Fiddleback

by Mark Morris

  ‘Gotcha!’

  I offered him a smile which I felt nervousness trying to pluck at. ‘Pardon?’

  ‘Thought you’d try and sneak past without me noticing, did you?’

  He grinned, but I could feel my cheeks burning. I grinned ferociously back at him and said lamely, ‘You looked so engrossed that I didn’t want to disturb you.’

  He ambled over to me. He was wearing a navy-blue silk shirt today, as tight and shimmery as yesterday’s one. He looked like an old crooner who’d gone to seed. ‘Settling in all right, are you?’ he asked. ‘Bed nice and comfortable?’

  It would be a lot more comfortable if you were in it with me. Is that what he wanted me to say? Instead I replied, ‘Perfect, thanks,’ and then, before I even fully realized I was going to say it, I added, ‘Actually, there was something I wanted to ask you about.’

  He spread his hands expansively. ‘Fire away.’

  ‘I wondered whether you knew anything about the grey man.’

  His face didn’t exactly fall, but it became expressionless. ‘The grey man?’ he repeated.

  ‘Yes. It’s a local legend apparently.’

  ‘I know that. Who told you about it?’

  ‘Oh, a couple of kids mentioned it. I just thought it sounded intriguing.’

  He snorted. ‘Load of old rubbish, more like. Just a daft story from a time when folk didn’t know any better.’

  ‘So who’s the grey man supposed to be? Some sort of local phantom?’

  ‘Aye, something like that. It’s said he stalks the lonely places at night and inflicts a terrible death on whoever comes across him.’

  It sounded as though he was quoting this last sentence from a pamphlet or guidebook. ‘What kind of terrible death?’ I asked.

  He shrugged. ‘It’s all a bit gruesome. Not worth repeating.’

  I laughed. ‘It’s all right, you won’t upset my female sensibilities. I like a nice gruesome story, especially one that isn’t true.’

  ‘Aye, well.’ He poked a stubby, bejewelled finger beneath the thin golden frame of his spectacles and rubbed at the pouchy flesh in the corner of his right eye. ‘The story goes that down through the ages, people have been found mutilated, their eyeballs gouged out.’ He gave another shrug as if adjusting a weight on his back. ‘Like I say, load of old rubbish.’

  Jim’s story didn’t exactly unsettle me, but I passed the rest of that morning in a state of anxiety, and even a little fear, all the same. Most of the fear came from my notion, fanciful or not, that after my encounter in the police station I was under hostile surveillance. Every time I heard a noise in the pub I tensed, thinking that it was the police downstairs, coming through the door that led up to my room. I knew it was ridiculous, but it didn’t stop me expecting to hear the thunder of booted feet as they ascended towards me.

  I tried phoning Alex again, mainly because I wanted the comfort of hearing his voice, even if it was only a recorded message. I didn’t mean to say anything, but after the beep I found myself wailing, ‘Oh, Alex, where are you?’ Then an image came to mind of dark figures sitting like vultures around Alex’s answerphone in his flat – heavy, shadowy shapes, listening to my despair and sniggering. I killed the connection with a shudder, and as I slumped back on to my bed it occurred to me for the first time what I was actually doing.

  I was hiding. I was doing the adult equivalent of sticking my head under the covers and hoping the bogeyman wouldn’t get me. As I realized I was doing this, so I also realized how pointless it was. A child’s blind, naive faith was no good to me now. I was in my room because I didn’t want to feel exposed and vulnerable out on the streets, but the truth of the matter was, I was far more vulnerable here. If people were keeping tabs on me, then they would certainly know where to find me. The fact that no one had come meant one of two things: either I was being paranoid and no one was interested in me, or they felt confident enough to keep paying out the rope in the sure knowledge that eventually I would hang myself.

  So what were my alternatives? Stay here and keep a low profile (what would be the point in that?); go back to London and forget about the whole thing (and abandon Alex? Unthinkable); or stick around and continue my – for want of a better word – investigations, and run the risk of suffering the consequences of sticking my nose where the people of Greenwell would no doubt claim it didn’t belong.

  I wasn’t really hungry, but I decided to sit in the pub and have some lunch, brazen it out. I heard voices coming from behind the door that led into the bar even before I’d got to the bottom of the stairs, but despite feeling as though I was going into an exam or a job interview, I marched forward and pushed the door open.

  As before, however, no one paid me much attention. When I entered the room the nearest people to the door – a pipe-smoking man with a white beard, and a heavy-set man with a helmet of thick, dark hair who was wearing a dusty checked shirt and clutching a pint – glanced at me with no more than the normal amount of interest a man will show when a reasonably attractive woman enters his line of sight.

  ‘Excuse me,’ I said, and they moved aside to let me through, the dark-haired man even presenting me with a smile. I moved to the centre of the bar, looking around as casually as I could.

  A good two-thirds of the clientele were in their fifties and above. Elderly couples sitting eating lunch; old-timers in flat caps who’d popped in for a pint and a ham roll; workmen with beer bellies and black-rimmed fingernails; a harassed young couple trying to keep their two pre-school children quiet with lemonades as they scanned the menu board by the bar.

  Normal. Non-threatening. Parochial. My wild thoughts began to seem almost shamefully silly in this context.

  I ordered a prawn salad and a lime and lemonade from a chubby girl I hadn’t seen before who was serving at the bar. I ate it amid gentle chatter, the occasional curl of cigarette or cigar smoke, the musical burble of the fruit machine.

  No hostile glances, nor even any curious ones. Even Jim’s wife ignored me, and I didn’t get the impression she was doing so studiously either. It was as if she hadn’t even noticed I was there.

  Buoyed by this, I decided to go for a walk after lunch. I wandered around aimlessly for a while, the quiet streets as drab on foot as they had seemed from the car. It was turning cold. The sky was hazy, the dark-stoned buildings again giving the peculiar impression that they were sucking the light out of it.

  I walked a circuitous route, coming back past the Red Dragon, which was closed (OPEN AT 6 said a sign in the window) and looked deserted. I had almost reached the Solomon Wedge when a police car cruised past me. I tensed, but the car didn’t stop or even slow down. I tried to make out the features of the two people inside, but they were little more than silhouettes. I swallowed, licked my lips, and the police car turned the corner. As soon as it was out of sight my mobile phone started the inane little jingle that I’d meant to change ever since I’d bought it.

  My heart leaped, even as my tight stomach cramped. Alex, where have you been? I imagined myself exclaiming as I scrabbled to pop the press stud on my little shoulder bag. I managed it on the third ring and scooped the phone free, scattering plastic – Visa, Sainsbury’s, Blockbuster Video – and loose change at my feet. I pressed the Call button and gasped, ‘Hello,’ as I stooped to pick up what I’d dropped.

  ‘I know where your brother is,’ said a male voice that I didn’t recognize.

  My bent legs began to shake so much that I had to steady myself on the pavement with my free hand to stop myself sprawling like a drunk in the street. ‘What?’ I said. ‘Who is this?’

  ‘Meet me tonight at the railway station. Ten p.m.,’ the voice said.

  ‘Who is this?’ I said again. ‘Where’s Alex?’

  But the caller had rung off.

  nine

  I told myself that I wasn’t seeing what I thought I was seeing, that my mind was playing tricks. Time flies, people say, and I thought that maybe it lies too. It carries us along through lif
e, and is cruel and duplicitous throughout the entire, sorry journey.

  I told myself that what I was seeing was nothing but an old branch line. Long-disused, fallen into disrepair, like so many in this part of the country. They were probably standardized, same design to save money, same materials, maybe even built by the same firm, a lot of them. It couldn’t be the same place, and yet it was (or at least in what I was beginning to think of as my fractured mess of a memory it was). The railway station at Greenwell – right down to the overgrown dirt track that led to it, the weed-strangled, rubble-strewn car park, the smoke-blackened stonework and the denuded roof – was a replica of the one Matt had taken me to three years ago, the one just outside Preston, where the smooth, blank sheet of his future had been screwed up, stamped on, damaged beyond repair.

  Sitting in my car, staring at the place, I suddenly felt as though I were Matt, or rather that I had changed places with him. Three years ago it had been his tight, tense hands on the steering wheel, his eyes which had held the fear.

  This couldn’t be, I told myself again. It was impossible. It was the darkness that was doing it; darkness was the most effective disguise of all. In the daylight this place would look so different that I would wonder how I could ever have seen the resemblance.

  I got out of the car and stood beside it for a moment, unwilling to leave its side. The moon was a white, curved blade above the exposed ribcage of the station roof. It seemed to be the light it cast that was chilling the air, turning to a rime of frost where it touched the upturned surfaces of the earth. As I walked slowly away from the safety of the car, towards the station entrance, the light shifted on the building’s rough stonework as if it were trying desperately to form a face, or at least a mouth with which to speak to me – welcome me in or warn me off.

  He stalks the lonely places at night, jovial Jim had said of the grey man, and inflicts a terrible death on whoever comes across him. The tangle of undergrowth bordering the car park behind me was growing fidgety in the rising wind, scraping and creaking and whispering as if in response to the soft, low moan of the wind itself.

  I looked back once. Moonlight slid across the ice-smooth bodywork of my car as if attempting to gain entry. Either I was here first or the man who had arranged to meet me had used some other mode of transport. Perhaps he had walked; I thought of boot heels tapping steadily along the lightless road, gravel crunching softly underfoot. Something about the image – the walker’s relentless patience, his act of placing one foot steadily, unhurriedly, in front of the other with the world dark and silent around him – made me shiver.

  I had tried to call him back, of course, but without success. I hadn’t even been able to get hold of the number he had called from. I had spent all day wondering who he was, speculating, counter-speculating, my hopes and fears rising in equal measure. I had exhausted every possibility, every theory, had played through a hundred different encounters in my head. I had come prepared, or so I had thought, a knife I had bought that afternoon in one pocket of my jacket (not that I could ever imagine using it), a can of fly killer and a rape alarm in the other.

  It was only when I arrived here, however, that I realized I wasn’t prepared for this at all. I should have staked out my territory beforehand, made myself fully aware of what I was getting into. It hadn’t occurred to me that the railway station would be remote and abandoned. It was jovial Jim who had directed me here, but he had neglected to mention that the place was no longer in use, and I had never thought to ask. Before coming I’d blithely reassured myself that nothing bad could happen, that a railway station was a public place, and that as long as I stayed in the busiest areas I’d be fine.

  I stood now in the station entrance, alert for the slightest sound or movement. I was uncomfortably aware of the building around me, of its dark corners, of how far away my car was. I thrust my hands into my jacket pockets and almost sliced open my finger on the knife that was already jabbing a hole in the pocket lining. The knife was a Kitchen Devil, small but incredibly sharp. Tentatively I found its handle and curled my fingers around it. It didn’t make me feel any safer.

  I took a deep breath to slow the ones that were coming too quickly, and stepped forward, into the station building. I moved as quietly as I could, but couldn’t prevent the snap, crackle and pop of broken glass beneath my feet.

  Despite the moonlight that sidled into the room and alighted on the glass shards, making them wink and flash, there were still dark places here. My eyes jerked to them, one after another, imagining movement in every clot of shadow.

  What would I do if I heard something? Slow footsteps tapping along the platform beyond the turnstile; the scraping of a match; the clearing of a throat; a voice speaking my name? I wondered about going back to the car, waiting there. Whoever was coming to meet me couldn’t fail to see the car parked there, would know I’d arrived.

  Unless, of course, they themselves weren’t supposed to be here. It could be that the caller had risked a great deal to see me, and was now hiding somewhere in scared silence, waiting for me to approach. If I chickened out, a golden opportunity to find Alex might be lost. The caller might not be prepared or able to try again.

  I moved slowly across the ticket office to the turnstile. I pushed at it, knowing it would be jammed. I climbed over carefully, thinking that this would not be good if I had to make a quick getaway. I emerged on to the platform, looked behind me to the far end, and felt my stomach lurch. There was the crossing point, the traffic light bent at an angle, a streak of moonlight climbing its metal pole. I walked forward to the waiting room, the words written in faded gold script on faded blue paint, the ‘it’ amended with a black marker pen. I swallowed. It felt as though there was something sharp in my throat. I reached out, grasped the handle, twisted the door open.

  Moonlight flooded into the room so greedily that if it had had any substance it would have barged me out of the way. It was early October, and turning cold, but I heard the drone of flies. My gaze was sucked to the room’s centre, where a figure hung like a life-sized puppet, its arms limp, like double pendulums at rest, its toes pointing downwards as though straining to touch solid ground. The noose around its neck had caused the figure’s head to tilt almost coquettishly to one side. The flies I had heard, buzzing with idiot greed, circled and alighted on the body in an ever-shifting black cloud, like a soul attempting to shed itself of its mortal remains.

  I couldn’t see the corpse’s face, and initially thought its features were obscured by shadow, or a mask of flies, before realizing that in fact the head had been smothered by a hood. After an instant of wide-eyed disbelief, an instant where I wondered almost coolly whether what I was witnessing here was the result of a suicide or an execution, the full horror of what I was seeing suddenly came screaming and flailing out of the darkness at me, and I staggered back as though under the onslaught of some invisible force, my internal organs contracting painfully, strength draining from my legs and blood from my head, making me certain and terrified I was going to pass out. My surroundings receded; I felt as though I were being lifted out of my body. The only thing that kept me rooted to consciousness was the thought that whoever had done this awful thing might still be here, lurking in the shadows, watching.

  I must have staggered the length of the platform and climbed over the rusted turnstile, but I don’t remember it. All I recall is the sound and feel of glass cracking beneath my feet as I ran across the ticket office and out of the building. I halted for a moment, swaying, disorientated by the wide, cold spaces of the night. I looked up at the gleaming scimitar of the moon, and then I staggered to my car, where I spent several horrible, exposed minutes fumbling for keys and trying to fit the correct one into the tiny lock with trembling hands before finally yanking the door open with such frantic force that I broke a nail, and sliding, falling, into my seat.

  I pressed down the nub which locked the door and for a minute or more just sat there, panting, half-sobbing, trying to fight down the lurch
ing nausea in my belly. I was in no fit state to drive. I took out my phone, jabbed 999, blurted, ‘Police,’ even before the receptionist could finish asking me which emergency service I required. I was put through and began to tell them where I was and what I had seen, my words tumbling over one another. My message must have been even more garbled than I thought, because the person I was talking to kept telling me to calm down, take deep breaths, speak more slowly, assured me that help was on its way.

  When the phone call was finished, I abruptly burst into tears, great surging lumps of reaction which almost choked me. I only snapped out of it – or rather, spasmed into life – when I heard something growling in the darkness behind the car. I cranked my head round, and saw white light cresting and shattering in the undergrowth. My senses were so heightened, my imagination so rampant, that it took me a moment to realize that what I was hearing and seeing was the engine and headlights of an approaching police car.

  I looked at the dashboard clock – 10:21 p.m. For the first time I wondered whether the killer (if there was one) was the man who had called me that afternoon, or whether he had arrived before me and been scared off by the terrible sight in the waiting room. The police car lurched to a stop and two peaked-capped policemen in bulky jackets with luminous flashes got out. They were stone-faced, their eyes shrouded in shadow. I didn’t unlock my door, but merely wound down my window a couple of inches. The policeman who had been driving, the one who was closer to me, leaned forward and said, ‘Are you the lady who reported the body in the station?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, thinking that if he asked me to get out of the car, to show them where the body was, I’d refuse.

  He didn’t, though. He squatted on his haunches, the peak of his cap still making dark pools of his eyes, his colleague hovering at his shoulder. ‘Would you mind telling us exactly what it was you saw?’