The Mammoth Book Of Best British Crime Volume 8

by Maxim Jakubowski

  She looks around again.

  There is something pink on the dirty floorboards. It seems hard and out of place and she succumbs to her curiosity.

  It is the leg of a doll.

  A child.

  My God! A child.

  “Gilly! Gilly!”

  At once, she is so scared that she drops it. Her breath is caught, her eyes are wide. She turns back to the darkness of the corridor down which Greg had walked.

  Gilly does not know it, but she has had a nervous breakdown.

  “Greg? Greg? What is it?” She walks forward but stops at the threshold to the darkness beyond. “Are you all right?” she calls into the heart of the house.

  “Come and look at this. Out the back.” His voice is some way off, a slight echo its handmaiden.

  “Is it safe?”

  “If you’re careful.”

  How typical of a man, she thinks as she gingerly picks her way down the corridor.

  The plaster has fallen in patches, exposing rotten wooden battens; the floorboards are a landscape of dirt, leaves, rubble and shapes that she cannot recognize but fears are rat droppings.

  “Which way?” she calls tentatively.

  “The hall turns right and leads into the kitchen. I’m out the back.”

  As she moves forward, she makes out light coming from the right and she can also hear a rushing sound. As she turns the corner, she sees the light is coming through a doorway from grimy windows.

  The kitchen is as laden with melancholy and decay as the rest of the house. A range cooker stands resolutely to her left and a butler sink accompanies it. The only other occupant of this space is a single half-glazed cupboard, bowed by age and oblivion, staring blearily at its companions from the opposite wall.

  Ahead of her are the windows, some of them broken, and a door to the outside. The rushing sound is louder now.

  “Greg?”

  But the rushing sound is too loud and she has to repeat herself.

  “Outside.”

  She barely hears this word.

  What is that noise?

  When she moves outside, her question is answered.

  The stream over which they had crossed now passed below her into a narrow, man-made gully. She steps out on to a rickety wooden balcony about fifteen feet above the crashing water and to her left is a huge waterwheel. Greg is on the balcony by the wheel; he is beckoning her excitedly. Rain falls steadily but the balcony is overhung by a sloping roof; bright sparkling drops of water hang and then fall from its edge.

  “Isn’t this fantastic?” he calls.

  She certainly finds it exhilarating – the sound is loud, her position is high and the woodland around her is dense and green and beautiful – but she also finds it unsettling. The balcony on which she is standing seems to be dangerously fragile. Below her, the water moves from rain-specked flow to turbulent chaos as it passes through and under the wheel.

  “Is it safe?” She has to raise her voice because of the white noise from below.

  “I think so. Take it carefully, though.”

  “You are joking … ”

  “You’ll be fine.”

  She moves forward gingerly, feels some give but is reassured that it seems to hold. Just to be safe she clings to the wooden railing that runs along the length of the walkway.

  “It’s incredible. Who’d have thought it?”

  The wheel is about fifteen feet in diameter and reaches to about the level of their knees. It is in need of much repair and does not move despite the water rushing past it.

  “I wonder what it’s for,” she says.

  Greg leans over the balcony, scares Gilly. “The axle goes into the side of the house beneath us. There must be some milling equipment down in the basement.”

  “Be careful.”

  He straightens up, looks across at her and smiles. “It’s perfectly safe,” he says. To demonstrate this he wobbles the railing, making her gasp slightly, eyes widening. This is typical of him, playing the macho man, trying to scare her.

  “Don’t,” she pleads, making him laugh.

  Turning back to the wheel he says, “I can’t work out why it isn’t turning. It must be stuck. Probably silted up or something.”

  This is amazing!

  Gilly is for the moment transported. The idea that she does not want to live here is suddenly absurd; this place is a paradise. Greg is right; of course, they must live here, deep in nowhere, surrounded by memories of things that perhaps never happened, enchanted and entranced.

  Greg’s phone rings. Although the noise is almost swamped by the water’s rush, Gilly hears it.

  She watches him reach into the breast pocket of his shirt, hardly look at the phone as he presses with his thumb, raise it to his ear.

  She walks towards him, feeling the balcony giving slightly beneath her feet despite the fact that she is petite and light-footed.

  Who’s ringing?

  Greg answers the call.

  “Hello?”

  A brief pause.

  “Oh, hi … ”

  He glances up at her as he turns slightly away, takes a step back …

  But then there is a crack for he has not noticed that the wood where he stands has rotted because when the wheel worked the water splashed for decades against the underside of the balcony. He falls through with a scream of shock. His knee is struck as he falls and he is aware of a shaft of pain that skewers into his leg …

  His head strikes the side of the house.

  Gilly screams.

  Gilly’s head has made perfection of her life, yet her life is far from perfect and the foundations of what she has made are already cracking. She watches Greg disappear through the wooden flooring, sees the phone flip upwards out of his grasp and fall in front of her.

  Please, no. Please, God, don’t do this to me.

  She rushes forward, now even more aware of the fragility of the balcony on which she treads, made fearful by the knowledge of how precarious her own position might be.

  The phone is lying between two planks of the balcony, saved from falling into the water by an underlying strut but this is barely registered.

  “Greg? Greg?” She half asks this, half screams it as she approaches as close to the splintered hole as she dares, leaning forward to look down through it. What she sees makes her almost hysterical.

  He is half submerged in rushing water and she can clearly see that his legs are being pulled away by the strength of the current; but the upper half of his body is caught. He has fallen on to the wheel – fallen partly through it – and is now wedged, splintered beams sticking into his abdomen just below his ribs, between the wheel and the house. The water falls and splashes around him and past him, only just missing his face.

  “Greg?” she calls again.

  She sees that he is dazed. He has hit his head and there is blood over the left of his face. When he looks up, she can see that he is having trouble focusing on her.

  And then the wheel moves.

  I remember a curious incident.

  It was the good time, the time when I was pregnant and full of joy and expectation – and I mean, “full”, as in replete, filled to bursting, completely consumed by them. This time things had gone without a hitch and we were just awaiting the result of the chromosome analysis …

  I had lost my keys to the house and had looked everywhere. Greg’s car was a last resort – I had driven it briefly the day before to pick him up from the station when my car was at the garage – and I came across a savings statement from a foreign bank, one I’d never heard of. It was in the glove box, under some travel sweets.

  It said that Greg had saved twenty-six thousand pounds.

  I asked him, of course. What wife (or husband) wouldn’t?

  He said that it was a tax avoidance scheme, a bolt-hole for money from the business. Not strictly legal, he said, but everyone did it.

  He was perfectly natural, perfectly convincing.

  I believed him.

/>   “Gilly?” She hears the terror in his voice as he comes to full realization of where he is.

  “Greg! Are you all right?”

  It is a stupid question.

  “It hurts, Gilly.”

  He is only two metres from her, but they are metres that stretch to infinity. His voice echoes and the noise of the water is loud and insistent and menacing. Above all this, she can still hear his panic, his pain, his terror.

  Gilly can see that he has fallen on to the wheel, partly broken it and then come to rest in the narrow gap beside the sheer drop of the house wall. She sees also that his fall has loosened the wheel, that it is creaking faintly against the rush of the water, that it will soon start to turn and drag him under the water.

  The creaking is getting louder.

  Turning away from the wheel she looks around, searching for something to stop the wheel beginning to turn, without any ideas as to how she might achieve this. She sees a splintered plank, grabs it, but it is caught by nails at one end.

  The wheel moves and she hears Greg scream.

  Spurred by terror she finally wrenches it free, then thrusts it down into the hole that Greg has fallen through. It is just long enough – but only just – to reach down between the spokes of the wheel and stop it turning.

  The day that they were given the results of the chromosome analysis has not faded into the past but lives with Gilly and always will. The events of the day – the emotions, the things seen and glimpses, the sounds heard and the places visited – revolve around a single discovery like dancers around a maypole, are tied to it for all of her eternity.

  The obstetrician was very kind and very calm, the nurse with him even more so, but that counted as nothing when the implications of what he said burst into molten pain within her.

  The baby had Down’s Syndrome, probably severely so.

  Greg had been with her, had held her hand, but all human contact was detached from her existence at that moment.

  The clock on the wall behind the obstetrician’s wiry grey hair had said that it was seventeen minutes past eleven; the calendar on his desk had said that it was the 6th of June.

  “Gilly?”

  The rain has begun again, adding to the noise. She peers down at him, now on her hands and knees.

  “Help me, Gilly.”

  But the futility of this request is obvious. He is beyond her reach.

  “I’ll have to get help.”

  “It hurts when I breathe. And my leg … I think it’s broken.”

  “Don’t worry … I’ll run and get someone.”

  But this only induces panic in him. “No! No! Don’t leave me, Gilly.”

  “I’ve got to, Greg … ”

  “What if the wheel turns again? It’ll pull me under.”

  “But I can’t do anything on my own … ”

  It is then that the mobile phone rings. At once she thinks, “Of course! I’ll phone for help.” At the same time she wonders who is calling him, who called him not five minutes before.

  She looks at the screen.

  Nikki.

  She does not know anyone called “Nikki”: she does not know that Greg knows anyone called “Nikki”.

  It is a curiously intimate name, full of suggestion.

  She knows then that it is the name of his lover.

  She presses the red button, the one that cuts off the connection, sees a movement out of the corner of her eye, and looks around to see a small girl standing just behind her. She jumps in shock.

  Greg sees Gilly’s head disappear from his view above.

  “Gilly?”

  The child has Down’s Syndrome – severely so. She does not speak, does not even react beyond a smile on her face that is part beatific, part eerie; the look in her eyes is unfocused, as if she does not see Gilly but far beyond her.

  Gilly tries a smile; a friendly one, a gentle one. “Hello. What’s your name?”

  No reaction; neither response nor movement.

  Greg’s voice comes from below a second time, this time more urgent, more panicked and almost angry.

  Gilly turns back to him and calls down, “It’s all right, Greg. There’s … ”

  But as she turns back to the girl, she sees nothing there. There is no child, no sign that there ever was.

  “What is it?” Greg is demanding, like a child himself.

  Gilly has stood up, is looking all around her – through the windows of the mill, over on the other side of the fast-flowing stream. Nothing.

  “Gilly, for God’s sake … ”

  At last she turns back to him but she is still confused, wondering.

  He calls, “Will you get me out of here?”

  She remembers the phone, bends to pick it up, but this time her head is filled with thoughts beyond Greg’s predicament.

  Would my child have looked like that?

  I was going to call her Belle …

  She wasn’t ugly, not ugly at all …

  I could have loved her …

  Gilly has suppressed from her memory the fact that she was sexually assaulted as a seven-year-old girl by an uncle, a brother of her now dead mother. She has suppressed this but it lurks there, not dead, not even dormant, just stealthy.

  It has poisoned her, turned her.

  She believes that she is still essentially innocent.

  But she is not.

  Virginity, both sexual and moral, went long ago, stolen from her, and the only thing between Gilly and depravity is the construct she has made of her life, the one that she has built on a foundation of a lie.

  Gilly does not carry a mobile phone, does not want the leash that it represents.

  She called him.

  Now, this week of all weeks, she called him. Couldn’t she let me have him to myself for just a week?

  She looks at the phone. She is familiar enough with it to work her way through the menus.

  She hears Greg call again. “Gilly? What’s happening?”

  Without looking down at him she replies, “I’m phoning, Greg.”

  She comes across the call log, is about to call back the last number received (although she does not know why), but then she hears, quite distinctly, a child’s voice in her head; although she never heard the little girl speak, it carries with it certainty that it is hers. Nor does it come in words, only knowledge.

  Gilly opts to look at the messages received.

  The rain is falling hard now. The stream is rushing and there is a single but deeply menacing creak as the plank of wood that juts through the hole moves slightly.

  “Gilly?”

  Some are from her, some are from strangers, but most are from “Nikki”.

  The ones from Nikki are graphic, sexual, illuminating. As Gilly reads them, moving backwards in time through the past few days, then weeks, she comes to appreciate just how little she has known about Greg’s life, about his thoughts, about his wishes for the future. She sees that Greg has gone elsewhere not just to complement something in his life that she is not supplying, that he has gone there for a completely different experience.

  She is stunned.

  The man with whom she has shared her pleasures and pains has been an actor. There is a facet to him that he has hidden from her, one that, now exposed, casts him as a liar, as contemptuous of her gullibility, as mocking of her sexual timidity.

  This epiphany is a light in her head, but one that burns as bright as laser-light, one that destroys as it enlightens. It cracks the entire edifice of her life, the beliefs that she has been in the possession of “truth”. It allows the evil that she went through as a child, that has adulterated her, to rise up and embrace her completely. It floods into the cracks in her mind and splinters it, making razor sharp shards with which to wound.

  It spreads through her and throws shadows in places that once were lit, lights crevices and thereby allows her to see the monsters that lurk within.

  She reassesses his actions and words of the past weeks and months, but there is wo
rse to come …

  “Where are you, Gilly?”

  Gilly’s head appears in the hole above him. “Here I am, dear.”

  “What’s happening?”

  She smiles. He is very, very cold; this helps the pain but dulls his thoughts. He can see that her attitude is somehow wrong, but he cannot bring his sluggish thoughts to wonder why. She says, “I’m sorting things out.”

  “Hurry up … please.”

  “It won’t be long.”

  Another creak from the wheel.

  He said, “We could live here.”

  He wasn’t talking to me, but to himself.

  Was he also talking to his girlfriend …?

  And the money …

  How far have your plans gone, Greg? How close are you to leaving me?

  Gilly is starting to feel strange. Her head is filling with all sorts of ideas and possibilities that have sprung into febrile activity, that scurry from corner to corner, feeding on all that has been done to her. She makes a last effort to control them, to counter the dizzying revolution in her mind.

  She glances back at the phone, sees for the first time a time and date.

  It is from Nikki and it is full of anticipation, apparently agreeing to meet him that afternoon.

  It is dated the 6th of June and it was sent at five minutes to two in the afternoon.

  It would all have been different if we could have had children. Perhaps that is what the problem was, the reason for his infidelity; I have not been able to give him children, could only promise him a handicapped baby …

  This attempt is futile; worse it is the fuel that causes the smouldering to erupt into conflagration.

  No!

  I’m being so stupid, so trusting, so blind.

  He never wanted children. Not really. He was lukewarm about the idea, at best. He saw it as something to give to me, to shut me up. It probably would have suited him to give me a baby to look after; it would have been a distraction for me, while he bedded “Nikki”, pleasured her as she desired …

  No, no, no!