(1998) Denial

by Peter James

  A rash of goosebumps erupted on his skin. He let go involuntarily, and crashed down. Oh, fuck, oh, fuck, oh, sweet Jesus!

  He was backing out of the closet, his heart berserk inside his chest. All he could see was the figure, the cold smile, the glossed lips, the long blonde hair, the full-length black silk dress.

  Get a fucking grip, man!

  Just an almighty bloody scary-looking mannequin.

  Remembering now. Of course. The Lady Is Out. One of Cora Burstridge’s best films, a real shocker, in which she played the demented victim of a stalker, Anthony Perkins in a reprise of his Psycho role. In the climax scene, she had set a trap for him by having this mannequin dressed up to look like her, and standing it in a room behind a net curtain while she waited behind the door with an axe and butchered him when he came in.

  He went back into the closet, but slowly, hauled himself up and looked again. The sight of the mannequin was almost as bad the second time. Watching it carefully now, taking his time, just to make sure – that it didn’t move, that it wasn’t a ghost.

  The face had been made up with exquisite care in every detail; it looked horribly, terrifyingly real. ‘Nice sense of humour, Cora,’ he whispered, wishing he could share this little joke with her, but not quite able to.

  He heaved his whole body up into the loft, his feet kicking out at the walls for a grip. This was how the cloths had come to be on the floor, he thought, and probably the dustpan and brush and the Brasso tin.

  On his knees, he looked around. A solitary lightbulb hung from a flex a short distance in front of him. A large water cistern. Suitcases and trunks piled all around. Stacks of pictures or paintings wrapped in brown paper and tied with string, coated in years of dust. The mannequin, too, was dusty, and a large cobweb had been spun on the wig.

  This was a treasure trove of Cora Burstridge memorabilia, and Glenn would have loved to have had the time to explore it. Instead, he hefted himself upright and concentrated on his task.

  Maybe Cora had come up here and left the light on. OK, I’m Cora, what am I looking for? I’ve come home from buying my grandchild Brittany a Babygro. I have people sending me flowers, phoning me to congratulate me on my BAFTA award. So I put down the bag with Brittany’s present, I get out the steps, I climb up into the loft. What am I looking for?

  Something for Brittany? Something that winning this award has reminded me to look for?

  Glenn pulled out a small torch he had brought with him, switched it on and ran the beam over each of the trunks, suitcases, brown-wrapped parcels. Dust, cobwebs, mouse droppings. None of these cases had been opened for months – years, maybe.

  Careful to step only on the joists, and keeping his head ducked against the low rafters, he made his way across the loft into the darkness beyond the throw of the lightbulb. Then he stopped and turned to look at the mannequin. It spooked the hell out of him again. And his bald head touched a large spider’s web. He jumped, then brushed it away in revulsion. As he did so he felt the feet of the spider running around his neck, and he snatched at it with his hand, shuddering. ‘Yuk! Get away!’

  He scrunched his shoulders and shook himself. As he did so, the beam of his torch caught what he thought at first was a moth hanging asleep on a wooden upright.

  Free of the spider now, he walked over and looked closer. It was a tiny strip of cloth hanging from a nail. Shoulder-high to him.

  He looked at it closer still. Cream threads. Had Cora snagged herself up here? But Cora was only five foot four. This would have been head-high to her.

  He left it as it was, without touching it, and walked on, over towards a rectangle of light he could see at the far end of the loft. As he got closer, playing the beam of his torch on it, he could see it was an ancient fire-escape door. Rusted, probably disused for years.

  It was secured by a padlocked hatch. Except the hatch had come away from the door and was hanging, twisted, four rusted screws still in place in it, four gaping holes in the door where they had been.

  Someone had kicked this door open. Recently.

  Chapter Fifty-three

  In 1966 the BBC banned from transmission a documentary made for them by director Peter Watkins, about a fictional H-bomb attack on Britain. It was called The War Game. It included footage of shadows on walls in Hiroshima that were the vaporised remains of tens of thousands of people caught in the atomic blast. It showed footage of others, even less fortunate, whose entire body skin was sloughing off them as they ran in blind, screaming agony.

  In the notoriety following its banning, The War Game became compulsive viewing in art-house cinemas and at private screenings. Gloria Lamark saw it at a special invitation-only preview at the National Film Theatre. Afterwards, like a lot of other people who had been terrified by it, she commissioned the construction of a nuclear shelter beneath her home. It would be dug out beneath the house’s existing cellar and its walls were to be of three-yards-thick concrete.

  In common with others who had built such shelters, Gloria Lamark kept it quiet. In the event of a nuclear attack, anyone who knew about your shelter would kill you to get in there first. She went to elaborate detail to disguise the shelter’s existence. If you took the staircase down at the back of the hallway, you would find yourself in a small gymnasium containing an exercise bicycle, some weights, a rowing-machine and a jogging-machine. A wooden door led into a small sauna. The entrance lay through a door below this sauna, of the kind used on bank vaults.

  Beyond the door was a chamber, monitored by a closed-circuit television camera. A second vault door, with a similar lock, opened onto a spiral staircase down to the shelter itself, which was accessed by yet a third door.

  The shelter was a small network of rooms, each hermetically sealed by steel doors, like the watertight compartments of a ship. If one room developed a leak, the others would still be free of contamination. There was ventilation ducting, and provision for a generator-run air-purification plant and a water-purification system. Gloria Lamark had intended that she and Tom-Tom could remain down here for months if necessary, living off tinned food and bottled water.

  However, the costs of constructing the shelter had been astronomic, even by her own extravagant standards. The shell had been completed in 1965, but by then her fears had subsided a little. She never completed plumbing it, nor did she put in the air purifier or the food stocks. Instead she had locks put on the outside of the doors and sometimes imprisoned Thomas there during his early childhood when he was bad. She stopped this after he reached his teens, and never entered the shelter after 1975. In fact, she had virtually forgotten all about it.

  But Thomas hadn’t.

  And now, in a sealed chamber deep inside the shelter, thirty feet beneath the ground-floor rooms of the house, Amanda Capstick lay in darkness, deafened by her own heartbeat.

  She had fallen again. Tripped over the mattress. She lay still, ear to the cold stone floor, listening. But the darkness was so loud. It sucked each rasp of her breath then echoed it back, the volume turned up as far as it would go. Her ears pulsed with fear. She was a mass of pulses, that was all, pulses, driven by one beat. Pulses, thoughts, pain – those were all that separated her from the void around her. The need to urinate, that separated her, too.

  She got back on her feet again, feeling more alert with every moment that passed, trying frantically to figure out where she was.

  One step at a time.

  Starting with this giddying darkness; scouring it, smelling it, still trying to work out what that acrid reek was. She was finding it hard to stay upright. Every few moments she would become disoriented and stumble against a wall, or trip on the mattress and fall.

  Surely, however dark a place is, there must be some light – under a door, around a window, through a crack in the ceiling? But not here. Nothing. No relief from the desperate blackness of the void.

  She touched her own body, checking it out, finding reassurance that she was still solid, still flesh. She pushed her fingers through h
er hair. Not dead. Definitely not dead.

  She had filmed once in a ward full of stroke victims. Some people could be trapped, deaf, dumb and blind, inside their bodies, with their consciousness still functioning normally.

  Me?

  If I could find my handbag. Cigarette lighter in there.

  The need to urinate was starting to dominate her thoughts. She could fight it off, but every few minutes it came back, worse than before. Now another rush came and this time the pain of fighting it was so bad that a tear rolled down her cheek. She stood, hunched against a wall, legs crossed, shaking, perspiring, her insides twisting as if someone was winding a tourniquet in there.

  Then, finally, the wave passed. She was OK again, for a few minutes.

  If I was in a hospital, paralysed, blind, I would have a catheter.

  She called out again for help. But the mere effort of shouting brought another rush from her bladder, and now, again, she put all other thoughts out of her head.

  Loo. Jesus. There must be a loo.

  Find a loo and then – and then think straight.

  Her left hand was hurting like hell from the last time she had fallen over. With her right hand, she began to feel the walls. Methodical. Must be methodical. One inch at a time, top to bottom. She reached down to the floor, then up, as far as she could stretch. Cold smooth stone.

  I got in here somehow, so there must be a way out.

  Wild thoughts flashing in her head now. Did Michael Tennent have something to do with this? Brian? Who was the man who had come down the stairs and shaken her hand?

  She stumbled, lost the wall, tried to find it. Her arms flailed, she let out a frightened yelp as she fell again, crashing hard on the stone floor, her face finding the mattress, the dank, musty, old-smelling mattress. She swept the floor with her arms, every inch of the floor, looking for her handbag. It wasn’t there.

  ‘Oh, God, please someone help me!’

  On her knees again. Upright. Calming. Deep breath. Steady, balancing now, taking it easy, one step at a time, over to the wall. Start again.

  Her hands moving again across smooth stone. She tried to tell herself that this was one of those really bad dreams of being trapped, running on the spot while the train bears down on you, or the murderer is coming towards you and your legs won’t work.

  But the pressure of her bladder told her she wasn’t dreaming. She was awake. She was pressing against the wall again, legs crossed, swearing now, anger leaching out through her gritted teeth.

  I am not going to wet my knickers. I am not going to piss on this floor.

  Sweet Jesus, I am not.

  Chapter Fifty-four

  ‘Do you know about the bower-bird, Dr Tennent? Are you interested in ornithology?’

  The lawnmower was at it again outside in the garden of the clinic. The heavy traffic, all the way back from Hampstead, had done nothing for Michael’s frayed nerves, and now Dr Terence Goel, sitting relaxed on his sofa, in a cream linen suit and moccasin loafers, was doing nothing for his nerves either.

  Each time Michael asked him a question he answered with a question. Michael had removed his jacket, but sweat was still running off him. The air in this office was oppressively hot; it had been mitigated a little by the scent of cut grass, but now it was heavy with the pungent cologne that Dr Goel was wearing.

  ‘The bower-bird? I don’t, no. Is ornithology one of your interests?’

  The drone of the mower was getting louder still. Michael sipped some water, glanced down at the American’s file.

  ‘How do you define an interest, Dr Tennent? At what point does knowledge become interest?’

  ‘When do you think it does?’ Michael asked.

  Goel placed his palms flat on the cushion either side of him, leaned back and stared with a worried look at the ceiling. ‘Ptilonorhynchus violaceous.’ He looked at Michael and, in response to the psychiatrist’s blank expression, added, ‘The satin bower-bird. Have you heard of the satin bower-bird?’

  ‘I’m afraid not.’

  ‘It mixes pigment from berries and charcoal. It builds a bower like a thatched house, nine feet high, with rooms. It manicures the lawn beneath each day and decorates it with insect skeletons and fresh flowers. Then it constructs an avenue of sticks leading up to its home, fabricates a paintbrush out of fibrous plant material, then decorates this avenue with the pigments it has mixed. It is the only animal in the world other than humans that makes tools and decorates its home. You have to admire that, don’t you, Dr Tennent?’

  ‘Yes,’ Michael said, guardedly, as before with Goel, not knowing where this was leading. He waited for his patient to continue.

  Dr Goel stared back at the ceiling. Michael glanced at his notes from their previous session. Goel had talked to him then about prisms, he had explained why stars twinkled. He appeared to like imparting seemingly irrelevant facts. Michael was having to make a supreme effort to keep up his concentration. Amanda, he kept thinking. Amanda, my love, where are you? Where are you?

  ‘Are you knowledgeable about ornithology, Dr Tennent?’

  ‘You just asked me that. No, I’m afraid not.’

  ‘I don’t think I asked you,’ he said.

  Michael made a note in the file. Terence Goel seemed to forget things. A defence mechanism.

  Thomas Lamark watched Dr Tennent. You are not having a good day today, are you, Dr Michael Tennent? You think I’m a screwed-up psychotic who forgets things he has just said. You can’t wait for this session to end. You are worried sick about your bit of fluff, Amanda Capstick. You have good reason to be worried about her. You should be desperately worried. You should be even more worried than you are.

  And you will be.

  ‘Did you know that many bird species mate for life?’ Dr Goel said.

  Michael paused before responding, hoping to encourage Goel to continue speaking. But Goel was waiting for him.

  ‘No, I didn’t.’

  ‘If they lose their mate they just pine and die.’ Now he fixed his eyes firmly on Michael.

  Breaking contact and looking discreetly down at his notes, Michael remembered now that, at the last consultation, Goel had brought up the subject of car crashes. He recalled wondering then whether the man knew about Katy. Now he wondered again. No, he concluded, probably not; almost certainly not. He was just making this connection himself.

  ‘Do you think, Dr Tennent, there would be a difference in the way the male bower-bird would mourn its mate depending on how the mate died?’

  Remembering Goel’s Achilles heel, his parents, Michael replied, ‘I don’t think I’m qualified to make that judgement. Let’s talk a little bit about you. You’re coming to see me because you’re suffering from depression. We didn’t get very far last time. I’d like to know a little more about you. Perhaps you could give me a brief life history.’

  ‘I’d like to ask you something first, Dr Tennent. Something that is bothering me.’

  ‘Go ahead.’

  ‘I read an article which said that too many people of the video generation are convinced they have what it takes to kill in cold blood. I’m a child of this video generation, but it seems to me that civilisation is a thin veneer over basic human nature, and basic human nature has no problem with killing at all. Would you agree with that?’

  Michael was determined to make his patient talk more. He turned the question back to him. ‘Do you?’

  Goel closed his eyes. ‘I’d like to consider the bower-bird a little further. There are all kinds of hazards that face a bird. Imagine a bower-bird is flying free, and she does not see power lines stretched across her path. She flies into these power lines and is killed by the impact. She falls to the ground.’

  He opened his eyes, stared at the psychiatrist, then continued, ‘Now imagine this bower-bird is flying free, and she lands in a trap that is set by a hunter who is collecting birds to sell to zoos. He has a specific commission to capture a bower-bird. Her mate, the male bower-bird, is out elsewhere, gathering
food. Which would be the most traumatic, do you think, Dr Tennent? To see the corpse of his mate? Or for his mate simply not to return home?’

  Michael squirmed in his chair. The man’s eyes were fixed on him. Jesus, if only this man knew how close to the knuckle he was. He wasn’t in any kind of a state to answer this question right now, that was the truth. It felt like his patient had tipped over a barrow inside his head.

  Amanda. Amanda darling. Call! Call me, tell me you are OK, oh God, Amanda, call me.

  Under the guise of looking at the man’s file, Michael glanced at his watch. Twenty minutes still to go. He wanted to call Amanda’s secretary, Lulu, just to hear her voice, to feel some kind of proximity to Amanda.

  And Thomas Lamark was finding it hard to keep his face straight. This was perfection! He had liked as a child to capture insects – flies were good, big ones, bluebottles were best – and then to stick a pin through one wing and press the point into a table top, and to watch the fly struggling, to feel the insect’s confusion as it went through all the motions of flying, but could not.

  ‘Let’s . . .’ Michael said, but he had lost the thread. He tried to regain his equilibrium. ‘Which – ah – which do you think would be the most traumatic?’

  Terence Goel slipped his hand into his jacket pocket, then pulled out a coin. He tossed it, then trapped it on the back of his hand. ‘Call,’ he said. ‘Heads or tails?’

  Michael was not sure whether to go along with this. Then curiosity got the better of him. ‘OK,’ he said. ‘Heads.’

  Terence Goel lifted his other hand. ‘Good call.’

  ‘And tails would have been a bad call?’

  Goel smiled. ‘No, that would have been a good call too. One’s good for you and one’s good for me.’

  ‘Is that a gold coin?’ Michael asked.

  ‘An heirloom.’ Goel slipped it back into his pocket.

  ‘Do you use it to make decisions?’

  ‘How do you make decisions, Dr Tennent?’