The Night Raven

by Sarah Painter

  ‘I see,’ the man said. He was around her age, Lydia thought. Maybe even younger. She had thought he was older first because of the weird jacket. It was paired with matching grey trousers and shiny shoes. Most blokes Lydia knew wore T-shirts, jeans and trainers.

  She crossed her arms and gave him her hard stare. She expected him to introduce himself and to spin some line about being the friend of a friend, or Charlie letting him stay here or something, but he didn’t say a word. He just stared back at her in wide-eyed terror as if she were the one lurking in supposed-to-be empty buildings and scaring people half to death.

  Citrus. Her brain was trying to tell her something. That scent which had the sharp tang of lemon but also something like smoke. Not cigarette or wood smoke, but definitely something burned. She hadn’t smelled it for years. Not since she had seen Grandma Crow attending her own funeral.

  Lydia opened her mouth to ask ‘are you real?’ when a noise from behind made her turn around. There was another man standing in the open doorway of the bedroom. This one was wearing a black T-shirt, tight over bulging muscles. He had close-cropped hair and a nose that looked like it had been broken more than once. He was also holding a gun and was pointing it straight at Lydia.

  Chapter Two

  Lydia had never even seen a gun in real life, much less had one aimed at her, and she felt an unpleasant liquid sensation in her stomach. The feeling headed further south and the thought of wetting herself – actually, truly wetting herself – was enough to make her tense her muscles and avert disaster. A small part of her brain was insisting that she ought to worry more about the gunman than an embarrassing wet patch, but she ignored it so that she didn’t pass out from terror.

  ‘Sit down please.’ The man indicated the bed by lifting his chin. ‘Time for a talk.’

  Bedroom. Gunman. Bed. This did not sound like a good idea. This sounded like the horrible details in some tragic and violent news story. The thug didn’t look hurried. He didn’t look excited or nervous, either. He didn’t look bored, exactly, but this was clearly not his first day at Bad Guy school. Lydia had been protected from the worst of her extended family, but she’d still met a few professionals at weddings, christenings and so on. They had the same dead-eye look.

  ‘Come on, now,’ the man said, gently enough, and Lydia realised something: He was going to kill her. She wondered if Grey Jacket knew the gun man. Why hadn’t he said anything? She glanced across, hoping to find solidarity, maybe even comfort, but instead she found the wardrobe. Jacket-boy had gone. Had he dived underneath the bed in fear? She didn’t blame him, but hoped to God he was dialling 999 from down there.

  Lydia tried to make her legs move. She wanted to obey the man, not to give him any reason to hurt her, but her feet felt stuck to the carpet.

  The gunman was looking around and his gaze caught on something behind Lydia. ‘Open the door,’ he said.

  For a moment, Lydia didn’t know what he was taking about. He was standing in the doorway. Then she remembered the glass door and turned around. The path to the door would lead them both to the other side of the bed. If jacket-boy was hiding there, he wasn’t going to stay safe for long. Lydia moved toward the door, anyway, not seeing any other option. When she got around the end of the bed she forced herself not to glance down, not wanting to give away jacket-boy’s position on the slim hope that the gunman was going to stay on the other side of the room.

  ‘Open it slowly,’ the man said. His voice was deep and expressionless and his accent oddly neutral. Lydia knew that she ought to be filing away details, her training with Karen had included advanced observation, but her brain seemed to be randomly firing. An image of her mother’s face, frowning as she piped wobbly writing onto Lydia’s tenth birthday cake, was followed by the thought that the voile curtain was a horrible peach colour, and that the door would almost certainly be locked. It wasn’t. The double-glazed door swung smoothly outward and the sudden rush of cool fresh air cleared Lydia’s mind a little. He was going to make her go outside, onto what Lydia could now see was a small roof terrace with a black iron railing running along its edge.

  The man was right behind her, she could smell his deodorant. He pressed the muzzle of the gun into the small of her back. ‘We’re going outside. Don’t make a sound.’

  Lydia stepped over the door frame and down a single step onto the paved surface of the terrace. She was aware of the grey sky stretching above, the roof scape to her left and right with a forest of chimney pots, and the red brick facade of the building. The house next door had a taller roof with a steeper pitch and a couple of dormer windows jutting out. They had built over their terrace space and there wasn’t a window facing onto where Lydia was standing, just the smooth masonry of the extension. She wondered whether anybody was home and if it was worth screaming. Would they hear her? And if they did, would they bother to call the police?

  Her legs were shaking and she cursed her weakness. Think, Lydia, don’t wobble. Think.

  ‘Forward,’ the thug said from behind her. ‘Six steps.’

  In an odd way, Lydia appreciated the man’s specificity. It made it feel as if she just followed his detailed instructions, all would be well. A second later, she realised that this was probably a technique. Maybe something you learned in assassin school.

  ‘You don’t have to do this. I can give you money.’ Lydia hated the thin sound of her voice. The pleading. Crows didn’t plead.

  He pressed a little with the gun and Lydia walked toward the railing. There was a yard below, the tops of wheelie bins visible and a wall with an access gate. A narrow road ran behind the terrace and, facing Lydia, were the backs of another row of buildings. These ones didn’t have balconies or roof gardens and the windows that she could see had obscured glass or closed blinds. Nobody to see. Nobody to call the police. Or Charlie.

  ‘My family’ Lydia began, the fear full and cold, now, filling every part of her mind. He wasn’t here to steal from the house. He wasn’t here for money or information. He was here to kill her.

  The gun was no longer pressing against her back, but that was scant comfort when she knew it was there. A mechanical assemblage of steel that could stop the heart that was currently beating wildly in her chest.

  ‘Climb over the railing,’ he said.

  ‘What?’ Lydia’s mind was stuttering, still not making sense.

  ‘You’re going to jump. Suicide.’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ Lydia said. She turned around. He was a couple of paces away, now, the gun still steadily trained upon her.

  ‘But, yes,’ he said. ‘Up and over. Let’s see if you can fly.’

  Lydia thought of her parents, then. And Charlie and every family story she had ever been told. She might be a weak member of the Family, might have been brought up outside the nest and be something of a genetic freak, but she wasn’t going to dishonour the Family name. Crows did not die easily. They fought, beak and claw.

  ‘No.’

  He shrugged. ‘Turn around.’

  ‘No,’ Lydia said, the word coming more easily this time. She wanted to see her killer. To look him in the eye and make him do the same as he took her life.

  At that moment, the man in the grey jacket appeared behind the gunman. He just appeared. Materialised. Before Lydia could feel surprised about that, he had hit the man with the gun over the back of the head with a large terracotta pot held in both hands.

  The gunman folded forwards, his legs crumpling so that his knees and face both hit the paving stone at the same time. It made a crunching sound and there was a spray of blood.

  Jacket-boy dropped his weapon and it broke in two, spilling dry earth. Lydia was looking at the blood and the gun, which was still in the man’s hand. She knew this was her moment. She should jump on his back, try to grab the gun, but the idea of getting closer to the enormous man, to attempting to touch that evil piece of metal, seemed utterly impossible.

  Also impossible was the speed with which he was recovering. Alrea
dy he was on his hands and knees, blood pouring from his face, his teeth bared in a grimace as he staggered upright. He began to raise the gun, again, and Lydia dived to the side, hoping to get to the door, to run far and fast.

  Jacket-boy shoved him and he staggered forward, taking steps to keep his balance. Jacket-boy shoved again, a look of fear, concentration and weird joy on his face. It sent a cold spike down Lydia’s spine. In a split second, the gun man was hitting the railing, his momentum causing his body to fold over it. Lydia ran forward. Whether to push him over or stop him from falling, she had no conscious idea. She only knew that it was a moment of opportunity.

  Before she reached him, Jacket-boy was there. He was lifting and shoving and, quicker than Lydia could believe possible, the big man’s centre of gravity altered and he went over the railing. One second he was there, his stomach on top of the railing and then his thighs, his feet lifting, and then he wasn’t there at all. He let out a sound as he fell. Halfway between a shout and a scream and then there was a sickening thud, followed by another.

  Lydia looked at jacket-boy in shock.

  ‘I did it,’ he said, his voice echoing strangely as if he was in a tiny room, not the open air. Then he disappeared.

  Lydia looked over the railing, very carefully and without touching the metal. The man was spread-eagled on the street below, his legs at terrible angles and a pool of blood spreading from beneath. The green wheelie bin was over on its side, plastic bottles, lids, and rusty tins spilled onto the ground.

  She pulled her phone from her back pocket and called 999. Police. Ambulance. All the emergency services. Please come quickly.

  Her mind was starting to work again, although her thoughts were still fragmented. Coldness flowed over her body and her stomach clenched. She leaned over as the bile rose. It was mostly liquid and Lydia remembered that she hadn’t eaten yet that day. She had been too tense; coming back home had felt oddly dangerous. Turned out her instincts were bang on.

  At once, she couldn’t stay on the terrace a second longer. Lydia went through the door, back into the bedroom. She sat on the bed and wrapped her arms around her body, hugging tightly. How long before the police and ambulance arrived? Was he dead? She was suddenly seized with renewed terror. That he wasn’t lying on the ground, bleeding and immobile, that he had somehow got up and was moving back through the house, coming to kill her. Like The Terminator.

  A jolt of adrenaline spiked through Lydia and she was up and moving. Back on the terrace and to the railing. The man was still lying in the same position. Out cold. Or dead. Lydia sunk down to the paving stone and held onto the black iron of the railing. A pigeon landed on the terrace and she watched it strut around, concentrating on the grey bird and its stupid jutting neck action so that she didn’t have to think about anything else.

  The sound of sirens. Lydia forced herself upright again. The pigeon flapped away and Lydia’s eye was caught by something else. The broken terracotta pot lying in two pieces with the mess of soil spilling across the floor. There had been a man in a grey jacket and he had hit the man with the gun. The man with the jacket had appeared and disappeared right in front of her. He had saved her life.

  Lydia went downstairs to meet the police who were now parked in the street below. There were flashing lights of an ambulance and the sounds of heavy shoes on tarmac, people talking, radios, sirens.

  Lydia held onto the bannister as she walked down the stairs. She was being careful as she didn’t want to fall. She also was being careful in her thoughts. She wasn’t thinking about the gun man who was lying in the street, surrounded by his own blood. She wasn’t thinking about how close she had come to death in the last half an hour. Instead, she thought about the man who had saved her life. She knew, of course, why jacket-boy’s voice sounded weird. She knew why it was a familiar weirdness. He was a ghost.

  * * *

  Later, sitting in the back of the second ambulance with a blanket around her shoulders and a paramedic taking her pulse, Lydia tried to organise what she was going to say about jacket-boy. She could hardly explain that a poltergeist had saved her life.

  ‘She’s good,’ the paramedic said to an approaching officer who turned and nodded to somebody else, somebody out of Lydia’s sight-line.

  The man who stepped up, then, wasn’t in uniform. Obviously a higher-up type. He was also very tall.

  ‘How are you feeling?’

  ‘Is he dead?’

  The broken-looking thug had been loaded onto the first ambulance and it had left with the siren and lights going. Lydia thought that meant he was still alive, but she wasn’t sure.

  The man shook his head. ‘I’m DCI Fleet. I’m the senior investigating officer. And you are-’

  ‘Lydia,’ Lydia had already given her name to a female officer. Moorhouse. She had patted her on the arm and told her they would speak to her once the paramedics had finished checking her over.

  ‘Lydia Crow,’ DCI Fleet said. ‘Is that correct?’

  ‘Yes,’ Lydia said.

  ‘Can you tell me what happened?’

  ‘He had a gun,’ Lydia said. ‘He walked me out onto the terrace and tried to get me over the railing. I struggled and he went over instead.’

  Fleet’s expression remained neutral. ‘Did the gun fire?’

  ‘No,’ Lydia said.

  ‘Can you show me where this happened?’

  * * *

  Lydia hated being on the terrace. The thought that she had gained a roof terrace but that she would never want to use it ran through her mind as she pointed out the railings to Fleet and Constable Moorhouse.

  ‘Was that involved in the altercation?’ Moorhouse pointed to the broken terracotta pot.

  Lydia hesitated. The medics would surely notice he had been hit over the back of the head with something heavy. But her fingerprints wouldn’t be on the pot. Would they take fingerprints? Wasn’t she the victim in this situation? She shook her head. ‘He made me walk over here,’ she pointed.

  The tall cop didn’t seem overly interested in the railings, he was looking around the terrace. After a thorough search of the space, his gaze found Lydia again and rested there. He had brown eyes and, while they were perfectly attractive from a purely aesthetic viewpoint, they were calculating and Lydia shifted her feet and looked away. And then wondered if that made her look guilty.

  ‘Do you need to sit down?’

  It wasn’t what she was expecting him to say and she felt her knees buckle as if they had been given permission.

  The female officer stepped forward. ‘Ms Crow, why don’t we step downstairs. Have a cup of tea and we can chat there.’

  Within minutes, Lydia found herself sat on the slightly sticky leatherette banquette of one of the booths in the window of the cafe. There was a large paper cup in front of her with steam escaping through the hole in the plastic lid. Someone, maybe the police constable, had gone to the nearest proper cafe and bought her a tea. Lydia blinked back sudden tears at this simple piece of kindness.

  ‘I just need to take a statement,’ constable Moorhouse said, apologetically. ‘Then we’ll leave you in peace. A sleep can be good after something like this.’

  Lydia wondered if she spoke from personal experience. ‘That’s fine,’ Lydia wrapped her hands around the tea, feeling comforted by its warmth.

  The constable got Lydia to go over the events, asking questions until the small sequence was clear. ‘Did you hear the man come into the building?’

  ‘No,’ Lydia shook her head. ‘I was just looking around the place, getting my bearings. I was in the bedroom and –’ Lydia stopped speaking. She had been in the bedroom and she had seen a ghost. ‘I turned around and he was there. In the doorway. With a gun.’

  Moorhouse made a note. ‘Did he say what he wanted?’

  Lydia swallowed, shook her head.

  ‘Did you recognise him?’

  Another head shake. Lydia drank some tea and gave it a little more thought. He had reminded her of some of th
e Family’s associates but just because of his air of power and intensity. She didn’t think she had ever seen him before.

  The door to the flat swung open and Fleet appeared, filling the room with his presence. He grabbed a cup from the cardboard tray and nodded at Moorhouse.

  She stood up immediately. ‘That will do for today. We will need to take a formal statement but I can see you are very shaken up and it can wait.’

  Lydia stood up, too. She held a hand out, relieved that the conversation was over but also not entirely ready to be alone.

  ‘I’ll be out in a second,’ Fleet said to Moorhouse’s retreating back.

  She looked at her watch and was surprised at how little time had passed. An hour at most since she had unlocked the door to her new home. ‘A new record,’ she said.

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘For things to turn bad,’ Lydia said. ‘It’s a speciality of mine.’

  He smiled, the crinkles around his eyes spreading out and making him look entirely different. ‘I don’t think this one counts,’ he said. ‘It’s not your fault.’

  Lydia focused on him properly, noticing for the first time that, in addition to being tall and hiding a good set of shoulders inside his suit jacket, there was a kind of glow about him. A gleam.

  ‘Have you lived here long?’ He pulled out a small notebook and Lydia’s heart sank. More questions.

  ‘I just arrived today,’ Lydia said. ‘Is that part of the statement?’

  He shook his head, smiling a little. ‘Just interested, sorry. Used to come here all the time with my mum. When I was little.’

  Lydia couldn’t picture the man in front of her as anything approaching ‘little’.

  ‘It used to smell so good.’ He shook his head, as if clearing it.

  ‘Well,’ Lydia said, suddenly feeling defensive. ‘I only moved in today. It’s derelict.’

  ‘You’ve taken on a project, all right,’ he nodded at the upturned chairs.