The Trawlerman

by William Shaw

‘You wake in the night and talk to dead people. Who are you to say what’s normal or not?’

  ‘Does she?’ asked South.

  ‘Zoë!’ scolded Alex. ‘No I don’t.’

  ‘Yes you do,’ muttered Zoë.

  Alex looked at South. ‘Sometimes I have nightmares. It’s part of the PTSD.’

  Bill turned to Zoë. ‘It must be scary for you.’

  The teenage girl cocked her head to one side. ‘It’s not every night.’

  ‘You know, if you ever need anything . . .’ South said. He stood and looked out of the north window, towards the lighthouses. ‘Anything at all.’

  Somewhere outside a motorbike roared down the Dungeness Road breaking the stillness. The new concrete lighthouse stood illuminated, a black and white rocket against the black sky. The summer air was moist. Every ten seconds it lit the air with a bright beam; a fixed point in a moving world.

  They wheeled their bikes home together, mother and daughter.

  It was only a short distance down a single-track road to their more solid house.

  ‘Which pub?’ asked Alex.

  ‘What?’

  ‘The pub that man says he saw the ghosts from. Which one was it.’

  ‘Kenny Abel? I don’t know. Was near the house where the dead people were, though.’ They had reached the back door of the house and Alex had her key in the door. ‘He said they flew up from the roof of the house into the sky.’

  They flew up from the roof and into the sky, thought Alex that night as she sat awake in bed, listening to owls.

  When she woke in the morning there was a cup of cold mint tea by her bed which she didn’t remember making.

  Nine

  Dressed in khaki shorts and a huge T-shirt that hung off her angular shoulders, Zoë was holding a knife in one hand and poking inside the toaster with it.

  ‘Is that unplugged?’

  Zoë looked up. ‘Yes, Mum. I’m not an idiot.’ For a while she carried on digging, until broken pieces of bread started emerging.

  ‘Is that peanut butter on that?’ Alex asked.

  ‘Kind of.’

  ‘What do you mean, kind of?’

  ‘Peanut butter and Marmite.’

  Zoë had the grace to look embarrassed.

  ‘Yes, Mum. I’m not an idiot.’

  ‘I hate using the grill,’ Zoë said. ‘It takes forever.’

  The sun was already high. It was going to be another delicious, slow summer’s day and the thought of finding anything to fill it made Alex’s heart shrink.

  Zoë was now trying to put the burned pieces into the bin, which was already full. Alex sighed. She crossed the room and pulled the bag out of the container, tied it and took it outside.

  As she was making her way back to the kitchen, a young man in a Manic Street Preachers T-shirt, standing by the back door of the house next door with a cigarette in his hand, looked at her nervously and asked, ‘I don’t mean to intrude, but is everything, you know . . . all right?’

  Puzzled, she said, ‘Yes. Fine.’

  ‘What did he mean, Is everything all right?’ she asked Zoë, when she was safely indoors.

  ‘You don’t remember.’

  Alex blinked. ‘Remember what?’

  ‘You were shouting.’

  Alex nodded. Pulled out a fresh bag from the drawer. ‘Was it bad?’

  Her daughter shook her head as nonchalantly as she could. ‘Not really. I’m used to it.’

  ‘You made me mint tea.’

  ‘It calms you down.’

  ‘Does it?’ she asked. She didn’t like mint tea, she thought.

  The house next door was rented out to people who wondered why their neighbour was screaming in the night. What kind of people, Alex considered, would leave it until the morning to ask if everything was OK? She wouldn’t have. She would have been out banging on the door, but maybe that was what was wrong with her.

  Zoë’s toast was ruined. Alex offered to make her some more but Zoë shook her head. ‘I’m not really hungry anyway.’

  Alex looked at her. These last few weeks, Alex had been so bound up in herself. ‘You have to eat something. Especially if you’re going digging again today.’

  Zoë didn’t answer.

  ‘Look. I’ll give you a lift there, if you like.’

  Her daughter nodded. ‘Not that I approve of cars, obviously.’

  Twenty minutes later, in the car parked at the Romney Marsh Wildlife Visitor Centre in front of the low, green-roofed building she said, ‘I’m sorry. About the shouting.’

  ‘It’s OK.’

  ‘Is it scary?’

  ‘Nope,’ her daughter said simply. ‘Not for me. Probably just for the neighbours.’

  Children accepted what you did, thought Alex, because you were their parent.

  Instead of getting out, Zoë sat in the car for a moment, rucksack in her lap. ‘I just want you to be all right,’ she said, then opened the door and got out before her mother could say anything in answer.

  Alex watched her stride off towards the building’s big front door.

  She sat for a minute, checked her face in the mirror, then got out and followed her.

  When Alex entered the building, she was already talking to a well-built man in his thirties, with long matted hair. He wore a khaki utility vest over a blue pullover.

  ‘Are you Kenny Abel?’

  ‘Mum,’ protested Zoë.

  ‘About her hands . . .’ said the man.

  ‘It’s not that. She’s fine. She chooses to do this stuff, I’d be scared of trying to stop her. But I wanted to ask you something. About what you saw on Wednesday night.’

  ‘Sorry,’ muttered Zoë. ‘I wouldn’t have told her if I thought she was that interested.’

  The man raised his head. ‘Why are you asking?’

  ‘My daughter said you thought you saw their souls going upwards.’

  ‘Yep,’ he said, chin jutting forward a little as he answered. ‘I was having a drink in the Romney Hotel after work. Went outside to have a ciggie and to make a call to the wife. I knew what it was when I saw it. Only realised something had gone on next day when I tried to get in to work down Ashford Road and it was all closed off. Then it was on the news.’

  ‘You can see souls?’

  ‘Yes.’ The muscles in his face seemed to tense, as if daring her to disbelieve him. ‘Not everyone can. I can.’

  ‘See souls?’ she repeated.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘So you’ve seen souls before?’

  Beside him, Zoë was squirming with embarrassment.

  ‘My grandmother’s. Only, that was during the daytime in a hospice. She had pancreatic cancer. She was weak as a kitten, barely breathing. The only way you knew she was alive was the beeping of the monitors. I saw her leave her body and go up, clear as anything. Nobody else did. Just me. It was like this pale cloud rising upwards. And, like, ten seconds later the monitors showed her heart stopping.’

  He could see the scepticism on her face. ‘I know what you’re thinking. I was tired and grieving. But I’m not the only one who’s seen stuff like that. Same happened to the poet William Blake. He saw his brother rise up from his deathbed and float into the air. Not everyone else saw it then either.’

  Alex felt as if she were coming down with something. The world seemed to be becoming untethered from the reality she understood. ‘What did it actually look like? What you saw on Wednesday night.’

  ‘It was like a line of silver, shooting upwards. All over in a second.’

  ‘A beam of light maybe?’

  ‘No. See . . . it’s not like that. More like the bodies were floating upwards, but fast, like.’

  Alex nodded. ‘What time was that?’

  ‘About ten.’

  ‘About?’<
br />
  ‘Hold on.’ He pulled out his phone, opened his messages and flicked up. ‘Must have been seven minutes past.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘I told my wife about it. We were on the phone.’ He held up the screen to show her his call log.

  Alex shivered, peered at it. ‘Where were you standing?’

  ‘At the back. There’s, like, a smoking area.’

  Alex looked at the man still holding up his phone, defying her to disbelieve him. ‘Thanks,’ she said.

  ‘Go now, Mum,’ said Zoë sternly.

  She took the route back past the Romney Hotel, stopped in front of it, thinking. It was a long, old, cream-painted building, fifteenth-century, just back from a narrow pavement. The bar was still closed at this time in the morning, but there was a bell for hotel enquiries.

  A man in his sixties with long grey sideboards opened the door. ‘I just want to check something,’ Alex said.

  ‘Beg your pardon?’

  ‘I’m a police officer,’ she found herself saying.

  ‘Is this to do with the murders?’ the man asked.

  She said, ‘I just need to see your smokers’ area. I’ll only be a minute.’

  He led her through the lounge bar, unlocked a door and pushed it open. ‘Why? What’s going on?’

  She stood under the electric space heaters among the mess of unemptied ashtrays and looked to the north-west, the direction of the Younises’ house. ‘Anything in particular?’ asked the man.

  ‘That’s the house over there, isn’t it?’

  ‘Bloody awful thing,’ said the man. ‘Everyone’s on edge, round here. Just had a waitress pull out of all her shifts on account of she doesn’t like coming this way now. Not that that’s important,’ he added quietly, ashamed of the selfishness of what he’d just said.

  The murder house’s roofline was hidden behind the willows and poplars that fringed a local sports field, but the land between the pub garden and the house was flat. One would be able to see a soul rising up from the rooftop of the murder house; if such a thing were even possible.

  She thanked the landlord and left him as bemused by her visit as she was.

  Turning off the main road, she drove up to the house, where police cars still cluttered the driveway, parked on the grass verge, then looked back over the hedge towards the pub.

  Her phone rang. ‘I can see you.’ Jill’s voice, barely heard because the line was breaking up.

  ‘Can you?’

  ‘Your car, anyway. What are you doing lurking here, Alex?’

  ‘I was just dropping Zoë at the Wildlife Centre.’

  ‘Yeah. Right.’

  ‘I was,’ Alex said, but the call had dropped.

  Ten seconds later, her phone rang again. ‘Funny way to drive home. You actually cannot leave it alone, can you?’

  ‘You’re still in there, then?’

  She could hear Jill’s sigh. ‘I’m taking a break. Meet you—’ But the call had dropped again. A few seconds later a message from her:

  Fk my phone. Wait there. Don’t talk to NO ONE. Something vv strange.

  Ten

  Alex’s desire to see inside the house, to see the details of the violence, how the bodies had fallen and the blood on the mirror, surprised even her.

  It was understandable. Normally Alex would have been inside, or would have access to photos and videos of the scene. She was on the outside now.

  Instead, she waited a little way from the murder house until she saw, in her rear-view mirror, Jill emerging from the front gate, half running as she got closer, clutching a pack of cigarettes in one hand.

  ‘Can we go somewhere for a bloody coffee?’ Jill blurted, opening the door. ‘That place is absolutely doing my head in.’

  ‘Round here? You’ve got to be joking.’

  ‘Even my phone doesn’t work in there. It’s spooked.’

  The place Alex drove them to was the best she could do. A pub in Littlestone, ten minutes away, that advertised free football on the TV. A tattered England flag sagged on a flagpole over the small paved area at the front where they could sit, but it was open.

  Alex fetched two coffees from the bar and joined Jill on the terrace among the Saturday morning drinkers.

  ‘It’s not healthy,’ said Jill. ‘You are not supposed to be thinking about this stuff. It’s this stuff that’s caused you to . . .’

  ‘Lose it?’

  ‘I wouldn’t say you’ve lost it, not exactly,’ said Jill.

  ‘Thanks.’

  ‘Mind if I . . . ?’ Jill had already pulled out a cigarette. ‘I’m losing it. Not surprised if everyone on this investigation is. When it comes to things like this, maybe they don’t make any sense.’ There were dark patches under Jill’s eyes.

  A teenager sped past on a motorbike, driving well over the limit. They both watched him disappear up the road but said nothing.

  ‘Well. What’s so odd?’

  ‘For starters, we have absolutely nothing,’ Jill said eventually. ‘It’s the weirdest thing. The house is clean. Evidence-wise, it’s like a black hole. That’s what forensics are telling us. No fingerprints that don’t match the victims. No footprints, ditto. No tyre tracks. No DNA yet. Yet no sign of it being cleaned either. No wipe marks, no traces of recent cleaning fluid. When does that ever happen?’

  ‘It does happen. Some people just don’t seem to leave prints, or bits of skin. It’s a phenomenon, but sometimes it happens.’

  ‘Not when two people are dead in some kind of psychotic attack. Tell me. What kind of killer doesn’t leave a single trace at a murder scene? It’s like someone flew in and out of there.’

  Alex said, ‘Ghosts, maybe.’

  ‘Very funny. I was thinking, what if it was some kind of ultra-professional killer who pretended to be psycho just to cover up.’

  ‘Around here?’

  ‘Why not?’ Jill picked up her coffee and tasted it, made a face. ‘And what does that actually mean, Kill them all. God will know his own? But to leave no clues at all . . . You’d have to be pretty methodical to do that. See what I mean? It doesn’t make sense.’

  ‘No. It doesn’t.’

  Jill took her time before she spoke again, and when she did so, her voice was cautious. ‘One really bloody weird thing’s come up, though. That’s what I need to talk to you about, Alex. You had that funny question. You asked what they ordered.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Why precisely did you ask that?’

  ‘Tell me what they ordered.’

  ‘I asked first. Come on. I need to know.’

  ‘You tell me. Then I’ll tell you why I asked the question.’

  Jill made a face, considered this for a minute, then reached down, picked up her bag and pulled out a notebook. ‘Here we go. This is exactly what they ordered. Dishwasher tablets. Four bottles of wine. Dog food. Gin.’

  ‘That all?’

  Jill looked up. ‘Exactly. You’d have thought that you’d order more than that if you’re going to go to all the trouble of an online order.’

  ‘Did you check the cupboards?’

  Jill smiled. ‘I did actually. No shortage of gin – or dog food.’

  ‘How much did it come to?’

  ‘Total value, £41.65.’

  ‘Is that all?’

  ‘Not much for a weekly shop, is it?’

  Alex didn’t answer. Opposite the pub was the New Romney railway station. She watched someone walk past with a set of golf clubs.

  ‘So?’

  ‘Right. The Younises didn’t need the food on the list. They already had gin, at least. What’s the minimum amount for a delivery? I’d guess about forty quid?’ Alex let that sit for a second. ‘That’s why I asked.’

  ‘Oh. Wait. I got it.’ Jill’s eyes went big. ‘You
think whoever put in the order did it only because whoever killed them wanted the delivery driver to find the dead bodies?’

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘Oh my God. Oh-my-God-oh-my-God. Why didn’t I see that?’

  Alex took a sugar cube, dropped it into her cup and stirred it, hoping sugar would give it something, at least.

  ‘And that’s why the murderer left Mrs Younis at the bottom of the stairs for them to see when they rang the bell?’

  ‘So who ordered the delivery, Jill?’

  ‘Mrs Younis ordered it online. But it’s hardly likely to have been her, is it? It’s like an invitation to see a dead body. It’s all super-weird.’

  Alex looked down at her feet. Butterflies danced around the dandelions that cracked through the paving stones of the patio. ‘Yes. It is.’

  A young couple joined them in the garden, both drinking lagers, lighting up cigarettes. Alex lowered her voice. ‘What about money? Have you looked at their bank accounts?’

  ‘We’re looking. Because there’s no sign of anything having been taken from the house.’

  ‘Still no suspects? Nothing?’

  ‘No relations we’re worried about. No lovers or colleagues. Just one report of Ayman Younis having a heated argument four days before the murder but we’ve been unable to work out who with. The postman heard shouting coming from the garden behind the house. He thinks he heard the words, “You’re going to fucking kill me, you know that?” He’s pretty sure that was Mr Younis’s voice but he can’t be absolutely certain.’

  Alex thought about the layout of the house. The front door was on the left, by the driveway. Behind the house, out of sight if you were at the front door, was a large rear garden. ‘Could it have been an argument with his wife?’

  ‘No. There was a second voice, he said, talking less loudly, and it was definitely male. We’re asking friends if they have any idea of who it might have been.’

  ‘You’re going to fucking kill me?’

  ‘Yes. McAdam has been calling him the Unknown Male. It’s got a ring to it, don’t you think? Mind you, pretty much all males are unknown to me.’

  ‘What about time of death?’ asked Alex.

  Jill frowned. ‘Why are you asking me that?’