by Tim Weaver
Or maybe she didn’t.
Maybe she never wrote him a letter. Maybe Howson lied about that, and he lied about not knowing where she was going, and he wrote her resignation letter himself.
‘Is Jacob coming in at all today?’ I asked.
‘No. He’s with a group of A-level students at the Museum of London. They’re studying Great Expectations and he thought the exhibitions might bring it to life.’ Dell glanced at his watch. ‘He should be done by four, although I’m not sure if he’ll come back here or go straight home. He does tend to work into the evenings a lot these days.’ Dell stopped again, shrugged, the inference clear: ever since Corrine left. ‘Would you like his number?’
‘That would be good,’ I said, and thought about my next move as Dell wrote it down. I wasn’t sure what Howson’s story was, and what part he may have played in the murder, but he surely would have foreseen this day coming. Someone turning up. Someone asking questions. Someone trying to understand what had really happened to Corrine Wilson. The issue now was whether, if I turned up at his home, he gave me the truth, he lied, or he bolted. He had ties here, a good job that was hard to walk away from, but that didn’t mean he wouldn’t run. People ran all the time when they were desperate.
‘There we go,’ Dell said.
I took the number and gathered the photos together.
‘Can I ask you one last question?’ I said.
‘Please.’
‘Richard is seeing a psychologist called Naomi Russum. Have you heard of her before?’
‘Naomi? Yes, of course. She works here. Well, part-time. She does four days a month as a counsellor.’
‘Right,’ I said, noting it down.
‘There are things some kids can’t tell their parents,’ Dell went on, ‘or their teachers – or sometimes even their friends. Naomi gives them an opportunity to do that. She’s highly qualified in her field, and we thought it would be a great tool for the kids, and the feedback we get from them seems to suggest it’s been worth every penny.’
It made sense: it explained how she had access to the building, how she knew Howson and why they were pictured together in the photo at the charity event; and if all three of them – Howson, Russum and Corrine Wilson – worked in the same place, I now knew what bound them together.
But two questions remained unanswered: why Russum was showing Richard Kite photographs of Corrine Wilson – and why Corrine and Richard had exactly the same tattoo.
24
After making a couple of calls, I found out that Jacob Howson’s mobile phone number was registered to an address in Kennington. It was a townhouse halfway along a short, quiet road with a rank of hire bikes on an island in the centre. I waited for him there and, at five thirty, he finally turned up, looking like I remembered him in the magazine: tall, thin, a little ungainly. He was dressed in a black suit and a pale green raincoat, and his brown hair had thinned to the point where his scalp shone under the street lights. He seemed tired, his eyes carrying dark smears.
I shifted forward a couple of steps, in behind the bulk of a Range Rover, and watched through its windows as he removed some keys and then looked out at his surroundings – the other cars, the other buildings – before letting himself in. I’d called him as soon as I’d left the school, and left a message, telling him very briefly who I was and what I wanted to talk to him about. I wanted to see what his next move would be.
Three minutes later, I found out.
When he reappeared he had an A4 plastic sleeve in his hands. Before he started to lock up properly, sliding the sleeve between his ribs and the inside of his arm, I was able to get a glimpse of what it contained: paperwork of some sort, printouts, maybe photocopies, maybe pictures. Something else too: smaller, blacker, about the size of a credit card.
He finished at the house, looked both ways along the street again, and took off in the opposite direction to me, hurrying, glancing over his shoulder.
I held back for a moment and then followed.
I trailed him for about a mile to the bottom of Waterloo Road, where he entered a shabby-looking hotel called The Tudor. It was squeezed between a kebab shop and a newsagent and had a sign at one of the ground-floor windows promising low rates for bed and breakfast. It wasn’t hard to see why.
As I hovered at the main door, looking in along a worn hallway, I could see Howson at the reception desk. He was paying in cash, taking money from a roll of notes. It was hard to tell from where I was standing, but it looked like there was a lot in his hands. He hadn’t stopped at an ATM on the way, and even if he had, he wouldn’t have been able to get that much out in one go. Which meant he must have kept the roll of money alongside the plastic sleeve at home. In turn, that meant he’d definitely seen this day coming. The roll of notes, going home to retrieve the sleeve, lying low in a crappy hotel while he presumably figured out his next move – he’d been planning this for a while.
He took the key from the receptionist and headed for some stairs on the other side of the dingy lobby. Once he was out of sight, I entered the hotel, striding through the reception area as if I was already a guest and knew exactly where I was going. I needn’t have worried: the woman behind the desk didn’t even look up, her eyes fixed on a small TV in the corner.
The hotel had three floors, and signs in the lobby suggested there were six rooms on the ground and eight on the others. I headed up. At a door leading to the second floor, I looked through the glass to the corridor on the other side. There was no sign of Howson. Almost on cue, I heard the stairs creak above me and the soft jangle of keys, so I kept going, along the thinning carpets.
I held back as I got to the top floor, allowing the door into the corridor to snap shut. Once it did, I stepped up to the glass and looked through. Howson was at the end, half hidden by more dingy lighting, letting himself into a room.
I waited, thinking about my next move. There weren’t many choices. If I knocked on his door and told him it was me, even if I reassured him that I was no threat to him, his guard would be up. If I waited, I lost time. If I didn’t take the chance at all, I might never find out about Corrine Wilson and how she was connected to Naomi Russum and Richard Kite.
Heading into the corridor, I listened for sounds of activity in the adjacent rooms, but mostly all I could hear was the hum of traffic from Waterloo Road and the chatter of a broken air-conditioning unit on the wall. The whole hotel smelled musty, as if a window had never once been opened in the entire time it had been standing.
At his door, I knocked twice.
Immediately, I heard movement: the squeak of mattress springs, the dull clunk of drawers, soft footsteps coming towards me. There was no peephole in the door, so he had to either pretend he wasn’t in or open up. A couple of seconds later, I heard the metallic scrape of a chain sliding into place.
‘Who is it?’ he said.
‘Jacob, it’s David Raker. I tried calling you earlier.’
A pause.
I bent down and slid a card beneath the door.
‘I just want to talk,’ I said. I heard movement as he picked it up; the muted moan of a floorboard. ‘I want to talk to you about Corrine Wilson.’
An even longer pause.
‘How did you know I was here?’
‘I followed you,’ I said. There was no point in lying to him. ‘I went down to the railway line at Abbey Wood. I saw the flowers you left there. I saw what you wrote on those cards.’ I stopped again, letting him process that. ‘I think Corrine might have known someone I’m trying to help. Maybe you did too.’
More movement. He was right next to the door now.
‘His name’s Richard Kite.’
Nothing.
‘Do you know who Richard is, Jacob?’
‘No, I don’t. Now go away.’
‘Why don’t you open up?’
‘Leave me alone.’
‘Look,’ I said, ‘I’m giving you the chance to tell me your side of the story. I’ll sit here and listen to you a
nd I won’t judge what you’ve done.’ That wasn’t true, but he didn’t need to know that. ‘Or I can give the police your name and they’ll come and arrest you. Either way, you’re going to tell one of us the truth.’
Again, there was no reaction. I looked along the corridor, one of the light bulbs flickering, and then returned my gaze to the door.
‘Jacob?’
It opened a crack but remained on the chain. He’d removed his tie, his coat, his suit jacket. He’d rolled up the sleeves on his shirt. I could only see one half of his face but it was enough: he looked distressed, his eye bloodshot.
I held up a hand. ‘I’m not here to hurt you, Jacob.’
‘So what are you here to do?’
‘To help you.’
He wiped the back of his hand under his nose, his gaze shifting over my shoulder into the corridor beyond. When his attention fixed on me again, it was like his thoughts were written across his face: he was frightened about letting me in, but desperate to accept my help. He looked like so many people I’d met over the years, shrinking under their burden.
‘Why should I trust you?’ he said.
‘Because I don’t think you have anyone else.’
He swallowed, saying nothing.
‘I know Corrine was your girlfriend, Jacob.’
He stared at me and a tear broke free from his eye, tracing the ridge of his cheekbone. He wiped at it, but didn’t look away. For a second I wasn’t sure if he was going to respond again, but eventually, and very quietly, he said, ‘Yes.’
‘How did she end up at the railway tracks?’
He just looked at me, his skin as pale as milk.
‘Did you kill Corrine, Jacob?’
‘That was just what she told everyone.’
I frowned. ‘What?’
‘Her name. She told everyone her name was Corrine.’
I watched him for a moment.
‘That wasn’t her real name?’
More tears began to form.
‘Jacob, what was her real name?’
‘Penny,’ he said softly. ‘Her name was Penny Beck.’
The Monster
The girls headed out of the pillbox.
Immediately, the driving rain knocked Penny off balance. She gripped her torch more tightly, its beam cutting across the bogs into the darkness, and made sure Beth was close. Penny asked if she was okay, but she didn’t hear the reply – her hood was up and Beth’s voice was suppressed by the roar of the storm. Within the arc of Penny’s beam, the rain looked like needles, jagging from left to right, and when they hit her exposed skin, they felt like them too. Penny shouted to her sister again and this time Beth gave a thumbs up.
They moved out across the soggy ground, towards the boundary fence. Under foot, the bog squelched and moved, as if they were crossing the spine of some great, dormant creature, and when the wind came, it came hard, the long grass whipping back and forth against their hands until their fingers were raw. Everything above the level of the grass was black, except for the fence itself; their torchlight glinted off the wire as they approached, and when they came to a stop in front of it, the boundary seemed to run for ever either side of them, greying and blurring as it disappeared into the darkness.
The Brink awaited them.
Penny watched as Beth drew level with her. They were both soaked through already, thick strands of Beth’s hair escaping out of her hood and visible at the side of her face. Breath formed in front of them like balls of spun sugar and, the closer Penny inched to the fence, the more she could feel her pulse quicken. It was six feet high, with enough foot holds to make it a relatively easy climb. Going beyond it was as simple as climbing up and dropping down on to the other side. But everyone knew you didn’t do that.
Not unless you didn’t want to come back.
But that was bullshit, Penny reminded herself. That was a story invented by the people in the town and, sooner or later, it was always going to come to this. Penny was always going to have to stand at the fence and demand answers about why the story was created.
Why keep everyone in the town away from here?
Even so, she still spent a moment watching the grass on the other side of the mesh, instinctively looking for signs of movement. It was habit. Routine. Muscle memory. The problem was, the whole hillside was moving, the long grass swaying and bowing in a synchronized dance. It shivered so rhythmically that, for a while, Penny was transfixed by it. But then Beth, who seemed to have grown in confidence on the walk across, said, ‘What’s the matter?’
Penny looked at her. ‘Nothing.’
‘Don’t you want to go any more?’
Penny wondered if Beth might have preferred it if she’d said no. No, we’re not going. No, we’re not climbing over the fence. I’m too scared, Beth.
I’m way too scared.
But, after taking a long breath, Penny answered her sister by lacing her fingers through the mesh and starting to climb. At the top, she paused, one foot on either side of the fence, and waited for Beth, and then they both looked out into the darkness. Finally, they swung their other legs over and dropped down.
Penny felt her feet slip slightly in the mud, and then the bog suck at the heels of her boots. She looked across the hillside in front of them, watching as it sloped away into a wall of absolute black. If she hadn’t known what the terrain was like out here, if she hadn’t seen it from the town, and from the pillbox on late summer evenings as the sun went down, she’d never have been able to work it out. All she could see around her – within the confines of the torch – was grass and mud. No landmarks. No signs of life.
They began moving further into the Brink.
After a while, Penny’s flashlight picked up a vague trail, a path that followed the slant of the hill and snaked between clumps of tussock grass. She looked for evidence that the path had been made by feet, by animals, by anything, and then the further down they got, the less certain she was that it was actually a path at all. She started to think it might have been the rain, or the wind, or maybe the flurries of snow they’d already had, flattening grass, compacting it for the winter.
Sometime after, she looked back to check on Beth and saw that she was a few yards behind her, and that they’d travelled much further than Penny had thought – four hundred feet maybe; possibly even more. She watched Beth for a second, the rain crackling against the fabric of their jackets, and then Penny realized that the fence was now above their eyeline.
‘Is everything okay?’ Beth asked, shouting over the rain.
Penny nodded.
‘So why have we stopped?’
This time she didn’t reply. Instead, she looked harder at the boundary fence, running across the hillside, vaguely backlit by the lights from the town. Something had changed. Something was different.
‘Pen?’
What was different?
‘Penny?’
Penny stepped closer, past Beth, eyes still fixed on the fence, trying to figure out what it was that had altered. What had she seen? What had changed up there?
‘Pen?’ Beth said from behind her. ‘What’s going on?’
The rain was really heavy now; a wall of sound. Penny turned to her sister and shouted, ‘I’m not sure.’
‘Can you see something?’
‘I don’t know.’
Beth didn’t hear the response, must have thought that Penny hadn’t replied at all, because she stepped closer and repeated herself: ‘Can you see something?’
Penny shrugged. ‘I don’t know.’
Beth squinted into the storm as it continued to lash across the slopes of the hillside. ‘I can’t see anything,’ she said.
Penny kept her eyes on the fence.
‘Pen, what can you see?’
‘I’m not sure,’ Penny said. ‘I thought maybe I saw a …’
She stopped. One of the fence posts was moving.
‘Shit,’ she said softly.
‘What?’
‘Someone’s up
here with us.’
Beth spun on her heel, slipping on the wet ground, and they both looked up the hill. A shape was standing behind the wire, watching them, its silhouette half obscured by a fence post. That was why it had taken Penny a moment to figure out what she was seeing. Suddenly panicked, she glanced at Beth again: Beth looked exactly like a twelve-year-old now – unnerved, scared. For a moment, they just stood there frozen to the spot, shoulder to shoulder, the two of them staring at the shape, the shape staring back.
‘What should we do?’ Beth said.
Penny was trying to think.
‘Pen?’ Beth said, more desperately. ‘What are we going to do?’
‘I don’t know. Give me a second to thin–’
Out of nowhere, a sound tore across the night.
It was so unexpected, so loud, it seemed to reverberate through the ground like an earthquake. It sounded like some sort of animal call; a screech.
‘What’s happening?’ Beth said, frantic now.
Penny looked at her, was about to say she didn’t know, when she saw something move out of the corner of her eye. She turned, looking across the slopes to her right, off into the darkness.
‘Pen?’
Beth’s voice was tremoring. She grabbed hold of Penny’s hand, squeezed it, her fingers slick with rainwater and sweat. Penny squeezed back.
‘I’m scared, Pen.’
‘I know.’
‘I’m really scared.’
‘I know you are.’
Penny looked hard into the night, down the hillside, in the direction they’d been heading. She couldn’t see anything. A sudden hush seemed to have settled across the valley, the wind dropping away, the rain easing off. The only other sound was Beth: she’d started to sob. Penny put her arm around her shoulders, and raised the torch, aiming it out into the dark. The tussock grass shone wet with rain, the clumps weird and disconcerting – like heads of hair; like hundreds of people were face down in the earth, lined up in shallow graves for as far as the eye could see.
Beth moaned, her voice muffled against Penny’s chest. She squeezed Beth even harder, grabbed her hand and said, ‘We need to go.’
