Slow Train

by Jack Benton

  ‘He was married before?’

  ‘Oh yes, but a long time ago now. She died young, though. He never really talks about her, but if I’m honest, I don’t want to know. I know she’s long dead, but she’s still my competition, isn’t she?’

  Slim smiled. He wondered if Lia would ever think that about his ex-wife, then found himself almost bursting into laughter. ‘Don’t worry, I’ll keep it to myself,’ he said. ‘So you’re not from round here?’

  ‘Oh no. I’m from Suffolk, way down south. We met on holiday.’

  She looked about to open the floodgates about their history, so Slim made his excuses and left. He returned to the guesthouse, left his phone on charge, and then went to the library.

  Jezebel. According to the Old Testament, she had been Ahab’s queen. Turned on by her supporters for persecuting Christians, she had been thrown from a window, then had her flesh eaten by dogs. She was often depicted in literature as a fallen angel, while her use of cosmetics had linked makeup and gaudiness to prostitution.

  Lia was right. Had Jennifer seen Bettelman and considered him the devil, the presence of some other, monstrous person linked to a persecuted biblical figure might have driven her close to madness.

  But who had it been?

  52

  It sometimes felt easier to assume his guise as Mike Lewis, BBC documentary researcher, than it did to maintain his regular persona. Sometimes, even Lewis had to do the dirty work, Slim thought, as he went door to door around Holdergate, showing copies of Toby’s horror caricature to residents under the pretext of researching an urban legend from the seventies and eighties.

  After a couple of dozen houses, during which he was met with repulsed looks and a few harsh words but no information, he began to feel the old pull, the draw back to his own sense of oblivion. The lights of local pubs seemed brighter than those of other establishments, and the booze racks of newsagents seemed to have little voices infiltrating his thoughts.

  He had ironically monikered the faceless man as “Facey”, but no one he spoke to knew anything. With his feet beginning to drag, and his fingers to shake from a need he was struggling to control, he knocked on one more door, steeling himself for the same spiel he had divulged time and time again until the words felt hollow in his mouth like an old piece of gum he couldn’t find somewhere to throw away. He waited on the step for the door to open, introduced himself with feigned enthusiasm, explained himself and held up the drawing.

  Minutes later, weary beyond words, he stumbled across the street, through an overgrown gateway into a small neglected park which bordered the train line. He brushed brambles off a bench and pulled out his phone.

  Lia answered on the second ring.

  ‘Help me.’

  ‘Slim? Where are you?’

  He looked around him. ‘Near the tracks. I’m not sure. A park. There’s a pub nearby called The Apple Tree. I need to drink. Help me, Lia.’

  His voice cracked even as he said it, both sorrowful for using her as a crutch but in a way also relieved that he had leaned on her before he leaned on the booze. He would break her eventually and they both knew it, but for now she was holding him up.

  ‘I’m at work, Slim….’

  ‘I know. I just … I didn’t know what else to do.’

  ‘It’s okay. Hang on, I’ll sneak out the back. We’re not busy. Don’t move. Don’t ring off. I’m five minutes away, that’s all.’

  The shakes were right up to his elbows now, not so much from the dependency he had broken a dozen times but from the memory of it.

  He waited. The seconds beat in his ears like the wings of bats, hammering the side of his face. He got up, waiting for the temptation to pass, but it persisted, claws holding on to his shoulders. The pub was a few doors up the nearest street, an OPEN sign outside. A hundred-metre walk. It would only take one drink to settle him. Perhaps if he had just one, a half maybe, to steady him, to make the shaking ease, he could get back out on the job. Just a half. That’s all he needed.

  He turned for the way he had come in, but it was no longer there. A hedgerow rose up in front of him, blocking the way forward. Butterflies made his vision flicker, and a high-pitched wail blocked out all other sound. The ground rumbled, something terrible approaching, and Slim threw himself at the hedgerow, determined to get away. Brambles, hawthorn, and nettles slashed at his face, stinging and scratching him. He ripped them aside, bloodying his hands. He dug his way forward until he was nearly face down, his feet caught, a broken branch digging into his stomach, and then something massive rushed past on the other side of the hedge.

  He screamed. The roar of engines rose to meet it, then they were receding, leaving only the lingering ring of his voice behind.

  ‘Slim?’

  He opened his eyes. All movement had stopped except the thundering of his heart and the gravelly intake of his breath. The train had hurried on down the line, leaving only the humming of the rails in its wake.

  ‘Slim? Are you all right?’

  The craving had gone. Slim pushed himself backward until he landed in a bloody, scuffed heap in the long grass at the hedge’s foot. Lia stood over him, eyes wide. A hand reached down to help him up, and he pulled her forward into an embrace, aware he had begun to cry.

  ‘Thank you,’ he whispered. ‘Thank you for coming.’

  ‘What were you doing? You could have fallen onto the line.’

  Slim looked around him. In his disorientation he had got turned around. Instead of heading for the street he had tried to climb over the thick, overgrown hedgerow separating the park from the railway line. He had left a ragged swathe through the undergrowth, and it had left its mark on him in a series of harsh scratches on his arms and an area of nettle rash on his stomach where the hawthorn branches had pulled up his sweater.

  ‘Something happened.’ He shook his head, trying to remember the exact reason for his sudden panic attack. It came back with a jolt, like a hard slap to the face.

  The crumpled sheet of paper lay on the grass nearby. Slim picked it up, reluctantly turning it over to reveal Facey on the other side.

  ‘Someone remembered him,’ Slim said, shivering. ‘Someone remembered Facey.’

  53

  They went for coffee. Slim’s hands shook as he drank, but no longer through a craving for drink, only out of fear. The look in the old woman’s eyes as they filled with tears. One hand rubbed her nose, then she ducked her head, unable to meet Slim’s eyes.

  ‘Oh, I remember him,’ she said. ‘Poor tragic thing.’

  She had few details to elaborate with, nor did she recall his name.

  ‘No one local ever liked to stand at the far eastern end of the platform,’ she told Slim, her eyes downcast as though recalling the way she might once have been while waiting for a train. ‘You could see into the goods yard from there, and sometimes he’d be about. Not often, just once in a while. And always playing with that dog of his, the pair of them clambering among the junk and the old trains.’

  Tom Jedder. The monster Slim had christened Facey had to be Tom Jedder, Toby’s Visitor, his ghost.

  Except that he wasn’t an aberration from a fantasy novel, but a very real person.

  Lia had to go back to work. Slim gave her a fierce hug, promising to call her if he felt himself sliding again. He wanted to say more, perhaps to offer her three words he hadn’t said to anyone in decades, but even after she had stepped up for him, put herself on the line for a man she still barely knew, he was afraid. Was he confusing dependency for something more? And if he wasn’t, did he want to burden her with something so heavy, something that would perhaps make it even harder for her to walk away?

  Resuming his search for information, now armed with what the old lady had told him, it wasn’t long before he found others who dredged nightmares from the depths of their memories. An elderly gentleman who had once worked in an office near the station recalled seeing Facey playing in the park one evening, long after it was usually deserted. Walking pas
t on his way home, he had come upon the figure by surprise, and caught just a glimpse before Facey bolted, pursued by a little white dog.

  Another elderly lady remembered seeing a short, nearly bald figure running among the siding tracks in the goods yard at Holdergate Station late one night while waiting for a delayed train to Manchester.

  ‘From the moment I caught a glimpse of that face I tried to forget it,’ the lady said. ‘A trick of the light, car lights catching something reflective through the slats in the fence. I only saw it for an instant, and always tried to put it out of my mind. And until I saw that picture of yours, I thought I had.’

  Yet still no connection to Tom Jedder beyond what Toby claimed, and what old Litchfield had said. Slim wanted to visit the old man again, but worried the picture might be too much of a shock for him.

  Instead, he turned his attention back to Toby. Back at the guesthouse, he lay on the bed and called Kim, catching her just before she left the office.

  After giving her an update on what had happened over the last few days, he told her what he had learned about Jedder, Facey, and the dog, and asked her if she had seen any parallels in Toby’s novels.

  ‘Well,’ she said. ‘Since you mention it, there was something. Don’t go on what I say, but check the online reviews for the fourth book. They’re scathing. There’s a sequence in the book where one of the minor villains—a shapeshifter called No-Face—dies in a particularly gruesome manner. He is tied across a train track and gets decapitated. You might expect that sort of thing in a book for adults, but this is a children’s book, remember. Fans were up in arms, apparently, parents asking for the passage to be removed. According to a gossip website, the third book undersold and the publisher allowed that passage to remain in order to generate a bit of publicity.’

  ‘Did you check it out?’

  Kim laughed. ‘Of course. I called the publisher, but got “no comment”. They wouldn’t talk to me.’

  ‘What are the circumstances around it?’

  ‘Well, it’s actually carried out by the main character, and when No-Face dies, it releases the main character from a negativity curse. You know, in the context of the story, it works, but it could have been done a little less violently, in my opinion, considering the audience.’

  ‘That’s interesting. Anything else?’

  ‘Well, I don’t know if it’s important, but No-Face appears from a dream the character has. At the beginning he’s a normal boy, but he gradually starts to change into a monster. Do you think it could be autobiographical? That Tobin P. Firth killed this person you’re looking for?’

  Slim shook his head. ‘I haven’t ruled it out,’ he said. ‘I think it’s unlikely. It’s more likely a form of catharsis. There’s a character Toby has in his head which is haunting him. I believe he knew about the person’s death and wrote it into his book as a way of expressing his own closure.’

  ‘Well, I guess it’s possible.’

  Slim nodded. ‘Thanks, Kim. Your information was a great help.’

  It was still light outside, and Slim felt restless. He went out, walking the streets until he found himself at the bottom of Charles Bosworth’s road. A light was on in the old policeman’s living room, so Slim went up to the door and knocked.

  Bosworth appeared pleased to see him and invited him inside.

  ‘How’s the case going?’ he asked, offering Slim a seat and his choice of drinks. Back in control after the earlier episode, Slim opted for tonic water on ice, claiming he was still on duty.

  ‘I’ve made some progress,’ he said. ‘I don’t know what it’ll lead to as I still haven’t come up with a body.’

  ‘But you have some new leads since we last spoke?’

  Slim shrugged. ‘Maybe. Something I wanted to ask you … you were still working for Derbyshire Constabulary through the eighties, weren’t you?’

  Bosworth nodded. ‘I retired in 1996.’

  ‘So you dealt with your share of train suicides? Or would that be the jurisdiction of the transport police?’

  ‘We’d pick them up and phone them in. So yeah, I dealt with a few.’ He gave a deep frown. ‘Never a pleasant experience.’

  Slim pulled Facey’s picture out of his back pocket and slid it across the table.

  ‘Was this person ever one of them?’

  At the sight of Facey, Bosworth immediately winced, leaving Slim no doubt he had seen the person before.

  ‘Oh, Slim, where did you get this?’

  ‘I’ll keep that to myself for the time being, if you don’t mind.’

  Bosworth nodded. ‘Said like a true policeman. Yes, I’ve seen this person before, although the likeness isn’t exact. He died on the train line in September 1982.’

  ‘Was he decapitated?’

  Bosworth closed his eyes for a long time. ‘How do you figure these things out? Yes, and no. He was, but perhaps not the way you think. He was struck from behind. The train’s driver testified that the figure appeared to be kneeling on the tracks at the time, his head lowered, facing away from the train. The spot at which he was struck was on a slight bend where the verges had a propensity to become overgrown late in the year. The driver had no chance to stop. He blew the train’s horn as is protocol, but the figure didn’t move.’

  ‘And who was he?’

  ‘A most unfortunate local boy. I’m afraid I couldn’t tell you much more. He was Holdergate’s unwanted secret.’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘I saw him alive only once, a year or so before then. I was on a train, coming into Holdergate Station. The boy was walking along the tracks. He glanced up as we passed, and the sight of him was enough to send a shiver through my heart.’

  ‘Was he known around the town?’

  ‘You didn’t speak of him. Yes, some local people knew of his existence, but you wouldn’t acknowledge him openly, and you wouldn’t talk about him.’

  ‘That’s … heartless.’

  ‘It makes me ashamed to think of it, even now. It wasn’t intentional. That he was so rarely seen made it worse, because you’d build up an image of him in your mind until it was almost like a shadow that would follow you home.’

  ‘It’s a horrible way to treat someone.’

  Bosworth sighed. ‘I remember a former colleague saying he would flinch at the yapping of any small dog, for fear it was that boy nearby.’

  ‘He had a dog?’

  ‘Yes, a small white terrier thing. A Scottsdale, maybe.’

  Slim frowned. For a few seconds he racked his brain, certain he had seen such a dog somewhere before, wishing his memory hadn’t been softened by years of alcohol abuse. ‘He had a dog of the right size that could have left the marks in Jennifer’s bag?’

  ‘Well, I guess it would have fit.’

  Slim leaned forward. ‘And you didn’t add all this up back in 1977? It’s my belief that the person in this picture was responsible for Jennifer’s disappearance. I believe she encountered him on that night, and was likely murdered.’

  Bosworth gave a tired laugh. ‘A fanciful idea, Slim, but one that’s astray, I’m afraid.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because the boy in this picture was just nine at the time of his death. At the time of Jennifer’s disappearance, therefore, he would have been just four years old. Even in this day and age, not many four-year-olds commit first-degree murder, do they?’

  54

  Slim spread the prints and scribbled sheets out on his bed. Saturday night. He was leaving first thing Sunday morning, but did he have enough to close the mystery down? He was close, so close, but the one thing he so desperately needed still eluded him.

  Jennifer’s body.

  If he found her remains, he could make the evidence he had found stick.

  Where was she?

  Bosworth had claimed not to recall the name of the boy Slim called Facey, and the case file had been lost over the years. A little too conveniently, Slim thought.

  He looked at the prints Don had
sent him, then reached for the bottle of whisky beside his bed.

  ‘I’m sorry, Lia,’ he whispered, glad she wasn’t here to see him fall off the wagon once again, but the girl had done her part. He recalled their brief phone conversation earlier that afternoon:

  ‘Slim, I spoke to my mother. She recognised the man in that picture.’

  It made perfect sense. And this morning he had gone back to visit Litchfield in the retirement home. Instead of getting to the questions he wanted to ask, Slim had just sat and listened to the old man, noticing the slur in his voice, the way certain letters blurred into each other, a lisp perhaps evident from childhood which might have turned certain words into others. Words which might have passed from one person to another, until the original meaning was lost, and a new meaning had taken its place.

  Don had come up with the goods, and Kay had done his part, too. Shoveling everything he had collected into a plastic bag, Slim took one last swig of the whisky and went out.

  He had to start shouting before lights came on and someone appeared behind the frosted glass in the doorway.

  ‘Let me in, damn you,’ Slim shouted. ‘Let me in or I’ll tell the whole street what you did to Jennifer Evans.’

  The door opened, revealing a figure in a dressing gown. Slim glared at him, breathing hard from the long uphill walk, glad he had stuffed the whisky back into his jacket beforehand. He held up the crumpled picture of Facey.

  ‘No more questions. I want answers.’

  The figure in the dressing gown gave a long, deflating sigh and nodded.

  ‘You’d better come in,’ Robert Downs said.

  55

  ‘You’d need more evidence,’ Kay said. ‘However, you’re right. My contact found traces of leather on that peg. There’s no proof it came from a bag strap—at least not without the bag in question being available for analysis—but there’s a pretty good chance, don’t you think?’