscle fought the strength of the spade.

  ‘—the beast that thou sawest was, and is not; and shall ascend out of the bottomless pit, and go into perdition—’

  She thought of that woodland clearing all those years ago…she couldn’t do it then and she couldn’t do it now, she couldn’t do it then and she couldn’t do it now, she couldn’t do it then and

  ‘—and they that dwell on the earth shall wonder, whose names were not written in the book of life from the foundation of the world, when they behold the beast that was, and is not, and yet—’

  Samson’s skull became the pedal.

  ‘—with whom the kings of the earth have committed unbonded copulation—’

  All she had to do was push the car a little further through the fog, that was all. Then the shape would become clear. Everything would become clear. She pressed the pedal harder against the carpet. A dull, outward gulp marked the expulsion of the hound’s eyes from their sockets. Its feeble struggling ended.

  ‘—and the inhabitants of the earth have been made drunk—’

  A dying retch from below. The final Samson wheezed its final breath, then stilled.

  ‘—with the wine of her fornication.’

  The fire’s crackling echoed in her ears. The grandfather clock watched on impartially, a silent monolith. Her shoe lay flat on the grimy carpet, cranial discharge encircling its sole. Lightning burst across the room, momentarily illuminating the rusted name tag on the dog’s collar, then its expelled eyes as they sunk into bloody mush. She lowered the spade.

  ‘You want to know the truth about Noah?’ he said, his blind gaze oblivious to the porridge of gore at his feet. ‘Your mother didn’t believe you deserved the truth. She wanted to protect you from it.’ He stuck his chin up at her. ‘But I’m beginning to think you deserve it. What do you think, girl? Do you deserve the truth?’

  Renata turned from him, lifting her foot from the crater of Samson’s skull, then walked to the door.

  ‘Speak, girl.’

  She stopped at the sideboard mirror, fixing the kirby grips in her hair, before looking down at the spade in her hand.

  ‘I know where to find the truth.’

  19

  The clock tower flashed, a pillar of light, then fell back into darkness. Weeds groped underfoot, rendering her shoes as waterlogged as her coat. The soaked hospital gown clung tight while her duffle flapped madly in the storm. The churchyard was a swamp out of which headstones leant drunkenly at every angle, its undergrowth reaching from below for sunlight that was not there. Rain battered the immutable scene, the graveyard as stoic as cliffs enduring the tide. She hunched forward and pushed through the storm, spade in hand.

  Soon it would all be over.

  As the truths gifted to her had stripped the weight from her father’s words, so had it dissolved her concern for him. Why had it been there at all? To honour her mother and the promise? No, it had been born of fear, she saw that now. Fear of a crippled old man. No matter, discover
ing for herself the reality of Quentin’s words was the only thing of importance now. Oblivion awaited, but she couldn’t meet it without knowing. Then she would end herself.

  Renata’s eyes fixed on her mother’s grave, then moved to the diminutive white headstone by its side. She’d barely registered it previously, but the unmarked pebble of a thing now seemed indisputably linked to Sylvia Wakefield’s. If there was any truth to Quentin’s words, if the dreams were in fact remnants of an act committed a lifetime ago, buried deeper than the dead, this stone held the answer. He was right about one thing: she had to discover the truth on her own. No more lies, no more deceit. Could she really do this? She placed a hand against the slab and, for a moment, heard that laugh in the howling gale.

  Ee-ee-eeee!

  She knelt and planted the blade of the metal spade in the soaked soil. Whether or not the answers lay here, there would be no coming back from this. Not that she wanted to, or that the rope would let her. One final confirmation of the truth, then the noose would have its way.