The Tall Man

by Phoebe Locke

  ‘Get your daughter back, Miles. She doesn’t deserve any of this.’ And his visitor turned and jogged away.

  Miles turned back towards his house and saw Sadie standing there.

  Out by the loch, Amber made it to the edge of the woods, her feet bleeding and the wind ripping at her torn T-shirt. The shadows reached out to swallow her but Leanna drew closer. Leanna followed her in.

  36

  2018

  She sits on the step and they crowd in beneath her. Federica and Tom closest, faces turned up to her like worshippers in a Renaissance painting, Luca stretching to angle the boom. Greta at the bottom, a light and reflector held up like a beacon. Amber is crying and they all pretend she isn’t. Amber is crying and they carry on.

  ‘So you ran,’ Federica says. ‘When you realised that the woman who’d been calling herself Leanna was behind you—’ She glances (they all glance) into the cavernous dark space cast by the spotlight. ‘You ran for the woods.’

  Amber nods.

  ‘There was another page of the diary, wasn’t there?’ Federica says, and her voice is unbearably soft, her words sinking into the dark like silt. ‘Did you know that?’

  ‘I didn’t read it. I was too busy fleeing for my life, funnily enough.’

  ‘I have a copy here,’ Federica says, a folded sheet of paper produced with a flourish from a pocket somewhere. Greta feels her blood turn to ice. Where has she found it? The diary was lost for a long time – its absence one of the biggest holes in Amber’s defence in court until finally, at the eleventh hour, her legal team managed to discover its hiding place here, in these woods. Guarded by this tainted house, along with all the rest of its secrets. And yet now here’s the most important page, photocopied and obtained by Federica from who knows where.

  Photocopied and obtained and brandished in front of a camera, like some kind of magic trick. Or just a trick, Greta thinks, a plain old dirty interviewer’s trick, designed to get a reaction. To manipulate. Exploit. She feels her mouth opening, the breath drawn in. It doesn’t have to be this way. She won’t let it be this way.

  But Amber doesn’t flinch at the sight of the paper the way Greta does. She leans forward and takes it. Though the tears are still making tracks in the make-up on her cheeks, her eyes widen hungrily at the sight of the words printed there. ‘Could you read it aloud for us?’ Federica asks, her eyes hungry too. Greta wants to hurl the light at the wall. She wants to leave.

  She wants to hear what the page says.

  37

  2016

  The darkness of the trees was different to the darkness inside the house. It lived, its shadows shifting and breathing all around her as she ran, branches and stems reaching out to snap and slap against her skin, to draw her on and pull her deeper. The forest floor was damp underfoot, her skin so bone-cold by now that the roots and stones that snagged the soles of her feet went unnoticed.

  And always, always, as the ground sloped upwards and the trees knotted closer, she heard Leanna behind her, that harsh breath and the snap snap of the branches as she crashed on.

  ‘You have to come with me, Amber,’ she’d called out as Amber first ran into the woods. ‘You must see that. It’s the only way.’

  But the only way, right then, was up and onwards, into the shadows.

  Billie stood at the open bedroom window and listened to the sound of her mother and her friend thrashing through the woods. She knew she should help.

  She was surprised at how calm she felt now. Prepared. She already had thick socks on and so she slid her feet into her boots, unlaced at the end of the bed. She pulled another jumper over her pyjamas, found the torch. And then she walked slowly down the stairs and out of the open front door.

  She had always known the story of Anna Louise; growing up, it had a fairy-tale slant in the telling, often whispered to her in the pink light of her bedside lamp, ended with a kiss to the forehead. Anna-Lou and the witches. Anna-Lou and her avengers. She remembered realising, wide-eyed beneath her Mulan duvet, that she was supposed to grow up to be the character in the story; the daughter who was meant to slay the witches alongside her mother.

  She knew her mother thought she was stupid. Naïve, maybe. She also knew that her mother was not herself, or not right somehow – that she didn’t think the way other people thought about things. Obsessed was the word. And Billie knew that this meant too that Leanna had always underestimated her, had always thought that she understood less than she did. It meant that she had never considered that Billie might have ideas of her own about how to extinguish the fire that had burned inside her mother since longer than she, Billie, had even been alive.

  The night was cool but not cold, not with her preparations. She clicked on her torch, sliced the beam through the trees. There was a cracking sound, followed by a scream and the swishing sound of someone sliding down the slope.

  Billie stepped into the woods. She knew she had to make this stop.

  She knew, most of all, that the ending of the story had changed in the telling. But the ending had finally arrived.

  Sadie stood looking at her husband, seeing him for the first time. She watched him try and call Amber’s mobile, watched him finally give up and call the police. Watched him search through his messages with the operator still on the line and then repeat the address of the cottage, which Leanna had emailed him. When he hung up, he looked at her, his face drained and pale.

  ‘You knew,’ she said, and he nodded. ‘How?’

  ‘Sadie . . .’ Miles reached out a hand to her and she stepped back sharply, her heart thudding and her mouth dry.

  ‘Tell me.’

  He nodded, helpless. ‘It’s not why, Sadie, I swear to you. I loved you anyway. I loved you straight away and I could see that you were holding something back and I wanted to know you. Know everything. So . . .’ He pushed a hand through his hair and looked away. ‘Sometimes I’d look through your things. When you were in the shower or when you left me in your room to go to lectures. I wanted to soak up everything about you.’

  ‘You went looking for my secrets.’

  ‘It—’ He seemed to think better of it. ‘Yes. There was an old birthday card. To Stacey, love Mum and Dad. And a few weeks later when you were drunk, you mentioned growing up in Westborough. And it all started to fall into place.’

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’

  He looked up at her, his eyes wet and wide. Pleading. ‘I hoped you’d tell me eventually. I hoped you’d learn to trust me.’ He looked as though he might reach out to her again but when she took another step back from him, her stomach churning, he looked away. ‘And then you became pregnant, and knowing became something special to me. It was . . . I don’t know. It was like it was this secret you were keeping to protect me – and yet I was keeping the fact I knew about it a secret to protect you. Do you see? It was our bond, Sadie. It was the thing that made us closest.’

  ‘How could you want a child with me? Knowing—’

  And then it was too much. She looked down and she was Stacey again, eleven and invincible. She looked down and the girl, Anna, was beside her. The girl’s tiny hand was in hers. She knelt down beside her and the road turned to grass. Those big blue eyes with their blond lashes looked into hers. Her head intact, her dress clean again.

  The Tall Man takes daughters. A child’s whisper, breath against the back of her neck, though the girl beside her looked back, unblinkingly, and smiled. A bird sailed high above them on an airless sky and Sadie pointed up at it until the child smiled. She stood and led the girl into the woods where the others waited. Where Justine’s laugh scared more birds from the trees.

  Alone again, Sadie felt those small cold fingers slip from hers. She felt Miles’s hand close over her shoulder.

  ‘I laughed,’ she said. ‘I stroked her face, and I laughed as the knife went in.’

  ‘You didn’t kill her, Sadie,’ Miles said, though they both felt the limpness of the lie. He looked at his phone. ‘I should call the police
back.’

  And Sadie was herself once more, her new self, her not-Stacey self, and a coldness was closing around her heart, panic prickling over her skin. ‘Why would she give you the right address?’ she said and she thought she heard a sound. The faintest of little girl giggles, from somewhere in the shadows.

  38

  2018

  It’s time, Sadie. I can’t wait any longer. I don’t want to wait any longer. I’m ready.

  I can remember her so clearly. Can you? The way her eyelashes were blond at the tips. The way her mouth puckered and pursed when she was sleeping, as if she were still giving her little kisses in her dreams. The way her hand felt in mine. I wonder if you remember that too. Poor Anna, led into the woods by you.

  You were not the only one, I understand that. I searched for all of you. I wanted to find you, to see what had happened to the girls who killed my sister, destroyed my parents. Because destroy them it did. They never got over Anna, never stopped thinking of the things you did to her. My father spent every night of his life after that screaming his way through nightmares that tormented all of us. My mother only found sleep at the bottom of a bottle and the drink made her see things when she was awake which no person should have to bear. And I lived my whole life being the daughter who couldn’t make up for that; the sister who couldn’t protect the only person she was supposed to. The sister who turned her back one afternoon for just long enough for you to creep in and destroy it all. All because the three of you were so desperate to believe in some playground tale.

  And I did find you. I put my mind to it, like any homework task I’d been so good at in school. And over the years, the leads turned up. Forwarded mail, a forgetful elderly relative. Contact with an old friend. It was all so easy, in the end. Do you want to know what the Tall Man did for your friends, Sadie? The prize for my sister’s life? The girl you called Helen is living in a council flat with a hoarding compulsion and crippling agoraphobia. Her sister Marie is twice divorced and an alcoholic at thirty-eight. And the girl you knew as Justine, the girl you were all so afraid of, died of a heroin overdose at twenty-two.

  But you. You tried to live. You found love, you had a child, even knowing what you did about the rottenness that lives deep inside you. An act so despicably selfish that even your parents cut their ties with you. An act – another act – which cannot go unpunished.

  And now here we are, this small perfect house in its place deep in the woods. I will get the knife from my bag. It’s not the cleanest way but it has a certain sense of balance.

  I think that’s what you’ve been searching for, all this time. I think you know that that day, all those years ago, you tilted the scale in the most monstrous way. And every day since that, in your own twisted manner, you’ve been trying to right things; to repay that debt. You’ve tortured yourself with it, more Macbeth than Lear. You were a tiger daughter for sure, Sadie, but now you are just a woman with blood indelibly on her hands.

  The problem is that you are impossibly, pathetically, despicably weak. You always have been. Little Stacey the sheep. Little Stacey who wanted to be special. You could never repay your debt; you could not right your wrong.

  I can.

  I will free you, Sadie. I will take from you what you took from us and you will be free. I hope that, as you read this, you will begin to see that. This ending is a beginning for all of us. You believed in the Tall Man once, but the Tall Man does not take daughters. You did. And I will too.

  And so it’s time for me to put down the pen; to pick up the knife. I am writing this so that you will truly understand, so you will know, without doubt, that your daughter’s death is an event which belongs to you. A balancing.

  We will both be free now.

  The words of the diary echo through the house and Greta stalks from one dark room to another, her hand hesitating at the lights. She feels poisoned by what she’s just heard, even though she knew all of the facts, knew everything that fills the gaps, too. It wasn’t the hatred in the words that repulsed her. It was watching them leave Amber’s mouth, watching Amber’s knuckles clench white at the edge of the photocopied sheet. Watching Federica’s fingers whiten on the banister too, her glee barely contained, while Tom’s mouth turned down at the corners, his face blank and polite, like someone given something curdled and turned at a dinner party.

  She stands in the doorway to one of the bedrooms and listens. Amber has made her excuses and gone outside to make a call, though Greta saw the way her hands were shaking as she fumbled with the front door. She can hear the others downstairs making tea; the rattling of the kettle, Federica talking excitedly in a low voice. She is pleased with herself for the letter stunt. Amber reading the words of a woman who planned to murder her, in the place it almost happened – Greta knows that it’ll be one of the scenes people post about online, one of the scenes reviewers will love and hate and share. Luca murmurs in agreement with whatever Federica is saying, there is the clink of a spoon, the creak of the fridge opening. And up here, around her, the house creaks and settles too. A cool gust of air whispers at her neck from somewhere. She lies down on the bed where Amber lay and didn’t sleep two years ago and stares at the ceiling.

  She can’t stop picturing Federica’s face when she pulled out the letter: Surprise. Can’t stop thinking of Tom’s words back in LA, gulls screaming around them. You know what’s going to happen. You know Federica’s going to do something to pull the rug out from under her. She always stitches them up, you know that.

  She’ll do it, Greta knows she will. Federica will not be content to let Sadie Banner stay protected in the shadows; she won’t rest until she’s pulled her into the light, considered her from every possible angle. She doesn’t understand, as Greta has come to, that Amber is trying to protect her mother in return for the protection Sadie has given her. Because Sadie giving up her anonymity – going to the tabloids herself – is what alerted the world to the terrible truth behind the murder and its connection to the Westborough Witches. It’s what changed the tide of public opinion from disgust to some kind of sympathy for ice princess Amber Banner. And by giving up the second life that was given to her when she was a thirteen-year-old girl called Stacey, Sadie Banner has given Amber a chance at one of her own.

  A floorboard creaks in the hallway, the sound of the others downstairs drifting up to her as they take their tea outside. Federica snorting with laughter at something Luca has said. The gruff sound of Tom’s voice, the words muffled. Everything carrying on. And that draught of cool air again, licking at her skin.

  She thinks of an email forwarded to her from Federica five minutes ago. Nothing said aloud, Federica continuing her conversation even as she pressed send. A random address, someone claiming to be the man Amber knew as Leo. He’ll talk for the right amount, he says, as long as his face isn’t shown. It’ll be up to Greta to validate his claims, figure out if this really is the man who slept with and stalked a sixteen-year-old and her family for cash. His connection to Leanna has never been corroborated though during the trial a tabloid claimed to have identified him as thirty-seven-year-old Lee Mitchell. Wanted in connection with an armed robbery charge and one of sexual assault, he once worked at a garage owned by Leanna’s father, David Weatherall. He’s still wanted for questioning regarding his part in the Banner case too. Greta wonders whether, should this person prove to actually be him, Federica will hand his information over to the police or if she will film him first.

  She gets up and goes to the window, pulls back the flimsy curtain. No view of the loch from here – only the sullen woods; a tree torn from the ground, its roots knotted with moss. The woods seem to stretch endlessly on, the trees pale and the sun not reaching through them, everything still and silent.

  She rests her head against the glass, thinking – trying not to think – of Amber’s voice shaking as she read that last page of the letter to them; Leanna’s last words to Sadie. We will both be free now. She watches a figure creep through the trees, moving in and out
of the weak light, and wonders if that might ever be true.

  39

  2016

  Amber had tried to hide the light from her phone with her sleeve, her fingers too shaky to be fast enough. She had heard Leanna fall but she must have gotten up, must have caught a glimpse of it, because now Amber could hear her heading up the slope, twigs cracking loudly in the dark. She scrambled further into the woods, bare feet scrabbling against the steep incline, thumb stabbing at the screen. She didn’t know if the call connected, didn’t dare speak. She walked blindly into a bough and cut open her forehead, her cheek; a bruise that would purple over her eye like a passing storm in the coming days. A scar that would stay far longer.

  And behind her, always, the footsteps.

  ‘Come on, Amber,’ Billie called, her voice playful. ‘It’s so dark for playing hide and seek. Scary.’

  She almost slipped down a sudden gap, her hands freewheeling out in the darkness. Billie. Goofy, clumsy Billie, out here looking for her. Like real life had crept into a nightmare, made her realise she needed to wake up. She could turn and call for help—

  ‘Ammmmber.’ Billie’s voice tight and strange. Her footsteps calculated now, as if she were listening for Amber’s, trying to track her. No goofing now, another mask shed.

  Her breath ragged in her chest, she slid a bare foot over the ridge. It was deep, cool air rising from it. Billie crunched through a shrub nearby and Amber crouched, lowering her body over the edge. Her hands felt ridges like bones; the roots of a tree. And then an absence, a rift in the ground where water had found its insistent way through, streaming towards the loch. She pushed into the bank, into the hollow between two broad roots, a rigid embrace with the stream running icy over her feet. She glanced at her phone but the call, if it had ever connected, had been ended.