Ventriloquists

by David Mathew

  The estate felt hushed; it lacked the bustle and commotion that Phyllie had imagined would mark a crime scene. As she locked her car door (manually for a change), she wondered where the helicopters were, where the frothing news crews were. It was all as subdued as a parrot with a cloth over its cage… an enforced sleep.

  Phyllie did not walk towards the house. Given the fact that no one had come out to greet her – either in a uniform or not – she assumed that no one was in the building at the moment. So be it: if this matter was al fresco, then Phyllie could use the exercise. Only last week, her doctor had told her that she was pregnant, not ill, and that a baby inside her was no good reason not to go for a stroll in the fresh air.

  And the air did not come fresher than it blew this afternoon! Normal-smelling, good, strong gusts, without the vaguest whiff of blood cavorting among them… Into these guests Phyllie strode, with a heart packed with grief – grief for Vig, not Dorota (not really), whom she neither knew well nor not at all, and whom she neither liked well nor detested. It was Vig – and only Vig – on Phyllie’s cluttered mind this early afternoon, and despite the size of the grounds, she knew – somehow knew – that she’d find him at the bird cages.

  She headed in their direction.

  7.

  It was not a perfect union of coincidences or instincts, for Vig had clearly been at the cages for a while. (Phyllie had imagined that they’d rock up simultaneously, albeit from opposite, or at least different, directions.) But it was close enough.

  ‘You look soaked to the skin,’ Phyllie told him. ‘Has it been raining?’

  ‘No. I’ve been exercising. Digging.’

  ‘For treasure? X marks the spot?’

  ‘Something like that.’ Vig held up a supermarket carrier bag. ‘It’s Don’s phone. His last testament if not his last will.’

  ‘I don’t get it,’ Phyllie admitted.

  ‘He left me a note,’ Vig explained from within the first cage on the left. Holding open the door, he added, ‘Care to join me?’

  Phyllie stepped into the cage.

  ‘I knew there had to be more than he said in the letter. The old bugger hid it for me to find.’

  Phyllie noted the dirt embedded in Vig’s fingernails, the excrement and slime coating his hands. ‘So he buried his phone.’

  ‘For me. That’s right, I’m sure of it.’

  ‘Do the police know you’re in here?’

  ‘Do the police know we’re in here, you mean. No they don’t. Not unless they’re watching with binoculars, which I wouldn’t put past them, I suppose.’ Vig smiled. ‘He must’ve known I’d be quick – he’d left it on. The phone. With the display reading PLAY MESSAGE question mark. So I played the message.’

  ‘And what did it say?’

  Vig’s smile widened. ‘Wanna hear?’

  ‘Well of course I do,’ Phyllie answered. ‘Don’t tease me, Vig.’

  ‘You’ll be shocked. It’s a ghost’s voice.’

  Phyllie shrugged. ‘I’ll take my chances,’ she told him.

  8.

  ‘Introduce yourself clearly,’ Don said into the ear of Phyllie Reydman. There followed a squawk of noise pollution – wind buffeting the mouthpiece, perhaps – and then another voice spoke, not quite as clearly as Don had, but audibly enough.

  ‘My name is Charles Eastlight,’ the second voice said. ‘And I am a prisoner of Don Bridges.’

  ‘He hasn’t given him the phone,’ said Vig. ‘He’s holding it for him – at the top of the hole, I reckon.’

  ‘Ssshhh.’

  ‘I am guilty of the crimes of kidnapping and torture,’ Eastlight confessed slowly. ‘My partner’s name is Massimo Sento… but he is innocent of most of our crimes… It was me… It was me. It was my idea. To take the kids.’

  Don interrupted. ‘What are their names? For the record, like.’

  ‘The boy is called Nero – his real name is Neil. The girl is called Jessica – Jess.’

  ‘Good,’ said Don.

  ‘Good God,’ said Phyllie. ‘It’s the missing girl from my school. It’s got to be.’

  ‘That’s what I thought too,’ Vig told her.

  Eastlight gave the address in Eggington: the address of the torture house, where he had planned to kill Nero and Jess on the night of his anniversary.

  Then he gave the date.

  ‘That’s tomorrow,’ said Phyllie under her breath.

  ‘Exactly. Don’s saved that girl’s life.’

  ‘In a roundabout way… Vig. You’ve got to give this to the police right now.’

  ‘You haven’t got to the best bit.’

  ‘I recognised him at your barbecue, sir,’ Don said into the mouthpiece, as clear as a whistle once more. ‘The way one species knows another by smell alone. I knew him for what he was, or would be, and the pervert knew me as well, a leopard being unable to change its spots and all that, sir. And I think that’s why we disliked each other from the word go. We were fighting over the same prey, so to speak.’

  Don left a long pause.

  ‘What does that mean?’ Phyllie asked. ‘Christ, I can hardly breathe.’

  ‘How far have you got?’

  ‘The bit about… fighting over the same prey.’

  As if he’d heard her through the divisions between life and death, Don elucidated his point.

  ‘You see, I was once like Mr Eastlight, and I’ve lived with it ever since. Until now, of course. I was a brute, sir. A savage. To me wife, to me daughter, God rest their harrowed souls. To stable girls and the youngsters wanting riding lessons. To the horses themselves – and what’s a horse ever done, except bring me luck and an income? A disgrace of a human being, through and through, I admit it for all to see.’

  Another pause. Wind crowding around the mouthpiece of Don’s phone while he gathered his thoughts (or had a weep? Who could tell?).

  ‘Everything I told you about me daughter was true, sir, with one rather large condition. The horse kicked her all right, and God help me when I say it might’ve been better if she’d died straight away, for she suffered her short life through. Damage to the brain, sir, you see. Affected her development – and ours, sir. And ours.’

  Don sighed; his words had started to sound chopped up, as if he was walking away from Eastlight. He didn’t want Eastlight to hear this?

  ‘We took it all out on that poor girl, emotionally speaking, the both of us did, when we weren’t doing the same to one another. It was a house of domestic abuse, sir – I’ll call it no other – and occasionally I was the victim meself. Me shattered knees, for example: nothing to do with the horses. That was me wife, God save her, when she ran me over in the car. Then reversed. To make it final – or so she thought.’

  Don laughed; coughed. The flick-and-catch of a cigarette lighter; an exhausted exhalation. Another cough.

  ‘Swear these things’ll be the death of me,’ he said, still laughing. Then he coughed again – and seemed to sober up.

  ‘What I wrote in the letter – about me wife’s disappearances? – all true. All true, sir. And I tried everything to find me wife and me daughter – or the daughter as she should’ve been if the horse hadn’t kicked her. My lost. My missing…

  ‘Only one man seemed to make sense to me. His name was Benny, and he represented something with the name of intra-rationalism, which basically means the spaces between alternative planes of being. Or so he sold it to me, any rate.

  Don gave out Benny’s address in Ashridge, and said, ‘Ask him to see his vivaria.’

  ‘See his what?’ Phyllie whispered.

  ‘Which brings me to my final confession, I suppose: on the subject of children who go missing…’

  ‘Oh God.’

  ‘I can tell you where three of them ended up over the years, and if there’s a Hell of burning excrement for me to dwel
l in for the rest of me days, I know it’s for those children I’ll dwell there.

  ‘They’re in the woods, sir. I’ve sent you a map of approximately where, sir, to the best of me recollection – I’ve sent it second class post. I can only plead grief or insanity – which are much the same thing – for those three children… I bought em off Benny himself. He keeps a zoo of human beings in his vivaria. Kept alive but in deep comas. Comas. And a lot of em connected together, for reasons of his own.

  ‘See… I thought the children, if I kept em in the hole in me kitchen – I thought they’d lure me own child and me wife back to me, from the other side – the other place. He convinced me it would work. He promised me it would. But it didn’t. So the freshest one you’ll find is in the septic tank – she was recent. The others I wouldn’t like to say what condition they’ll be in, sir. Sorry about that.’

  ‘Is he crying?’ Phyllie asked.

  ‘Or laughing. I couldn’t tell,’ Vig replied.

  Phyllie nodded. ‘You’ll have entered the address for this Benny guy in your phone, right?’

  ‘Right as rain.’

  The two of them stopped talking when a voice said, ‘I wouldn’t want to disturb you in there… but would either of you like to tell me what the hell’s going on?’

  It was Dorota.

  The Intra-Rationalist

  1.

  For the first ten minutes of the journey, Vig could not think about Don: his imagination was crowded with Dorota. He and Phyllie had left her behind, and when he returned to the house there’d be hell to pay, no doubt; but then again, perhaps she would run away from him – she had certainly been angry enough to do so. She had frothed with rage while he’d used his phone to find the postcode for Benny’s property. And she had fizzed with temper while he’d walked away from the empty cages (with Phyllie a stride behind) on his way to the car on the driveway.

  Phyllie had tapped the postcode into the journey-planner that Vig kept beneath the driver’s seat. Fixing the device to the windscreen for him to see the roadmap, Phyllie had said, ‘I’m sorry if I’ve created a ruckus for when you get back.’

  ‘At the end of the road, in two hundred yards, turn left,’ said the journey-planner.

  Vig said nothing.

  ‘Should we have told the police where we’re going?’ Phyllie asked, trying a different tack.

  Vig said nothing. Silently he obeyed the direction that the device had given.

  ‘Vig?’

  And then he spoke, his words more robotic than the planner’s. ‘I think it’s over between me and Dorota,’ he said. ‘I think it’s been over for longer than I was willing to admit.’

  ‘Well, I’m sorry to hear that,’ Phyllie replied.

  ‘I left instructions for her to call the police if she doesn’t hear from me within an hour. But it’s probably not the best time to be throwing out my orders, in retrospect.’

  Phyllie waited before asking, ‘…What do you intend to do when we get there, by the way?’

  ‘Talk to this guy Benny.’

  ‘If he’s there. If he still lives there.’

  Vig shrugged. ‘If he’s there,’ he agreed.

  ‘And say what?’ Phyllie asked.

  ‘At the roundabout, take the third exit,’ said the journey-planner.

  ‘I don’t know. But Don was not exactly ambiguous about Benny’s involvement, was he?’

  ‘…No. But he wasn’t exactly sane either.’

  ‘Oh I don’t know. Maybe killing himself was the sanest thing he ever did in his life.’

  2.

  The navigation device took them right to the door. Vig would not have known how precisely to articulate his feelings at this moment (not even in German), but there was something unsettling about the house’s absence of protection. No gates or fences secured the perimeter; no long gravel driveway snaked and teased its way from the road to the front door. In fact, to Vig, it resembled nothing more or less than a countryside B&B. It was wide open. Utterly unthreatening… And this had to be a mistake, didn’t it?

  ‘No time like the present,’ Phyllie suggested.

  ‘Just give me a minute.’

  His thoughts of Dorota had been quiet for the last fifteen minutes, but now Vig pictured her standing by the front door, puzzled and furious; she would be waiting for him, her fists clenched. Perhaps she had already packed a suitcase – a suitcase for him. He saw the fences around his own property – the security seemed ludicrous now – and he knew that once he walked away, he walked away for good.

  ‘What if Don was having us on?’ he whispered. ‘It doesn’t look…’

  ‘It doesn’t look odd enough,’ Phyllie interrupted. ‘I agree. What better place to hide something? A place so ordinary…’

  Vig killed the engine.

  ‘So what impression do I give, I wonder. With my gates, I mean.’

  ‘You give the impression of uneasy money,’ Phyllie answered. ‘You’ll be burgled before this wanker is… Are you ready?’

  They were met at the door by a short young woman who smiled at them pleasantly. ‘Can I help you?’ she asked.

  Vig recognised an Eastern European facial structure when he saw one. The lady at the door even resembled Dorota, and Vig was a breath away from addressing her in Polish when she spoke.

  ‘Would it be all right to speak to Benny?’ she asked.

  ‘Is he expecting you?’

  ‘No. No I don’t think so,’ Vig replied… and he immediately wondered if this was true.

  For a second the woman’s eyes lost their distant ethereal quality; they focused, something sharpened to a point… and Vig was convinced that the interview was at an end, almost before it had begun. Partly because of embarrassment, he avoided the woman’s expression and averted his eyes in a downward glance. By doing this he was able to see what the woman had made no attempt to hide.

  On her right hip she wore a holster. Poking from the top of the holster was a gun butt.

  ‘You can come in,’ she said, standing aside – but the decision that she’d made had armed her with a smile that Vig didn’t like, and he was certain that he wouldn’t like the hospitality on offer.

  Telling himself not to be a baby, Vig stepped into the house. The woman had been out the back somewhere when they’d called. Target practice or something. Country ways… Didn’t Vig himself enjoy a shoot? Sure! Sure he did! The difference was, he was not in the habit of answering the front door carrying a shotgun.

  ‘He’ll be in the vivaria,’ the woman called over her shoulder. Indicating to her right as she walked, she added, ‘Perhaps you’d like to wait in the library. I’m Eva, by the way.’

  When they were certain that Eva was out of earshot, Phyllie and Vig spoke industriously at low volume.

  ‘She had a gun!’ said Phyllie.

  ‘Didn’t even ask our names,’ said Vig. ‘He’s not frightened of anyone or he’s stupid.’

  ‘I should’ve waited in the car.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because she has a gun.’

  ‘So? His daughter, do you think?’

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘What the hell is this vivaria that everyone keeps mentioning?’

  Phyllie’s faced pinched as she attempted the recollection. ‘Something to do with animals, I think.’

  ‘I’ve got a sense of déjà vu,’ Vig admitted. ‘I remember talking to Charlie in my library when Dorota and I had just moved in. Now we’re in Benny’s – it’s like one of those Russian dolls. And now he keeps animals, you tell me. Like Don did. It’s too weird.’

  ‘You should talk to Roger about patterns of behaviour. I’m sure he’ll appreciate the chance to sing his old hymns.’

  ‘Yeah, I’ll do that if we don’t get shot. And fed to the creatures… Does he know where you are, by the way?’


  ‘No.’

  ‘Why not text him,’ Vig advised. ‘Be on the safe side.’

  They were wordless for a few moments. They listened for clues – for anything inside the house, a moan, a cry – and then Phyllie said, after removing her phone from her handbag, ‘It’s snakes. Vivaria is the plural of vivarium. It’s where people keep snakes.’

  3.

  ‘What magazine are you from?’ Benny asked, smiling. ‘Excuse the wet hair – I’m off out tonight. Shower.’

  ‘It’s fine. We’re not from a magazine,’ said Phyllie.

  ‘Ah. You’re not here about the reptiles, then.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I have to say I was wondering why no camera. So what then?’

  ‘Don Bridges,’ Vig answered.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Don Bridges.’

  ‘Yeah I heard you. And I asked you: who?’

  ‘He used to work for me. Groundskeeper. He had a few choice words for you, Benny. It is Benny, isn’t it?’

  ‘It is.’ Benny sat down on one of the plump chairs, indicating for his guests to do likewise. ‘Please.’ Memories creased his face. ‘This Don Bridges. He used to be a jockey, did he?’

  ‘That’s the one,’ said Phyllie.

  Benny nodded. ‘Yeah. He worked for me for a while. Yonks ago. What about him?’

  ‘He killed himself,’ Vig replied.

  ‘Sorry to hear that. Did he leave me something in his will?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘See, I’m trying to grasp why you’re here,’ said Benny.

  ‘He alluded to your experiments. With people.’

  ‘Did he now. Well the cunt was finally good for something. Who’da thought it?’ Benny smirked. ‘I’d given up on the prick.’

  ‘Would you mind telling us about the experiments?’ Phyllie asked.

  ‘Not at all.’

  He doesn’t know our names, Vig realised, and yet he’ll tell us all about his experiments. What the dickens?

  ‘Eva!’ Benny shouted. ‘Something for my guests, if you’d be so kind.’