Rob silenced it and dialled the operator. As he waited for the zero to become a person, his mother pushed past him to settle the weight of her gaze on his face. ‘Do you realise what time it is? You can’t afford to be late for school. Come and take this away from him, Tom.’
‘I won’t be late.’
‘I don’t want you driving like a mad thing either,’ she said, so fiercely anxious that Rob almost desisted. Then a voice that might have been understudying for the announcement of unobtainable numbers produced itself. ‘Operator, how may I help you?’
‘I’m trying to get this number,’ Rob said, and gave Amy’s.
While he loitered the phone kept up a hiss of static which suggested a distillation of his mother’s reproach. At last the sound retreated to let the operator tell him ‘That line is out of order. I’ll inform the engineers.’
‘How soon will they be there?’
‘I’m afraid I couldn’t say, sir.’
Rob planted the droning receiver before hurrying upstairs to brush his teeth and grab his rucksack. He considered adding Nazarill to its burden, but left the book on the chair to lie about his intentions. It was no more of a lie than his parents had allowed him to believe, after all. He tried to imitate someone bound directly for school, which wasn’t enough for his mother, who said as she opened the front door for him ‘I hope you’ve left yourself plenty of time to get to your first class.’
‘I have, I promise.’
He might as well not have spoken, for she looked no less worried, wrinkling her nostrils at the hint of mist in the air. He couldn’t very well admit the rest of the truth—that his first period that morning was free, since one of the psychology teachers was off sick. She watched while he unlocked the Micra and switched on the engine and, to console her, the headlamps. Having returned half the wave he’d given her, she closed the front door as he manoeuvred around the first of the potholes in the slope to the main road. There was no traffic to prevent him from driving straight across and up the nearest street to Nazarill.
Children were hurrying along the street, some of the girls dressed in the uniform Amy had to wear. The memory made the seat beside him feel deserted, and he heard her saying ‘It’s a nice little Microbe.’ Beyond the railings at the end of the street the mist was trailing away through the grounds to let the facade confront him with the pallor it appeared to have extended to the daylight all around it. The drive glistened like the tracks of a plague of snails, and he found himself beginning to detest the place as much as Amy had. If she was inside and didn’t want to be, it was time someone listened to her.
The windows of her apartment caught the sunlight and twinkled mockingly at him, aggravating his dislike, as he drove between the drooling gateposts onto the gravel. He was halfway along the drive when a car swung around the left-hand corner of the building and came for him. It was a bronzed Jaguar driven by a red-faced woman wearing a white blouse and a severe grey suit. She stopped her car abreast of his and ran her window down. ‘Can I help you?’
‘I’m here for Amy,’ Rob said, having leaned across to wind down the window that had once been hers. ‘Have you seen her?’
‘Is she home? I understood from her father she was away undergoing treatment.’
Rob experienced a shiver that felt as though Nazarill had cast its pale shadow over him. He could have understood if Amy’s father had lied about her whereabouts to keep him away from her, but if he’d also told the other tenants that she wasn’t there when she was… ‘When did he say that?’
‘Within the last few days,’ the woman said, employing her demeanour to ensure he recognised her for the magistrate Amy had mentioned to him. ‘Are you implying you know otherwise?’
‘I’m here to find out. I’ll ask him to tell you where things are at, shall I?’
‘I’m sure we would all appreciate that,’ the magistrate said, and having completed a stare at Rob which more than doubled the force of her words, sped off.
Rob drove up to the front of Nazarill and halted in its shadow. He would only waste time by parking round the corner, and so he climbed out of the car. As he switched off the headlamps the ground-floor corridor darkened beyond the glass, and he seemed to glimpse movement. If somebody was coming out, he would do his best to talk his way in—but when he peered through the glass nobody was in sight. He couldn’t have seen any of the doors opening or closing; he must have seen shadows vanishing as his lights did. He strode to the wide doorstep and rang the Priestleys’ bell.
There was silence, or at least no more than the usual sound of Partington mumbling to itself, until a girl screamed. He turned to see her dodging out of Little Hope Way as three of her schoolmates pelted her with scraps of litter. A metal shutter clattered up beyond the gates of the marketplace as though to hasten her on her way, and then Partington subsumed her protests into its vague murmur. Rob was about to give the bell a second try when the grille beside the twin columns of bellpushes spat words at him. ‘Who’s there?’
It was a man’s voice, and so it must belong to Amy’s father. If the intercom was capable of rendering it so unrecognisable, the same ought to happen to Rob’s, and in the moment of locating the button under the grille he changed whatever plan he’d half conceived. ‘Parcel for Miss Priestley,’ he said.
The response was slow in coming—slow enough that Rob had time to wish he hadn’t left his car where it would be visible from the front windows. For the moment Amy’s father couldn’t see it, and eventually the wall said in something not much like his voice ‘Leave it without.’
Rob ducked his head towards the grille, too late to be certain if he’d overheard another sound—surely only a high-pitched distortion. He poked the button as soon as he thought of an answer. ‘I can’t leave it. It has to be signed for.’
‘She is unable to sign for the nonce.’
The voice seemed increasingly focused on the microphone, filling it to the exclusion of any other sound. Rob imagined Amy’s father pressing his lips against the underside of the metal to produce the close electronic whisper, and couldn’t help shivering as though the mouth in the stone had breathed at him. ‘Then can you sign for it?’ he said.
‘What manner of package are you seeking to deliver?’
Rob hadn’t anticipated such a question. ‘A. A book,’ he improvised, ‘or some books, it looks like.’
‘We have no need of any more books here.’
‘It’ll have to be signed for before I can take it away,’ Rob said, growing desperate.
‘Then let it be left where I bade it be left.’
‘I can’t do that. The instructions are, they’re if it can’t be delivered it has to be sent on, forwarded, and I’ll need an address.’
‘I leave you to light upon one you find appropriate.’
‘No, I mean I need it from you, the address where I can send this to her.’
‘Her whereabouts are nobody’s affair but mine.’
‘They’re hers as well, aren’t they?’
Rob wasn’t sure if he’d discarded his role; perhaps a postman might just conceivably have said that. The grille crackled with static like the dryest laughter he’d ever heard, which was transformed into a whisper that sounded as though it was embedded in the stone of Nazarill. ‘I think not. No longer,’ it said, and then the grille was as dead as the wall.
Amy was upstairs: Rob was certain of that now. ‘Hello?’ he said after the fashion of innumerable characters abandoned by phones in films, and leaned on the doorbell. When it provoked no response he struck the closer of the glass doors with the edge of his hand. An ominous low note resounded through the corridor, and he imagined he saw all six doors stir with the vibration. That wouldn’t gain him entry to Nazarill, and so he pushed a fist’s worth of doorbells and poised his thumb on the intercom button. ‘Special delivery,’ he would say, or was that pretence past standing up? ‘I need to speak to someone about Amy Priestley’ would be better. He could be calling on behalf of her school—o
f a friend of his parents, a teacher, who’d asked him to find out how Amy was. Only there was nobody to persuade of this; the grille wasn’t even bothering to raise his hopes with static. Then he saw that in his haste, not that haste impressed him as quite enough of an explanation, he’d rung all the ground-floor doorbells. He rubbed his hands together to rid them of the chill he seemed to feel seeping out of the wall, and was about to jab the lowest of the second-floor buttons when two whitish globes appeared at the far end of the corridor and glided towards him.
They weren’t the lifeless eyes they appeared to be, of course. They were the headlamps of a car approaching up the drive behind him, a car moving so slowly that the muted crunch of gravel beneath its wheels resembled an increasing burst of static from the intercom. Rob turned to meet it, vowing that whoever the driver might be, they were going to admit him to the building. ‘Her school sent me,’ he heard himself say in his head. The Triumph, which was brown as an official envelope, pulled up behind his car, almost butting it, and the driver climbed out with a double slam of boots on gravel. ‘What are you hanging round here for, Hayward?’ he said.
It was Shaun Pickles in his uniform. Beneath such hair as he permitted himself his bony face was as studded with dull angles as a fist, one reddened by anticipation of delivering a blow. Rob told himself he mustn’t allow his dislike to get in the way of any help the guard might be persuaded to offer. ‘I’m trying to reach Amy,’ he said.
‘Better do as she told you, and quick.’
‘She’d tell you to if she saw you,’ Rob said, and was momentarily so confused that he wondered if Pickles might be there at her invitation, but she couldn’t have changed that much. ‘Anyway, what’s it to you?’
‘Plenty. We’re friends of her father.’
‘So?’ Rob retorted, and forced out a question that almost blocked his throat. ‘Do you care about her?’
‘A damn sight more than you have, did you but know.’
‘Then help her now. Help me to. She’s up there and she doesn’t want to be.’
‘Doesn’t know what she wants, more like, and no wonder with the likes of you trying to stuff mad ideas like that into her head along with God knows what else you need arresting for.’
‘It isn’t my idea, it’s hers. She called me.’
‘Isn’t that nice after her telling you the other thing. And what did she whisper in your ear?’
‘I wasn’t there, my mother was.’
‘Then your mother wants to learn how to take messages. Your used-to-be girlfriend’s gone away. Wanted shut of you, I shouldn’t wonder.’
‘Her father told you she’d gone, didn’t he? I don’t know if she went or not, but now she’s here.’
‘Watch who you’re saying is a liar.’ As blotches flared on his cheeks. Pickles struck Rob as more and more like an overgrown schoolboy in the wrong uniform. ‘Who says she’s here?’
‘I do. I heard her before.’
‘What did you hear, you bloody pothead?’
‘Amy, when I rang the bell.’ Rob knew he mustn’t sound even slightly uncertain, and indeed with everything he said now he was convincing himself. ‘He answered it, but I’m sure I heard her trying to call to me until he blocked her off somehow. He’s keeping her up there against her will.’
‘Sounds right to me.’
‘I’m serious. Somebody ought to see how she is.’
‘I’m bloody serious too, and don’t you mistake it. Somebody’s seeing to her all right, the way she needs to be seen.’
Rob restrained himself from lashing out at the stiff smug face, which he was beginning to identify with the impregnability of Nazarill. ‘If that’s what you think I haven’t time to stop you. Just leave me to think different.’
‘Can’t do that. Her dad asked me to keep an eye on his property.’
A hot wave of rage passed through Rob before it was overwhelmed by the chill. ‘Amy’s not property.’
‘She is at her age.’
Rob clenched his fists and turned his back to hold them away from the guard. He was ignoring him in order to identify the next bell he should ring when he saw there was no need: several people were descending the stairs. In the dimness that was coated with the daylight on the glass, he thought at first the girl in the middle was Amy. When he pressed his forehead against a door he made out that she was younger, not least by the way she shrank back from the sight of him. He straightened up and smiled and displayed his palms, but her father came stalking at him while she followed timidly alongside her mother. The man yanked the door open, drooping one corner of his mouth as though to counteract the asymmetry of his face and ensure it didn’t appear remotely comical, an ambition by no means achieved. ‘What do you want?’ he demanded.
‘Amy. Amy—’
‘I know who you mean. She’s not here.’
‘She told my mother she was. I’m just going up to check. It’s fine, I’ve been up before.’
The man blocked his way while continuing to hold the door ajar, and his tall stooping wife pushed their daughter forward. ‘Go out quickly, Pam. He won’t hurt you.’ She squeezed through after the girl, who fled to stand beyond Pickles for protection, and added her stare to her husband’s. ‘You’ve been told she isn’t here. We live next door, so we should know.’
‘I’ve been told all sorts of stuff. I want to see for myself.’
‘Then ring their bell,’ the man advised, further lowering the corner of his mouth, and shut the door behind him with a glassy clang that sounded final.
‘He already has. He isn’t wanted,’ Pickles said.
Surely Amy still had friends who would be sufficiently concerned to let him in, Rob thought, and was pressing bells in the middle of the column when the woman said ‘Can’t you do something about him?’
‘That’s what I’m here for,’ Pickles said, and took a gravelly step towards Rob. ‘I’m warning you—’
‘Come away, Pam. No need to watch.’ The woman steered the girl in the direction of the car park while her husband lingered. ‘You’ll handle him, will you?’ he asked Pickles.
‘You won’t be seeing him round here again uninvited.’
‘That’s what my family wants to hear,’ the man said, and hastened after them as Rob, having failed to break the stony silence of the grille, made to push another gathering of bells. Behind him Pickles said at the top of his voice ‘You’ve been told to go by the people who live here. Are you going to get in that pile of junk now and stop bothering people?’
‘Not until I know if Amy’s here I’m not,’ said Rob, and knuckled the bellpushes.
‘Then I’m escorting you off this property.’ As he spoke Pickles closed a wiry hand around Rob’s wrist. Rob leaned his weight on the buttons so as not to be shifted and said ‘Better let go of me. We’re not at school any more.’
‘Are you coming quietly or do I have to use force?’
‘Don’t try it,’ Rob said, clenching his teeth as the bones of his wrist began to ache. ‘Fuck off, Picknose, or I’m—’
‘You may say that to your girlfriends if you’ve got any, but you aren’t saying it to me,’ Pickles snarled, and planting his free hand on Rob’s left shoulder, twisted Rob’s arm up towards it, hard.
Rob’s forehead struck the glass door, producing a gong-note which reverberated in his brain. The dim corridor lurched into focus, and he saw the six doors tremble as though they were preparing to spring open. Then a blade of pain drove itself through his arm and deep into his shoulder, and he reached behind him with his other hand and grabbed the back of Pickles’ neck.
Perhaps he was remembering some film; he didn’t know where the instinct was coming from. He shoved himself away from the doors with his feet and immediately bent forward with all the strength he could summon to throw his adversary over his shoulder—or rather, he started to do so. As Rob made to fling his body forward Pickles let go of his wrist and stepped back to release himself. Before he could, Rob sprawled on his back, having had n
o time to let go of Pickles’ neck.
The guard’s weight came with him. His arm was still twisted behind him, and gravel bit into the length of it. When Pickles struggled off him and stood up, Rob attempted to roll over, but the pain which filled his arm was so intense that he crouched into a sitting position instead. A lump of gravel seemed to have lodged itself where the arm met the shoulder. He braced himself, gripping his thigh with his free hand, and tried very gingerly to move the twisted arm. The rush of pain brought the front of Nazarill toppling at him. The lump embedded in his flesh wasn’t gravel, it was a knob of the bone of his arm.
Pickles was watching from a safe distance. ‘Serve you right,’ he said, then frowned as Rob’s vision blurred. ‘Come on, get up. You’re not hurt that bad.’
Somewhere out beyond his pain Rob heard a car start and coast over the gravel. The sound of bits of stone grinding together beneath the wheels suggested that his injury was expanding into the world. The car halted with an unnecessarily violent crunch of gravel, and a window was lowered. ‘Everything in hand?’ said the voice of the man who’d barred Rob.
‘He did himself an injury trying to resist while I was bringing him away. Does anyone know first aid?’
Apparently nobody did; there was silence apart from the panting of the car. Rob tried once more to coax the arm from behind him, but the pain nearly overbalanced him onto it. ‘Hospital,’ he gasped as tears flooded down his cheeks.
‘Can you take him? Maybe one of you could drive him in his car. I’m expected at the market in five minutes.’
‘I suppose I could,’ the woman said, not by any means immediately. ‘You can tell them at the library I’m on an errand of mercy, Leonard.’
Rob heard the slam of a car door, and footsteps disturbing the broken stones. As a piece of gravel struck the hand with which he was supporting himself the woman said ‘I can’t do anything unless he gets up.’
‘Here, for God’s sake.’ Pickles grasped Rob’s uninjured arm and hauled him to his feet with a vigour that shifted the dislocated bone in the flesh. ‘Behave yourself while you’re with this lady,’ he murmured in Rob’s ear, ‘or I’ll do for your other arm.’
The House On Nazareth Hill Page 39