Bex found him a pillow and a blanket, and he crashed out on a sofa in the last light of the dying fire. He lay for some time, listening to the wind, and found it very easy to imagine as the rising malice of the Holly King, beating restlessly around the house, searching for a way in.
2 Rosey
Andrew ‘Rosey’ Penrose was making a Christmas wreath in the woods on Wychbury Hill when Pete Sumner called and told him that his son had disappeared off the face of the earth.
The sound of his phone startled him so much that the pain in his back – which normally didn’t bother him at all when he came up the hill – flared with savage agony, and the familiar feeling like broken glass grinding between the fused vertebrae of his lower spine made him bite back a curse. It startled him because there was no phone signal up here. In all the times he had come here, there never had been.
He laid down the holly-woven hoop of willow which he’d been working on and took out his phone, examining it suspiciously. The signal-strength showed no bars. There was even a little symbol of a crossed-out phone on the display, and the words ‘Limited Service’ where it normally read ‘Vodaphone’.
And yet still it rang.
He knew that if he moved barely five yards in any direction, he would get a full signal clear as day. Wychbury Hill was only just on the outskirts of town – one of a low range which nestled to the southwest of Halesowen and the Black Country – so coverage was never normally a problem. The fact was, Rosey liked being out of contact with the world. He’d spent the last couple of hours relaxing in the peace of this place, letting his hands make something, and for another preciously short span of time enjoying the fact that here, for whatever quirk of nature, his crippled back didn’t hurt. It was one of those things about the world which Rosey, for the sake of his sanity, never thought about too hard or questioned.
The phone’s screen now said Caller ID: Sumner, even though he’d had no contact with the family for years. How had Peter even found his number? Go away, he begged it silently. Leave me alone. It was sixteen years ago.
Mercifully, it stopped ringing as his answerphone cut in.
The physiotherapists who had cajoled, bullied, and tortured him back into mobility had tried to suggest swimming as the best thing for his spine, but his first and only trip to the swimming baths at Halesowen Leisure Centre had left him with serious doubts about the therapeutic benefits of chlorine-induced blindness, and he’d taken to walking instead. He’d rambled over the Lickeys, the Clent Hills, and even as far as the lonely height of the Wrekin, discovering that a man built for full-contact sports could still enjoy an energetic lifestyle even if his rugby-playing days were over – and discovering too a previously unsuspected joy in making things out of the raw materials of field and hedgerow.
Wychbury Hill was an Iron Age fort with a dark history of having been ransacked and burned by the Romans, and an even darker reputation for modern witchcraft and pagan worship. What interested his policeman’s instincts – which no amount of early retirement was ever going to blunt – were the tales of smaller, human darkness. Like the mysterious Bella, found murdered in a hollow wych-hazel in 1943, whose death was never solved. Or the fact that in 2002, when the oldest yew tree was burnt down by either pagans or vandals, people left flowers and messages of affection by its remains. What kind of people left flowers for a dead tree, he wanted to know?
There was something about this particular spot, though. He called it a ‘quirk of nature’ to himself; the fact that here, and only here, the back pain which the doctors had told him was chronic, inoperable, and untreatable – except by the kinds of drugs which would make him a junkie for life – simply disappeared completely. The irony was that while it afforded him some relief from physical pain, his discomfort about the place ran altogether deeper. It stemmed, he suspected from having been mixed up in the Sumner business all those years ago. Yes, he’d promised to look out for the boy, but sixteen years?
His phone began to ring again.
Limited Service. Caller ID: Sumner
Rosey wondered if he would even have found this spot if the business at Tyler Road hadn’t happened. Maybe it had sensitised him, somehow, to more subtle energies in nature, whatever they were. Maybe he owed the boy that.
With great reluctance, he pressed the connect button and raised the phone to his ear.
***
‘We’ll have to be quick,’ said DS Fallon as he led Rosey past a couple of uniforms and through the barrier of incident tape in front of the ruined block of flats. ‘This thing is a fucking jurisdictional nightmare, you know. Environmental Health say it’s a dangerous structure and nobody can go in until it’s been properly shored up, and the anti-terrorist mob won’t let anybody in because they don’t want a bunch of council workmen bollocksing up the forensics. I ask you. War on terror? Don’t make me laugh.’
‘What’s Counter Terrorism got to do with this?’ asked Rosey, surprised.
‘See all that glass?’ Fallon pointed out the glittering debris on the ground surrounding the flats. Every single window that Rosey could see on three floors had smashed. ‘They’re saying it’s a bomb factory that went tits-up.’
‘I don’t think so. Anything big enough to take out all of those windows would throw stuff for miles. This looks like it’s just fallen out.’
‘Don’t tell me, mate,’ the other man grumbled. ‘I just bloody work here.’ He stopped before the entrance lobby, where the security light was dangling by its wires and the door hung twisted on one hinge, and turned back to Rosey. ‘I don’t know what kind of favours you called in to get here, but just don’t go touching anything and costing me my job, alright?’
‘Don’t worry.’
Fallon grunted sceptically as they edged their way into the lobby. ‘Upstairs,’ he said. ‘Number six.’
Rosey’s back started to shout at him as he climbed, not helped by the unreliable state of the stairs. They were cracked and covered in rubble, and some kind of support seemed to have gone on one side, because every step sloped sideways towards the stairwell’s echoing throat.
‘Me,’ said Fallon, ‘I’m going with earthquake.’
Rosey couldn’t help uttering a short laugh of disbelief.
‘No, seriously. Earthquake. We’re on a fault-line here, you know. I mean don’t get me wrong, it’s not a big one, we’re not going to have the earth opening up and lava and Tommy Lee Jones running around waving his arms in the air like they do in California. But we’ve got a decent, honest-to-goodness geological fault line running right across the middle of the city, and every so often it gives a little shrug.’
‘Every so often.’
‘Case in point: September two-thousand and two. One o’clock in the morning, measured four point eight on the Richter scale. The epicentre was in Dudley – your neck of the woods. They felt it in bloody Carlisle.’
‘I remember that – I thought somebody had driven a truck through the back garden.’
They reached the landing; it was twisted, as if a giant pair of hands had tried to tear it in half like a phone book.
‘There you go then. I tell you, you don’t need bloody bombs to make people desert their homes. If it’d been me having my tea when this happened I’d have buggered off myself. Mark my words, in a few days’ time all the residents that we can’t account for will turn up kipping on their mates’ floors or staying with relatives. Here we are: number six.’
They picked their way into the flat, around patches of fallen ceiling plaster in the hall. Dim light from the rooms on either side (box-room, bedroom, bathroom) filtered in, dusty and cold. It had a queer smell – not just broken, but broken and old. In the lounge he found a cracked Aston Villa mug with a mat of green mould in the bottom. He showed Fallon, who wasn’t impressed.
‘Young people these days – I don’t know.’
; ‘Can’t you smell it though? This place feels like it’s been abandoned for weeks, not just a day or so.’
‘Look, the point is that the young lady who lives here – a very smart-looking and, it has to be said, quite fit bit of skirt by the name of Muzz Laura Bishop – reported to the officers at the scene that her fiancé was nowhere to be found. She’d checked his work, they’d said he’d clocked off early, he hadn’t called and she had no idea where he was. He’ll turn up either tomorrow or the day after with a hangover and a nice little collection of love-bites.’
Rosey had found a photo album at the bottom of a bookcase which had spilled most of its contents on the floor. He flipped through the pages – photographs of a young couple who could have been anyone: eating pizza with friends, standing in snow somewhere Welsh-looking, covered in silly string at a party. The boy – young man, he corrected himself – looked cheerfully and utterly nondescript. Brown hair, brown eyes, clean shaven. Was this what he looked like, all these years later? It could have been anyone. Rosey was struck with a sudden and overwhelming sense of the absurdity of what he was doing. Get a grip on yourself, old man.
Fallon was already bored. ‘Well look, you have a nice mooch around up here, and I’ll be waiting downstairs. Just don’t go looting anything, alright? I know the pension’s shit but please, don’t make me arrest you.’
Left alone, Rosey wandered through the wreckage of the flat, trying to get some sense of the life which the boy had lived here – and more importantly some clue to his present whereabouts. He failed miserably on both counts. He puzzled over the strange gouges in the kitchen door but couldn’t be sure that they weren’t anything more suspicious than earthquake damage – if Fallon was to be believed. Without the presence of another human being, the shadows were darker, and the silence acquired a watchful malevolence.
Back when this sort of thing had been part of his job, he’d invariably felt like something of a trespasser, picking through the jumbled pieces of other people’s lives. Crime scenes especially. Even when searching suspects’ homes there’d been that sense of broken continuity, of lives on pause: things dropped, to be taken up again after he was gone. But here… here everything felt simply abandoned. No, worse than that – dead, used up, sucked dry. In the wardrobe, clothes hung dusty and moth-eaten. Food in the fridge had rotted and then dried to a crust. He was walking through a brittle honeycomb which only carried the shape of what it used to be, and if he poked it hard enough, it would collapse in on itself.
Whatever had happened here might well have occurred yesterday afternoon at a little after half past four, but it looked like the effects had lasted for weeks. Something had aged the place, and it carried that brooding weight badly. There had only ever been one other time in his life when he’d felt something like this.
Suddenly, he couldn’t get out of the flat fast enough.
***
If Tony Fallon thought that there was anything odd about Jerusalem Construction’s head office, he didn’t say anything. He just waited quietly while Mr Barber read the dossier which Tony had compiled for him.
In his admittedly limited experience of such things, he’d have expected the head office of a multi-million pound construction and development company to be a bit more flash. Something with a bit of chrome and glass, and maybe a big old piece of corporate sculpture that looked like a pile of spanners and cost more than a hospital. Not, as in this case, King Edward House on New Street, the top floor of which seemed to have escaped any kind of development since the Second World War. It looked and smelled like an old school library. Honest to God, the light switches were actually bakelite.
But he didn’t say anything. Mr Barber didn’t seem to like what he was reading, and that made Tony extremely nervous. Still, there was one extra tiny piece of information which wasn’t in the file – nothing, really – and the only thing worse than telling Mr Barber something he didn’t like was not telling him something important. Problem being that it was impossible to guess what the man thought important at any given time.
Tony had seen what happened to people who disappointed Mr Barber. So yeah, fuck it, he was nervous.
He cleared his throat.
Barber looked up. ‘Something else, Detective Sergeant?’
‘Well, yes sir, sort of. It’s probably nothing more than a coincidence.’
‘Do I look to you like a man who believes in coincidences, Detective?’
‘No sir.’ What he looked like was the kind of man who, if the rumours were true, could fuck your career in the arse so badly that you wouldn’t even be able to get a job as a lollipop lady. ‘If you’ll refer to document 4, you’ll see it’s a police report from a PC Andrew Penrose, written in 1993.’
Barber regarded him, waiting. Fallon felt his upper lip starting to sweat.
‘It’s just that yesterday afternoon I gave Penrose a guided tour of Sumner’s flat. Apparently he knew somebody who knew somebody who owed a favour, and he wanted to check the place out. No idea why.’
‘I take it you haven’t read the rest of this, then,’ said Barber, indicating the dossier. Police statements. Child protection reports. Fostering and adoption papers. All attempts at papering over the gaps in a life broken almost as soon as it had begun.
‘Not in great detail, no.’
‘That may very well be for the best, at least as far as you’re concerned. Thank you, Detective – you may go.’
Barber watched the other man scurry from his office. His favourite stripe of police officer: discreet, reasonably priced and essentially spineless. Nevertheless, he had done an effective job at putting together a lot of information at short notice. It was not comprehensive – not even in the ordinary sense – but there was enough for Barber to confirm his suspicions about whom he was dealing with.
Andrew Sumner, was that what they’d named him? The stolen boy. Destined for such greatness and denied it by an act of stupid, ill-considered conscience. Barber had written him off as a lost cause nearly two decades ago and moved on with his work, but it seemed that something had awoken in the boy at last. He wondered whether it was it too little, too late. Even the hero-cop had come out to play, too. And all of it now, right now, just when his own preparations were so nearly complete.
No, it couldn’t possibly be coincidence.
Barber moved to the window and looked down at the street six floors below – the early evening crowds milling around under strands of garish Christmas lights, oblivious of anything but the bright, empty now of their lives.
The past was not a different country, and they did not do things differently there. It was all around, all the time, hiding in plain sight just on the other side of awareness, on street-corners and in the alleyways of people’s minds. It was in the dust under their feet and the rain which fell on their heads. He’d stood here and watched the skyline of this city burn under German bombs, and then as bulldozers levelled what slums were left to make space for tower blocks and ringroads, and now again as these were being pulled down by his own hand to make room for the future. A clean slate from which to create anew. The key to successful urban development, in his opinion, was knowing which bits of the past to preserve, and which to obliterate utterly.
There were a lot of old names in that dossier; Fallon had done his job well. Barber took out his phone and called Carling.
The next few days were going to be extremely busy.
3 Fault
Andy was woken by a confusion of running and panicked voices.
‘He’s doing it!’
‘Is he doing it?’
‘Where’s my stuff? Shit!’
‘Swear to god, he’s doing it right now.’
‘But there’s a load of people still out!’
‘Where’s my sodding stuff?’
Figures were running back and forth through the room – and
all over the house by the sounds of it. Feeling unwashed and generally scuzzy, he dragged the blanket around his shoulders and wandered in the direction of where the majority of Narrowfolk were hastening towards the back door. He wondered if there was any chance of scrounging a cup of tea for breakfast.
He found a nervous crowd muttering uneasily to themselves just outside, as if they were afraid to venture any further. Nobody took any notice of him. Their attention was fixed on the figure of Walter, who was engaged in spray-painting the most intricate graffito Andy had yet seen on the fence at the bottom of Moon Grove’s expansive allotment-garden.
It was circular in design and took up most of the six-foot-high larch-lap panel, resembling an impossibly intricate Celtic knot, and after the manner of Narrowfolk sigils, it seemed to float simultaneously just in front of and just behind the surface. Evidently the work required great concentration because Walter was completely oblivious to the agitated crowd growing at a cautious distance.
He looked terrible. His clothes were mud-smeared and torn in several places, and there were dark half-moons of exhaustion under his eyes. He looked as if he’d spent the entire night since his sudden departure hiking back and forth across the city. In fact, his rucksack lay flung to one side as if he hadn’t even bothered to stop since he got back, but had marched straight through the house and begun painting this bizarre mural.
In the cold light of morning, Andy realised something which should have been obvious to him last night: Walter was completely off his trolley.
The Narrows Page 13
