by Jo Bannister
It sounded to Rosie an impossibly tall order. But it wouldn’t help to say so. “Maybe he’ll be at my place.”
But Shad wasn’t there. “Now what?”
Nothing more could be done until morning. “Try and get some rest,” said Marsh. “We’ll start again at daybreak.”
For as long as he could, until sheer bone-grinding exhaustion intervened, he moved as the rods move in a dowser’s hands, a visible response to an invisible compulsion. When he was pointing the right way there was a little island of stillness in his head; when he wasn’t it tugged at him as an agitated child tugs its mother’s hand, dragging him back on course.
While he was moving – at first away from the terror and later towards whatever was drawing him – he was able to ignore the wider implications of his situation. There were too many things to do – he needed boots for his bare and bloody feet, a coat for his chilled body, food for his empty belly even if it was only carrots fresh from the fields and water from a trough; most of all he needed to put miles behind him – for him to dwell on what he had become and what he had been before. The very idea of ‘before’was beyond his comprehension.
But it kept pace with his travels, stalking him like a panther, biding its time; and whenever he glanced back in trepidation, aware by the crawling of his skin that something was hunting him, it was that: the knowledge that before he was like this he was different. Things were different; life was different.
As long as he could keep moving he could avoid thinking about it. But finally he had to stop. He could hardly put one foot in front of the other. He was on the edge of a town: fields and hedge-lined lanes at his back, lights and angular buildings ahead. But he was too tired to continue. He smelled the sweet musk of hay and found a barn.
The smell meant something to him: he’d been somewhere like this before. He didn’t know how that was possible: so far as he knew his life began mere hours ago. It hinted at a prior existence somewhere. That troubled him because he could find nothing in his head relating to it, but it also gave cause for hope. If there was more, perhaps the world made more sense than it seemed to. Perhaps there was some reason for him to run until he dropped. He didn’t know what, but then he couldn’t remember sleeping in a barn before.
Perhaps he would remember tomorrow. He climbed high enough off the ground to evade the draughts and surrendered himself to the spiky embrace of the hay. He wrapped his purloined coat around his aching body and waited for sleep to take him.
But it came too slow. Between exhaustion and oblivion there was a crack of time for thought to insert a crowbar. On the cusp of night, his defences down, the amok past swarmed over him.
From having no history, in the blink of an eye he went to having too much, swamped under a tidal wave of the stuff. Faces to which he could put no names, sensations he couldn’t dignify with a context, emotions that left their mark in pain and loss but seemed to come from nowhere like desert plants blossoming after rain. Was this what memory was – glittering fragments of a mosaic with no frame of reference, nothing binding them in time or space? It made no sense.
He tossed on the hay and moaned, raking his temples in an attempt to get it out of his head, longing for the nothing that went before because nothing wasn’t supposed to make sense and nothing couldn’t hurt. This maelstrom of disconnected information racked him. He was supposed to understand. It was supposed to mean something. If he could understand what it all meant, where it came from, he could begin to make sense of where he was, who he was, what he was doing here. Until then he was trapped in a hall of mirrors, unable to distinguish between true and twisted reflections, the way out and mere echoes of the way out. He was still lost, still adrift on a raft of stars in an alien sky, still alone – the only difference was that now he knew it. And knowing made it worse.
Overwhelmed, whimpering with fear – because if this was what his life was going to be he didn’t want it, didn’t want anything to do with it – he packed his arms around his head like a soldier under bombardment and ached for release.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Rosie kept expecting the phone to ring and someone to say, ‘We’ve found him’. But it only rang once, and that was a stringer for one of the nationals wanting her comments on the day’s events. He got a comment all right, but not one he could print.
With Shad still lost out there in the dark she couldn’t bring herself to go to bed. Sometime after midnight she fell into a ragged, restless sleep curled in her chair.
At half-past one she was suddenly wide awake, snatching for the phone. When the night sergeant at Brickfields said Detective Superintendent Marsh had gone home she demanded they get him back.
After six minutes the phone rang again and this time it was Marsh. “What’s happened?”
“I know where he is.”
“What?!”
“I know where he’s gone. Pick me up.”
The door opened as he reached for the bell. “Where?”
“Where does a murderer always return? Axiomatically?”
There aren’t many police officers who know what ‘axiomatically’ means. But Harry Marsh was one. “The scene of the crime? But Lucas didn’t …”
“I know that,” said Rosie impatiently, bundling him back down the path to his car, “and you know that, but Shad thinks he killed Jackie Pickering. However little of his mind is functioning, that thought will be at its heart. He’s at the sidings.”
Marsh’s first thought was that he couldn’t be: that end of the station had been turned into an exclusion zone by DO NOT CROSS
tape strung up by the Scenes of Crime Officer, anyone trying to enter would have been stopped. But time had moved on: SOCO had completed his work and wound up his tape two days ago, returning their goods yards to a relieved railway. He reached for his radio. “I’ll get some help.”
But Rosie stopped his hand. “Just us. Superintendent, he must be so scared already. If he sees a dozen men in uniform coming for him there’s no telling what he’ll do.”
Marsh looked politely sceptical. “I doubt he’s up to hurting anyone.”
She cast him a withering look. “I’m worried he might hurt himself. It’s a goddamned station, if he wanders in front of a train you’ll need to scrape up what’s left with a shovel!”
Marsh made no reply, but he did drive faster.
Rosie wasn’t climbing any eight-foot wire fences. They drove to the main entrance and a night watchman let them in. There were no passengers on the station at this time of night, but the distant rumble and grunt of machinery indicated where wagons were being marshalled for the next goods train.
There were lights on the platform and lights across the yard where the wagons were, and between yawned a great gulf of darkness. Rosie felt a sudden tug at her heartstrings. Jackie Pickering had walked along this platform, arguing fiercely yet with a kind of bitter triumph with the man beside her, and didn’t notice when she’d stepped off the end of the pier into the cold black ocean. By the time she realised her danger the darkness had swallowed her: she was out of sight and earshot of any who might have helped.
But there was still someone who could have helped, who tried to help. Rosie hoped she’d known she wasn’t entirely alone; that even though it was too late, she hadn’t died thinking her killer was the only one interested in her fate.
“Where would he go?” asked Marsh. The powerful torch was standard issue, but in a space this big it turned into a pale pathetic worm and quickly dissipated. All it achieved was to blind them to the light of the stars.
But Rosie had never been beyond where the platform ended. “I don’t know. Where did he go before?”
Marsh had not seen it in the dark. It took him a moment to get his bearings. “Over there – no, over here. The wagons were on this track, waiting for the Holyhead train. Mind where you step.” It had been rough enough by daylight.
“Is it electrified?”
He couldn’t remember the subject coming up. He hunched his shoul
ders and repeated gruffly, “Just mind where you step.”
The night watchman had offered to come with them. Already Rosie was regretting saying no.
There was nothing on this length of track tonight. They followed it to the buffers and glimpses of Railwayview Street through the wire netting beyond. A week ago Shad’s Land Rover was sitting there, though Shad himself was in Crewe.
They stood for a minute, waiting. Then they stood for another minute with a growing sense of anticlimax. “Call him,” suggested Marsh.
It seemed odd raising her voice in such a place at such a time. But there was no point keeping their presence secret: they weren’t going to find Shad if he didn’t want them to, the best they could do was persuade him to find them.
“Shad, it’s Rosie. I’ve come to take you home. Don’t worry, you’re not in trouble. We know what happened and none of it was your fault. Everything’s going to be all right.”
She waited again; but she didn’t expect him to say, ‘That’s all right then, and walk out of the shadows, and he didn’t.
Marsh murmured, “Keep talking. I’ll have a look round.”
“Don’t scare him off.”
He passed her the torch, so when he moved away after three or four paces the darkness swallowed him up.
She tried again. “I don’t know if you even remember me, Shad. You’ve had a bad time, it may be that right now nothing makes much sense. So I’ll fill you in. Stop me if you’ve heard it.
“I’m Rosie Holland. We’ve known one another about five months. We have a mutual friend in Arthur Prufrock. He has a cottage in Foxford with topiary peacocks along his back hedge. He thinks they’re whimsical; you hate them.
“The only problem with Arthur as a friend is that he doesn’t drive. If you need a lift you need to call someone else. You needed a lift back from Crewe. You called Arthur, Arthur called me and we picked you up at the station. Just a week ago.
“You didn’t know how you got there. Well, we know now. Somebody knocked you out and left you in a goods wagon. Right here. You stumbled on to something terrible: a man killed a girl. If you’d seen his face he’d have killed you too; but you only saw her before he dropped you. Afterwards, when you started to remember, you thought you did it. But you didn’t, Shad. The man who killed her is in custody now.”
Across the yard a distant light flickered as something passed in front. Rosie couldn’t see if it was one of the railway workers, or Marsh, or the man they were looking for.
“Shad, I know you’re afraid,” she called out. “You’ve been through hell these last few days. But it’s over. Where are you? Shad, tell me where you are.”
Someone spoke then but it wasn’t Shad. Harry Marsh, fifty metres away in the darkness, raised his voice. “Ms Holland, come over here. I think …”
She waited but he didn’t finish the sentence. “Think what?” she prompted, but still he added nothing more. Irritably, Rosie went to see why not.
The torch picked up the side of a building: tar-black corrugated iron, some kind of shed. She walked round the corner and found a door. The door was open. She flashed the beam of the torch inside.
The first thing she saw was Harry Marsh, on his knees on the cinder floor, his face above the muffler white and startled in the torchlight, his eyes stretched, his body twisted awkwardly as if … as if … Rosie couldn’t think of a single reason why he’d be kneeling there like that.
As if someone had a knee in his back, an arm across his throat and a blade under his jaw. What she’d mistaken for a scarf was in fact a sleeve. She looked past Marsh into the shadows, and someone else was there.
It was Shad, no question about it. Even in somebody else’s coat, with his hair tangled and seeded with hay, with his cheeks sunken and sallow, with a day’s growth of beard on his jaw and nearly enough dirt to count as camouflage over the top of it, there was still no doubt that the man crouching behind Detective Superintendent Marsh, bending his spine across his knee as if he meant to break it, was Shad Lucas. But he looked back at her out of a stranger’s eyes, wild and without comprehension.
Rosie gasped his name. But there was no recognition in the black pits of his gaze. He might not have heard her; or she might have hailed him in a foreign tongue; or language itself may have had no meaning for him. He went on watching with the fathomless stare of an autistic child. Her heart surged once and then fell.
“Shad,” she said again, fighting to get the words out calmly, “it’s Rosie. It’s all right – you’re safe now.”
He still didn’t move. Nothing flickered in the abyss of his eyes.
In moments of stress people tend to go back to what they know best. Matt Gosling saw his problems in terms of military strategy. Rosie became a pathologist again.
She couldn’t see exactly what Shad was holding against Marsh’s carotid artery, only that it was metal and winked in the light. She presumed it was a knife he’d got hold of somewhere, perhaps with the coat he’d stolen. It wasn’t a big knife, but then it didn’t need to be. If he used it in a determined scything motion, starting under one ear and finishing under the other, the presence of a doctor would not be enough to save Harry Marsh’s life. She’d lose them both then: the policeman who’d done his best to help, to get at the truth even when the lie was easier, and the profoundly damaged young man who was going to end up after all as the killer he’d been made to think himself.
When all was told and understood, the law wouldn’t blame him for that. He wouldn’t be tried as a murderer. But if he escaped jail on the grounds that he had no control of his actions, a secure hospital was the likeliest alternative. It would be Fellowes Hall multiplied by a factor of ten. His remarkable brain would go nova then shrink to a white dwarf. Nothing that was recognisably Shad Lucas would remain.
Rosie was all that stood between either man and destruction. She was finally where she’d thought she was when she entered the house at Brindley Road, facing a young man with a knife and a head full of demons.
She backed slowly away from the door, lowering the torch so as not to blind him. She must, at all costs, avoid panicking him. She strove to keep her voice steady. “Shad, listen to me. This man has never hurt you. No one wants to hurt you now. Let him go, and let me look after you.”
Her only reply was a desperate grunt from Marsh as the strong arm tightened across his larynx.
“I’m not going to jump you, Shad,” Rosie promised, taking another backward step. “I’m too old, too fat and too tired. I’m also your friend. I know you. I know what you’re capable of – and you’re not capable of this. So I can wait while you think it through, decide what you want to do. Take as long as you need, but get it right. It’s too important to make a mistake. No one’ll disturb us: me and Harry are the only ones who know you’re here.” They hadn’t been on first name terms but now didn’t seem a good time to give the policeman his title. “You need to trust someone. Trust me.”
That finally provoked a spark of recognition. Shad’s head came up like a spurred horse’s and a rush of breath, half indignant, half afraid, escaped him. The point of the knife jerked against Marsh’s skin, drawing a bead of blood. Too late Rosie remembered where Shad must have heard those words last. Her insides flinched.
“God in heaven, Shad, I don’t know what to say to you! I know what you’ve been through; better than you do. I’ll tell you about it. But please, please don’t do anything you’re going to regret. Stop now and it’s over. Put the knife away and we can go home. Please come home.”
Things were happening in his face, expressions trying to find a way through the storm-torn pathways of his brain. His heavy brows gathered and his lips moved as if he were searching for words; but the effort proved too great and he looked away, defeated, surrendering to the nameless pain.
“All right,” said Rosie, and now the shake in her voice was plain. “Let’s get back to basics. I’ve told you who I am. Do you know who you are?
“You’re a gardener. Other things t
oo, but most of the time you’re a gardener. You carry your gear in the back of a Land Rover. It’s a rather elderly Land Rover and the doors don’t match. The body’s green, one door’s cream and the other’s orange. You keep saying you’re going to paint it but you never have time.
“You live in Skipley, over a shoe shop in the High Street. There are steep stairs up to your flat – any time I visit you have to pull me up the last three.” She paused, trying to think what other aspects of his life she could reintroduce him to without straying into danger areas. “Your mother doesn’t have the same problem. She’s my age but she’s got the legs of a dancer. She’s very dark, very striking, and she always wears red. She works in an end-of-the-pier show. You always say she’s the worst clairvoyant in the world.”
That was a mistake. Rosie saw him recoil as if she’d slapped him. The bent body of Harry Marsh jerked too. His face was wet with sweat.
But he was holding himself together. He knew Rosie was their best hope of all of walking away from this. He could put up with the pain in his back, and the knife at his throat, and wait stoically while there remained the chance that she could talk the crazed boy back to reality. He didn’t blame Lucas; he was afraid of him but he didn’t hold him accountable. How could you blame him for what he had no control of? Even before Cunningham got hold of him he wasn’t entirely … He recognised where that thought was going and, shocked, stopped dead. It was as Rosie had said: sooner or later everyone called him a freak.
Right now, and for as long as his throat was intact, Rosie wasn’t concerned with Marsh. All her attention was on Shad. It might have been a mistake, what she’d said, but at least she’d got a response. That meant something to him, connected with something. She pushed ahead, carefully.
“You, on the other hand, are pretty good at it. Not perfect – if you were you could save us all a lot of trouble – but still pretty good. You’ve helped me, and you’ve helped the police. Harry’s a policeman. He knows you’re one of the good guys.”