Trick of the Dark

by Val McDermid

  Because nothing was ever constant, because drugs are unpredictable, because Jenna would do almost anything for the next fix, Jay saw more than any child should. She knew about going to bed hungry. She knew about watching her mother being beaten by men. She knew about women being forced into sexual activity they had not consented to. And somehow, in the middle of all that, she taught herself to read. She learned not just how to survive but also how to protect herself. She knew kids who were sexually abused. She watched the predators single them out. And somehow, Jay learned how not to be the one who was chosen.

  Charlie found it all too credible. There were moments where her professional experience kicked in and she understood that Jay was ascribing to herself judgements that could only have been made in hindsight. Like claiming to have recognised at the age of only seven that what she had was not freedom but a prison of ignorance.

  I spied on other children. Sometimes it was easier than others. We lived for a while in a caravan on the edge of a wood somewhere in Somerset. Jenna's boyfriend was called Barry and he worked sometimes in the pub in a village nearby. I followed him one evening when he was walking through the wood to work so I learned the way to the village. Because the wood came right up to the edge of the houses, spying was easy.

  Their lives were obviously very different from mine. They wore the same clothes every day to go to school. I couldn't understand that. Sometimes I wore the same clothes for a few days at a time, but not every single day. And other kids called me names for it.

  Whenever these children came home, someone gave them a drink and something nice to eat. They didn't have to scavenge or settle for whatever they could find. And they looked like they just took it for granted, as if there was no question about that being how it should be.

  They got to sit and watch TV by themselves, which meant they got to choose what they wanted to see. Sometimes there were two or more rooms with TVs in. I was used to having to put up with whatever Jenna and the boyfriend wanted to watch. And sometimes their choices were incomprehensible to me. Especially the porn, which none of the kids I spied on ever watched.

  I should remind readers that, back in the seventies, porn was a very different experience. For a start, adults had pubic hair. You never really saw an erect penis either. There was a lot of soft focus, terrible muzak and acting that even I recognised was desperately bad. Compared to what you can see on terrestrial TV now, never mind the internet, it was pretty innocuous. Still, I probably shouldn't have been watching it.

  It was fascinating stuff, Charlie thought. Literally fascinating. You couldn't stop reading because you wanted to know where Jay was going to take you. She had the knack of pinning her extraordinary experiences to the stuff of ordinary life. There were enough of these tangents to make the reader feel that this peculiar life could almost have happened to them. The counterpoint to that was the way she constantly contrasted her life with mainstream middle-class experience. It had the flavour of Craig Raine's famous poem about the Martian writing a letter home. The reader clearly understood that Jay had spent a lot of her early life trying to make sense of things that had no correspondence in her own world.

  'How is it?' Maria had asked.

  'I'm not sure whether I like her, but it's impossible not to admire her. The squalor and chaos of her early years make you want to weep for her. She didn't just survive, she's built a life that would have been unimaginable to her as a child. I can't wait to get on to the transformation.'

  'You mean when she went to Oxford?' Maria said, throwing her towel over a chair and strutting naked across the room to put on fresh clothes.

  'No. That's where it ends. I'm talking about before that. Her mother went from hapless junkie hippie to born-again Christian. And not just any old Christian. She plunged head first into one of the more repressive sects of evangelicals. Clearly someone who was hopelessly addicted to addiction. Heroin or Jesus, didn't seem to matter much.'

  'Woo-hoo. That must have been some transition. If you want, I'll do the lion's share of the drive tomorrow, then you can carry on reading.'

  'I could read it aloud if you like,' Charlie offered, marking her place with a hotel postcard and putting the book away. Maria did an impression of Munch's The Scream. 'OK, I was only joking. You can have Joan Osborne and Patty Griffin all the way to Fort William.'

  The restaurant had lived up to its online reviews. They both chose a stew of local seafood to start with and exclaimed over its richness and the depth of its flavours. Venison followed with spiced beetroot and lemon thyme mash. When she tasted the meat, Charlie actually groaned aloud. They finished with cheese and Maria kept making small moaning noises as she savoured each morsel. 'I wish I was still hungry so I could eat it all over again,' Charlie said.

  They'd planned to go straight to their room when they returned to the hotel but that was when Charlie's luck ran out again. As they walked in the door, Lisa emerged from the ladies' toilets. A radiant smile lit up her face. 'How lovely to see you both. We thought we'd missed you. We're in the bar. Come and have a drink?'

  Charlie said, 'No, thanks,' as Maria said, 'That sounds nice.' They looked at each other and laughed.

  'Seven years and we're still two minds with but a single thought,' Maria joked.

  'I'm really tired,' Charlie said. 'I just want to go horizontal. Sorry.'

  'That's OK,' Maria said. 'I want a brandy, though. Why don't you go on up and I'll get myself a drink and join you?'

  Charlie, with visions of Lisa snagging Maria and drawing her into late-night conversation, said, 'It's OK, I'll wait for you, we can go up together.'

  'I'll keep you company while Maria's getting served,' Lisa said quickly.

  'What about Nadia? Won't she be wondering where you are?'

  'I'll tell her,' Maria said over her shoulder as she headed for the bar.

  'You look delicious this evening,' Lisa said. 'Good enough to eat.'

  'Don't,' Charlie sighed. 'I feel like I'm on a rollercoaster. I can't cope with having both of you under one roof.'

  'I'm sorry. I thought you might enjoy the frisson of knowing I was near.' Lisa looked contrite. 'I see now I misjudged things. But I'm not sorry that I've had the chance to see you.'

  Charlie gave her a beseeching look. 'Please. I can't do this now.'

  Lisa gave Charlie a sad-eyed look, the kind of up-and-under that Princess Diana always used to such effect. 'I understand. Believe me, I know how hard it is to resist.' She flashed a smile. 'So how did your pursuit of the mountain rescue team go? Did you manage to uncover new evidence that eluded the police and the coroner all those years ago?'

  Charlie made a wry face. 'Much safer ground. Actually, they don't have coroners in Scotland. And as it happens, I did find out one or two things that seem suggestive.'

  'Really?' Lisa said, with the appearance of genuine interest. 'You found the smoking gun?'

  'If I was Sherlock Holmes and you were Watson, I would say something like, "There was the curious incident of the phone call to the rescue services from the hotel." And you would say, "What about the phone call to the rescue services from the hotel?" and I would say, "There was no phone call to the rescue services from the hotel."'

  Now Lisa looked bemused. 'I'm sorry, you've lost me.'

  'There was something odd about the phone call that set off the rescue alert for Jay and Kathy. The source wasn't what it purported to be.'

  Lisa's mouth quirked in dismissal. 'What's that supposed to mean?'

  'I don't know. Then there's the convenient matter of the knife.'

  'Do you have to be so cryptic?'

  Charlie laughed. 'Yes, I do have to be so cryptic because it's fun. But then, you know that. You are the queen of cryptic. The knife is significant because when Jay dropped her backpack, she lost every single piece of equipment that might be useful, including her sat-phone. All except her knife, which luckily was in her jacket pocket.'

  Lisa laughed and wagged a finger at Charlie. 'Talk about grasping at straws. A
ll sorts of people carry a Swiss Army knife or something similar in their pocket when they go out walking. It's hardly suspicious.'

  'I never said it was suspicious. I said it was suggestive. It's what you would do if you were planning to stage an accident.'

  Lisa shook her head indulgently. 'I'm beginning to wonder if playing detective has loosened you from your moorings.'

  Charlie gave a sad little smile. 'You were the one who did that, Lisa.'

  Lisa put a hand on her arm. 'And you know that's not a one-way street, Charlie. You know that.' Her voice was soft and seductive and in spite of her determination to stay cool, Charlie's flesh tingled. What saved her was the sight of Maria emerging from the bar with a crystal brandy bowl in her hand. Lisa let her hand fall away without any fuss and stepped back.

  'I told Nadia you were just coming,' Maria said, slipping her free arm through Charlie's and steering her towards the lift. 'Good night, Lisa.'

  As the lift doors closed, Maria giggled. 'Nadia's got a face like thunder. She's not keen on being left sitting alone in a busy bar, not when she thinks she's the trophy girlfriend.'

  'She really thinks that?' Charlie couldn't stifle a laugh.

  'I reckon so. Oh, what it is to be young and full of illusions. She'd better watch her step, that one.'

  'Nadia? Why?'

  'That Lisa. She's not somebody you'd want to mess with.'

  Clever Maria, Charlie thought. Maybe we should do a job swap. 'Well, chances are we'll never have to see them again.'

  And so the evening had ended. They'd fallen into bed, still too full for anything but sleep. Waking with a clear head, the prospect of finishing Jay's book ahead of her, Charlie finally began to see how things might be made to come together.

  6

  They were on the road by ten. As if to make the leaving easier, the weather had changed. Mist and rain covered the landscape in a grey veil, turning the Cuillins into a vague looming presence in the distance. 'Nick's in court tomorrow. I think I should go down to London and talk to him,' Charlie said gloomily as they crossed the ocean back to the mainland. 'We need to make a decision about how much further we can pursue this. And what we do with our pitiful findings. Not a lot, I suspect.'

  'It's not all been wasted,' Maria said. 'You've re-established contact with Corinna and Magda. And we've had a glorious weekend in Skye.' She took a hand off the wheel to pat Charlie's thigh. 'And it's taken your mind off the other shit. This has been the first time in a while when you seem to have let go of what's hanging over you.'

  'Maybe I should start offering it as an alternative therapy,' Charlie said drily. 'Immerse yourself in a wild-goose chase. Perfect for taking your mind off what's oppressing you. Now, put your foot down and drive. I'm going to immerse myself even deeper.' She pulled Unrepentant from her jacket pocket and found her place.

  Afterwards, when I asked my mother why we'd gone to see Blair Andreson in the big tent at Sunderland, the only possible answer was the one she always gave: because God called us. That's probably as far from the truth as it's possible to get.

  By the time the American evangelist Blair Andreson launched his 1984 crusade to the UK, our lives had dipped to an all-time low. We were living in a squalid caravan encampment on the outskirts of one of the big towns in Teesside. I'm not even sure which one. The police and the local residents waged a constant war of attrition against us. I can't say I blame them. I'd probably do the same myself. We were not a romantic New Age camp of people who believed in beautiful things. We were scum. My mother was selling sex to keep herself in drugs. I was running wild with a bunch of other kids, stealing food and money whenever I got the chance.

  We went to the conversion service at Andreson's big top with a couple of other women from the site. I suspect our intentions were criminal. They must have seen a way to make money out of the service, picking pockets or stealing collection plates. I don't know for sure because nobody confided in me. It was a cool afternoon in July but the tent was packed, the air heavy with the smell of too many bodies crammed together. My mother and I were sitting towards the back of the steeply banked seats, letting Andreson's hysterical rhetoric wash over us. At least, I thought that was what was going on. I was completely unmoved by the oratory. I'd far rather have had a lamb kebab than be washed in the blood of the lamb.

  But something happened to my mother that afternoon. All she would ever say was that she was touched by the hand of God. I wanted to know what it had felt like. Whether it was a sudden, blinding revelation or a gradual, creeping realisation that there was a very different path open to her. But she would never go into detail. 'Filled with the spirit'was another of her meaningless phrases that was meant to make clear to me what had happened to her.

  From where I was sitting it was more like demonic possession. When Andreson called upon people to come forward to be received by God, my mother stood up like an automaton and walked to the stage like she was sleep-walking. I assumed it was part of a scam, so I just sat there. Waiting for it to be over.

  She looked very frail up there beside Andreson, who had the bristly pink sheen of a prize pig. She knelt before him and he placed his hands on her head, giving her a full measure of the mumbo jumbo. Then she was led away by two of his acolytes, taken off through the curtains at the back of the stage. At that point, I was just bored. I was barely ten years old and watching a bunch of weirdos being born again was not my idea of a good time.

  After what felt like half a lifetime, we all had to pray together, then we got to sing a rousing hymn, something about God walking beside us on the hard road of life. And then it was time to leave. An army of clean-cut young men in suits lined the exits with buckets for our donations. I was impressed with the amount of money they were scamming. Whatever Jenna and her pals had in mind, they'd picked a target that had plenty to go round. And weren't they supposed to be all about sharing in Christ's bounty, after all?

  I hung around outside the tent but after the audience had emptied out, I didn't know where to go. In the end, I went up to one of the lads with the collecting buckets. 'My mum went up to the stage,' I said. 'And she hasn't come out.'

  He nodded, as if this wasn't an unusual occurrence. 'Coming to the Lord can be an overwhelming experience,' he said, trying to sound important and portentous. 'If you think about it, being born the first time is a pretty traumatic happening. The second time isn't any less momentous.'

  Even at ten, I wanted to slap him. 'But where's my mum?' I said instead.

  'Come with me,' he said, leading me round the back of the main tent to a smaller enclosure. Inside, small knots of people were kneeling together. Blair Andreson was moving from group to group, laying his hands on whoever was at the heart of the group. After the bright lights and noise of the circus tent, this place felt very peaceful and cocooned. It took me a few moments to spot my mother, but at last I saw her in the far corner, being tended to by three other women. I had no idea what she was up to. Most of our scams were simple and quick. I didn't know what was going on here or why it was taking so long.

  I started weaving my way towards Jenna, but I'd hardly taken a step when Blair Andreson himself blocked my path. 'Now, who do we have here?' he said in the deep rich voice that seemed to fill whatever space he occupied.

  'You've got my mum over there,' I said. 'I want to go to her.'

  'Your mom's having a pretty intense encounter with her Heavenly Father right now,' he said, taking a firm grip of my shoulder and steering me towards the entrance. 'Howsabout I get somebody to get you something to eat, then when your mom's done here, we'll come get you?'

  It wasn't a suggestion. I thought about running for it but there was nowhere to run to. I didn't know where the other women from the camp had got to and I had no idea how to find my way back. So I pretended to be meek and mild and let one of the young men take me to another tent that was set up like a buffet. There were long tables of sandwiches and salads. And piles of muffins, which I had never seen before. I'd seen other kids tuck i
nto home baking before - fairy cakes and butterfly buns - but never anything on this scale. So it wasn't much of a hardship, waiting there among the born again. I will give them credit for leaving me alone and not trying to cram Jesus down my throat along with the grub.

  Eventually, somebody came for me and took me back to the tent. Jenna looked dazed, like she sometimes did when she'd smoked heroin, but when I appeared, she smiled and pulled me to her. I was surprised. She wasn't usually that demonstrative. 'Something wonderful's happened, Jennifer,' she said, stroking my hair, which was probably a mass of greasy rats' tails. 'I've accepted Jesus into my life.'

  If you've ever seen The Invasion of the Body Snatchers, you'll have an idea of how I felt right then. I just wanted to get Jenna away from there and back into our scrappy shitty life where at least I knew what was what. 'When are we going home?' I asked her.

  She smiled then, one of those radiant, peaceful smiles you get from people with a poor connection to reality. 'We're going to live in a new home, Jennifer,' she said. 'In a proper house. We're part of the Christian family now.'