The Living and the Dead in Winsford

by Håkan Nesser

  ‘Did you feel threatened?’

  ‘Yes. When you don’t know what he’s thinking, it’s threatening.’

  ‘You said to start with . . .’

  I nodded and took another mouthful of wine. ‘It carried on like this for about half a year. I reported it to the police, but they weren’t much help: they just gave me a number to ring if he overstepped the mark. They reckoned they couldn’t do much if he didn’t actually threaten me.’

  ‘But they identified him, did they?’

  ‘Yes. They took him in once for questioning. Then they released him because he hadn’t done anything illegal. That’s what they said, in any case.’

  ‘Silly so-and-sos,’ said Mark.

  ‘Maybe, but they have a lot to do. And they kept stressing that they were understaffed.’

  ‘But it, er, escalated, did it?’

  ‘Yes. I came home one evening and he was lying in my bed.’

  ‘Lying in your bed?’

  ‘Yes. He was naked. I still have no idea how he got in. He told the police we’d had a date and I’d given him a key. Luckily they didn’t believe him.’

  ‘Good God,’ said Mark, slapping the table with the palms of his hands. ‘But what happened when you found him naked in your bed?’

  ‘I rushed out. Rang the police on my mobile, and they came to fetch him a quarter of an hour later. He was still naked when they dragged him out into the street – I don’t know why they didn’t give him time to put his clothes on, he was carrying them, trying to use them to hide his modesty.’

  I noticed that I was beginning to enjoy my tale, and realized that I ought to keep myself in check. It wouldn’t be very clever to give him a mass of facts about all kinds of things that I might then forget about.

  ‘I don’t need to go into detail. He ended up with a year in jail in any case. But the problem is—’

  ‘That he didn’t stop there.’ Mark finished off the sentence for me. ‘He carried on pestering you after he came out, did he?’

  ‘Exactly,’ I said. ‘He waited for a few months, but before I came here a few things happened that I’m sure he was mixed up in. There was nothing especially remarkable or threatening, so I didn’t contact the police. I was going to leave Sweden anyway, so I didn’t think there was any real danger. But now . . . Well, now it seems that he’s found me again.’

  ‘Here on Exmoor?’

  ‘Yes, I think so.’

  Mark shook his head. ‘How on earth did he manage to do that? But I suppose you’ve had your mail forwarded and so on . . . Perhaps it isn’t all that difficult if you really put your mind to it?’

  I shrugged, and wondered if I ought to start going into speculation. I decided it wasn’t necessary. No point in getting bogged down in details, as I’d already thought.

  ‘I think I’ve seen him in a hire car,’ I said instead. ‘Both here in the village and in a few other places.’

  ‘Bloody hell,’ said Mark. I think that was the first time I’d heard him use a swearword.

  ‘And there are a few other things he might have done as well,’ I added.

  ‘Such as?’

  ‘Somebody has been leaving dead pheasants outside my front door.’

  ‘Dead what . . . ?’

  He paused and sat up straight. Looked at me with a new expression in his eyes that I couldn’t make out. Had he seen through me? But how could he have seen through me? The pheasants were not an invention, nor was the hire car. Or was it just that ability to read other people’s minds that he claimed he had? I decided not to mention the Hawkridge business in any case.

  ‘Dead pheasants?’ he repeated thoughtfully, scratching at the back of his neck. ‘That sounds really odd. Do you know . . . Well, I suppose you can’t very well know what that means, can you?’

  ‘Means?’ I said. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘What it could mean,’ he said, correcting himself. ‘But it seems pretty far-fetched when I think about it. Anyway, it’s just a matter of an old superstition.’

  ‘Superstition?’ I repeated, feeling rather silly.

  He laughed and held his upturned palms towards the ceiling to indicate that what he was about to say was not something he believed in.

  ‘In the old days,’ he began, ‘out here on Exmoor in any case, it was seen as a way of warding off death. If somebody was lying ill in their house on the moor, for instance, people would sometimes place a dead animal outside their front door during the night.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘The idea was that when Death came to knock on the door and harvest a life, he would make do with the animal and go away. A sort of primitive sacrifice, you might say, and inevitably there are countless stories to suggest that it really worked. The animal had disappeared by the next morning, which meant that Death had been sent packing and the sick person could recover in peace and quiet. It didn’t have to be pheasants, of course, but there were plenty of them around. You come across them everywhere, and the males especially make very handsome sacrificial offerings – assuming you haven’t run them over with your car, of course.’

  ‘They were males,’ I said. ‘Both mine. And they seemed to be completely uninjured.’

  ‘Apart from being dead?’

  ‘They were most certainly dead. They could have been just the same one, incidentally.’

  ‘But nobody came to collect them? Or it?’

  I shook my head. ‘No, I threw them away.’

  Then we sat in silence for quite some time. Mark poured out what remained of wine bottle number two. I thought that if I had still been a smoker this would have been an obvious moment to go out onto the terrace for a ciggie.

  But I wasn’t a smoker any longer. Nor was Mark. He really did seem to be sitting there thinking over what I had said.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I should never have brought this up.’

  ‘Rubbish,’ he said. ‘Of course you needed to mention it. What are our fellow human beings there for?’

  That sounded a little theatrical, and he noticed that himself.

  ‘Anyway, I shall obviously do whatever I can to find out who this character is. But I don’t understand that pheasant business. You don’t have customs like that back in your country, do you?’

  ‘Not that I know of.’

  ‘Do you happen to have the registration number of that hire car he drives around in?’

  ‘I’m afraid not. I’ve boobed there. But it’s a silver-coloured Renault. The rental company is called Sixt, and they have their logo on both sides of the car.’

  ‘A silver-coloured Renault from Sixt?’

  I nodded.

  ‘Right,’ said Mark, standing up. ‘I’ll do what I can. But now it’s time for afters. Just a simple panna cotta, but you’ll get a full-bodied Sauternes to help it down. What do you say to that?’

  I said it might be possible to force it down, and as he stood pottering about by the refrigerator I wondered how on earth he thought I was going to get home.

  I certainly wasn’t going to try to walk home with Castor through the dark.

  36

  ‘A boy may only make love to his girlfriend when the gorse is in bloom. That’s an ancient rule here on Exmoor – are you familiar with it?’

  ‘No. But I’m not exactly a girl.’

  ‘I won’t pretend that I regard myself as a boy,’ said Mark. ‘But the point is that gorse blooms all the year round. Even now, in December – perhaps you’ve seen it?’

  We were lying under the feather duvet in his wide bed. We really had made love. I couldn’t believe it, but I didn’t want to deny it either. We were both naked, and it had gone really well. Before we removed our clothes I told him that I was fifty-five years old and hadn’t been in bed with a man for over two years. He responded by saying that the figures were not far off identical for him: fifty-two and two-and-a-half respectively.

  A cluster of scented candles was still burning on the window ledge. It was half past one. The door was ajar
, and had been all the time. Castor was presumably still curled up in front of the fire in the kitchen downstairs. I assumed that Jeremy was asleep in his room on the next floor up. I thought it felt remarkable, and said as much to Mark.

  ‘You ought to know that this is among the most unexpected things that have happened to me for a very long time.’

  ‘For me too,’ said Mark, stroking my cheek with the back of his hand. ‘I stopped thinking about this kind of thing ages ago. If you live in a village like Winsford that is the only sensible attitude to take. The number of available women has been rather less than zero for the last sixty years.’

  ‘I thought lots of tourists come to Exmoor every summer?’

  He snorted. ‘If you’re looking for a man you don’t put on Wellington boots and a waterproof jacket and go out on a moor.’

  ‘But I would like to go walking over the moor with you.’

  ‘You are different. Presumably you’re not quite right in the head, but that suits me down to the ground. Where would you like to go?’

  I thought for a moment. ‘Simonsbath and on towards Brendon, I think. Isn’t that what you recommended? Where you went walking as a child?’

  ‘Whenever you like,’ said Mark, yawning. ‘Yes, that’s where the moor is at its most beautiful . . . And its most desolate. It’ll be as windy and rainy as hell at this time of year, but that’s a risk you have to take. As long as you have the right clothes it’s not a problem.’

  I explained that I even had a waterproof jacket for my dog, and he promised that we would go there as soon as an opportunity arose.

  ‘But not before Christmas,’ he said.

  ‘Why not?’ I asked, more as a joke than anything else. ‘There’s a whole week left yet.’

  ‘I’m going to be busy at the beginning of the week,’ he said. ‘A chap I work quite a lot with is coming here. And then Jeremy and I are off to my sister’s over Christmas – the main holidays, that is.’

  ‘I see. Where does she live?’

  ‘Scarborough, if you know where that is. It takes half a day to drive there, and I don’t know how it will go. How Jeremy will react. He doesn’t really want to leave this house at all, as you’ve probably gathered. I suppose you could say it’s an experiment, but I’ve set my mind on going through with it. In any case, we’ll be back before New Year, and then I promise to go walking over the moor with you until you drop.’

  I said I was looking forward to that. Then added that what I wanted more than anything else just at the moment was to sleep for a few hours.

  ‘I thought you were never going to stop talking,’ said Mark, and so we rolled over on our sides and fell asleep.

  It was eleven o’clock the next morning before Castor and I left Heathercombe Cottage. Jeremy joined us for breakfast – for twenty minutes, at least: that was the time he needed to eat his meal which comprised two eggs fried on both sides, a cup of tea, and two slices of toast with apricot jam. Mark said he had eaten exactly the same breakfast every single morning for the last two years, and the only place you could get the right sort of apricot jam was a little health food shop in Tiverton. If ever it closed down there would be a major problem.

  Three spoonfuls of sugar in the tea, and lots of milk. Jeremy measured the dosage himself, concentrating as if he were placing the final card in a house of cards. He was wearing the same Harlequins jersey as yesterday, but his jeans were blue rather than black; and just as the previous day he shook hands with me once again. As I sat at the table, watching him more or less counting the grains of sugar in each spoon, I felt overcome by a feeling of tenderness towards him that I found difficult to explain.

  ‘What does he do up there in his room with his computer?’

  Mark hesitated. Jeremy had just left us, and I found it difficult to talk about him when he was present. Castor had been given a portion of scrambled egg and bacon that he gobbled in less than five seconds.

  ‘You don’t really want to know that.’

  ‘Yes I do,’ I said. ‘I really do.’

  He sighed. ‘Okay. Only two things, in fact. Recently, at least. He watches violent films and solves sudokus.’

  ‘Violent films and sudokus?’

  ‘Yes, I’m afraid so.’

  ‘And he . . . I mean, why violent films?’

  ‘I don’t know. But he doesn’t seem to be adversely affected by them. And he gets into a much worse humour if he’s not allowed to look at them. I’ve tried restricting him, believe you me.’

  I thought about that gesture he had made in the window, but yet again decided not to mention it.

  ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to . . .’

  Mark shrugged. ‘That’s okay. He sits watching those films . . . He does watch other films as well, not only ones in which people kill one another, but I just don’t know what he gets out of them. Either sort. He sometimes watches the same film three times without a pause – maybe he needs to do that for it to sink in. He’s not exactly a star at solving sudokus either.’

  There was a trace of bitterness in his voice, and I wished I hadn’t asked in the first place. ‘I suspect sudokus aren’t the easiest of puzzles to solve,’ I said, ‘but I’ve never tried so I don’t know.’

  Mark laughed. ‘He understands the rules. I tried telling myself that he’s better with numbers than with letters, so I spent a few weeks teaching him . . . Well, he understands what you have to do, but the problem is that he has no idea how to distinguish between right and wrong. I’ve checked up on him, and instead of working something out he tries pot luck, and it’s wrong more or less all the time. When he realizes it’s wrong, he goes back and tries pot luck again. I think it takes him about half a day to solve a sudoku of the easiest sort.’

  ‘Hmm,’ I said. ‘But it keeps him occupied, I suppose.’

  ‘Yes, it does,’ said Mark with a sigh. ‘And who’s to say what the rest of us do to occupy ourselves is so much more sensible? Manufacturing weapons? Selling shares? Advertising rubbish that nobody wants?’

  He was certainly starting to sound gloomy, and I thought it would be best to let the matter drop. Once again I’m not at all sure what I mean by ‘let the matter drop’.

  ‘I dreamt about it again last night,’ he said after a few seconds of silence.

  ‘About what?’

  ‘About what I said when we first met. That absent husband and the house in the south. Perhaps it was because you were lying beside me . . .’

  I was totally unprepared for this, and it came as a bit of a shock. I had almost succeeded in repressing his clairvoyant abilities, or whatever they were. In any case, I hadn’t spent much time thinking about it, and that business about reading other people’s minds felt more like an in-joke by this time.

  But perhaps that was an over-hasty conclusion?

  ‘Really?’ I said, sounding more doubtful than I would have liked.

  ‘It was the same thing, really. A group of men around a table dressed in white, wondering where somebody had disappeared to. A white house as well . . . somewhere a long way south, as I said before.’

  ‘And what about me? Was I there in a corner somewhere?’

  ‘That might be what was new about it,’ said Mark, looking thoughtful. ‘You were walking along a beach – it must have been quite close by, because I saw you at the same time as I saw the house. Yes, you were walking along a beach with your dog . . . There was no more to it than that.’

  ‘That’s quite enough,’ I said, trying to laugh. ‘I don’t want you to be limitlessly supernatural.’

  Mark cleared his throat and apologized.

  ‘But I’m really pleased that Castor and I could come here,’ I said after a short pause while I got a grip on myself. ‘I’d like to invite you up to Darne Lodge, but that somehow feels like a move in the wrong direction . . . And I assume it would be hard to persuade Jeremy to come there. It really is a rat-hole.’

  He smiled. Reached over the table and took hold of my hands. ‘I’m sure you’ve m
ade it very cosy up there,’ he said. ‘But even so I think we should blame Jeremy and continue to meet here.’

  ‘Continue?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘We must go for a walk above Simonsbath first.’

  ‘Certainly,’ said Mark, looking serious. ‘First Christmas, then a walk over the moor, then Heathercombe Cottage part two.’

  ‘Okay,’ I said. ‘I’ll go along with that. The entire programme.’

  ‘By the way, that stalker – what’s his name? In case I happen to come across a certain Renault . . .’

  Castor and I were already on the way to our car, which I’d parked on the other side of the bridge.

  ‘His name’s Simmel,’ I said. ‘Yes, he’s called John Simmel.’

  That was just a name that happened to come into my head. I’ve no idea where it came from: perhaps from a book or a film.

  ‘Good,’ said Mark. ‘John Simmel. I’ll remember that. Look after yourself. It’s possible that I might be having dinner with my colleague at The Royal Oak on Wednesday . . . Just in case you fancy meeting two nice Englishmen instead of just one.’

  ‘I’m perfectly happy with one, thank you,’ I assured him as I let Castor into the car. ‘Thank you for everything.’

  ‘I’m the one who should be thanking you.’

  I glanced up at Jeremy’s window, but he was evidently sitting at his computer. A violent film or a sudoku?

  And as we sat shuddering and shaking on the bumpy and muddy road down into the village, it occurred to me that I’d forgotten to ask for help with that password.

  Something told me that was just as well.

  Something else told me that I should forget all about all those silly threats and thoughts. No doubt it is the moor and the solitariness of my existence here that gives rise to them.

  37

  The nineteenth of December. A Wednesday. The moment I wake up I remember that it’s Yolanda Mendez’s birthday.

  Yolanda Mendez was my best friend for two years at primary school – year four and most of year five. She came from Peru, had big brown eyes and a horse of her own. If the family hadn’t moved she might well have been my best friend at secondary school as well – I think so, as there was never the slightest hitch in our well-oiled friendship.