by Tim Weaver
They looked to the fence.
There was no one up there now.
‘We need to get back up to the top.’
‘Okay,’ Beth said. ‘Are we going home?’
‘Yes. We need to get back up to the top and we –’
More movement to their right.
Beth didn’t see it – but Penny did. It was about a hundred feet away, on the fringes of the torchlight. She swallowed, tensed, and as she did Beth felt the shift, the stiffening of her sister’s muscles, and followed her gaze, out into the blackness of the downward slope. The rain gradually became harder again, pounding at them, at their jackets, the sound like waves crashing on a pebble beach. Every time Penny swallowed, it felt like she had chips of glass in her throat. She’d come out here convinced it was all a myth, lies made up by the people in the town.
But it didn’t feel like a lie any more.
‘Let’s go,’ she said, and tugged at Beth’s hand.
They began running up the hillside, beating a retreat. Penny could feel Beth struggle, her legs dragging, her breath coarse and ragged. She looked back at her, pulling at her arm, and, as she did, glimpsed something in the long grass, forty feet to their right.
Penny’s heart hit her throat.
Whatever it was, it was following them, crouched slightly, the arch of its back, its arms, visible above the apex of the grass. Penny wanted to say something, to tell Beth, to warn her, but the words got lost. Instead, she made a low, soft whine which instantly vanished in the rain, and then pulled at Beth’s hand again – trying to draw her closer in – half concentrating on where they were heading, half focused on the grass to their right. For the first time, Penny could see breath hissing out of the bog, like the ground itself was panting.
‘Quickly!’ Penny shouted.
This time, Beth heard the terror in her sister’s voice and looked back over her shoulder. She spotted the shape instantly, trailing them. Beth screamed and started to sob even harder, and Penny yanked at her again, almost dragging her up the hillside.
Thirty feet to the wire fence.
‘Come on!’ Penny screamed, pulling so hard at Beth’s arm it felt like she might tear it from its socket. Beth shrieked in pain but didn’t let go of her hand.
Twenty feet.
‘Come on!’ she shouted again and felt Beth move, accelerating, as if she realized they were close to the boundary fence. Penny glanced back over her shoulder, searching for it in the grass behind them – but now she couldn’t see it.
Ten feet.
She looked again and glimpsed something.
They let go of each other’s hand and leaped for the fence, Penny hitting it a fraction later than Beth. Scrambling up, the toes of Penny’s boots slipped on the wire mesh, and at the top she slipped again, her torch falling from her grasp. It hit the wet ground beneath her with a dull thunk at the same time as Beth landed on the other side.
‘Penny!’ Beth shouted. ‘Quickly!’
Penny, at the top, one foot on either side of the boundary line, looked down at the torch, hesitating, wondering whether to go back for it. Jack would notice if it wasn’t in the cupboard tomorrow. But then she saw movement beyond the range of the prone torch.
I can’t go back for it, she thought.
She dropped down, into the long grass, and landed awkwardly, rolling on to her backside and scrambling away on her hands, like a crab heading for shelter. From where they were, they could only see a few feet into the Brink now.
But that was enough.
Something stayed there on the edge of the torchlight for a moment, as if deliberately trying to prevent itself from being seen, an obscure mass in the thick swirl of the darkness. They watched it moving back and forth, Beth barely able to look at all, her eyes on the ground, her head tilted away. Penny reached out for her sister again and squeezed her hand, telling her they were safe now, telling her everything would be all right.
And then she looked back through to the other side of the fence.
Whatever had been out there was gone.
25
The room was lit by a single lamp in the corner. After Howson let me in, he checked the corridor before pushing the door shut and reattaching the chain. I made my way around to the other side of the bed, its sheets crumpled. The lights of the city leaked in through the half-open curtains, spilling across the bed like a pot of paint.
I pulled a chair out from the wall. Sitting opposite the bed, I watched Howson perch himself on its edge, trying to summon some strength by taking a series of long breaths while wiping his eyes and cheeks with his sleeve. I texted Richard Kite, gave him the address of the hotel and the room number, and told him to come immediately. I wanted to see if they knew one another. When I tuned back in, Howson had gathered himself a little but it had made no difference at all: the tears had stopped, but he still looked rinsed.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said softly.
I wasn’t sure if he was talking about his tears or his crimes, so I remained silent. He took another long breath, his eyes flicking across to a dark wardrobe, its doors so warped they failed to align. I looked around at the rest of the room, searching for the plastic sleeve he’d been carrying. It was probably in the wardrobe.
‘Why don’t you tell me about Penny, Jacob?’
‘I didn’t kill her,’ he said immediately.
His voice was uneven. He was from somewhere in the Home Counties but it was hard to be more specific than that because the heaviness of his words seemed to weigh on his diction.
‘I would never have hurt her.’
‘So who killed her?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Really?’
‘I don’t. Not for sure.’ He looked up, still tearful. ‘But it’s got something to do with the school.’
‘In what way?’
‘I think Corrine – Penny – she found something there.’
‘What did she find?’
‘I don’t know,’ he said.
I watched him for a moment, uncertain whether to trust him or not. His grief looked and sounded genuine, but with his head angled towards the floor, it was hard to see his eyes, and the eyes were always the best way to pick a liar.
‘Is that why she changed her name?’
He shrugged. ‘She was Corrine before she arrived at the school. No one knew her real name was Penny Beck. I only found out after she was dead.’
‘How?’
I wasn’t even sure if he was listening.
‘How, Jacob?’
‘I eventually found an old passport hidden in our flat. Her real name was on that.’
‘Okay.’ I watched him. ‘What else?’
He swallowed, sniffed.
‘Maybe we should just start at the beginning,’ he said.
I tried to keep the impatience out of my voice. ‘Fine. Let’s start at the beginning – but don’t leave anything out.’
Slowly, he started talking about Penny. He said he’d met her at the Red Tree when he first joined the school as Head of English in July 2012. A year after he started, they were dating. A year on from that, her body was found on the railway tracks beside the Armbury estate.
‘I found the messages you left for her,’ I said. ‘The flowers.’
He nodded.
‘She’s never been identified by the police.’ I got out my notepad and opened the front. ‘So how did you know the woman on the railway tracks was Penny?’
Again, he didn’t reply, but not because he didn’t want to – because he was summoning the courage. After a while, he looked from the pad to me and across to the window. The light of the city was scorched against the dark.
‘Jacob?’
A hint of a smile on his face. ‘When I asked her out, she said no to start with. So I just kept asking her, over and over again. Eventually, she caved in.’ He smiled again, but after a while it became a sort of grimace. ‘Whatever’s going on, it’s got something to do with Marek.’
‘Who the he
ll is Marek?’
‘He’s responsible for school security,’ Howson said.
Alexander.
He was the man who’d come to meet me in reception, who’d walked me to Roland Dell’s office.
‘He’s a psycho,’ Howson said. ‘Everyone at the Red Tree is scared of him. Or, if they’re not, they think he’s weird and remote. Even Roland’s frightened of him. I mean, Marek just does what he wants. He doesn’t give a fuck what Roland thinks, and Roland’s too weak to do anything about it.’
I thought of Dell apologizing after Marek had gone. Dell had told me he was uncomfortable with the idea of security meeting guests in reception, even if he understood the reasoning, but it was something Marek had insisted upon. Maybe now I knew why.
‘So you think Marek killed Penny?’
‘I don’t know for sure, but …’
‘Why would he kill her?’
A flicker of something in Howson’s face.
‘Jacob?’
‘I think she found out something about him.’
‘Like what?’
I’d paused, my pen hovering above my pad. For the first time, Howson’s face hardened.
‘I don’t know exactly,’ he said. ‘Thing is, I’ve seen what Marek’s like. You get on the wrong side of him and he’ll make your life an absolute fucking misery. And he seems to get a kick out of it, that’s the thing. Once you’re in his sights, he’ll just keep pushing.’ Howson swallowed. ‘But he was never like that with Penny. In fact, it was the opposite with her.’
He glanced at me again; a flash of jealousy.
‘You’re saying he had a soft spot for her?’
He shrugged. ‘I mean … yeah. I guess.’
‘Did anything ever happen between them?’
‘No,’ he said, vociferous now. ‘No way. She didn’t like Marek. She was like the rest of us. But I think Corrine – Penny – was using him, or trying to use him, to get at something. Something he knew. So she played the game. She batted off his flirting, his comments, but stayed just close enough to the right side of him to get what she needed.’ He frowned, as if he hadn’t liked how that last part had come out. ‘Marek had a blind spot when it came to Penny.’
‘A blind spot?’
‘He thought he knew her.’
It was only five words, but there was a density to them that seemed to thicken the atmosphere in the room. Howson moved position on the bed again, the springs wheezing beneath his weight.
‘But he didn’t know her?’ I said.
‘I think the reason she got close to him was so she could gain access to the security suite – or, at least, the computers in there. Marek’s files. The camera footage he collects. What goes on in the school when we’re not around; what’s been going on at the school since before I ever arrived. Marek’s been there years. He guards that place like it’s Fort Knox. I think Corr– Penny … I think she knew that.’
‘So what did she find?’
‘A pattern.’
‘What sort of pattern?’
Howson’s eyes drifted to the wardrobe, and then he shifted off the bed and walked across to it. The doors juddered stiffly, filling the room with the smell of mothballs.
It was empty – except for the plastic sleeve.
He took it out and brought it back to the bed. As he moved, pictures at the front shifted around, glimpses of a face briefly visible. Printouts that looked like timesheets, although a lot of the type was too small, the room too badly lit, for me to be one hundred per cent sure.
He set the sleeve down beside him and looked at me; it was clear he was having doubts about sharing its contents. I’d got him to let me in, I’d got him to talk to me about Penny, but the printouts were what he was really trying to protect.
‘Is what she found out on those printouts?’ I asked him.
His eyes fell to the plastic sleeve.
‘Is that evidence against Marek?’
‘Evidence,’ he repeated, not looking up at me. ‘I don’t know if it’s evidence. I’ve been over and over it, collecting together everything that she left behind, and I still don’t know. But there’s something in here.’ Howson removed the contents of the plastic sleeve. ‘Somewhere in here is the reason why Penny was killed.’
26
Immediately, I saw that the photos in the sleeve were all of Penny. The printouts, they were evidence, or they were a way to get at answers. But these portraits of a woman’s life, these brief snapshots of who she’d been, were more than that.
They were Howson’s memories of her.
His eyes lingered on them as he pulled them out, handling them so delicately it was like he was frightened they’d blow away. There were three in all. I waited and eventually he looked across the room at me, as if remembering he wasn’t alone, and held them out. Two were of Penny on her own; one was of her and Howson together. None of them was the same picture I already knew, of her on the Regent’s Park bench.
‘Did you take these?’ I asked.
‘Yes.’
I looked up at him. ‘You know Naomi Russum, right?’
‘Yes,’ he said, puzzled by the question. ‘She works at the school.’
‘You know her well?’
He shrugged. ‘Well enough, I guess. I’ve ended up at a few events with her. I’ve talked to her in the staffroom, that sort of thing.’
‘Because she also had a picture of Penny. A different one.’
His frown deepened, the confusion evident. But there was something else in his face too. I just couldn’t work out what.
‘Why would she have a picture of Penny?’ he asked.
I watched him for a second, trying to see whether he was playing me.
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘Why do you think she would?’
‘I don’t know,’ he replied.
I let it go for now, and focused on the immediate questions. How did Russum end up with the photograph? Why was she showing it to Richard?
‘Do you ever remember taking a picture of Penny at Regent’s Park?’
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I took that picture the week before she went missing; a month before she was discovered. It was the last photograph I ever took of her.’
‘Do you still have a copy of it?’
‘I have a digital copy at home on my computer somewhere. But the one physical copy I made of it …’ He glanced at me.
‘What?’
‘I had it stuck to the inside of a notebook I used for lesson planning. After she went missing, I printed it out and put it in there because I wanted to be able to see her. I missed her. I was confused. I had no idea where she’d gone, or what she was doing, or why she was doing it. All I had was this.’
He selected one of the printouts from the sleeve. It was a photocopy of a typewritten letter.
Dear Jacob,
I love you so much, but I need to go. I can’t begin to explain to you why. It isn’t you. Please don’t try to look for me.
Corrine
He looked at me. ‘You know what’s wrong with this letter?’
‘What?’
‘She never called me Jacob. She called me Jake.’
‘So you think it was written by someone else?’
‘Yes.’
‘Marek?’
He nodded. ‘Yes. I mean, I don’t know for sure, but …’ His words fell away.
‘So Penny just disappeared one day?’
‘Pretty much,’ he said. ‘She left home on a Tuesday morning in October, just like every other day, because she had to be at school early – and that was the last time I ever saw her. I didn’t start to look for her until morning break. At lunch, I still couldn’t find her anywhere, so started asking around – and then Roland called me up to his office. He showed me her resignation letter. It didn’t sound like her either, but it was enough to convince Roland; enough to convince everyone else. I mean, Roland was annoyed because it’s pretty standard to give a term’s worth of notice – but the actual resignation letter?
He believed it.’
‘But you didn’t?’
He drew a long breath. ‘I just felt like something was wrong, so I called the police and they said people disappear all the time, and that they couldn’t go out and look for her, or file a report or whatever else, until there was evidence that she was actually in some sort of danger. I said, “I really think she might be in danger,” because I knew the letter that she left for me wasn’t written by her, I knew it even if I couldn’t prove it. But they said, “A person has the right to disappear,” and after that, I became angry, irrational. For a while, I started to believe that she had left on purpose, that what we’d had together, all the time we’d spent as a couple, was a sham and she’d run off with someone else. And then, in the two weeks before her body was found, the anger went away and it became this clear sense that something was wrong; that she was in trouble, that something awful had happened. Penny didn’t have any family to look out for her – her parents were gone; she was an only child – so I was all she had. I think that was another reason I stuck that photograph of her in my notebook. I needed a reminder not to let up, not to forget her. When I put it inside those pages …’ He faded out again, his voice replaced by the gurgle of water pipes behind the walls and the soft drone of the traffic. ‘When I put it there,’ he said again, much quieter this time, ‘honestly, I had every intention of going back to see the police.’
‘So why didn’t you?’
Remorse clung to his face. ‘If I’d gone back to the police after three weeks and said, “She’s still missing,” they would have taken me seriously. It was so out of character for her. But I didn’t. I never went back, so they had no official record of her disappearance. That’s why they never matched her to that body.’
‘Why didn’t you go back?’ I asked again.
He turned his head towards the window. I could see a shaving rash at his jaw, red skin and dots of dried blood still visible above his shirt collar.
‘I used the computers in the school library to try and look for her one day,’ he said, distant now, as if he wasn’t talking to me but to the ghost of the woman he’d loved and lost. ‘I went looking for people who’d been reported missing, for anyone who might be her. I didn’t know what I was doing or looking for, but I just wanted some answers. When I couldn’t find anything, I decided I was going to go back to the police the next day. I trawled websites looking for the best way to report a missing person; the best way to get the police to sit up and take notice. I printed some things out, and then I went and got a sandwich from down the street, and after that I went back to my classroom. I remember it so clearly. I decided to work late, do some marking, try to keep my mind on other things.’ A long pause. ‘It wasn’t there.’
