The Shadow Man

by Mark Brownless

  ‘So, Professor Lankham, can you confirm that this lady burned to death in … unusual circumstances?’

  ‘Yes, Shona, I can. Mrs Ethel Grimshaw was asleep in her bed, when, for reasons unknown at this stage, her body ignited, burning it to ash, yet, mysteriously, leaving her limbs almost untouched.’ He said ‘mysteriously’ with raised hands and eyes wide, like a magician at a kids’ birthday party, aiming to ramp up the mystery of his act. He was certainly captivating Shona McIntyre, the presenter.

  ‘Is there any evidence of foul play in this case, in your opinion?’

  ‘No, not at all, this is a classic case of spontaneous human combustion, where, for reasons unknown, people burst into flames.’

  ‘Why do you think it was that only Mrs Grimshaw’s body was consumed by the flames, yet her arms and legs weren’t?’

  ‘That’s a good question, Shona, and one which has puzzled science for hundreds of years in these cases. There is a famous case of a man whose torso was completely incinerated yet his legs remained unscathed, and there have been others, typically sitting in a chair, who will just leave a pile of ash but limbs intact.’ The news piece cut between the interview and old stock footage of burnt bodies to illustrate his point.

  ‘So the fire centres around the body of the person only?’

  ‘Yes, in the majority of cases, it does.’

  ‘Why is that – do theories exist?’

  ‘There are a number. Some investigators have hypothesised that victims might have been alcoholics, with so much alcohol in their gut that it has ignited and burnt them from within but not touched the periphery of their bodies. Others have suggested a ‘wicking’ effect of cigarettes and maybe alcohol combined, creating a slow burn that gradually consumes parts of the victim but leaves other parts unscathed, such as the limbs as we’ve seen here.’

  ∞ ∞ ∞

  I picked up the phone after watching the show. Some people had push button phones now, Clara even had a cordless one, but not us, no, we had a regular old-fashioned avocado phone with a dial. I dialled Clara’s number. As the phone rang I sat down in the hallway, having pulled the phone cord under the lounge door – not the easiest thing to do as Dad still hadn’t got around to planing the bottom of the door off since the arrival of the new, thicker carpet nearly a year ago. Shutting the door took some effort.

  ‘Did you see the news?’ I asked as she answered, slightly out of breath.

  ‘Yeah, the scientist guy.’

  ‘So it was spontaneous human combustion…?’

  ‘Fuck off. People don’t just burst into flames – they just don’t. And why wasn’t her nightie or bed clothes burned too? Nah, something’s not right. Well, apart from someone being dead not being right, of course.’

  ∞ ∞ ∞

  For days, TV crews raced around the village trying to interview as many people as possible – anyone who’d ever spoken to Mrs Grimshaw, as we now more respectfully referred to her, now that she was dead. We watched all of this from the outside – occasionally they’d try and speak to us but we avoided them like the plague. They didn’t know that we’d seen more of the case up close than anyone other than the police on the scene, and we could’ve told that story, but it didn’t interest us. Besides, in the back of my mind I was still worried we’d get into trouble if they found out we’d been snooping in her garden. The naivety of youth. Instead we followed them, watching from afar, sitting on our bikes around a corner as herds of journalists migrated from one lead to the next.

  Interest in the story started to wane after that. A few journalists did longer pieces about the village or Mrs Grimshaw – one particularly nasty piece of lazy journalism in the local paper ripped off Professor Lankham’s interview and suggested that she’d had a drink problem and had fallen asleep pissed with a cigarette in her hand. Lankham stayed around for a couple of days, speaking in turn to both ITV and the BBC as well as the various freelance magazine journalists who’d stayed.

  But gradually they drifted away, disappearing on the wind it seemed, until one day, after about a week, the village was ours again, and the vans and the cars and the cameras and the people holding sound booms and make-up brushes had all gone.

  Chapter 4 – Now – The Wheatsheaf

  IT WASN’T LONG before Janey started to look tired. Emotionally exhausted from the events of the last week or two and from interacting with people for the first time in thirty years, but also from trying in her own way to play host and ply us with tea and soft cheesy biscuits. I suggested we decamp to the village pub where the rest of us were staying. Janey had offered to put some of us up at her place, but we’d politely made our excuses about arranging to stay in the village, and not wanting to be any trouble. More than that, though, Janey’s was so dark, dusty and damp, it was already halfway to being a haunted house (bungalow), and nobody wanted to be anywhere near it. We did try to persuade her to join us for dinner later, but she repeatedly declined. I could tell she was pleased to be asked, almost enjoying being part of a group again, blushing and being bashful when we ribbed her. But she wasn’t yet ready to take the next step to going outside her door. Maybe she never would.

  Sally wasn’t staying with us at the pub. When we’d arranged to meet up she’d looked up an old boyfriend on social media, and she’d be staying at his place for the weekend. So it was just Katie, Clara and me at The Wheatsheaf. It hadn’t changed much. We used to drink in here, of course – even that summer, at fifteen. We’d get served, usually, depending who was working behind the bar. Now the place had a logo above the sign, showing that it was part of a national brewery chain, so the food would be pre-packed and the atmosphere soulless. But hey, it wasn’t Janey’s place. I let myself into my room and walked back into the seventies. Anaglypta wallpaper and pointless dado rails overpainted so many times it had probably reduced the volume of the room. The only interruptions to the textured walls were ‘tasteful’ lights with gold lampshades and tassels, and three ducks screwed to the wall. I dumped my bag on the world’s saggiest bed and called home – glad for the relative sanity of Nick and the kids talking nonsense about their day.

  ‘Are you okay, babe?’ He asked in his familiar rasping voice.

  ‘Yeah. Yes I am,’ I said, clearing my throat, and banishing some of the silly ideas that had been flying around in my head.

  ‘Sure? No, you’re not. What’s going on?’

  ‘I just…’ I sighed and fell back onto the bed, holding the phone to my ear. ‘It’s just fucking weird coming back here. I dunno.’

  ‘It’s not been that long since we were there though, has it?’ It wasn’t a question. He was fishing.

  ‘Yes but when we came here before it was to see Mum and Dad. Now they’re gone, it feels like I’m a stranger. But there’s something else…’ I restlessly turned on my side, propping myself up on an elbow.

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘Something’s going on, and Janey kinda summoning us back here makes it feel really strange, like I’ve actually gone back in time or something. I almost feel like I’m fifteen again, like it’s 1985.’ I shivered although it wasn’t cold, as if someone or something was in there with me and had run its fingers down my spine – I sat up and looked around, almost expecting to see someone in the shadows. There wasn’t anyone, of course – just me.

  ‘I’m not sure that’s unusual, it’s the only point of reference you’ve got left. It is weird, though, that email and Janey getting you back together so quickly. I know we’ve discussed it, but is there anything else you’re not telling me? I am a bit worried. Talk to me, Flip.’ Nick and I had talked at length when Janey got in touch. I don’t think I’d told him about when I was a teenager – only the odd memory that cropped up in conversation. I explained about Janey, how she’d been badly burned that year. How we’d all drifted apart shortly afterwards, as if her injury had changed us all and we’d drawn a line in the sand, losing touch completely by the time we were doing our A-levels. Nick was fascinated to hear new things about my
life but we did argue when I told him that I was planning to go back, that although I hadn’t been in touch with the others for so long, we would all get together to see if we could help her.

  So why go back? He’d said. I wouldn’t meet up with someone that I’d had no contact with for three decades, babe. You said yourself you haven’t thought about the others in all that time.

  I couldn’t properly explain to him why I had a sense of duty, why there was a feeling that I had to return, like the village was pulling me back. I think we all did. We never slept on an argument, but we did after this one, but the next day Nick changed some plans to cover our childcare, and didn’t really ask too much more.

  ‘It’s nothing, love. Sorry, I’m just a bit tired and seeing folks after all this time is… well it’s tiring.’

  ‘How is Janey? Do you think you can help her?’ I could tell from Nick’s voice that he was holding back, wanting to know more, to probe and work through the whole issue. It was obviously strange for him to understand, but he knew me well enough to leave me to it. Neither of us wanted another argument and he backed down from his line of questioning.

  ‘I think she’s just stayed in this place for too long – like I told you, she hasn’t even left the house. Company is going to be good for her and to talk through some things. I don’t see what else we can do.’

  ‘An intervention, as the Americans would say.’

  ‘Yep, that’s it, an intervention.’

  ‘Okay, well as long as that’s all.’

  ‘It is and it’s not. There’s been something preying on my mind since we arranged this – nothing massive, nothing in the foreground, but now I’m here it’s like it’s always been there. Just watching.’

  ‘Now I am officially fucking freaked out. I’ve never heard you talking like this.’

  ‘It’s okay, it’s just like a nagging thought. Janey thinks it’s this place. That it gets to you, and even when you go you never leave.’

  ‘That’s not helping.’

  ‘I’m here because I can’t remember, Nick. That summer is a façade of memories for me, and when Janey got in touch, a little of that façade peeled away. More pieces seem to be falling away all the time, and I need to find out what happened.’

  ‘What do you mean ‘what happened’?’

  ‘To Janey, for a start.’

  ‘You can’t remember?’

  ‘No. Honestly? No. I know she got burned somehow, and spent a shitload of time in hospital and hasn’t left her house since. But there’s nothing else.’

  ‘So you weren’t around when she was injured?’ He was theorising now. Nick in a nutshell. ‘Were you on holiday, maybe, when whatever happened, happened? That’s why you can’t remember, because you simply haven’t got any memories of it?’

  ‘But surely I’d remember seeing her when I came back, and visiting her in hospital and at home and all that, and I just don’t. It’s not just Janey, it’s everything. It feels like my whole recollection is just two-dimensional and made up like a bad special effect in a film.’

  ‘But why? How would something like that happen?’

  ‘It feels like my memories from then don’t belong to me – like I’ve read them somewhere – there’s no depth to any of it.’

  ‘I don’t know what that means.’

  ‘I can’t explain it properly. It’s like – it feels like I’ve suppressed something that happened, like my subconscious is hiding something from me.’

  ‘But why would it – you – why would you do that?’

  I sighed, frustrated. ‘I’ve no idea.’

  ‘There’s nothing… bad, is there? Do I need to be as worried as I am right now?’ His usually confident voice cracked.

  ‘No, not at all. It’s just closure. We’ll sort Janey out, reminisce, get pissed, close it out and move on.’

  ‘Sure?’

  ‘Yeah,’ I said unconvincingly. ‘All good. Listen, I’ve gotta go, babe, I’m meeting the others for some horrible pub food.’

  ‘Okay. Text me later.’

  ‘Will do, give the boys a kiss from me.’

  ‘Done.’

  I went into the bathroom. Ignoring the mouldy silicone along the bath and the mildew on the shower curtain was one thing, but it seemed like gravity itself was different in the shower – there was so little water pressure that the water droplets barely had the energy to chuck themselves out of the end of the showerhead. It wouldn’t have surprised me to see them going upwards. It was only when I was in there that I remembered how hard the water was round here, as I fought in vain to rinse the conditioner from my hair. To add insult to injury, still far from finished, the water started to run cold, so I climbed out, shivering for real this time, my body covered in goose bumps, and still with my hair full of conditioner. I was, however, determined not to let the side down and knew that Katie would be breaking out the war-paint just to make a ‘remember me’ statement. As I dried my hair, the degree of gnawing familiarity that I’d felt since walking into the room became clear. It was almost exactly the same as the guest house where I’d lived in my first year at university. They hadn’t had enough halls of residence places to put up every fresher. The landlady had tried to be posh, and every inch the president of the local hoteliers’ association. In reality she ran a fleapit. I hoped the food here was better than hers.

  We’d agreed to meet in the bar at eight, and Sally had said she’d join us as well, but that was always going to depend on how ‘busy’ she was. I came downstairs to find Clara and Katie had got there just ahead of me. Apparently Sally would be along a little later when she’d finished ‘checking in’ with her fella.

  ‘Did you call home?’ Katie asked as we waited at the bar.

  ‘Yeah, I spoke to Spock.’

  ‘I’m sorry, who?’

  ‘Oh yeah,’ I laughed, ‘I call him Spock.’

  ‘Why,’ asked Clara. ‘Big ears? Flies a spaceship, maybe?’

  ‘Because he’s always so bloody logical and measured and precise in how he works things out.’

  ‘Really? Isn’t that infuriating?’

  ‘Yes, it is, but things get done. Whilst I have to nag him – course I do – what he does is so precise that I call him Spock.’

  ‘Wow, wish I could have such a clever nickname for mine,’ grumbled Clara.

  ‘What do you call him?’ I asked.

  ‘Smelly twat most of the time – he’s always farting. I’m so glad I’m away every other month.’

  ‘How romantic. What about you, Katie? Oh shit, sorry,’ I blushed, regretting that our discussions on social media of the previous week hadn’t stopped my mouth.

  ‘No, it’s okay. If he wants to fuck off with his secretary that’s his look out. Here, let’s grab that table.’ Katie turned and busied herself paying for the drinks as we sat down. As predicted, she’d gone to town, with a fitted t-shirt and jeans, her hair half up in a clip, yet with some layers casually falling over her shoulders. It must’ve taken her hours. Clara and I looked positively frumpy in comparison.

  ‘This place doesn’t look like it’s improved any,’ Katie said, putting two glasses of gin with ice on the table we’d occupied by the window, along with three bottles of tonic.

  ‘Do you have Fever Tree?’ she’d asked when we were stood at the bar.

  ‘We’ve got slimline?’ said the barman, seemingly as delighted with his comprehensive assortment of mixers as he was ignorant of any others.

  The glasses seemed to stick somewhat to the rustic wooden table and Katie reached for some coasters as she mouthed, could do with a wipe. She returned to the bar to get her vodka.

  ‘So what do you do, Clara, I must’ve missed it on social media. Didn’t you just say you were away every other month?’ Katie asked as we finally got settled.

  ‘Oh you wait ’til you hear this,’ I said.

  ‘I’m a geologist. I work offshore.’

  ‘What do you mean ‘offshore’?’ Katie put so little tonic in her gin it woul
dn’t have mattered what brand it was and took a big drink.

  ‘Oil rigs, love.’

  ‘Bloody hell.’

  ‘I was the first female geologist to work offshore in the UK.’

  ‘How cool is that?’ said Katie, raising her glass in a mock toast.

  ‘It sounds a lot cooler than it actually is. I spend most of my time sitting in a control room staring at a computer screen, looking at pressure readouts from the sea bed. Feel free to think of it as cool though,’ she smiled at them. ‘A smelly oil rig full of beardy blokes in check shirts isn’t anywhere near as cool as being a fashion designer, is it, Katie?’

  ‘I don’t really do that anymore.’

  ‘You did Fashion at uni though, didn’t you?’

  ‘Yeah, but I couldn’t really pay the rent doing it – it’s so hard to break into the industry. But I met a load of designers so I ended up becoming a buyer for different fashion outlets. Because I had such a tough time, I try to support young people who are new to the industry when I can.’

  ‘Wow, that’s proper cool. Any shops I might know?’ Clara seemed to recognise the irony of the question as she looked down at her entirely functional jeans and t-shirt.

  ‘Did you ever do a range of lumberjack shirts, K?’ I asked. She ignored me.

  ‘At one point I did some buying for Debenhams, but I prefer working for smaller boutique shops – it’s much more likely they’ll give someone new a leg up. And as my divorce saw my bastard ex being forced to very kindly invest in my company, it’s given me a little bit more financial freedom to do that.’

  ‘So you’re an ‘advertising exec’, right?’ Clara asked, smiling as she made inverted commas with her fingers.

  ‘That’s me.’

  ‘Anything I know? Did you do the John Lewis ad?’ Katie was expectant as if everyone in advertising must’ve been involved with those ads at some point or another. I could specialise in advertising slug pellets for all she knew.

  ‘No but I did Sainsbury’s summer range last year.’