Secret Story

by Ramsey Campbell

  As he covered the scratches with his free hand he threw Mrs Garrett a glance not far short of loathing. Kathy had spoken too loud, of course, and he was embarrassed. Most of his reply stayed behind his clenched teeth. “I said.”

  “Sodding hell, son, sounds like you’ve had even less luck with the judies than me.”

  “You said other things as well, Dudley.” She was so busy ignoring his father that for a moment the sight of a couple on their way out of the bistro signified too little to her. “Anyway, let’s not argue now,” she said and held up a palm to detain the two young women. “You aren’t leaving yet, are you? Dudley Smith’s about to read.”

  “Good luck to him, whoever he is,” one said as they escaped on either side of Kathy. “We were expecting Shell Garridge.”

  “She wasn’t as much news as she’d have thought,” Dudley commented.

  Kathy hoped Mrs Garrett hadn’t overheard him through the doorway. “Shall we tell them you’re ready to read before anyone else leaves?”

  “I’ve stopped feeling like reading.”

  “See, that’s how you’ve left him,” she almost cried at Monty, but that would be as unhelpful as blaming herself. “Don’t do yourself down,” she appealed to Dudley. “The magazine wanted you here. I know you wouldn’t like to disappoint anyone.”

  “I’ll fix it,” Monty said and darted into the bistro. “Walt, shall I tell them he’s reading or will you?”

  “Why don’t you. Keep it in the family.”

  This goaded Kathy into the bistro as fast as she could shoo Dudley in front of her. “Shurrup, youse lot,” Monty was shouting. “Shurrup for Dudley Smith.”

  “Who?” asked someone Kathy would have been glad to locate.

  “Only a chip off the old block, that’s who. One chip and no fish. What’re you going to read, son?”

  Kathy held her breath until Dudley said “My story that would have been in except for Shell.”

  “Next issue for sure,” Walt called.

  “Means you’re all getting a sneak. What’s it called again?”

  “ ‘Night Trains Don’t Take You Home’,” Kathy mouthed as Dudley said.

  “Because the railway companies put profits before people. Should be their slogan, Profits Before People, shouldn’t it? About time the workers and the passengers took over public transport if you ask me. Anyway, we’ve had enough of me for now. Here’s Dudley.”

  Kathy heard him nearly fail to pronounce the final syllable. She thought this was one reason why Dudley hesitated not far from the exit until Patricia took pity on him. “Shall we have you over here?” she said, indicating the corner farthest from the door. “Then you can sit if you like.”

  A few people did so as he made his way to the stool. He seemed either eager or determined now. The audience was largely silent by the time he slid the typescript out of the envelope. All the same, Kathy wouldn’t have been able to distinguish his first words if she hadn’t already read them. “Hang on,” Monty interrupted. “Shout up, son.”

  “Night trains don’t take you home by Dudley Smith. Her first mistake was thinking he was mad. As the train left the station he started to talk—”

  “Can’t hear a word,” Mrs Garrett announced, though it sounded less like a complaint than triumph.

  “Don’t rush it quite so much, Dudley,” Kathy took the chance to say. “And even a little louder, do you think? You don’t want anybody missing anything.”

  He gave her a scowl she thought he could have saved for Mrs Garrett and ducked again to his task. “Night trains don’t take you home by Dudley Smith. Her first mistake was thinking he was mad. As the train left the station he started to talk in a low passionate voice . . .”

  He might have been trying to convey its lowness, but certainly not its passion. From gabbling the text he’d halved his speed, and his utter monotone was threatening to drag it slower. Even worse, he was still reading as though he’d never seen the words before. He raised his voice a little at “. . . taking the latest prize-winning bestseller by Dudley Smith out of her handbag”, but this only provoked a stir of embarrassment and a few titters. His forehead had begun to glisten, though Kathy was having to restrain her shivers. “I thought you said what you asked for, sorry,” he blundered onwards, “I thought you said I gave you asked for. I thought you said I gave you what you asked for,” and his gaze left the page at last. Three people were murmuring goodbyes to Walt as they collected their magazines on the way to the door.

  Dudley looked trapped by the sight of them and incapable of speaking. “Go on, son,” his father urged. “I’ve had worse down south.”

  “She moved with her back to him, she moved to sit with her back to him . . .” Dudley stammered and droned to the end of the page, which he slipped under the envelope. Perhaps this demonstrated how much he had yet to read, because five people headed for the exit as he retrieved the page to remind himself which sentence he was halfway through. Everyone would be gripped once he reached the scene with Greta and the gang, Kathy vowed on his behalf, except that as he read the dialogue his delivery became yet more monotonous. “On your own love must be said the man in the middle and spat across the aisle she’s got to read a book . . .”

  Walt coughed, and after half a page of this, coughed more sharply. “Well, I think maybe—”

  Kathy was on the point of crying out that they should give her son another chance, since even his father seemed tired of his performance, when Patricia spoke. “Could it need a female voice, Dudley, if it’s supposed to be told by a girl?”

  He stopped glaring at the typescript long enough to scrutinise her face across the room. “You want to read the things she says, you mean?”

  “Or the whole story might be easier if you like. They used to say I wasn’t bad at drama.”

  Dudley frowned, and then his eyes widened to let acceptance in. “All right, you should be able to. You’ve already read it.”

  Kathy sensed more relief around her than she thought was fair. He handed Patricia the typescript and retreated into the audience. “Shall I start at the beginning again?” she said.

  “Just pick up where Dudley left off,” her mother suggested.

  She and several groans meant everyone was anxious to learn what happened next, Kathy assured herself. Patricia read in a strong clear voice, altering it subtly when Greta or the young man spoke and characterising all the members of the gang with a dull Liverpudlian sameness. When Kathy made her unobtrusive way to her son, she found he looked enraptured by Patricia, so intent on her that he scowled impatiently at Kathy for touching his arm. Occasionally a listener stirred, but she thought it was from unease. There were satisfying gasps when Greta was pushed under the train, and silence after the last paragraph, followed by applause. Kathy might have proposed a second round of it for Patricia if Mrs Garrett hadn’t spoken over it. “That’s what they thought Shell was more important than, is it? Good on them. Shame they have to publish it at all.”

  “Don’t mind her, son. She has to be missing her kid.” Dudley’s father gave him a look more meaningful than Kathy felt it had any right to seem, especially once he added “Fair bit of writing, but it’s not the only sort of stuff you do, is it? You want to try and find your roots like me.”

  Kathy was addressing him as well, and anybody else who needed it, as she raised her voice. “Thanks, Patricia. Thanks for doing Dudley justice.”

  Bespectacled Vincent strolled over through the dissipating crowd. “That was inspiring,” he told Dudley. “Best part of the do. It gave me a great idea for the film.”

  “What one’s that?”

  “I thought what he has to be, the killer.”

  “What are you thinking he does?” Dudley asked with, Kathy thought, undue wariness.

  “I hope you like it. We can get moving on the screenplay then. You might even have come up with it yourself.” Vincent let a smile fiddle with his lips before he said “Tell us how this grabs you, Patricia. What do you think the killer pose
s as? Maybe you’re too close to it to see it, Dudley. A crime writer just like you. That’s why nobody suspects him.”

  THIRTEEN

  As Patricia stepped out of the lunchtime sunlight into Les Internationales, a waitress in a blouse based on the Italian flag bustled to meet her. “Have you booked, love?”

  “I’m meeting Mr Moore.”

  The phrase sounded like a title in any number of genres, and brought a man to his feet halfway down the broad room full of executives at tables draped with various flags. “Miss Martingale?” he called. “Or I expect I should say Ms.”

  “So long as it isn’t Mrs I don’t mind.”

  By now she had joined him and was receiving a loose pudgy handshake. His large pale somewhat more than well-fed face hiked up a smile. His padded chin bore stubble, perhaps celebrating his day off from work as well as toning with his reddish curls, but he wore a white shirt and a dark suit so discreetly patterned that the stripes looked surreptitious. Only a tie swarming with pink cartoon pigs belied the civil servant’s uniform. “I’m having the set lunch,” Eamonn Moore said, “but you have whatever you fancy.”

  A card held between bottles of soy sauce and olive oil in the middle of the table spread with a Greek standard listed the set courses: gazpacho, dim sum, gumbo, baklava. “Well, thanks,” Patricia said and felt bound to add “I’ll have that too.”

  His crooked finger summoned a waiter emblematic of France. As the waiter made for the bar decked with pennants to fetch her a fino, Eamonn remarked “You’re not much for marriage, then.”

  “Did I say that? I’m just not married.”

  “You shouldn’t till you find the right person. Is Dudley yet?”

  “He isn’t married, no.”

  “He’s not still living with his mother, is he?”

  “I’m afraid he is. Well, not afraid, I don’t know why I should be that. We wouldn’t be publishing him except for Kathy. Have you rather lost touch?”

  “Rather. That’s why I was surprised you wanted to interview me.”

  “He says you influenced the kind of thing he writes.”

  “I don’t know what that is.”

  “You ought to have come to our launch last week. You’d have heard me read his story,” Patricia said, although doing so had left her less sure how it worked: the only way she’d found to perform it had been straight, in the hope that her listeners would take it as ironic. “It’s a murder story seen through the eyes of the girl who’s going to be the victim.”

  “I should have known that’d be his thing.”

  “Because of the films you used to watch together, you mean?”

  Eamonn didn’t answer until the waiter moved away from delivering Patricia’s sherry. “What did he say we did?”

  “Watched lots of thrillers was my impression. I wasn’t clear how old you were.”

  “We were at primary school. He sat next to me in class one year. I must have told him my parents ran a video library. He asked to see some of the films.”

  “Any in particular?”

  “Horrors when he saw we’d got them. My parents didn’t know what the worst of them were like then. Someone in a van used to drive round the video shops and sell them cheap.”

  “You’re saying those were the ones you watched.”

  “They were the ones he liked best. Anything with people being tortured in. I couldn’t watch them now.”

  “Do any titles come to mind?”

  “Lord, I don’t know. Cut Her Up and Pull Her Guts Out. That’s what you could have called any of his favourites.”

  “Were you this unhappy about them when you were watching them?” Patricia felt she was asking on Dudley’s behalf.

  “I was young. Didn’t know any better.” Eamonn fell silent while a waitress sporting Portuguese insignia served them chilly soup. “Are we having wine?” he suggested with a good deal more enthusiasm.

  “If it’s dry and white.”

  “A Chilean sauvignon should do us.” Having displayed his expertise, he lowered his voice as the waitress headed for the bar. “Anyway, yes, I didn’t like the ones he kept rewinding even back then,” he said. “I ought to say we never watched them at my house. I’m not blaming his mother, mind. He always managed to keep her out of the way during any of the bad bits. He’d ask her to bring us a drink or make us something else to eat. And his father was pretty well always out or upstairs writing and couldn’t be disturbed.”

  “Do you think there’s much to blame anyone for? It doesn’t seem to have done you or Dudley any harm.”

  “I had nightmares.” As if this was more than he’d wanted to reveal he said “Are you planning to put all this in your magazine?”

  “I’m not sure yet. Is there anything you wouldn’t want me to?”

  “Anything about my parents. They’d hate to be reminded. They never really got over having the shop raided by the police when they’d never been in trouble with them before or since. They were in the papers and had to pay a fine, and twenty years later the law says those films are all right for people to see after all.” His face seemed to absorb his anger so as to let him say “And don’t tell anyone how old we were in case that reflects on them.”

  “Perhaps I could just mention you were at school.”

  “Will you have to? I wouldn’t be talking about it at all if he hadn’t told you. I only wanted you to hear my side of it.”

  This struck Patricia as an odd way to refer to watching films, but at least it let her ask “Is there anything else you’d like me to hear?”

  Once he’d swallowed a spoonful of gazpacho more dramatically than she thought was called for, he said “One of the nightmares was about him.”

  “Gosh, I don’t think he could have that effect on me. I suppose it was because you were so young, was it? What was the nightmare?”

  “About something he told me. I shouldn’t think you’d want to hear about it just now.”

  “I certainly would. Don’t keep me in suspense, or are you trying to compete with him?”

  “I wouldn’t want to,” Eamonn said and dropped his voice until she had to lean across the table to listen. “He’d been to the library, I think it was, and he came across a stray dog in the park. The way he told the story, he just started throwing sticks for it.”

  “He might have, mightn’t he?”

  “You or I might. According to him he didn’t realise one was a bit of old fence with a point on the end. That’s till he threw it and it went in the dog’s eye.”

  “Oh, poor thing,” Patricia cried and had to remind herself that they were talking about perhaps twenty years ago. “What did he do? Was anybody there to help?”

  “Nobody about, he said. So he just stood and watched the dog try to shake the stick out of its eye, and at last it did.”

  “He was afraid to touch it, you mean.”

  “He touched it all right. When it lay down, or he said it fell. I’m only telling you what he told me.” Eamonn gazed at her, possibly in case she wanted him to stop. “He pushed the stick back in and the dog ran off, and he never saw it again.”

  Patricia took a spoonful of soup and kept it down until that required no effort. “How much of his story did you believe?”

  “All of it. I told you, I had nightmares.”

  “How much do you believe now?”

  “I’ve no reason not to I can think of. Why would anyone that age make up something like that, or any other age for that matter?”

  “Little boys can be pretty nasty sometimes in my experience.” Rather than suggest that Eamonn had recounted the anecdote with more relish and hesitation for effect than he was admitting, Patricia said “Might it have been his first story, do you think? Maybe he was trying to compete with the films you were both watching.”

  “Are you going to put it in your magazine, then?”

  “I don’t know yet,” Patricia said, although she thought it quite unlikely. “Depends what else you tell me.”

  “Nothing
much else to tell.” When she raised her eyebrows and an encouraging smile he said brusquely “Nothing at all.”

  She didn’t speak while a waiter garbed as Germany served them dim sum, and then she said “Who else do you think I should talk to?”

  “Juicy,” Eamonn enthused over a prawn dumpling, and licked his lips and rubbed them over each other. When he’d finished he said “If he hasn’t told you anybody, I don’t know.”

  “Even if you aren’t in touch with them, could you give me the names of a few friends?”

  “There was just me if he says I was.”

  She had to wonder if he was claiming this for the sake of fame. “He must have played with other children, surely.”

  “Nobody wanted to. They got tired of him telling stories all the time.”

  “Do you remember any of those?”

  “I mean he told lies,” Eamonn said with a fatigued look.

  “I’d still be interested in hearing any that come to mind.”

  “There were so many I ended up not listening. How his father had published lots of books instead of just a couple and sold millions of copies, that was one. And his mother was supposed to be publishing a book too that people told her was the best they’d ever read. You can see why he started being bullied. I’m not saying it’s right.”

  “I’m not sure I can see. How long did it go on?”

  “The last couple of years he was at that school. I don’t believe his mother knew.”

  “If he told so many lies I don’t understand why this story about the dog couldn’t have been one.”

  “Maybe it was. It’s too far back to tell.” He devoured a pork bun and admitted “He did send me an invitation to your show. Sent it to my place of work.”

  “You sound as if you wish he hadn’t.”

  “No reason for my boss to know what we used to get up to when we were out of control. Watching films we shouldn’t have, I mean.” Eamonn raised his face as if to slough off any guilt. “I mostly didn’t come because I had a prior family commitment,” he said. “They take precedence.”