by Steve Mosby
‘I am absolutely not feeling guilty.’
‘Yes, you are. Your face twitches when you lie.’
‘Don’t be so fucking stupid.’
‘It just did it again.’
I frowned. ‘Maybe I’m feeling a little guilty.’
‘And why?’
‘Because of what happened to her. Jesus, Rob. She was left to die on her own. Nobody came looking to check she was okay.’
‘Yeah, that bothers me too. I should have done something.’
‘You didn’t even know her.’
‘And neither did you. That’s the point, Dave. She cheated on you, and instead of hating her like any decent person would, you’re actually feeling responsible because something bad happened to her a year down the line.’
I rubbed my forehead with my palm. ‘You’re as bad as that fucking cop.’
Rob said nothing for a moment.
Then: ‘Did you tell Sarah?’
‘No.’
He almost looked relieved. ‘That’s probably for the best. Like I said, she seems nice.’
‘She is nice.’
‘Right. So don’t allow your personality to fuck this up.’
‘Thank you.’
‘Seriously, I mean it. You’re my friend, and I’m not going to sit back while you mess your life up. I know how you get sometimes.’
I wanted to be annoyed with him, but he had such an earnest expression on his face that I couldn’t bring myself to feel it. And deep down, he was right. Something awful had happened, but it had nothing to do with me. It wasn’t my fault. There was nothing I could or should have done to stop it.
‘I’m getting there,’ I said. ‘Honestly.’
He continued to stare at me, then nodded. He picked up Thom Stanley’s book and held it out to me. I took it, noticing the two tickets protruding from the top edge.
‘What are these?’ I said.
‘For tomorrow night. I want you to take Sarah.’
‘What? But you’ve been looking forward to it.’
‘Yeah, but I really shouldn’t go.’ He looked unhappy. ‘His people might recognise me.’
Rob had shared a TV spot with Thom Stanley last year at the time of our revelations, and I believe the polite way of describing it would be ‘an incident live on air’. There had also been accusations of nuisance phone calls afterwards, although Rob strenuously denied any involvement - just as he denied the existence of a friend at the phone company who might supply him with such details as private home phone numbers and addresses.
‘We talked about that before,’ I said. ‘It’s unlikely.’
‘Yet possible. Jesus Christ, Dave, do you want the fucking ticket or not? I think it might be good for you. You can see a bit more of each other. Christ knows I’m fed up of seeing you.’
I gave up, and folded the tickets into my pocket.
‘Okay. Thanks, Rob.’
‘No problem.’ He took the book off me, then tapped the cover expectantly and raised his eyebrows. ‘Can we burn this now?’
I was about to say no, but then thought about it some more, remembering my father and his bonfires. Why not?
‘Outside.’ I smiled. ‘Second garden down.’
Chapter Twelve
Thursday 1st September
Did it work like this with anything terrible, Mary wondered - with everything you were frightened of? You anticipated it, building it up in your head until it reached huge proportions, only to end up surprised by how mundane it turned out to be. How incredibly ordinary.
It was just before noon, and she was sitting in her car at the base of a tower block, feeling almost absurdly calm. What she was doing at this moment had been the subject of nightmares for the last twelve years, but there was something anti-climactic about it now that it was actually happening.
Seeing her father, in the flesh.
He’d assumed such mythical power in her mind that it was almost shocking to see him outside the context of her memories.
He’s just a man, she told herself.
And yet she was shaking, and having to fight back the urge to drive off, which every instinct she had told her she must do right now. It was horribly fascinating to see him, in the same way it might be fascinating to look down and see your guts in your lap.
No, she told herself. You mustn’t run away.
You have to deal with him eventually.
She sipped hot soup from the flask she’d brought, and forced herself to watch him. Practice - that was all this was. She was preparing for the day he finally came to take her. Because Mary understood now that it would happen. It was inevitable. After Currie’s visit, she’d been left feeling desolate and hopeless - but it had always been stupid to believe anyone might help her. There were only two possibilities now. Either her father would turn up and she’d collapse into the little girl she’d once been, or else he would arrive to find a strong, grown woman who was ready for him. That he would turn up wasn’t in doubt. So she needed to get herself used to him.
He’s over a hundred metres away; this is perfectly safe.
Over the years, she’d worked hard at risk analysis, and the process was second nature to her now. If her father looked down the hill towards the tower, it was possible he might see her car, but there were several others parked around her, and no reason for him to pick out hers in particular. If he did, he wouldn’t be able to recognise her from this distance; she would just be a silhouette: not even a woman, never mind a daughter. And if he approached, either by accident or design, she would drive away before he got anywhere near. That made at least three safety gates between them, which meant she was fine.
As though logic was any defence against monsters.
But in the ten minutes she’d been here, he hadn’t so much as glanced in this direction. He was standing in his pathetic little garden, his back to her, working slowly. A sky-blue bucket sat on the step beside him, and he kept dipping a sponge into it, then lifting it slowly and wiping the front door, ineffectually rubbing at whatever obscenity had been scrawled there. It was little more than a white spiral now: some kind of smeared mandala that her father’s attentions couldn’t erase, but rendered more and more obscure.
His house adjoined the one next door, and his neighbour was in his own garden. The man was overweight - his face and neck a landslide of flesh, his bottom lip pouting out like a ledge - and he was standing very still, holding a hose like a bright-green riding crop, openly inspecting her father at work. As Mary watched, the man spoke - some muttered abuse that made his face work like a belch. Her father paused, and Mary realised she was holding her breath, expecting … but then he just bent down slowly, awkwardly, and dipped the sponge in the bucket again.
What had Detective Currie described him as? A broken man. Now that she’d seen him, Mary understood what he meant.
I’ve seen the picture of him when he was arrested, and he’s changed a great deal.
Twelve years ago, when she’d last laid eyes on him, her father had been a big, powerful man. He’d seemed to fill whole rooms with his body and his presence, and people who didn’t know better often mistook him for fat. The reality was entirely different. Her father had spent long hours, for years on end, performing exercises she barely knew the names of - if they even had names at all. Modified squats and dead lifts. He curled punishingly heavy barbells in short sets, and swung dumbbells around in his huge fists. Every weight he lifted was training him to heft a person around. He never cared about looks; he only cared about power. If anything, he liked that the layer of fat covering his muscles often gave him an element of surprise.
The intervening years appeared to have trimmed all that excess away, and taken a good deal of the muscle with it as well. Her father looked emaciated and weak, and terribly old. Some trick of time had made him serve two years within himself for every one without. And he was moving gingerly, a little hunched over, as though a muscle in his back had torn at some point, and then healed into place at a crippling
angle.
He isn’t the man you remember.
That was true. The father in her memories would have beaten the neighbour’s face apart for whatever he’d said.
He can barely cross the room without a walking stick …
Except that - no matter what she tried to tell herself - Mary didn’t believe a word of it. Not for a second.
There was nothing weak or fragile about her father, and if he appeared it then he was acting that way for a reason. Biding his time, perhaps. Laying low. People always underestimated him. Currie hadn’t listened when she’d said that, and now she could appreciate why. He didn’t know this man like she did, so he was easily taken in by what he chose to show on the surface.
What about the electronic tag?
Mary peered closer, wondering if she could see it through her father’s tracksuit bottoms. She couldn’t, but Currie had been sure about that: certain that it put Frank Carroll in the clear. Once again, she was sure that wasn’t the case. There had to be ways around those devices, didn’t there? And a man like Frank Carroll would know what they were, or he’d know people who did.
So could she face this man? What would happen when she opened her eyes one night to see him standing there in the corner of her bedroom, holding those old leather belts between his fists?
She stared at him now, thinking again about that night in the snow twelve years ago. It had taken every last drop of courage to escape from the house. By then, her father had begun to tie the bindings looser, daring her to break free, confident that her fear would hold her in place - and it almost had. As she’d staggered along in the cold, Mary had been certain there was nothing left inside her anymore. She’d used up the whole store of whatever fortitude and resolve there had ever been: all of it summoned for one last, desperate effort.
Had it ever returned?
Mary drank the last of the soup from the cup, tipping her head back slightly so it could roll thickly out. As she did, she felt her neck start to itch.
She looked down. Very slowly.
And then froze.
Her father was looking right at her. Still standing on his doorstep, but now with his back to the smeared writing. One hand held up over his eyes to shield out the sun. A look of curiosity on his face.
Her hand started trembling.
No reason for him to pick out hers in particular …
But she could feel his gaze squirming all over her face.
You could drive away before he got anywhere near.
And yet she didn’t seem able to move. The part of her brain that told her body to work had been displaced, knocked out of alignment. Her mind couldn’t even remember what movement was, the way a forgotten word would keep slipping from you the more you tried to think of it.
As she stared across the insignificant distance between them, her father moved his hand from above his eyes and waved once. Still she didn’t move. She watched him smile, and then he reached down slowly, apparently with difficulty, and patted his lower leg, like it was a dog that had just performed a good trick.
Get out of here.
He stepped down onto his front path.
She came back to her senses, realising only now that her heart was actually punching against her chest. Go. Her hand found the gear-stick, crunched it once, and then she was reversing around. The tyres screeched. She didn’t look in the rear-view mirror as she drove away.
She didn’t need to see him to know he was watching her.
In the summer, if she left the windows open, wasps would find their way into the house.
Mary hated them. They always nuzzled hopelessly at the window, then hummed in loops around the room, looking for something to sting. She’d roll up a magazine, wait for the thing to land, and then smack it as hard as she could.
One time, entirely by accident, she hadn’t killed one of them outright. And instead of hitting it again, she’d looked down at it, watching it die with horrified fascination.
It had buzzed and fizzed on the kitchen counter, its head and thorax looking like squashed pieces of sweetcorn, the rest of its body convulsing. The dying wasp kept curling up on itself, again and again, and it had taken her a second to work out what it was doing: repeatedly stinging the air. Even when the rest of it had stopped moving, the end continued pulsing slowly: in and out of empty space. It was the last part of its body to go still.
Mary drove along now. Terrified. Trying to stop herself shaking.
That was what Detective Sam Currie didn’t get - that was what nobody seemed to get. He’d said her father was a broken man, and perhaps he was right. What he didn’t understand was that men like Frank Carroll didn’t break like normal people. They broke the way that wasps did.
Chapter Thirteen
Thursday 1st September
If I’d had any doubts about the lecture Rob had given me, they’d been well and truly pushed aside by quarter past seven the next evening, when I was sitting with Sarah in the rather plush bar inside the Western Varieties Theatre.
It was filled with wood, folded crimson curtains and wall-mounted lanterns. Sitting in here was a little like being inside the stomach of a sea-monster that had just eaten a pirate’s cabin. The bar had been full when we’d arrived, but the performance was due to start in a few minutes and most people had made their way upstairs now. There was no hurry. We’d already had one drink and were lingering over a second.
‘Sorry I had to rush off this morning,’ Sarah said. ‘I tried to say goodbye, but it was like waking the dead.’
‘That’s okay. It’s not like me to sleep late.’
‘Must have given you a reason.’
I smiled. ‘I do vaguely remember you leaving. To begin with, I thought you might have done a runner.’
‘In the middle of the night?’
‘When you realised the error of your ways.’
Sarah raised an amused eyebrow, and touched the straw in her drink, absently stirring the ice. She looked great, dressed in thin, dark jeans, an untucked black shirt and a green velvet jacket. Her skin was luminous.
‘I liked waking up with you,’ she said quietly.
‘Well, I’ll have to take your word for that, seeing as I was unconscious at the time.’
She gave me a secret kind of smile.
‘I’ll wake you up next time.’
‘Glad to hear it.’
‘With ice-cold water.’
‘You could do the washing up while you’re at the sink.’
She stuck her tongue out and grinned.
I said, ‘I’m pleased you’ve come with me tonight.’
‘How could I not?’ She abandoned the straw and leaned over conspiratorially. ‘I feel like a spy. It’s exciting.’
‘That’s cool. Don’t blow your cover, though.’
‘No way.’ She leaned back, moving her hand in front of her face. ‘Absolutely serious. I promise.’
‘Impressive.’ I finished my drink. ‘Okay, let’s make a move.’
The theatre itself was built around a central stage, with a semicircle of seats rising up in tiers. The stage was plain and almost unadorned - just a single microphone stand at the front, and then a table some way back with a jug of water and a chair to one side, presumably in case Thom Stanley’s melodramatics got the better of him and he needed to sit down and recover.
‘Excuse me. Sorry.’
We entered at the top, and had to squeeze past the resentfully angled legs of the elderly. There were some younger couples in the audience, but the majority was made up of older people: lonely men and women searching for some kind of solace - for their loved ones to be brought back to life, their loss to be annulled. In return for an entrance fee, Thom Stanley supplied that illusion. In this theatre tonight, the end of someone’s life was going to be reduced to the equivalent of a cross-country move.
I couldn’t blame anyone for wanting that; I wanted it too. But I could blame Thom Stanley for exploiting it. He was a conman: a parasite that fed on grief and weakness.
Everything that was bad about someone dying enabled people like him to make a living.
Sarah and I found our seats and sat down to wait. I listened to the mumbled chatter all around us and checked my coat pocket, ready to turn on the digital recorder when the show started. It was a high-end model and the in-built mic would be more than sufficient to catch what happened. Or what Rob and I hoped was going to, anyway.
Sarah whispered: ‘Might he know you’re here?’
‘Of course,’ I said. ‘He’s psychic.’
She nudged me - just as the house lights dimmed. I pressed record quickly, then reached over and took her hand.
A single spotlight shone down on the microphone, and polite applause began to echo around the theatre, catching and building steadily. When Thom Stanley emerged from the wings, it intensified.
So: here he was. The star of the show.
Stanley was one of the new breed of mediums: young and good-looking, with his hair styled impeccably messily. He was tall and slim, and dressed in a fashion shirt untucked from his neat trousers. Whenever I saw him, I always thought that a cheap, late-night game show somewhere was missing a host. One of those ones where they sucker you into calling over and over, and you just get a recorded message saying sorry, better luck next time.
‘Good evening everyone.’
He gave a slight bow to each of the tiers. Amplified by the theatre PA, his voice sounded like it was right in my ear. Good news for the recording.
‘Thank you - thank you all for coming - and welcome. I hope it’s a productive and useful evening for all of you. I always say I can never promise results, but I certainly can promise that I’ll do my best.’
He circled his hand in front of his face, swallowed once.
‘As you know, I’m only able to work with the spirits who choose to come to me. Hopefully, by cultivating the right atmosphere, we can all encourage that to happen. I want to feel positivity. I want to feel love and acceptance. The aim is to create a warm and safe place for the spirits to come.’ He frowned. ‘Does that make sense?’
There was a murmur of assent, as though it did.