Red Gloves, Volumes I & II

by Christopher Fowler

  A classic Mercedes has a solid tempered steel chassis. As the two front wheels spun free of the tarmac and slipped over the verge, they hung above the velvet green surface of the marsh for what felt like an age. Slowly, inexorably, the vehicle tilted and dropped into the dark still water of the fen. Gabriel fought to unclasp his belt, but found himself in the same situation as his brother. The blinding weed-green liquid began pushing at the seals of the windows. It sprayed in through the radio, the steering column, the radiators. Gabriel was hysterical now, unable to do anything except twist about in panic. He could have escaped if he had only retained his presence of mind, for the fen was not deep. But the water was muddy and impenetrable, the embodiment of icy death. As the Mercedes settled it rolled over and filled, and there was nothing Gabriel could do about it.

  Nobody thought to check up on his whereabouts until darkness had already fallen. It took another day for the police to dredge the fen and locate his corpse in the weed-camouflaged car.

  Cheryl Bayer

  Mark was in his favourite Wardour Street café, an independent coffee shop with permanently steamed-up windows, when he bumped into Uncle Andrew’s lawyer, Lycus Gerolstein. He had a pale oval face and thinning grey hair that added to his air of reticence. A stern but seemingly fair-minded man, he was greatly trusted by his loyal clients.

  ‘May I?’ he asked, joining Mark at his table. ‘I thought I might find you here. There was something I wanted to talk to you about. You know you were always your uncle’s favourite.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Mark, ‘it’s funny he decided not to show it. Not that I mind, I just don’t understand what happened.’

  ‘Well, that’s what I wanted to explain. Your uncle made some big changes to his will in a series of handwritten codicils before his death.’

  ‘What kind of changes?’

  ‘Switching bequests from one side of the family to the other, that sort of thing. I tried to talk him out of them, because I felt the original will was fine as it stood. Hell, it had taken us many months to plan and refine it, to make sure that everyone in the family was treated with equanimity.’

  ‘You don’t think he was coerced into making the alterations, do you?’

  ‘I wasn’t there when he made them, but I can tell you the signatures on the codicils are definitely Andrew’s, although they’re pretty shaky. Lately I’ve had my suspicions.’

  ‘When did he make these alterations?’

  ‘Well, as you know, your uncle was in hospital quite a few times.’

  ‘He was having blackouts. At first he just told me it was high blood pressure. But I spoke to the doctor and discovered he was due to have chemotherapy for lung cancer. After a while, he admitted the truth and his treatments began.’

  ‘Obviously, I knew your uncle was unwell,’ said Lycus. ‘And when people become sick, families tend to gather in preparation for the worst. I checked with the hospital, and was told that several relatives visited him while he was there. I have a feeling the codicils appeared around then. As I say, I can’t be sure until I’ve done some more checking. I just thought you should know.’

  Lycus rose to go, but placed a hand on Mark’s shoulder. ‘At times like this, family members you know and love can behave strangely. This is just a friendly word of warning. I’d keep an eye on them if I were you.’

  As Mark headed back to the office he rented, a dank attic with an alarmingly sloped floor in one of the last unrestored properties in Soho, he mentally drew up a list of suspects. Who might have manipulated the old man for his money? The idea revolted him. He looked around the office, at his obsolete computer, and the walls that were wet from the leaking ceiling. He was painfully short of cash. Projects had been hard to come by lately, and although he felt a little envious of his brother and his cousins, he could not bring himself to ask them for a loan. It just didn’t feel right. Surely his uncle would have left him money if he had wanted him to have it.

  Pushing the thought to the back of his mind, he settled down to the morning’s work.

  Some time later on the other side of the city, Cheryl Bayer wrote out her name on a piece of paper and studied it with a critical eye. She had kept her former husband’s name after the divorce but now, for the first time, the forty-six-year-old retail manager was thinking of ditching it. Andrew had left her his four-room flat in Stratton Street, Mayfair, choosing to bequeath his huge Buckinghamshire house to his younger second wife, Catherine. Why, she wondered, did the first wives always get the raw deals?

  Okay, the flat was worth a small fortune, but it still didn’t seem fair when you looked at what everyone else had got. Cheryl was trying to sell the place privately, and decided she would continue to live in it until she found a purchaser. The property had hardly been touched since the 1950s and probably needed rewiring, but she resented the idea of paying out hard-earned money to fix it before the sale.

  She studied the signature once more. That was it then. She would change back to her given name and finally put her marriage to Andrew behind her. She balled up the paper and tossed it into the bin.

  Finishing her second bottle of red wine—she would have to watch the drinking if she was going to find another husband—she went to bed, and lay listening to the taxis sloshing along the wet street outside. She thought about Andrew, trying to remember how he had looked in their happier times, but already those memories were growing dim. What were the chances of contesting his will—could she even do it now that it had been implemented? The whole thing was so unfair. Why should the second wife get so much?

  It was no use. She couldn’t sleep. Getting back out of bed she walked through the half-emptied flat without turning on the lights. As she approached the kitchen mirror, she looked at her reflection and instinctively knew that something was wrong. Her shaded figure shimmered and buzzed apart as if it was made of flies, and reshaped itself into Andrew. He was leaning against the kitchen wall behind her, with his hands raised in a friendly gesture. He was smiling at her benignly. With a gasp, she span around, but found nothing there. She hoped Andrew had not been able to read her unkind thoughts. When she looked back at the mirror he was gone, and she realised her sleep had overlapped into her drunken wakeful state, and he had never been there at all.

  No more red wine. She decided to make some tea.

  There was something wrong with the electric kettle. It was making a funny noise. Perhaps she had overfilled it. She honestly couldn’t remember what she had done. She tentatively touched the side, but it didn’t feel as if it was heating. She tapped the plug, tried the wall switch. The kitchen lights weren’t working for some reason.

  She wiggled the kettle plug more violently.

  She saw the spark, and watched as it jumped with a sharp crack from the plug to the wall, vanishing under the wallpaper. It seemed to have actually gone behind the outlet. She could see it glowing red, burrowing through the paper. Suddenly it surfaced, burning upwards in a fierce crimson line. She knew she had drunk far too much, but she had never actually hallucinated before. She slapped her hands over the progressing spark, trying to stop it, but it continued to burn a path, searing and blistering the flesh of her palms. Now it was rising fast and branching into other patterns, burning channels across the kitchen wall, stopping once to flare and hiss, burning onwards again.

  She stepped back and studied the wall, incredulous, trying to understand what was happening. Some kind of pattern was forming. It looked almost like handwriting. She wondered if she should try to call someone, or whether the fault would simply burn itself out. She knew she should have had the electrics checked.

  The realisation of what she was looking at hit her. The burning ziggurat appeared to be her ex-husband’s signature. God knows she had seen it enough times when he had signed money over to her. The thought was so silly she started to giggle. At precisely this moment the lines all flared, and the entire kitchen wall burst into a single fierce sheet of flame.

  Jake Bayer

  It seemed as if the
rain would never let up. Mark Bayer had attended few funerals in his life, but in one month his presence had been required at three. He watched the gathered family guiltily smoking under the eaves of the crematorium like schoolchildren, and almost felt sorry for them. During the service, everyone had talked about how much Cheryl had doted on her husband, but Mark was beginning to wonder. After the divorce she had become an angry drunk. Nobody mentioned that.

  Two of the relatives closest to Andrew were dead. It was almost as if his uncle had planned their fates from beyond the grave. But Mark couldn’t bring himself to suspect that such a kind, conciliatory old man would want to bring harm to his family.

  Cheryl had been burned bald and blackened, which had presumably saved the crematorium some time. Her flat had been gutted and rendered into an empty shell that brought vulgarity to the precious Mayfair street. The coroner noted that the former Mrs Bayer had been drinking heavily and would not have been able to exercise clear judgement, and although he was puzzled by the striped burns on her hands, a verdict of death by misadventure was passed.

  With no assignments to work on, Mark took the next morning off to go and visit Joan and Warren, his parents. Over lunch in their favourite restaurant, a monstrously overdecorated trattoria in Highgate, North London, he attempted to confront them about the codicils to Uncle Andrew’s will, but they neatly deflected his questions. If they knew the truth, it seemed they were not about to tell him.

  He was starting to suspect everyone. Even those closest to him were now behaving differently in the aftermath of his uncle’s death. As Mark questioned his parents, he started to see how aggrieved they became when discussing Andrew’s wealth, and how disappointed they were with what they had been left.

  Everyone except Mark had been left amounts of money, but his mother had also inherited a somewhat peculiar emerald necklace, and his father had been presented with an art deco diamond skull cufflink and tiepin set. However, it was obvious that his parents had been hoping for more; Andrew’s spectacular Buckinghamshire house, perhaps. Surely they took precedence over his childlike second wife? Wasn’t blood thicker than youthfulness?

  Mark looked from Warren to Joan as they forked sweetbreads and osso bucco into their mouths, and saw them in a different, less flattering light.

  Uncle Gabriel had a nineteen-year-old son studying at Cambridge. Jake Bayer had been left a brand-new Kawasaki motorcycle by his uncle, to replace the one he had had stolen the previous year. Gabriel had never approved of his son’s love of motorbikes. Now that Jake was fatherless, he found that he was allowed to ride the glistening machine.

  On impulse, Jake set off to visit his girlfriend in Manchester, and powered up the M1 hoping to catch her before she went out for the night. He, too, had become infected by the thought that the other side of the family was profiting more heavily from his uncle’s death. He had lost his father (not that they had ever been close) and had been given the admittedly beautiful Kawasaki Ninja Performance Edition machine which his uncle had bought in readiness for his twenty-first birthday. But that was all he’d been bequeathed. Aunt Joan and Uncle Warren had been left valuable jewels, and Andrew’s second wife had inherited a huge mansion. It seemed unfair. Of course, his cousin Mark had been left nothing, but the guy was a loser, trying to build a tiny graphic design company in a recession, refusing help from anyone.

  The lowering skies were brownish grey and the black road ahead was slick with rain, so he decelerated and concentrated on the traffic around him. With his father gone, Jake was the most senior male on his side of the family, and responsibility was expected of him.

  A few hundred yards ahead, the articulated supermarket truck that had been pacing the Kawasaki for two junctions also decelerated sharply. According to the signs, one of the lanes was closed for the next mile. Most of the main truck haulage between London and Manchester was conducted on this route, and you had to remain watchful in wet weather.

  Damn, the truck was coming close.

  Jake loosened the throttle, watching the fast approach of the truck’s backplate, and knew he would have to slow down fast. It was okay, though, because there was nothing behind him. He checked the wing mirrors expecting to see a clear straight stretch of glistening blacktop. Instead, he saw his uncle’s face. He was saying something, trying to warn him.

  Shocked, Jake slammed on his brakes.

  When he looked in the mirrors again, Uncle Andrew had been replaced by the steel grille of another truck, just feet from his rear fender and approaching at an insane speed.

  The two great trucks slammed into each other, with Jake at their centre. The motorcycle flipped onto its side and was crushed as flat as a milk bottle top.

  It proved impossible to fully separate Jake Bayer from the Kawasaki. His head was found under the wheel arch of the second truck. His left foot turned up two days later on the slip road of a Little Chef restaurant.

  Joan Bayer

  As soon as Mark heard of his cousin’s death, he became convinced that this string of accidents was no longer coincidental. But the main question which haunted him was this: Even if Uncle Andrew had somehow planned for his family to be hurt, why would he want to harm his young nephew? It seemed as if the items specified by the will were somehow cursed to inflict damage on their inheritors. But how could that be possible? Uncle Andrew had loved his family.

  Mark tried to discuss the matter with his brother Ben, who clearly thought he was crazy. He knew there was no point in going to the police. He tried talking to his parents again, but the deflection he had encountered before now turned to outright hostility. Everyone was bitter and confused by this inexplicable and disastrous turn of events. Mark sat in his gloomy office and tried to figure out an answer. His brother had been left money. Surely, if there really was a curse he would be spared—after all, how could a gift as universal and as abstract as cash ever hurt him?

  Over the next few weeks, the aftershocks of death continued to ripple through the Bayer family. Jake’s girlfriend was devastated by her loss, and discreetly dropped out of school. Autumn crushed the life from London’s trees and winter set in hard. It felt as if nothing could be healed.

  Mark’s mother finally went to see the family lawyer about contesting the will. She felt that as Andrew’s sister, she should have been left considerably more, so Lycus Gerolstein agreed to put her case to the rest of the family. However, they unanimously refused to grant her an extra tranche of cash from her brother’s inheritance fund, and as a consequence, the divisions between them all grew deeper.

  Mark was at a loss to understand what was happening. He had always thought of his family as—well, typically English. They were scattered across countryside and city, eminently sensible, rather too respectable, slightly dull, slightly superior, but now they seemed vindictive, bitter, mean-spirited.

  Mark’s mother had changed more than anyone. Status and power had suddenly become ridiculously important to her. With his own salary running out and no new clients offering work, Mark had been forced to move back to his parents’ house in Chiswick. That evening, he came home just as the first of the real winter storms was breaking, and found Joan preparing for her husband’s annual office dinner. Shaking out his umbrella and leaving it against the banisters on the first-floor hall, he knocked and entered his mother’s dressing room.

  He barely recognised Joan anymore. She had lost weight and Botoxed away her wrinkles. With her newly auburn hair swept up and the antique emerald necklace at her throat, she suddenly seemed like every other hungry social-climber who attended London’s glitzy winter events. Now she spoke of little else than what had befallen the family, who had got what, and why they were not entitled to have it.

  ‘Your uncle had always had his favourites,’ she told him, trying on new lipstick and popping her mouth at the mirror. ‘Catherine only married him for his money, everyone knows that. And she got exactly what she wanted. She’s been left that house, which must be worth a couple of million. He even left her children
the attached land, and they’re not even his!’

  Mark was miserable. He wanted his world to return to how it had been before the death of his uncle. He was sick of hearing about money. But their lives were broken and there was no going back.

  ‘Well,’ said Joan with a final snap of her handbag, ‘I wouldn’t be surprised if Andrew had kept a few other funds tucked away. He was always clever with his cash. Perhaps we should hire Lycus to look into the matter. He must know where everything is, he was as thick as thieves with your uncle.’ She turned to her son, as if suddenly becoming aware that he was in the room. ‘Are you sure you don’t want to come with us tonight?’

  ‘No, I’m trying to build a business plan,’ he told her.

  ‘It’s so unfair. You were supposed to be his favourite nephew. I think it’s disgraceful, the way he’s treated you.’

  ‘Where’s Dad?’

  ‘I’m meeting him there.’ She rose and looked about her. ‘Where did I put my jacket?’

  ‘I think I saw it downstairs.’

  Joan kissed him and went out into the corridor. Mark put on his headphones and went to work on his laptop.

  His mother stood in front of the hall mirror and tried to work out what was wrong with her reflection. It was the necklace; it refused to hang straight. The emerald pendant at its centre was crooked, and the settings of the diamonds around it felt razor-sharp on her delicate skin. Annoyed, she unclipped the clasp at the back and attempted to realign the chain.

  In the mirror, something was coagulating in the shadows behind her right shoulder, as if the very darkness was knitting itself into a shape. The penumbral figure was speaking to her. The flesh of Joan’s neck prickled. She reached out a hand to the glass.

  ‘Andrew?’