Mirrorman

by Trevor Hoyle

  MIRRORMAN

  Trevor Hoyle

  First published in Great Britain in 1999 by Virgin Worlds Limited, an imprint of Virgin Publishing Ltd

  This ebook edition published in 2014 by

  Quercus Editions Ltd

  55 Baker Street

  7th Floor, South Block

  London

  W1U 8EW

  Copyright © 1999 by Trevor Hoyle

  The moral right of Trevor Hoyle to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  ISBN 978 1 84866 926 0

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places and events are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  You can find this and many other great books at:

  www.quercusbooks.co.uk

  To Liz and Laurence James.

  With love, admiration and respect.

  And hope for the future.

  CONTENTS

  Part One

  DARK SHIP

  Part Two

  TEMPLE DEEP

  Part Three

  LOST ZONE

  PART ONE

  DARK SHIP

  What might have been is an abstraction

  Remaining a perpetual possibility

  Only in a world of speculation.

  What might have been and what has been

  Point to one end, which is always present.

  TS Eliot

  ‘Burnt Norton’, Four Quartets

  DARK ROW

  1

  Somebody must have been playing tricks on Frank Kersh, because in the very last second of his life he was granted a reprieve from the electric chair.

  Kersh lay on the narrow trestle bed in the twelve-foot-by-eight-foot cell, semicircles of damp spreading from the armpits of his blue work shirt. Through the barred window the Louisiana sky was a bright, aching blue. Another lousy perfect day. Kersh wrinkled his nostrils, smelling his own sweat, but what could he do? Let out of this stinking oven one hour in every twenty-four. When a man was going to die in nine days’ time you’d think they’d at least leave him his self-respect.

  Somebody was wailing down the Block. That was the name some joker had given to Unit F-2, their last permanent residence:

  The Block. Chopping block.

  Very funny. Kersh might die laughing.

  He lay back, hands clasped behind his head, and listened to the Nigra wailing his lament. Another guy joined in with a soft harmonica. Twenty-three blacks and three whites occupied the cells on Death Row. One of the black kids had just turned sixteen. He was pumped full of drugs to keep him quiet. For three nights he’d driven the rest of the inmates crazy, yelling and screaming and smashing his head against the bars. So now they kept him topped up, and he didn’t bother anyone.

  Kersh wriggled his bare toes. He tried to imagine them sliding into cool black mud. He’d never know that feeling again. Standing up to his shins in the creek. He’d never taste cold beer either. Or touch a woman. The list of what he’d never do again was endless.

  What had Jason, the black guy in the next cell, said? ‘It don’t hurt none, that’s what one of the guards told me. It just kind of tickles a little bit. There ain’t no pain. That’s what he said.’

  ‘How the hell does he know?’ Kersh had asked. ‘He tried it?’

  Jason went grey in the face and shut his mouth.

  There was a metal jug and a tin cup on the shelf above the bed. Kersh poured out some lukewarm water and sipped it. Within seconds, sweat popped out all over his body. It trickled down his legs, ran between his toes. Formed pools on the floor. His shirt scraped on his back. Hellfire couldn’t be hotter than this. But Kersh didn’t believe in heaven or hell. There was nothing. Void. Just empty cold blackness, like cool black mud. Frozen to a pinpoint of nothingness. The Bible-punchers talked about bright light and angels with wings. Or else about eternal damnation, purgatory. Given the choice, he’d go for damnation – who wanted to end up like some goddamn faggot with silver wings on a pink cloud?

  A bird twittered on the window ledge.

  Kersh pushed the lank fair hair from his forehead and stared up at it with his one good eye, the other a milky opaque blue. It looked dead. People never knew if he could see with that eye, so they dropped their own eyes, avoided his stare. He liked that. He used it brazenly, a leper flaunting an open sore, liked to watch them blink and turn away. He bet some of them were ashamed they had two good eyes.

  The bird hopped about on tiny legs as frail as twigs. It cocked its head, observed him with an eye like a glittering bead. Frank Kersh didn’t move. The sparrow grew bolder. It hopped between the bars and stood on the inner ledge. Head cocked one way and then the other. It was a scrawny little thing, hardly an ounce of flesh on its fragile bones.

  ‘Hello, little fella,’ Kersh said softly. ‘Are you thirsty? That’s all I got to give you, a drink. Here we go.’

  He slid off the bed, holding the metal cup.

  The sparrow inspected the cell. Shiny green walls. Hustler pin-ups of spread-eagled women. Stallone with scarred biceps toting a machine gun. Dirty Harry with his long-barrelled Magnum. Half a dozen puzzle and crossword magazines, crumpled and dog-eared. The narrow bed with the hard flock mattress. The yellow plastic bucket with a lid, down there in the corner. Just this and the steel-barred sliding door.

  Kersh’s twelve-by-eight universe.

  ‘Come on now,’ Kersh said soothingly. ‘You don’t like this heat any better’n I do, huh? Take a nice long drink.’ He half-filled the cup and stretched out, pushing it with his fingertips on to the ledge. The sparrow retreated and then came back.

  Kersh leant against the wall and folded his arms, smiling.

  The sparrow approached the cup, pecked at it. Then hopped up and clung to the rim with its tiny feet. Tentatively, it ducked its head, but couldn’t reach the water. It looked sharply at Kersh, then tried again. No dice. But it was a trier. Another wary glance and down it went again. Tail feathers stuck in the air.

  Slowly, Kersh unfolded his arms – and pounced. His bony hands shot out, one for the cup, the other like a trap coming down on the rim. The grey feathery ball battered against his fingers. Its head poked through. But before he could clamp his hand tight down it had got free, a fluttery blur of feathers, and was through the bars and away.

  A dark soaring speck against the blue …

  The cup clanged against the bars, flung with all Kersh’s strength. He nearly kicked at the clamped-down metal leg of the bed, remembered just in time that he wasn’t wearing shoes, and smacked his fist into his palm instead.

  Kersh dropped to his knees. He reached under the bed and pulled out the wooden box. Carefully, he lifted the lid and peered inside. Slitted red eyes glinted from a dark corner. The thick pelt of fur was smooth and shiny. The black nose and long whiskers twitched, never ceasing, sniffing for food.

  The rat drew back, baring its yellow teeth, hissing in its throat, as Kersh bent nearer to see inside. He wanted to stroke it, but some creatures could never be tamed. He’d had it nearly two weeks, feeding it on morsels from his own plate. Maybe in time it would grow to trust him, let him fondle it.

  Maybe in time. Nine days. That’s how much time he had left.

  ‘Just missed a yumm
y little snack for you, Manson, old buddy,’ he informed the rat. ‘A skinny little thing, hardly a mouthful. But a change from beef stew. You could’ve crunched the bones. Sorry ‘bout that.’

  The long whiskers twitched; the slitted red eyes watched him steadily. No, it wasn’t ready for stroking. Kersh valued his fingers too much.

  He winked at it fondly with his milky eye, and then glanced up, frowning. Footsteps. Quickly, he fastened the lid and slid the box under the bed. A couple of the guards knew about Manson, allowed Kersh to keep his ‘pet’ as a special privilege. But Meacham, the head guard, didn’t. And Meacham didn’t care that this was Death Row, and all the guys here were terminal. ‘What special privileges did the victims get?’ Kersh had once heard him ask a social worker. ‘You got any sympathy to spare, give it to their families.’

  Kersh was sitting on his bed, sipping water, when the footsteps halted outside his cell. Meacham’s peardrop-shaped belly hung over his gunbelt. His soft pudgy fists rested on the third tyre where his waist should have been.

  ‘Put your shoes on and smarten yourself up.’ Meacham jerked his thumb. ‘You got a visitor, Kersh.’

  The guard at the control panel operated the electronic door and Kersh preceded the head guard down the Block, past the row of cells with their lounging prisoners. One of them leant against the bars.

  ‘If it’s that born-again dame, give her one for me, Frank.’

  In the next cell, the black kid was staring at the wall with vacant bloodshot eyes, saliva dribbling down his chin.

  Farther along, a black guy rubbed his groin suggestively and licked his lips as Kersh went by. ‘That white pussy sure tastes good, man.’

  Kersh gave him the finger and got a prod in the small of the back from Meacham’s bully stick as they went through the double security doors into the main corridor of F Cellhouse. TV cameras mounted high in each corner swivelled to watch them go. Plastic signs of red letters on a white ground displayed the geography of the Block: UNIT F-1, UNIT F-2, DETENTION, PROTECTIVE MEASURES, VISITORS’ SECTION.

  Meacham unhooked his bully stick and pointed the way. Kersh knew it already. Meacham just liked handling his bully stick, the fat slob.

  Afterward, puzzling over what had taken place, and when, Jeff Cawdor would wonder if it hadn’t all started on that particular day – at that particular moment – when he was standing at his office window on the 23rd floor of the Chrysler Building.

  New York was shrouded under a thick grey blanket, a phantom city lost in a cloud of sulphuric mist. Lightning crackled like a plague of mad fireflies through the murk. He was enjoying the display from his grandstand vantage point, feeling safe and impregnable (like a child in a secret cave) behind the granite fascia and the tinted double glazing. Plus the fact he’d always, ever since he was a kid growing up in Torrence, North Carolina, relished the play of natural forces, the more majestic and awesome the better.

  On that particular day, hands stuffed in his trouser pockets, a dreamy gawping look on his face, he hadn’t thought of this storm as being any different. Maybe the difference wasn’t in the storm itself, but in him. A couple of times he’d glanced over his shoulder, having that uncanny sense of there being somebody in the room with him. There wasn’t, but he couldn’t shake the feeling.

  The morning had started ordinarily enough. He’d had breakfast with Sarah and Daniella, then driven in from his home in Franklin, New Jersey, his mind a million miles away as he listened to Scheherazade on the CD deck. Well, not a million miles, more like three and a half thousand – the distance roughly between Manhattan and Tuscany, where the three of them were to spend their first European vacation together as a family, after a five-day stopover in London. Cawdor had visited Europe many times before, on business, as a senior partner and chief designer for the civil-engineering company UltraCast International. On this trip he had people to see in London and Norwich, during which time his wife and daughter would stay with friends in Shropshire. Sarah had put in some time on her English family tree and come up against a mysterious gap in the late eighteenth century. Now she was hoping to pick up the trail again and trace it back through parish-church records, filling in the missing pieces. Daniella had never been to England, or indeed Europe, at all. She had vague, muddled ideas about England, fed by old black and white movies on TV, and the only place she had expressed any desire to visit was 221B Baker Street. His daughter would be stricken with disappointment, Cawdor reckoned, chuckling to himself, not to see hansom cabs rattling through fog-shrouded streets and to hear in the distance the baying of monstrous slavering hounds.

  It was going to be wonderful! Sights, experiences, sensations; a whole new world the three of them could share together for the first time. And not least because he and Sarah would be seeing it all afresh through the girl’s eyes. Staring unseeingly at the roiling turbulence outside the window, Cawdor couldn’t stop himself recalling their last trip to Europe – his and Sarah’s. It had been sixteen years ago, two years after they got married and six months after Rebecca died. Their baby daughter had been another tiny statistic in the files labelled COT DEATHS. A perfectly happy, healthy child, just starting to take notice of the wider world beyond the protective perimeter of her mother’s embrace and her father’s cuddles and funny faces. A real family at last, which overnight had turned into a small, cold, rigid lump with clenched blue fists lying face down in the crib, and two desolate individuals for whom the planet, the entire universe, had ceased turning. That had been the reason for Europe. They had to do something, anything, go somewhere, anywhere, or go mad. So Cawdor had taken a clear six weeks off work and they had gone in search of other places, any form of distraction to fill the void. And – if such a thing might exist in some remote spot on the face of the earth – to find peace of mind.

  But that was in the past.

  Rebecca was a dear small memory. She would never be forgotten, and the pain would never ultimately be assuaged, but their life now had meaning and purpose – as well as lots of fun, laughter, and love.

  Cawdor shook off the reverie, his dark-brown eyes sharpening into focus. He brushed back the wavy locks of unruly hair from his forehead and returned to his CAD workstation. The storm slowly abated, moving west across the Hudson, as the sky resumed a more tranquil aspect. From behind a ragged fringe of purple cloud a golden shaft of sunlight poured in through the window. Cawdor was distracted once again, his mind basking in warm sunshine from the vaulted blue of an Italian sky, his hand caressing worn, pitted stones that had been put in place 4,000 years ago, the tingle of blood-red Chianti on his tongue, the dry rasp of its aftertaste making his senses glow…

  Enough, enough. He snapped out of it and concentrated on the job in hand: calculating some stress-load factors for a shopping mall in Lambertville, Michigan. It was pleasant drudgery, punching in the numbers and watching the columns multiply on the green screen as if breeding exponentially like a virus in a fifties horror flick. God, and to think he used to do all this with a slide rule, a pocket calculator and a tattered book of logarithm tables he’d carried with him since his student days at Columbia.

  Twenty minutes later, deciding he needed to take a leak, he walked through the outer office on his way to the men’s room. UltraCast International occupied two whole floors of the building: the executive offices, administration and design team on this level; the civil-engineering section, site planning and accounts on the floor below. Sixty-three people in all, labouring on projects as diverse as schools, bridges, office blocks, multiple-screen movie complexes, and, currently, a hotel and open-air casino in Florida that was being overseen by Cawdor’s fellow senior partner, Don Carlson.

  On the way back he stopped for a word with one of the design engineers in the drawing office, then asked Phyllis, his plump, efficient secretary with the dimpled cheeks, to get him a tuna-mayonnaise sandwich, bluecheese-flavoured potato chips and a Sprite; woolly-headed daydreaming while he watched the storm had put him behind, and he intended to work through his
lunch break. This simple request brought a dimpling, sidelong smile from Phyllis. She was always smiling at him from under her eyelashes, as if they shared an intimate secret or a private joke. She had a crush on him, he guessed (no guessing about it: he knew damn well she did) and he shamelessly played on the fact as an angler plays a fish, pretending all the while to be blithely ignorant of the mute adoration shining out of her eyes.

  Of course this made her adore him even more, which of course he also knew, and so the circle tightened its silken spiral.

  ‘You don’t know how lucky you are, not having to watch your figure,’ Phyllis said, reaching inside the desk drawer for her purse.

  Oh God no, Cawdor thought. She wasn’t going to make some remark about his lean manly physique, was she? He didn’t mind silent worship in small doses, but this threatened to become embarrassing. Once he’d overheard her rhapsodising to another secretary about some guy with ‘sleepy bedroom eyes and a wicked seductive smile’, and then been mortified to realise this guy was himself.

  Cawdor gave a weak grin. ‘I gotta few pounds I could stand to lose,’ he mumbled, speaking the truth. But Phyllis was blind to any – even the tiniest – imperfection in her hero.

  ‘Not that it shows. Take it from me. To say you have a desk job, you’re in pretty good shape. Most men your age –’

  Cawdor retreated, almost blushing. ‘Er, thanks. Nice of you to say so, Phyllis. Still, better make that a Diet Sprite, OK?’ He turned and fled into his office.

  2

  A thick sheet of laminated perspex prevented any physical contact between prisoner and visitor, a series of holes the size of dimes punched in it so they could hear one another. Tubular-metal-framed chairs were bolted to the scuffed floor, separated by narrow wooden partitions to provide an illusion of privacy. Three large fans moved slowly overhead, stirring the sluggish air. In the corner behind a square deal table a guard in a dark-grey peaked cap sat boredly watching the proceedings.