by Ewart Hutton
It looked like a dead thing.
I felt the grab on my dynamic as the drab reality of the place applied its clamp. One look told me that it had been a long, long time since this building had housed anything that didn’t own claws or trail slime.
Magda wasn’t here. I rounded on Paul. ‘You’ve brought me to the wrong place.’
He just smiled again and hunched his shoulders in a constrained shrug. ‘You wanted me to show you the Den. I told you we’d stopped coming.’
But someone had been coming here I reminded myself. Those quad-bike tracks were fresh.
I looked at the derelict hut again and remembered the dummy trail. That’s what you’re meant to think.
The door was padlocked. A tough-looking bronze affair with the stainless-steel lock crook still shiny. It was overkill. The hinges were rusted to shit. I could have prized the door open with a not very big stick. But I was still running with the notion that I did not want Ken and Les to know that I had been here.
Each window had been curtained with a pair of dirty sacks that had been drawn to overlap. Most of the panes of glass were cracked, but one had been replaced by a yellowed rectangle of celluloid that had been tacked into place. I used a small branch and worked at the edge of the celluloid until two of the tacks popped free. I slipped the branch in through the small gap that I had created and pulled the edge of a sack up and to the side.
The inside surprised me. It looked like the desolation had been left on the outside. The furniture was under dust covers, but from the outlines I made out three armchairs, and one sofa against the far wall. The floors were randomly scattered with worn rugs and old pieces of carpet, and a cast-iron wood stove stood in the corner, with a healthy pile of cut firewood beside it. A solitary bucket was placed on the floor. To catch the drips from a leak in the roof ? Or a blood libation?
Dust covers? A functioning stove? A floor that wasn’t heaped with rat shit? Perhaps I was wrong. Perhaps this place did harbour life? Or had recently.
‘What girls did you used to bring up here?’ I asked.
He shook his head. ‘I told you. It was cider and fags and air rifles.’
‘And wanking, I’ll bet.’ He looked away. Had I actually embarrassed him, or struck a deeper chord? ‘Come on, Paul,’ I pursued. ‘You’re not going to tell me that a bunch of young guys are not going to use a place like this to make out with girls.’
He shook his head.
‘Why did you get invited in, Paul?’
He looked puzzled. ‘What?’
‘The group. You’re quite a bit younger. How did you get to hook up with them?’
He frowned, thinking about it. ‘They liked the way I played rugby,’ he said, almost making it a question.
‘It wasn’t Wendy?’
‘What the fuck has Wendy got to do with anything?’ His voice cracked down into low and ominous.
‘Why did Wendy run away with Boon’s father?’
‘We don’t talk about her any more. She’s not part of the family.’
‘Why?’ I pressed.
‘Because she was a fucking little slut,’ he snarled.
‘And who made her that way?’
‘Malcolm Paterson took advantage of her.’
‘Surely he was just picking up the pieces?’
He looked at me as if I was crazy. This wasn’t acting. The guy didn’t know.
He didn’t know. Paul Evans had not deliberately pimped his sister.
Had I got this completely wrong? My brain raced for a lever. Something that would switch the tracks back towards the possible. ‘You brought her up here though, didn’t you? You brought your sister to them?’
‘She wanted to come with her friend Donna. I just helped out with a lift from time to time.’ He smirked. ‘Les couldn’t exactly give them a lift, considering.’
‘Considering that he was fucking Donna? Two-timing his fiancée?’
‘They weren’t engaged then. And Les was a mate.’
‘What about Ken? Didn’t you find it creepy that he was fucking around with your sister?’
His eyes flared angrily. ‘He wasn’t doing anything like that. They messed about, but it was just in fun. They knew she was my sister. She only turned into a slut when she ran off with that bastard Paterson.’
I watched his face. He believed this.
‘Anyway, it was Donna we were all fucking,’ he announced smugly.
‘All?’
He smirked. ‘That’s right.’
‘Les let you fuck his girlfriend?’ I asked, playing up the disbelief.
‘We all did her one night. They showed me the proof.’
I felt the tickle in my kidneys. I tried to remain impassive. ‘What proof ?’
He blushed. ‘They showed me a photograph of me on the job.’
I kept my voice gentle. Lead him calmly, I instructed myself. ‘Why would you need to see a photograph to know that, Paul?’
‘We all took some pills that Les had. Whatever they were, they wiped me out.’
Now I saw it.
‘Just one photograph?’
‘We’re not fucking perverts!’ he blazed.
They only showed him the one. The one that made him their buddy. The rest of the set they kept to themselves. And Wendy. Oh yes, they shared them with Wendy. The tool that they had used to lock her into their lives.
‘Tell me, Paul, did the photo show you taking Donna from behind?’
He scowled, reddening. ‘How the fuck did you know that?’
Should I protect him?
Fuck no … He had been the instrument of Wendy’s suffering.
‘Paul, you fucked your sister.’
14
I asked Mackay for two favours. The loan of the Range Rover, and to take Paul home to Herefordshire with him. I needed him removed. I needed Ken and Les to get edgy. I wanted them wondering why Paul had disappeared.
Paul hadn’t believed me. The initial shock of my accusation split his face for a moment, but his defences wouldn’t allow it through. His imagination conspired with his psyche to convince him that I was playing a dirty trick on him. It didn’t surprise me. The kind of manipulation and betrayal that used incest as a tool didn’t belong in the Dinas that Paul inhabited.
But Wendy had not been given the choice. She would have been shown the full frontals in widescreen and Technicolor. A set of images that would have left her in no doubt that she had been buttfucked by her own brother. The pictures that Ken and Les threatened to show her parents unless she demonstrated full compliance. Okay, she probably hadn’t been anywhere close to virginal. She had gone there voluntarily with Donna. She must have been aware what her friend was up to with Les. But this she didn’t deserve. Now they had her anchored, riveted to their cause.
What pills had they been given? Rohypnol, most probably. Then again, as a farmer, Ken had connections with vets, so maybe ketamine. Whatever pharmaceutical it was, it didn’t matter now. Long past traceability. The damage done. Paul and Wendy would both have been so out of it that they wouldn’t have known what happened. Until they were shown the pictures. I winced, thinking about it. Trying to put myself into Wendy’s position. The horror. I wondered whether the callous bastards had even considered the risk of this thing kicking her over so badly that she could have topped herself?
I had another thought then. The description of Paul’s condition that night in the hut in the forest. The sight of him in the morning, coming down off the hill, wasted, Trevor Vaughan and Les Tucker propping him up. Were they still feeding him dope? For their amusement, or to keep him out of their affairs?
I drove the Range Rover off the track into a thicket of brush to hide it, and retraced my steps back to the Den. The light was starting to die, a wind picking up, catching the tops of the trees. I was in for a long cold wait if my hunch proved wrong.
This place was important to them. I was convinced of it. The quad-bike tracks were recent, and the ruts deep enough to show that they kept coming her
e. But the place was empty. Could Magda have been and gone?
I climbed the bank, up to a shelf that was large enough to accommodate me, with enough vegetation to hide behind. I made a gap in the bracken to give me a view of the approach to the hut over the clump of willows that screened it from the track, and settled down to wait.
I was pinning my hopes on Paul’s mother. Her Sunday routine had been sideswiped. Her huge son had missed his Sunday lunch. She would start to be concerned. She would call his mobile phone. But, as we now controlled that, she would not get a reply. So she would start in on his friends. Ken and Les would both get a call.
And they in turn would not be able to raise Paul. So, would they get edgy? Start wondering if Paul had worked himself into a funk, and come up here for refuge? Or would they want to check out that this place was still safe?
I didn’t care about the motivation. I just wanted them here. I wanted to see them open that box. I wanted to know if it really was empty. Or was there magic involved?
I felt like a hunter with only hope and the force of will to bait the trapline.
The day eased out. The light went into deep grey, the chill seeped in, and I lost all sense of time. The wind and the dampening effect of the surrounding trees chopped up all other night sounds. Even throttled down, the engines, when I first heard them, sounded like crop-duster planes. A squadron of them. The perception of distance was warped. The engines sounded as though they were getting closer, but I could see no lights.
I started to stand, hoping to increase my visual range, and caught it out there on a bend on the track. Nothing solid, just an impression of movement, a flitting of something momentarily darker than the blue-grey backdrop. I ducked back down, hoping that I hadn’t sky-lined myself.
They were driving without lights. Two distinct engine notes were identifiable now. Coming slowly, using the tramlines on the tracks to navigate.
The bank’s shadow deepened the darkness in the clearing in front of the den. They came through the willow screen as crude and unrefined shapes. Even when they stopped and dismounted there was not enough definition to make out which one was which.
They went to the door without talking. The padlock clattered against the corrugated iron when they unlocked it, and the buckled door opened with a screech. The door protested again as they closed it behind them, and an incandescent white light flared up as a gas mantle was lit inside.
And nothing more happened.
I waited them out. I forced myself to use my watch to stop my imagination telling me that too much time had passed. The gas light continued to flare in front of the sack curtain, and nothing passed between it to cast a shadow. I had to resist the urge to climb down and creep up in front of a window. It was too risky. I would make too much noise getting down off the bank.
What were they doing in there?
They startled me when they barrelled out of the hut flashing torches. The hairs on the back of my neck went up, and the skin around my scrotum tightened in a fear reflex. Then I realized that they weren’t looking for me. The torch beams were aimed on the ground. They were arcing in front of the hut, crossing each other’s trails, their torch beams swinging like erratic pendulums.
By the time they started shining the torches up on the bank, I had composed myself. The movements were perfunctory, they were just going through the motions. Whatever it was that they were looking for, they didn’t expect to find it up here. There was an uncoordinated vibrancy about their actions. They were spooked.
Very carefully I checked my watch again. They had been inside the hut for just under ten minutes. In a space that small, what could have taken them all this time?
With an almost insect affinity they came to an unspoken decision, turning back to the hut. They shut the gas light down, levered the sticking door closed, and padlocked it. This time they put their headlights on. They went through the willow screen in single file, and then branched off, each taking a different direction along the track. Both in a hurry.
I remained on my platform until the wash from the headlights disappeared, and then forced myself to stay put long enough to establish that they weren’t going to double-back to sucker me. I climbed down into the clearing. The anticipation that had sparked when they first arrived had turned hollow. I had learned nothing. I still had an empty hut.
I walked to the far side where the willows clustered in. The smell of diesel from their quad bikes still hung in the damp air here.
I stopped, hammered to the spot when it came to me.
The quad bikes had petrol engines.
I ran through the possibilities and kept turning up the same result. I was smelling the residual fumes from a diesel generator’s exhaust outlet. I risked shining my torch into the willows that crowded the base of the bank in front of me. But there was too much shadow involvement in the tangle of branches to make anything out.
I took a deep breath, shut my eyes, and concentrated on listening. Catching the wind soughing through the trees on the bank above me, and that sense of suspension, as if all the wild things in the vicinity were holding themselves in bated stillness until my attention wandered again. Nothing mechanical.
I stood in front of the Den and went back through Ken and Les’s arrival. The light that they’d turned on had had the unmistakable white incandescence of a gas lantern. At no point had I heard a generator start up.
I already knew where this was taking me. But, for the sake of professionalism and procedures, I had to argue with myself. By breaking into the Den, I would be putting a future case in jeopardy by making any evidence I found inadmissible. They would probably overlook the transgression if I discovered a body. But I didn’t want to find a body.
How could I just walk away, though? Especially when there was a possibility that Magda’s orbit had at last come into conjunction with mine.
I did some ethical juggling. Forcing an entry would be a Bad Thing because I did not have a search warrant, and it would corrupt any evidence that I might find. Covering up a forced entry would not turn it into a Good Thing, but, if I found anything vibrant in there to screw Ken and Les with, I was pretty sure that I could shoulder that moral burden.
The door had slumped on a mismatched set of hinges nailed to a raw pine post that was now rotted and spongy. I jiggled the door, working it towards me. The nails in the bottom hinge came out, and the door dropped and skewed with a painful screech of twisting iron. Now it was only supported by the top hinge and the padlock hasp. I slipped into the nearest shadow and practised rigid attention while I strained to hear if there were going to be any consequences arising from the banshee noise that I had just ripped the night with.
I gave a spider enough time to anchor half a web to my right ear before I crept out again. I gauged the door’s list. By pulling the bottom corner away there would be just enough room for me to crawl in.
It was a tight squeeze, like trying to limbo dance into a crushed car. Inside the hut the enfolding darkness and the difficulty of the access made me feel trapped. I fought down the panic possibility that Ken and Les could return at any time. I couldn’t risk turning their light on. I was going to have to rely on my torch, keeping it masked as much as possible.
The interior gave off a damp reek of burned butane gas and mildew. No sound of a generator, no smell of diesel fumes in here.
I swung the torch round slowly, concentrating on the rear wall, which was built up against the bank. This, like the rest of the interior, was lined with vertical timber planks. There was no visible door in the wall, and the only thing that could have disguised one was an old wardrobe, the walnut veneer peeling off. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe? I resisted the temptation to open it and discover the portal to an enchanted land. Instead, I rocked it away from the wall. I didn’t have to move it far. The back was solid, and the quantity of cobwebs and general crud behind it told me that it hadn’t been shifted in a long time. Very carefully I moved it back to where I had found it.
I had an art
teacher once who had almost inspired me. Mr Hawkins. He had a saying that he used to drill into us: Things may not always be in the form that you expect to find them. For him it had been about a way of relating to and experiencing abstract art; for me it became a useful exercise in keeping perception fluid.
Doors don’t have to be door shaped.
I tested the floorboards with a flamenco dancer’s foot stomp. Hollowness. There was a void under the floor. I got down on my knees and worked systematically across the room, moving the furniture piece by piece and replacing it in exactly the same spot as I had found it. I had a couple of false alarms but, on close inspection, they turned out to be just replacements for the original boards. There was no trapdoor.
My back ached when I stood up again. The doubt pills started to work. An instinct was nagging at me to get out of there. Had I been mistaken about the smell of diesel? Could I have misinterpreted some tricky olfactory esters produced by the decomposition of leaf mould because I had not wanted to accept that the game stopped here?
Doors don’t have to be door shaped.
I used the mantra to damp down my internal panic, and looked around again. But I had already searched everywhere. The three external walls could be discounted, unless an entirely new dimension in the space/time continuum was involved, and I didn’t have the physics to cope with that. I had checked behind the wardrobe. I had moved the sofa bed away from the wall. I went back to that thought and qualified it. I had moved the sofa bed when I had been looking for a trapdoor in the floor.
I shifted it again, getting in close and concentrating on the wall this time. There was a horizontal seam in the vertical planking, low down, about seventy-five centimetres off the floor. It looked like a repair job, a replacement for some rotten boards. But then, they would want it to look like a repair job. Something that would pass a cursory inspection.
The panel was completely flush, and roughly square. I ran my fingers around the perimeter joint carefully, wary of wood splinters or deliberately planted needles. I missed it on the first circuit. A clever little spring-loaded catch that popped the top of the panel out when pressure was applied. I pulled it away. Behind the revealed opening was another, heavier, hatch set into a wall of dense concrete blockwork and secured with two heavy deadbolts.