by Martyn Ford
The second piece of film is much shorter – it starts with nothing more than a shadow triggering the motion sensor at 2.30 a.m. Recording now – the slight movement of something passing left to right along the path at the bottom of the garden. Something tall behind that thick hedge. A person. Sixty seconds of nothing and then, again, it fades out.
The third, captured nineteen minutes later, is the same but in reverse. The shadow passes right to left and, as before, there’s a minute of nocturnal tranquillity before the camera stops recording.
‘And no one’s spoken to you about this?’ Sam asked, watching and rewatching the videos.
‘Nope,’ the man said in his spacious kitchen – open-plan and visible from the living room. ‘I see all the commotion though. Just steered clear. Didn’t think to check the camera.’
They’ve not even knocked on doors yet, Sam thought, shaking his head. But his eyes, as wide as they’d ever been, stayed locked on the screen as he clicked the footage back for perhaps the tenth time. Again, the shadow, left to right, nineteen minutes later, right to left. Steady speed. Walking pace. ‘That’s you, isn’t it,’ Sam whispered to himself. ‘You’re carrying her.’
‘Huh?’ A clink-clink-clink of a spoon on a mug, then a bin lid opening.
‘Can you email this to me?’
‘Sure.’
Once Sam had explained he was assisting the police, the white-haired man had invited him in to look at the wildlife footage on his laptop. It was perched on a low coffee table, atop a stack of magazines – mostly women’s interest. These, plus the size-five boots by the back door and noises upstairs, and Sam assumed a wife was present. However, the man wasn’t wearing a ring and everything else about this place said single, maybe even lonely.
‘And if they do come, I’m more than happy to answer any questions,’ he added, quieter now as he entered the living room and set down two mugs. He sat on the chair to Sam’s right and took a hard, green sweet from a bowl on the cluttered table. The wrapper crinkled open like a flower on the armrest.
‘And your wife?’
He threw the sweet into his mouth as though it was a pill. ‘My . . . well . . .’ It clattered around his teeth when he spoke.
Sam turned his gaze to the ceiling.
‘Mmm.’ He wiped his lips. ‘Mmm, no, that’s my daughter. Middle of a divorce. Very involved, I won’t bore you with it. But, of course, yes, she will assist however she can.’
They sat for a while in silence – the man watching Sam watching the screen.
‘Little Robin’s a gem.’ He sighed, holding his tea now. ‘Always waves. So polite.’ He took a sip and Sam heard his old tongue working. ‘Can’t say the same about her mother.’
‘Do you know the Clarkes well?’
He tilted his head one way then the other. ‘Francis says hello in the mornings and, as I say, Robin’s a sweetheart, but we’re not particularly close, no.’ With some effort, he removed a handkerchief from his pocket. ‘Not much community spirit round here.’ He dabbed his mouth. ‘Mmm. Tall gates, you know. Mostly stuffy old millionaires.’
‘Are you a stuffy old millionaire?’
‘What do you think?’ The man gestured around his messy property. Big, but yeah, Sam agreed, hardly any sign of wealth. ‘Back to the wife – it’s her house, God rest her soul. Or, really, her father’s. Now he was a stuffy old millionaire.’ He laughed.
‘Mr Shanley?’ Sam remembered the previous owner he’d interviewed all those years ago.
‘That’s the one.’
‘What’s your name?’ Sam asked, still focused on the screen. He’d opened two windows, both pertinent videos displayed at the same time. On the sofa, leaning forwards, he blinked, paused them and looked at each in turn.
‘Sorry, Jasper. Jasper Parker.’
‘Well, Jasper Parker,’ Sam said. ‘I would be grateful if you could—’
He stopped, lifted the laptop and held it near his face. Blinking again, he rubbed an eye, then squinted at the second piece of footage.
‘You found something?’ Jasper placed his tea on the table.
Sam moved the cursor and zoomed into the top right-hand corner. A tiny shape nestled, tucked neatly on a tree branch right by the edge of the path. Not visible in the first film, but definitely visible in the second. Spot the difference. In the second film, the leaves had been parted.
‘What do you suppose that is?’ he said, rotating the screen and pointing.
Jasper turned his mouth down, held a pair of bifocals to his face and peered closer. ‘Bird maybe? Small. Probably a sparrow, that.’
‘In the middle of the night?’
Back outside, across the grass and past the broken gnomes, Sam’s eyes took a moment to adjust in the hazy dusk. The sun was behind the horizon now, just beyond the long barley field that rose up gradually into the sky at the foot of the garden. He identified the branch in question.
‘There you are,’ Isabelle said from the path that ran behind all four properties.
Ignoring her, Sam walked through the gate and stood behind the tree. A section of old metal fence was wedged in the bush, brambles had grown out and claimed it, but he reckoned he could climb on top and reach round to that nook. But he stopped himself. The camera couldn’t see him here. He was not the first person to stand in this spot.
‘Didn’t activate the motion sensor,’ Sam whispered to himself. It could tolerate twigs and leaves in the wind, or the hand of a hidden shadow. ‘Jasper,’ he said, rolling up his sleeves, heading back into the garden. ‘Got a stepladder?’
Isabelle watched as Jasper, bumbling and slow, cursed the mess in his shed, then produced a small steel ladder, which he wrestled out and handed to Sam.
The tree was in the corner of the yard by the side fence, and the tall canopy, like the upper half of Jasper’s wide house, was still catching the last of the day’s light. The highest leaves glowed like embers, a spent torch, fluttering out in the cold air. Sam set the ladder next to the trunk, then climbed and stood on the second-to-last step. It wobbled when he held the handle – Isabelle grabbed either side to keep it steady.
‘You all right?’
With an elbow on the knotted limb, Sam manoeuvred himself to the right-hand side of the tree and used his phone’s torch to illuminate the area. A freshly snapped branch near his wrist. Someone had cleared the way to the object.
‘What is it?’ Isabelle said.
Some kind of wooden toy – or, or cloth maybe? Sam blinked and leaned in closer. The small figure was scruffy, home-made, like a voodoo doll? But no, different. Hand-carved from burned wood – the face was black – a fractured protrusion of what might have once been charcoal. It had no legs, but this was hard to gauge as the object had been half swallowed by the tree. Like hot metal on wax, it had sunk into the knot, its back pressed into the curved bark. Thinner twigs had crept out and caged it further. Time had done this. Lots and lots of time.
However, jutting from its wooden cocoon, it did have arms – one of which was lifted, pointing away from Sam. Pointing over his right shoulder. Pointing, he saw, directly at the Clarkes’ house. He left it in place and took three photographs.
Not bad, he thought, coming down the ladder.
‘What is it?’ Isabelle repeated, this time quieter.
As Sam arrived back on the grass, he brushed bark from his sleeve and said, ‘Significant.’
They returned to the house and Isabelle – much more equipped to deal with this officially – reported the find. Two forensic officers, anonymous in dust masks and white overalls, went to check. Then names were called on the radio – ‘Uh, you’ll want to see this’ – and three more faceless hoods disappeared down the Clarkes’ long garden.
‘Any ideas?’ Isabelle asked on the driveway, zooming in on the photo on Sam’s phone. ‘Looks like some recent damage around the head. How long you think it’s been there?’
‘Hard to say . . .’ Sam sighed. ‘Years.’
Her eyebrows lifted. �
��Eight?’
‘About that,’ he said. ‘It’s wedged there, it’s stuck. The tree . . . has absorbed it.’
‘Why would someone interfere? What were they doing?’
Blinking, he crouched over the tarmac and inspected the plastic teddy eye. ‘They were trying to take the figure from the tree.’
‘But why?’
‘Because . . .’ he turned towards the garage, looked into Francis Clarke’s bloodstained car, lit now by flood bulbs so bright they stained his vision with two green, orange, flashing blue spots and rendered the evening a starless night. Standing, he took his mobile back and held the photo in the palm of his hand. ‘Because this is something we weren’t meant to find.’
We see the Hallowfield Criminal Investigation Department in full swing. The room is busy. Men and women at computers, on phones, one looking at a map on the wall with his hand on his hip – another by his side, pointing something out with a pen. Then, with sudden purpose, one of the younger female officers pushes her swivel chair away from her desk and stands. All this is visible from a webcam on her monitor. However, she strides out of view and steps towards Phil Webber’s office. The camera can’t see in there, only the doorway and the female officer’s shoulder. She’s wearing a white, pinstriped blouse – her watch comes into shot as she places a hand on the wooden frame.
‘Got the data back from Virgin Media,’ she says.
‘Yeah?’
‘God bless the internet.’ Paper rustles. ‘Last week, late-night searches. Listen to this: “modern forensics”,’ she reads. ‘“Decomposition” and, my personal favourite, “how to dispose of a human body”. All on the Clarkes’ secured Wi-Fi.’
‘Fuck off,’ Phil says, in a high-pitched, jubilant tone.
‘Yep. Social media, news, some stuff about insurance, loads of streamed cartoons – Robin likes the classics, Tom and Jerry’s a winner – and then that, bam.’
‘Is . . . I mean, who . . . Are they Francis’s searches?’
‘Can’t confirm for sure yet,’ she says. ‘But it’s Anna, Francis or Robin. Guessing we can rule out an eight-year-old. And the dog doesn’t have fingers. Weirdly though, there is VPN use – private browsing.’
‘What does that mean?’
‘Well, someone in the household is security conscious and covers their tracks. Someone is going online and looking at stuff they want to keep secret.’
‘Is that common?’
‘Nowadays, yeah, nothing incriminating with that alone.’
‘Any info on which device uses the VPNs?’
‘You’re good at this, Phil, you should turn pro. Yes, Francis. Private networks for a lot of browsing – not all of it, mind. The guy used to work in IT, remember.’
‘So, this shit is what, a slip-up?’
‘Looks that way. Just forgot maybe?’
‘Unbelievable,’ Phil says. But, from his voice, it’s clear he does in fact believe what he’s just heard. ‘It’ll be a late one – let’s get all this written up.’
‘What do you reckon they’ll say?’
‘I don’t give a fuck – I just want to see Blinky’s face.’
Chapter 6
Sam had never seen inside Hallowfield University. Besides fleeting visits to friends back in the day, he had never seen inside any university. The Coriolis was the closest he had ever come to academia – oh, what would his father say about that? Despite his efforts, Sam’s contribution to man’s bank of knowledge remained relatively pedestrian.
Once Isabelle had parked the car, they walked up some narrow stone stairs and along a path lined with shrubs so neat Sam had thought they were fake. But when he leaned down, plucked a leaf and folded it twice between his thumb and finger, a residue, sticky and real, was left on his skin. Hallowfield University, bold and big, sprawled out ahead of them. A new build – still clean, still modern, like a perfectly conceived life-size model of itself.
Nowadays, upon entering an open-plan space, particularly a campus, Sam found himself thinking about the dynamics of a mass shooting. Maybe an overexposure to American culture, or maybe knowing that, when it comes to weapons, ‘difficult to get’ isn’t the same as ‘impossible to get’ – either way, he considered funnel exits and imagined newsreel footage of crowds screaming, running from the dull clack-thud of semi-automatic gunfire. No sparks, no blazing muzzle flash, just dust and noise – nothing romantic at all in reality. He assessed large public spaces from an attacker’s and victim’s perspective. Often, when hearing news of a spree killer’s body count, he would shake his head and roll his eyes, both at the senseless violence and at the typical ineptitude rife in men who carry it out. Their cause – be it God or lesser – would be similarly unimpressed.
They were heading towards Professor Adriana Moretti’s office, which, Sam learned from a theme-park-style map on an outside wall, was on the second floor of Red Block. You are here, it told him – a grand, philosophical claim for an arrow to make.
‘How do you know her?’ he asked, as they turned a corner into an ideal choke point, wondering if these thoughts said more about him or more about the world he called home.
‘I was a student of hers,’ Isabelle said. ‘She used to teach at the old site.’ Anticipating the next question, she added, ‘History and politics.’
‘Quite a diversion. How’s the debt?’
Isabelle slowed and looked at him – she would pause before each response, processing everything she heard – the disarming stare from those dark eyes almost bringing an apology to the table. But no. Initially, Sam thought these micro beats in conversation were shock, naivety, even disapproval – however, he soon realised Isabelle wasn’t taking offence, she was just paying attention. She was simply listening. A rare trait indeed.
‘Well, you know what I earn,’ she said. ‘You do the maths. And, no, not a diversion – making sense of what happened years ago is an adaptable skill.’
With half-shut eyes and a tilt of his head, Sam gave her that one.
They walked for a few seconds in silence, passing a couple of evening classes but otherwise seeing no people. After a while, Isabelle added, ‘And you’re wrong, by the way – plenty of chaos in the past, not nearly as orderly as you’d like to think. The future is the only place with any guarantees.’
Arriving at the university’s Red Block just before 8.30 p.m., they crossed limestone slabs dappled in fresh rain which filled the air with a damp warmth that reminded Sam of greenhouse strawberries and the humid metal underbelly of the Coriolis. Back there again with the slightest prompt – the bounce of a speed bump, the disparity between an escalator and the relatively still earth or, today, the ground steam from a summer shower.
He couldn’t say why he was being so candid but, when the topic of first memories had arisen in the car on the way here, Sam told Isabelle about those years aboard the ship. About how he still looked for birds overhead, and still associated the sight with the token tasks given to him at sea. You can tell a lot about a place by the type of things that fly above it. An abundance of feathers meant land, safety, a chance of survival, should you find yourself stranded and alone.
On and off, the Coriolis was his home for the first eight years of his life – a wide, maroon research vessel captained by his father and run with a crew of twenty or so men and women. Academics prepared to leave the grass behind for months at a time. As its name implied, the boat, a former cargo ship, sailed in long curves around the globe, taking samples of water and sea air. Other researchers, from countries he couldn’t recall, came for the ride and studied everything from avian migration to ocean litter. It was ahead of its time in that sense – well before the days of landfill islands, well before great swathes of plastic bottles and bags drifted without direction, tricking gulls, killing turtles, posing for viral videos. Even now, as environmentally culpable as the next man, Sam felt the sea should be somehow exempt from all this. A mysterious supermodel at the edge of a pub brawl, far too beautiful for such casual injury.
Those days, homeschooled on a home away from home, were among his happiest. Although his brother, older by six years, recalled the time less favourably, so perhaps this nostalgia, like all nostalgia, had more to do with youth than it did with reality.
‘We used to hang off the stern railings.’
‘Why?’ Isabelle had asked.
Sam just shrugged.
It involved him and his brother sneaking up to the top deck when it was dark. At night, the two spotlights that jutted from the bridge like a pair of glowing horns sent white beams into the sky above them – long, fading triangles filled with mist. Everywhere else would seem almost as black as the water below. But, of course, as his brother used to say, nothing is darker than the ocean at night. The game went like this: they would head to the rear of the ship, clamber over the railings, lower themselves down on to a narrow shelf, shuffle around the bulbous outcrop of metal at the base of a flagpole, then climb up the other side.
Sometimes, they would hang by their fingers and do clumsy pull-ups. Worse still, Sam would occasionally creep out of bed and play this game alone. Certain death awaited anyone who slipped. A thirty-foot drop into pitch-black water, flowing away at invisible speed. It wouldn’t be instant. It might even take hours, or days, depending on the temperature and injuries sustained from the fall. He would have watched the ship sail away into darkness, lights turning to fireflies, a fog, and finally becoming any one of a thousand unreachable stars arching up and over him from every nearby horizon. At the time, Sam didn’t imagine this horror. He scarcely even thought of it as water – those nights the ocean looked as though it wasn’t there, looked like a void, so his childish mind treated it as such. Just nothing. A boat balanced, suspended impossibly in the vacuum of space.
Thinking about the absurd, unnecessary risks involved used to make Sam feel ill – a cringe, a pang of what if. Nowadays, he found the idea uniquely comforting. The Coriolis was a solid, shifting home that felt as secure as land itself, so to fall off, unwitnessed and sudden, would be the antithesis. Young Sam didn’t know what the opposite of safety and life was – but he enjoyed dangling his body above it when everyone else was asleep.