by R.J. Ellory
I tried to slide underneath the bed, tried to gain some purchase against the wet floor, but it was useless, and I was losing consciousness…
Kill the motherfucker, someone said.
And I thought I heard my mother's voice.
No, not my mother… it was Eve Chantry.
And then it sounded like Caroline Lanafeuille.
She was saying something, quoting something like she used to, something from Frost or Whitman…
My surface is myself… under which to witness… youth is buried… Roots?… Everybody has roots…
I opened my mouth to scream again and felt a hand around my throat, a hand that was squeezing every ounce of breath from my lungs.
I flailed my arms wildly, I connected with something, something hard…
Asshole motherfucker!
A fist collided with the side of my face. I felt as if all my teeth had moved from one side to the other, and then I was gasping as my head was forced down against the floor, and I could smell the blood, taste it in my mouth. My own? I didn't know. Christ, there was so much blood… so much blood…
I was dragged across the room.
I heard Linny screaming again.
I tried to shout her name.
There was a sound like when Nathan hit Marty Hooper in Benny's and then there was silence but for my own breathing… my own desperate struggle for breath as the two men started raining punches down on me.
I moved sideways, sideways again, and somehow I managed to roll onto my side and get to my knees. Pushing my back against the wall I started to rise, and then heaved myself forward, propelling myself towards the bed as if there I could find some sanctuary.
And he was there.
Nathan was there.
Nathan's eyes staring back at me from his head.
Nathan's head lying on its side amidst a still wave of blood that had erupted from his body and covered much of the room.
His body lay still, his arms outstretched like Christ crucified.
His head on the side of the mattress.
Disconnected. Detached.
I opened my mouth to scream again, and a shoe collided with my lower jaw and sent me hurtling back against the wall.
I saw nothing but blackness… blackness and the image of Nathan's decapitated head staring back at me from the torrent of red…
I heard Caroline's voice as I slid into the darkness.
She was smiling.
We should… you know, we should… before I leave…
And then there was nothing.
* * *
Chapter Twenty-Nine
'Were the police there when you came round?' Father John asked.
'Yes, they were there.'
'And you were already cuffed?'
'Yes. I was on my stomach on the upper landing floor, face against the banister, hands cuffed behind my back. I could taste blood in my mouth, and this excruciating pain was pounding through the side of my head. There was so much noise, so many voices.'
'And you saw them take Nathan out?'
'Yes.'
'How could you see that?'
'I was able to see through the banister posts and down the stairs. They carried him down on a stretcher but he wasn't covered up then.'
'And his head?'
I closed my eyes.
I could see it vividly - too vividly - even now.
'His head was carried by someone else. In a see-through polythene bag.'
'And what happened then?'
'They took him out, presumably to the coroner's car or an ambulance or something, and then they came back to get me.'
'And Lieutenant Garrett was there?'
'Yes, he was there.'
'And he was the one who told you that you were going to be charged with Nathan's killing.'
I nodded. 'Yes.'
'And Linny wasn't there, and no-one mentioned her name?'
'No, she was gone. It wasn't until much later that day that she was found.'
'In a field about a mile away.'
I nodded.
'Naked, covered in Nathan's blood.'
'Apparently so. I was told she was hysterical, delusional, in shock, all manner of things. It was intimated I had tried to kill her too, killed Nathan in a jealous rage and then tried to kill her.'
'But you were never charged with attempted murder?'
'It was not that I was never charged with attempted murder, it was that charges were never brought by Linny or the police for attempted murder.'
'And she went straight to Charleston.'
'To the State Psychiatric Hospital, yes,' I said.
'And for the duration of the trial she was classified mentally unfit to testify?'
'You're asking me questions you know the answers to.'
Father John smiled. 'I'm sorry. It's just that even now I find it so hard to believe that the entire thing was constructed around circumstantial evidence, that the only witness was classified as mentally unfit to testify and kept in Charleston State Psychiatric Hospital, and the State Defender never challenged any one of the aspects of evidence put forward by the prosecution.'
I shrugged. 'I think he was paid not to challenge them.'
Father John looked up. 'By whom?'
'Linny's father.'
'Because it was his people that killed Nathan, the two men that stopped you at Eve Chantry's house.'
'Right.'
Father John sighed resignedly. 'And then there was the axe,' he said quietly.
I nodded. 'The axe from the woodshed, the axe I'd used that very same day to cut logs outside.'
'And that was what they used to decapitate Nathan Verney.'
I nodded in the affirmative.
'And there were no other fingerprints?'
'That's what I was told.'
'By Garrett?'
'Yes,' I said. 'And then all the details over again in the trial. Forensics said there were no indications of anyone but Nathan, myself and Linny having been in the room, that the axe had only my fingerprints on it, that the footprints left in the blood on the floor and the landing were concurrent with my entry and exit to the room, with Linny's running away… you know the routine.'
'Okay,' Father John said. 'Enough for today.'
'You have somewhere better to be?' I asked.
'Somewhere to be, though not necessarily somewhere better,' he answered.
He started to rise from his chair.
'Father John?'
He looked at me.
'I wondered if you could do something for me.'
'Sure,' he said. 'What?'
'Do you think you could find someone?'
He shrugged. 'Who do you want me to find?'
'There was a girl I knew in Greenleaf, a girl I went out with for a short while. Her name was Caroline Lanafeuille, spelled L-A-N-A-F-E-U-I-L-L-E. She left Greenleaf suddenly in August of '65, and I never knew where she went.'
'And you want me to find out where she is now, seventeen years later?'
I nodded. 'If you can.'
Father John sat down again. 'Why, Danny?'
I smiled and shrugged. 'Curiosity. She was the first girl I loved… hell, the way I see things now, she was the only girl I ever loved.'
'And what do you want to know?'
'If she's okay, if she's married, does she have kids, anything at all really… if it's possible.'
'Anything's possible, Danny,' Father John said.
He reached out and closed his hand over mine.
'And if you find out these things or - a worse scenario - you find out she's not okay, or even that she's dead… what then?'
'Then nothing,' I said. 'I just want to know, that's all. Whatever the situation, I just want to know. You think you can do that for me?'
Father John nodded. 'I can try, Danny, best I can do is try.'
'Then try, okay?'
Father John smiled, squeezed my hand reassuringly, and once again rose to his feet.
'I'm gonna be g
one a couple of days now, Danny, maybe three.'
I looked up. 'I will miss my interrogations,' I said.
'As will I,' he replied. 'You take care, okay?'
'I'll take care.'
Father John reached for the buzzer.
I stood up and waited for the Duty Officer to come take me home.
Later, much later, I lay on the thin mattress in my cell, my eyes closed, and replayed the events of that terrible night. I was tired, my eyes scattered with sand, but I could not sleep. I turned everything over and over time and again, and I could never get away from the feeling that I had created my own fate by my omissions. Hindsight - our cruellest and most astute adviser - flickered in the rearview mirror of my mind. It haunted me, taunted me with names and accusations, and I watched it close up against me and
then retreat, and then close up against me once more as if to remind me that whatever I might think, however I might seek to justify my actions, it would always be there. Every once in a while it carried Nathan's face, and then the face of my mother, and at one point it looked like Caroline as she walked away from my house that morning.
My thoughts were disturbed by a sound to my right. I turned and, my eyes accustomed to the dark, I saw a figure standing against the far wall a good fifteen feet from where I lay.
The figure moved, moved again, and then with half a dozen swift steps whoever it was had reached the bars of my cell and stopped.
'Can't sleep, little man?'
Mr. West.
My breath stopped in my lungs. My throat swelled and tightened with tension. I tried to close my eyes, to block him out, but there was something far more powerful forcing me to watch him.
He shifted sideways and gripped the bars ahead of him. He brought his face up close, and even through the darkness I could see the shadows beneath his eyes, and above those shadows the direct and unflinching gaze that held me cornered, barely able to move.
'Have been thinking of you, Ford,' he whispered.
The idea of Mr. West thinking of me disturbed me greatly. Like a killer selecting you as his next victim, tailing you, stalking you, learning your routines and habits, and all the while you know nothing.
'Have been thinking about the hollowness you must feel right now, the pointlessness of everything that you are, everything you have ever done… except when you killed the nigger.'
West laughed, a gentle creeping sound that echoed back at me from the walls and ceiling.
'That, my friend, was perhaps the only worthwhile thing you ever did.'
West moved again, squatted down on his haunches so his eyeline was level with mine. He was a good ten feet away, but in that moment it was almost as if I could feel his breath against my skin as he spoke.
'And the priest… what the fuck he comes down here for I don't know. Wasting what little time you have left justifying your pitiful existence. Haven't you figured out that there is no God yet? If there was a God would he have let you rot here? Would he have seen you walk all the way to the chair and never once raised his hand to help you? I think not.'
I closed my eyes for a second or two. There was blackness behind my eyelids, black and deep enough to swallow me. In that moment I wished it would.
West stood up. He pushed himself away from the bars.
'Count the days, Ford… count the days. Sleep if you can, but remember that for every hour you sleep you lose another hour of the few you have remaining. It goes so fast. Look at the last year… seems to have vanished into yesterday, right?'
I shuddered. He was right. The last twelve years had folded neatly into a heartbeat that I hadn't even noticed.
'Watch it disappear, Ford… watch it all disappear…'
And then he was gone. In the moment that it took to close and open my eyes he was gone.
I could hear the sound of my own heart beating. Conscious then more than ever of that sound, I imagined it was slowing down. My heart knew the end was coming. It was preparing itself. Preparing itself to stop.
And I would stop with it.
That simple.
* * *
Chapter Thirty
It was the 17th by the time Father John Rousseau came back.
The previous four days had disappeared quietly, soundlessly, into nothing. Time had become intangible, immeasurable, and though I knew when the days began and ended because the lights came on and went out, it was still unsettling to realize that only twenty-four remained. A little more than five hundred hours.
Clarence Timmons came down to tell me Father John had arrived.
'How you doing there, Danny?' Mister Timmons had asked.
I looked up. I felt the heaviness of my face, the nothingness in my eyes.
'Don't want to die, Mr. Timmons,' I said.
'I know, son, I know.' His tone was that of a father comforting a child. 'You go see Father Rousseau now, you talk to him, okay?'
I nodded, rose from my bed, and waited for Mr. Timmons to pass the belt through.
'I found her,' Father John said as I walked into the room.
I frowned.
'Your girlfriend, the Lanafeuille woman.'
The Lanafeuille woman. She would be as old as me. I had not thought of this. When I thought of her I saw a teenager.
'You found her?'
I didn't know what I felt. Something powerful. Something indescribable.
Father John sat down. 'And you won't believe what she's doing.'
'What?'
Father John smiled. 'She's a lawyer.'
I started to laugh. I laughed at the irony, perhaps at the fact that she even existed.
'You spoke to her?' I asked.
'No, Danny, of course I didn't speak to her.'
'How did you find her?'
'I called Greenleaf High School, got the details of the school she transferred to in 1965, and then I just followed the trail. It was easy to find her, a lot easier than I thought.'
'Where does she live?'
'In Charleston.'
'She's still here, in North Carolina?'
Father John nodded. 'Yes, she's still here.'
'And she's a lawyer.'
'A conservation lawyer,' Father John said.
'A what?'
'A conservation lawyer. She handles cases to do with land rights and violations of public ordinances regarding waste dumping, that kind of thing.'
I was quiet for a moment. I could see her face. I could smell her as she leaned over and kissed me as she left. I could remember not wanting to look out the window. Not wanting to remember her leaving.
'Danny?'
I looked up.
'You okay?'
'Sure,' I said. 'Sure.'
'Does this upset you?' Father John asked.
I shrugged my shoulders. 'I don't know what I feel… upset, happy to hear she's okay… I don't know.'
'Why did you want me to find out?'
I shook my head. There was a tightness in my chest, a feeling that tears would well into my eyes if I didn't grit my teeth, clench my fists, hold it all in…
But I couldn't.
Someone, something, was gently, irrevocably pushing me towards somewhere I didn't want to go. I started to cry. I could feel the rush of pain through my chest, my head, my whole body. I began to shake, to sob, and I sat there rocking back and forth as Father John came round the table and placed his hands on my shoulders.
'Let it go, Danny… let it go,' I could hear him saying.
And I did.
And it kept on coming.
Like twelve years' worth.
It must have been an hour or so later that Father John asked me about the events that immediately followed my arrest.
I was tired of talking, a bone-deep exhaustion pervaded my thoughts, my actions. But I talked anyway, talked because talking was an exorcism, a catharsis, and because Father John Rousseau wanted me to.
