EQMM, December 2009

by Dell Magazine Authors

  "Danny,” Father Gregory repeated softly. Several moments went by and neither man spoke. Then, at last, the priest broke the silence. “He drowned, perhaps?"

  Julian shook his head and smiled ruefully. “Oh no,” he answered. “Though with all the holes in him, I'm certain he would have. He had been stabbed many times with a serrated blade—many, many times, Father. Something like a steak knife, the M.E. thinks. Once his carotid artery was punctured, he had only moments left."

  "Oh, I see,” the little priest murmured. “I see."

  They were both quiet for several long moments. This time it was Julian who interrupted their reveries. “It may not have been ‘Erin,’ Father. I suspect our victim made many enemies along his merry way. In any event, she's probably a long way from here by now and we don't even know her real name.” He signaled for the check.

  When their dizzy waitress arrived, she thrust the bill at Father Gregory before the policeman could stop her and fled to the kitchen.

  "Let me get it, Father,” Julian pled, reaching for the check in the priest's hand.

  Father Gregory clutched it to his chest with a gasp, then held it out once more, studying it closely, as Chief Hall looked on in alarm. At last, he whispered, “For there is nothing hidden."

  The chief leaned forward saying, “Pardon?"

  "A quote from the Scriptures,” the priest mumbled distractedly. “'For there is nothing hidden which will not be revealed, nor has anything been kept secret but that it should come to light.'” Father Gregory raised his eyes from the extravagant, familiar writing on the check that read, “Thanks! Brittany” (the i in the name surmounted with a jubilant star instead of the usual mundane dot) to find their server returning for their payment; unable to take her eyes from the journal clutched in the policeman's hands, her curls bedraggled by the steam of the kitchen, her elfin face drawn with exhaustion and lack of sleep.

  Julian eyed his friend suspiciously and said, “Meaning?"

  "Just what it says,” Father Gregory answered sadly, and slid the check across the table to test the truth of his pronouncement.

  Copyright © 2009 David Dean

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  Fiction: MEMORY by Robert Barnard

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  Art by Mark Evan Walker

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  Robert Barnard is back this month with another of his memorable short, dark tales. Readers who'd like to see something longer and lighter from the Cartier Diamond Dagger winner should check out The Killings onJubilee Terrace (Scribner, May 2009), a traditional whodunit whose action takes place on the TV set of a long-running soap opera, with its closed circle of suspects. The book stars veteran Leeds policeman Charlie Peace, last seen in Mr. Barnard's 2007 novel A Fall From Grace.

  The old man crossed the road to the football pitch and then took the path by the left-hand goal posts leading down to the woods. Here his steps gained in confidence: He had always known this path from before the pitch was constructed, always known the woods. The very road he had crossed was a fifty-year-old intruder, whose construction he had witnessed.

  It was night, but nobody local, seeing him, would have been worried for him, nor for themselves. He was a common sight. People talking about him called him Old Percy and tapped their foreheads to signify mental weakness: Old age was progressively taking its toll. Tonight he had an old shoe on one foot, and a thong sandal over bare foot on the other. Though nobody realized it, he sometimes got the idea that his legs were uneven in length. Then he built up the left with a sturdy working shoe and put the sandal on the other, and thus shod he felt he could walk with complete confidence. On other nights he would be wearing a furry hat in summer, pyjama trousers in winter. He was a local curiosity.

  Now, weaving his way forward rather hazily but always finding his way back to the path, he stopped occasionally, threw back his head, and emitted the song of a bird: blackbird, lark, thrush. He had been taught them long ago by his English teacher at the school which he had left at fourteen. They had stayed with him, and the love of birds, for seventy years.

  There was no response to his calls. It was long past closing time in birdland.

  When he had been going for five minutes down the sloping grass he sat down and looked down to the canal below him, and to the fields and the Abbey beyond it. Kirkstall Abbey, a twelfth-century construction three miles out of Leeds, had been overtaken long ago by urban sprawl, but remained as a reminder of a different age, a different mind-set.

  He could see nothing. The moon was obscured and he was beyond the aid of the streetlights on the road. It made no difference. He knew Falls Park as well as he knew his own kitchen in his one-bedroomed flat. Better, because he had known the park all his life. He had it in his mind's eye, one of the few things that had stayed with him.

  He had been moved to his flat on the fourth floor of a twelve-storey block when it was clear that he could barely look after himself and could certainly not care for a two-bedroomed Council house. It was in danger of becoming a slum, and he knew this, and was distressed. The flat needed very little looking after, and the social services paid for a woman to come one morning a week to put things in order. He had a few contacts in the tower block. For example, if he coincided on the landing with Mrs. Flower from the flat opposite he would say: “Good morning, Mrs., er ... Lovely day."

  He said the same thing, regardless of the weather. Mrs. Flower worried about him. Worse, his mental state made her worry about herself.

  He was just getting up from his seated position, a difficult procedure, when he heard a cry. Not a bird—they had been long asleep, head under wing. One of the Falls Woods animals: There were plentiful grey squirrels, the odd urban fox who preyed on the dustbins of the houses up the road, small herds of deer from time to time, and the horses of gypsies, left on one of the adjacent fields for winter. It was one of the last he could imagine making a noise like the one he had heard. Horses often made whinnies which sounded like a human scream.

  He wondered whether he really had heard anything. He sometimes thought he had heard a knock on the door or a telephone, but found nothing when he acted on his thought. Equally he often heard a noise but failed entirely to act on what he heard. If it was the telephone it could only be his daughter in Australia. She rang periodically, and she asked the same questions every time, and he gave the same answers.

  "Is Kevin keeping an eye on you?” she would ask, of her brother with whom she had quarrelled many years before.

  "Oh yes, he drops in,” said Old Percy, of the son whom he had not seen for twenty-odd years. None of the faint messages from his brain told him he wanted to be visited by Kevin.

  He had gone out to stay with his daughter and her family in Grafton many, many years before. The thong sandals were a relic of that trip. She had pressed him to stay there, but there was too much that was strange, and also too many things lacking that he was used to.

  "Good to go for a visit,” he said when he came home, “but not to stay there for good."

  The phrase lodged in his brain, and even now it came out automatically if the subject of Australia came up. He said it to his daughter, and she had given up pressing him to join her.

  He was standing now, looking down into the blackness, seeing nothing but knowing everything that was there. He started on the last lap down the sloping grassy parkland, down towards the thick belt of trees.

  "Help!"

  It was another cry. He couldn't hear the word “help,” but it was the way people did call for help. This time he could not convince himself it was a horse crying in its sleep. It was a human being. A woman.

  He stopped. He usually didn't get scared, roaming the fields and woods after dark, but this was different—not lovers or druggies, or children out in the woods at night as an adventure. This was a person, in some kind of crisis, in fear for her life.

  He began to turn, but was stopped in his tracks. There were two people now. He thought they were on the edge of the woodlands. They we
re struggling, and he felt sure it was a woman and a man: He heard low, gruff tones; he could visualise what was happening. He turned and began up the hill with a surprising turn of speed. He had been a runner at school. Every few seconds he turned his head to look down to the woods. A black shape, almost invisible in the surrounding darkness but not quite, was running up the slope, but it was not clear if he was following him or just escaping from the scene of—But his brain declined now to visualise what the scene consisted of.

  Now he was running by the side of the football pitch, past the goalposts again, then nearing the road. Now the streetlights began to illuminate him. He breathed an old man's exhausted breath, ran an old man's run. The other shape had not reached the top of the hill, but across the road lights were still on in several of the houses. There was no traffic on the road and his instinct told him to run out into it, across, into a front garden and to bang on one of the doors where the inhabitants were still up. As he banged he looked over his shoulder and saw the dark shape, a bent-over hulk of a man, with loping stride, swerve away, his face invisible, towards Kirkstall and a denser population to disappear into.

  "Who is it?” shouted a man's voice from the house.

  "Please open the door. I think something terrible has happened."

  "Something awful is always happening in the Falls Woods,” came a female voice. “What were you doing there?"

  "Really awful,” shouted Old Percy, his voice quavering. “Rape or murder. I'm an old man..."

  "Dick, I think it's that old bugger who often walks there. Can't you put the outside light on and look through the spyhole?"

  There was a pause, then the bolts were pulled back. There was another pause before the door was opened and Old Percy staggered into the hallway and fell to his knees.

  "Call the police, Dick,” said the woman of the house.

  "You do it. I'll see if he needs artificial respiration."

  It was ten minutes later before Percy really came back to life. He was sitting in an armchair in the living room, two policemen opposite him, and he was still anxious to tell what he had seen, or heard.

  "It was two people down below me. They came out of the woods. I know the place like the back of my hand—have done since I was a boy."

  "He's well known locally,” whispered the wife. “Goes walking there at night and all other times of day. I think he's harmless, but..."

  "She was crying for help, screaming,” Percy went on, the policemen still looking a little sceptical. “Then quiet. It was down below, what was happening, on the edge of the parklands and the woods."

  "Would you be able to show us?"

  "O’ course I could. Know the place like the back o’ my hand. Known it all my life.” One of the policemen raised his eyebrows, but Percy was led gently out of the front door, through the gate, and across the road. They were soon at the top of the sloping grassland.

  "It was there,” he said, pointing. “I saw shapes, people. I think they were fighting. Go and have a look. She might still be alive."

  One of the policemen looked at the other, then, taking his torch from his pocket, he ran down the hill.

  "It's a woman,” came a cry after less than a minute. “Get reinforcements. But I think she's dead."

  Ten minutes later, reinforcements arrived, and Percy was confided to a fresh-faced constable who would take him home. He was assured that he would be interviewed the next day, that his evidence was vital, and that what he needed first was a good night's rest. The young constable was anxious to get back to the crime scene, but there was a holdup on the landing of the fourth floor when Old Percy couldn't find his flat keys. Their voices disturbed the sleepers on the same floor, and Mrs. Flowers opposite did more than just open her door a crack.

  "What are you doing with him?” she demanded, coming out in her dressing gown and looking both frightful and frightening.

  "There's no problem, ma'am,” said the constable. “I'm just bringing him home."

  "You'll not pin anything on him. He's quite harmless."

  "We're not pinning anything on anybody,” said the constable. “He's had a very upsetting experience. Ah, there are the keys. Here we go."

  The policeman had noticed that the keys had been in the pocket Percy had looked into first. He took him inside, ignoring Mrs. Flowers’ demands to be told what the “upsetting experience” had consisted of, and he left him fully clothed except for his shoe and sandal, his eyes closed, on the bed. In case he wasn't asleep, he assured Percy that the police would be around in the morning, and as he slipped away he heard Percy say, “What? What?” It was as if, as he later said to the inspector in charge of the scene of the crime, he was already beginning to forget what had happened.

  The inspector, with a detective sergeant to take notes, came to see Percy next morning. On the whole, he was agreeably surprised. The witness went quite logically through the sequence of events, with only a few side remarks about how he had loved the park and woodlands since he was twelve and knew them like the back of his hand. He described admirably the sloping grass hill, and then identified the path from the woods which the fighting pair had emerged from. He was good too on the pursuit of him by the possible murderer of the girl.

  "It was good that you reached the top well ahead of him,” said the inspector. “Then the streetlights gave some kind of view of you—and of him. Anyone watching from the windows of the houses opposite might have got a good view. If he was planning to do the same to you he will have changed his mind then."

  "That's when he swerved aside,” said Percy.

  "Did you get to see his face?"

  "Oh no. Not his face. He kept his arm and shoulder well over his face, and ran along sort of bent over."

  The inspector nodded. He turned to the pursuer's body (quite bulky but not tall), his gait (quite fast, but not the gait of a great athlete). At the end of the interview the inspector returned to the face.

  "Are you quite sure you had no sight of the face? Think back. Think."

  There was a long pause. Then Percy said:

  "What was it you asked me?"

  "The face. The man's face."

  "I told you. He made sure I didn't see it."

  "Was there anything else about the man that springs to mind?"

  This time Percy came good.

  "Well, I've thought about that.... The run, the way he covered the ground. It was heavy, like he was carrying a lot of weight, and it was—like—intimidating. Like he enjoys making people feel scared. It made me more scared than I was already.... It reminded me of somebody."

  "Who was it? Think."

  There was a long silence, and the inspector was afraid he was going to be asked again what the question was. But finally Percy shook his head.

  "No. I've tried since I thought of it. But I can't catch hold of it."

  "Think! Try harder!"

  "No. You're bullying me. I've tried to remember.... I'm an old man. I'm not going to be bullied."

  The inspector realized he had gone wrong. He had affronted the old man's dignity by treating him as a child. He got up to go.

  "I'm sorry. Please keep thinking about who this man reminds you of. Was it someone in this block of flats? Someone you might have seen when you were out shopping? Someone in the bank or post office?"

  "No. I don't know anyone in these flats. They're just young men, middle-aged men, old men—just a blur.... And I don't go to banks. Never have.... What about the woman?"

  He had been so long in asking about her that the inspector thought he didn't want to know, preferred to remain in ignorance.

  "She was young. Hardly more than a girl. But she'd been on the game since she was sixteen."

  Old Percy creased his forehead with bewilderment.

  "What do you mean? What game?"

  "Sorry. It's a way of speaking. I mean, she'd been a prostitute. She came from round here. Angel Court."

  Percy frowned again. The ironic name meant nothing to him.

  "It's a b
lock of flats, a couple of hundred yards from this one,” explained the inspector. “She died from stabbing."

  "Poor little thing."

  "Look, I'll leave this notebook and biro. If you think of anything—anything at all—write it down."

  "I don't need a notebook. I've got pencil and paper. I'm not a pauper."

  "Of course you're not. But I'll just leave it there convenient for you, and I'll be back in a day or two to see if anything's come to mind."

  He was as good as his word, but when he came back he brought with him his boss on the case, Superintendent Collins. He thought he'd adopted the wrong tone with Percy, and knew that his super had an old and mentally frail mother to whom he was devoted. The day they chose to come was not ideal because it was the morning Percy's cleaner, Mrs. Harben, put the flat to right. Their talk was accompanied by the sounds from elsewhere in the flat of a vacuum cleaner or of clinking crockery and cutlery being washed up.

  "I can't ask her to come another time,” said Percy, “because she doesn't have another time."

  "Don't worry your head about that,” said Collins. “My mother was a housekeeper, and I've always had polishing and cleaning going on around me. Now, I thought I'd bring this to show you."

  He took from his pocket a big, shiny sheet of paper, folded up, and he opened it out before Old Percy's eyes. It contained ten pictures, some of them recognisable (but not to Percy) as police mug shots, others more blurred and distant snapshots.

  "These are all men from around here or from the North generally—men who we're pretty sure have committed rape, sometimes rape and murder. Some have been convicted of it, some have either got off or have disappeared. The inspector and I would like you to look at each one in turn, take your time, and then tell us if the pictures ring bells in your mind."

  Percy looked dubious, but he took the sheet, set it on his dining table, then sat down in front of it. His right forefinger went to the top left-hand picture, then, after a short time, went on to the next, then the next, on and down, until the super was wishing he had not told him to take his time. But in the end it was worth it. When he had taken his finger from the tenth picture, he surveyed the rapists’ gallery for a second time, then unhesitatingly put his finger on the eighth picture.