Darkfall

by Stephen Laws

“Alright. We need an ambulance for the caretaker. And you’ll have to put the hand on ice—just in case we find the owner and he wants it back.”

  “On ice?”

  “That’s what I said.”

  “How do I . . . ?”

  “Someone must have had a Christmas party somewhere in the building, mate. Find an ice bucket. Stick it in, until we get there.”

  “You’re the CO, Jack.”

  “Okay, now ring off and telephone into control. I’ll be there soon. Oh . . . and Barry?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Happy Christmas.”

  “Hah, hah,” he said, without humour.

  EIGHTEEN

  Paul McNichol, fifty-nine, slightly overweight—but trying to ignore the fact in view of the anticipated food indulgences over the Christmas ahead—was watching television. It was typical British Christmas Eve TV: game shows, Christmas spectaculars and a three hour “Lawrence-of-Bloody-Arabia”, as he put it. Retirement was a year away and he should be enjoying the prospect, but wasn’t anymore. Not since his work colleague, Jackie Shaughnessy, had retired from the factory last year at sixty—and had promptly keeled over dead of a heart attack in the supermarket while shopping with his wife three weeks later. Now, idly switching channels on the television with his remote control, he was sitting in an armchair while Miriam, his wife, pottered in the kitchen, basting a turkey in the oven. The kids (kids, hah? The boy was twenty-five, the girl thirty) and their families were coming over for Christmas dinner tomorrow. This would be their last real Christmas-time alone.

  He had taken the Christmas Eve shift off, even though the others were either working for the bonus time, or simply going to the boozer to get pissed. He wanted this to be a good Christmas (your last Christmas? asked that pessimistic inner voice) so he’d done the last-minute shopping for Miriam while she got on with the work in the house. Now, at home, with a belly full of tea and soft drinks (you didn’t need alcohol to get a high, after all), he just wanted to spend this Christmas Eve at home with his wife in their comfortable three-up, three-down semi-detached haven in Jarrow.

  “Tea?” asked Miriam from the kitchen.

  He patted his stomach and groaned.

  “Okay.” Miriam went back to basting the turkey. The bird, he had commented, was almost the size of a pterodactyl—which was just what they needed, bearing in mind the hungry mouths that would be crowding that dinner table tomorrow. Pretty soon, he would force himself to find the energy to start wrapping up the kids’ Christmas presents. Maybe he would wait until Miriam was done, then they could perform the task together. Paul checked his watch. It was 7.10 p.m. He wondered whether Miriam was feeling tired, or whether he should go into the kitchen and grab her from behind.

  Then something exploded in the garden with an almighty crash of glass.

  “Bloody hell, what was that?”

  Miriam shrieked and hopped back out of the kitchen. The turkey crashed from the oven on to the kitchen floor in a spray of boiling fat. Paul leaped from his seat and ran to her, grabbing her arms and pulling her out of the kitchen.

  “Are you okay? Are you hurt? Are you burned?”

  “No, no . . . I’m alright. But that noise. What on earth was it, Paul?”

  His first instinctive concern had been that something had happened to Miriam. Now he knew that this wasn’t the case. Paul’s mind refocused in the three seconds it had taken for that reverberating crash to reach his ears.

  The garden.

  “I don’t know, but it . . . sounded like . . .”

  Paul hurried to the lounge windows and twitched back the curtains to look out at their garden. It was too dark. Rain and sleet were running diagonally across the glass. All he could see was the faint sodium glow of the streetlights on the motorway a mile away. He hurried into the hall, pulled on his coat from the peg on the back of the door and made for the back door leading out into the garden.

  “A car crash,” said Miriam, hurrying behind him. “It must be a car crash. That was glass breaking, wasn’t it?”

  “I don’t know. Where’s the torch?”

  Miriam found the torch in the hall cupboard and gave it to him.

  Seconds later, Paul was outside in the back garden, pulling the zipper up tight on his waterproof coat and swinging the torch beam across the garden.

  He could see immediately what had happened.

  The greenhouse standing by the fence had caved in on itself. Even from where he was standing, he could see that the roof had collapsed completely and that one of the main walls was also on the verge of falling apart. In this wind and with the rain coming down as’ it was, it could only be a matter of time before the entire thing collapsed. Glass shards littered his patio and the neatly trimmed grass of his lawn. The fragments of glass caught the torch beam as he swept it over the scene of devastation, and only one thought now came to mind.

  “Kids!”

  Something like this had happened last year. Those little swines from Collingwood Avenue had once prised up a flagstone from the main street and heaved it over the fence at his greenhouse. He had lost seven panes of expensive glass on that occasion. But tonight was worse. The whole greenhouse was a write-off.

  Paul strode across the garden into the biting wind and rain, steadying the beam on the greenhouse.

  “What is it, Paul?” asked Miriam nervously from the back door.

  “Bloody kids again, I think,” he replied. “Look at it!”

  “Come back in. I’ll get the police.” Miriam’s voice was resigned and weary.

  “Christmas Eve! You’d think the little sods would have something better to do on a night like this.”

  He reached the greenhouse and fumbled with the latch on the main door. The glass was smeared, the torchlight reflecting back and obscuring his view. Well aware that by opening the door, the whole place might fall apart, Paul pulled open the door anyway, intent on finding what it was that the little bastards had thrown through the roof to cause such damage. The glass panes shuddered as he wrenched it open.

  “Be careful, love. You’ll get cut . . .”

  But now Paul had wrenched the door all the way open. The structure groaned and tilted a little in the wind, but remained intact.

  He shone the torch beam into the centre of the greenhouse . . . and then recoiled.

  There was a body lying in the middle of the greenhouse, covered in broken glass and wood.

  There was a growing dark pool around it and splashes of black-red stuff all over the inside glass panes, as if someone had gone mad with a pot of paint. The entire inside of the greenhouse had been destroyed; shelves and plants, pots, roots and compost all in the centre of the greenhouse in a devastated pile. But there was no mistaking that huddled, dark, contorted shape lying in the middle of all that destruction.

  It was a man.

  The torchlight played on his face, and Paul nearly vomited when he saw the shattered extent of that face.

  “What is it, Paul? What’s happened?”

  Paul swung away from the doorframe, bile rising. The structure groaned again and glass began to crack once more.

  “Paul!”

  He darted away from the greenhouse, just as the far wall caved in at last with a crackling explosion of glass. The remaining walls followed after it; slap-slap-slap. Rain hissed on the shattered ruin.

  “What, Paul? What?”

  “Ring for the police, Miriam.” Paul pushed her back inside again, glad that she hadn’t seen what had fallen through the roof. “Ring for them, quick!”

  NINETEEN

  Cardiff sat in the back of the panda, watching dark streets glide by as the car sliced through winter’s tears towards Fernley House. It was bloody cold tonight, and he was beginning to wish now that he had tucked one or two whiskies under his belt to help him through the rest of the night.

  What for? asked a small voice. No use in doing that. Don’t need anything warm where you’re headed, pal. Don’t you remember the right-hand drawer in your de
sk? Yes, I remember it. Well, what were you intending to do? Wasn’t tonight the big night? Wasn’t the climax of the Big Show going to take place right there, in the station? Right there in the office, with all your colleagues around? No. Maybe not there. Wouldn’t be fair on them. When then? Maybe later, maybe at home. Don’t bullshit me, Cardiff. If you really meant it, you would have taken that gun home. Yeah? Well, there’s a reason I haven’t taken it home. It’s the wrong place. You’re full of crap, Cardiff. So where’s the right place? Not at work, not at home. I don’t know . . . maybe somewhere out there on the street where . . . But not at home.

  Cardiff laughed at the word: “Home”. It had really ceased to be a home almost four years ago. Now, it was . . . what? Some kind of shrine. Some kind of memory chamber, where whisky turned to acid in his stomach and kept the ulcer fermenting.

  Detective Sergeant Ken Pearce was sitting in the back seat next to Cardiff. He looked up at Cardiff ‘s laugh, waiting to be let in on the joke. When it became clear that he was not and that Cardiff had slipped back into some kind of reverie, Pearce gave him an unnoticed look of disdain and returned to window-watching. He was not looking at the streets, or the storm—but at himself. He straightened his tie and smiled.

  Pearce was the same age as Cardiff, and had worked with him before. But he could identify a near burnt-out case when he saw one—and Cardiff was certainly heading that way. It was all a question of proportion. Pearce smiled at his reflection, dusting lapels on a jacket that was perhaps too expensive for a policeman’s wages. He turned back to Cardiff, still in reverie. Just a matter of time . . . and Pearce could be standing for promotion again.

  Cardiff watched the dark streets gliding by; peered at the blurred orange street lamps standing crooked in dirty back-alleys. The pavements glistened ebony black, refusing to give in to the light frosting of snow which was whipped from the skies by the rain and the wind and the oncoming storm. He heard the distant ratcheting echo of more thunder, even over the noise of the car engine and the slush sliding by under the wheels.

  “Bad storm coming,” said Evans, his Constable driver.

  “Someone better let Santa know,” replied Pearce. “Can’t have the old bugger knocked off his sleigh.”

  “You really think all those people have vanished, sir?” asked Evans.

  Cardiff laughed, returning from his thoughts. “No, just a pissed caretaker, that’s all.”

  But the hand was another thing altogether.

  Cardiff had known Sergeant Barry Lawrence for seven years. He was a good man; dependable, reliable and had seen a hell of a lot of street action in his time. He knew that he would have checked the place as thoroughly as he could and if he said he’d found a severed hand, well then . . . he’d found a severed hand.

  Even now, the Control Room network was checking out the local hospitals for any notification of severe injury. Two further panda cars were right behind them now, containing a further six uniformed officers to begin a systematic check of the building. But they wouldn’t be searching for lost people.” Cardiff was pretty sure that there was nothing wrong there; nothing that a check on keyholders for the various offices and companies in the buildings wouldn’t confirm. There would be at least three names of keyholders for each company. It was simply a matter of checking and it was also a safe bet that the caretaker had got pissed and slept while everyone had gone home. He’d woken up with his brain addled. No, the search was related to the hand and the possibility that the owner of the missing hand was lying in a cupboard somewhere, dead. In which case, there would be a whole new slant on the affair. At present, there was a grey area of who should be responsible for this particular incident. Was it a matter for CID or a matter for the uniformed bobbies to sort out? Cardiff had taken the first initiative. Once they’d arrived, a search would be made, the building checked and the caretaker interviewed properly, then the next stage of responsibility could be decided.

  Morale was not good tonight. Not on Christmas Eve, with the regulars wanting to get home as soon as possible. Only the unlucky ones who had drawn the short straw for the Christmas Eve shift were deriving any pleasure from the reporting of the incident; a kind of gleeful sadism in the knowledge that they didn’t have to suffer alone until the whole business had been cleared up. Christmas Eve always brought with it a plethora of drink-related incidents in the City Centre and suburbs, stretching already limited manpower and resources.

  The procedures were locked in Cardiff’s mind. He knew just exactly what he would do when he got there, knew how to react to the given situations. But nothing about the incident galvanised him, nothing was thawing that ice block inside . . . and his attention turned back to the street again.

  The street . . . the street . . . And he was thinking again, as he so often thought, of that day in June I986.

  It was Sunday. And the sun was shining; a kind of fresh, cleansing sunshine. Not warm enough for summer sun, but enough to make you feel good anyway, with the smell of a hot summer on the way . . . just as surely as there was the smell of a bad storm on the streets tonight, bad and foul and very near. Just the opposite.

  She had turned to him and laughed as they walked. He was holding Jamie in the crook of one arm while the kid played with the curls of hair on his father’s neck. He was four and a half, and all the more dear because those idiotic doctors had told Lisa that, at forty years old, she could never have a child. Playfully, Lisa attributed the success to the fact that she had married a toy boy; then, at thirty-five years old and with a promising career ahead of him in the police force. A Detective Inspector, happily married to Lisa these past eight years. Theirs was a special marriage. Statistically, divorce was a high risk in the force, with long hours of work and the inevitable strains of a basically hideous job at times spilling over into many relationships.

  But not for Jack Cardiff.

  Not for Lisa Cardiff. What had held them so close and tight? Surely not ‘love’? No . . . nothing so clichéd. A policeman’s cynicism would not allow this sentimental term to apply to their marriage. A better word was . . . strength. A strength in, and about, each other. A strength which bound them together. Affection without sentiment. A regenerating power between them whenever he came home from the scene of a murder investigation and she had turned over in bed to embrace him. The strength that it took to take those images of pain and mutilation and hideous death away and file it into the proper recess of his mind where it could do no damage. The strength to dispel any doubts or fears about humanity, when he was involved with and subject to all the desperation, misery and loneliness of the victims with whom he came into contact every day. She was his balance. She gave him everything he needed just by being what she was. An effortless gift, because she was who she was . . . and they knew each other as lovers really must.

  Jack and Lisa. A twee-sounding pair. A bit like Jack and Jill, that perennial pair from English reading primers. And a comparison that made her laugh a lot. “Don’t break your crown,” she would say. “I’m not coming tumbling after.”

  And then that Sunday.

  How appropriate that the sun was so vivid on that day. They had walked and talked while Jamie twisted and burbled and laughed in Jack’s arms. And they’d talked about nothing in particular; and Jack had felt that peculiar, joyful and invigorating strength flooding into him. He could hear her talking now.

  “Okay,” she’d said, throwing back her head and giving him a mock fierce look. “You’re in a panda car on a lonely country road, and there’s a car right behind you, chasing you. And it’s full of criminals, armed to the teeth. Axe murderers, maniacs, cannibals, estate agents. And they’re going to kill you. Their car is doing eighty miles per hour right behind you. What would you do?”

  “Ninety,” he’d replied . . . and she’d blown a raspberry, taken his arm and laughed when Jamie had grabbed a strand of her red hair and began twisting it in a chubby fist.

  And then she’d turned to him and said: “You know What I’d really like
for Christmas . . . ?” She’d paused then, her dark eyes were filled with a kind of mysterious amusement. He had turned towards her, hoisting the child further up on to his shoulder and began to ask her what she was going to say.

  Then every nerve-ending inside him spasmed when that horrifying, shrieking noise began. The intensity of that high-pitched banshee—shriek was like a physical assault. He turned . . . just in time to see the car, out of control, mounting the pavement like some kind of mechanical juggernaut. In a dream, unable to move, he could see that whoever or whatever was driving that car—had no face. In the split second before the car hit them, he could see only the blurred white mask of the shape behind the wheel.

  The shrieking of tyres became another kind of shrieking as Cardiff smashed on to the bonnet of the car and the child was torn from his grasp. The shrieking continued as Cardiff whirled over the car roof, the knowledge of agony within his legs—but without feeling the agony as such. He was spinning in a black vortex and the shrieking was resolving itself into the sound of . . .

  . . . ambulance sirens, as his pain suddenly focused into sick agony. He was on a stretcher; people were shouting, lights were flashing. His double vision focused into single vision and now he could see that car again. It was a wreck, its front end embedded in the wall, broken glass lying on the pavement and a pool of something dark running from under the devastated front of the car and into the gutter on the street.

  His own screaming had started then.

  Tyres screeched again—cutting deeply into Cardiff’s memories with the same hideous effect. The shock of that familiar sound brought him back from that time with horrifying suddenness and immediacy. He started forward, clutching at the seat in front.

  “Sorry, sir,” said Evans—and Cardiff’s mind was back again. He was in the car, travelling through Newcastle on a wild goose chase. Rain slurried against the windscreen, the wipers barely having a chance to make a clear view. “This bloody weather. Didn’t see him coming.” And now the car was crossing the central reservation in a spray of slush. A car horn bleated angrily somewhere.